Elvis
If he had lived, Elvis would have turned 90 today. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, Elvis Presley as an old man? He was so intrinsically part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and so much a symbol of the youth of his era that, somehow, we knew he was never going to make what your grandmother might have called ‘old bones’.
His fame lives today, almost undimmed. He was one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century although, as a child in Mississippi in the late 1930s, he would have been astounded to know that. As a boy, he was drawn to Black musicians of the South, and synthesised their music into songs with an insistent beat and original sensibility. Nobody taught him. He was a pioneer of rockabilly, an up-tempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues.
When he was only 21 in 1956 he met Colonel Tom Parker, who became his manager for his whole career. Heartbreak Hotel was released that year and became a number-one hit in the US. Within a year, his record company would sell ten million Presley singles, all influenced by the African-American music that he loved and that made him the leading figure in rock’n’roll.
His performance style and vocal quality ‘sounded’ Black but his audience was White. This worried a wide swathe of their parents who suspected him of being a threat to the moral well-being of White American youth. That perception didn’t hurt him at all.
In the same year, 1956, he made his first movie, Love Me Tender. That too was a massive hit and, for the rest of his short life he was the biggest star in the world.
The end of his life was immeasurably sad. He died of ‘polypharmacy’, the result of 14 different drugs in his system adding up to cardiac arrest at the age of 42.
Elvis Presley wasn’t a rebel. Rather he was the unconventional product of a conventional system of recordings, television, film appearances, and the consuming detritus of super-stardom. Blessed by God with the looks and voice that were discovered young, Elvis loved being a star but couldn’t handle it. Perhaps, on the scale that stardom happened to him, nobody could. A simple boy from Tupelo, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee, he didn’t know how to get off the bandwagon of public exposure until it killed him.
Watch this messy video of ten of Elvis’s most famous songs intercut with clips of each stage of his over-examined life, every moment lived in public, even a few clips from those final concerts when he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.
Most of these were filmed during the earlier part of his career when he was young, slim and impossibly handsome with the kind of kinetic energy that takes your breath away. His rapport with every kind of audience is unmistakeable and, when performing with others, his ability to perform complex choreography with split-second timing is remarkable.
Perhaps the best example here of his extraordinary talent is when he dispenses with the band and support dancers and backup singers, and even his own frenetic movements, to sing If I Can Dream as a simple solo. That’s where the voice and charisma are most obvious.
Elvis Presley was a great artist and a true original.
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