It's all about music, photography, the short story and politics of living.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Elvis Presley Love Me Tender!
You had to be around to witness
the insanity. Television was relative new to most households with NBCs Dave
Garroway (1952-1961) holding court mornings on the Today Show and Ed Sullivan
Sunday nights. There was something simple about life in the ‘50s, although if
you step away a lot more complex than remembered.
Spencer Tracy and Katherine
Hepburn were the dream parents and often assumed the perfect marriage. A drive
to a greasy burger stand would find you waving at the occasional passing
vehicle. Everyone went to church – some devout, others on business. School was
in walking distance and summers long and hot - time enough to grow an inch or
two.
Elvis Presley began his career
in 1954 under the guidance of famed Memphis record mogul Sam Phillips. Presley
had the sweet-sounding church tenor you’d hear above all the heavy baritones
that would rumble-turn like dying steam locomotives. You couldn’t make out the
Christian words because men just didn’t know them – they stood and honked along
as women clarified.
Elvis was a singing angel.
Black and white news was polar
opposites. Hard news carried the daily sit-ins, civil rights marches, the
murders, intruders –drowning; local news – knitting circles and farm reports –
the occasional obituary.
Patti Page, Perry Como played
endlessly. The Yankees ran a string of World Series triumphs – Mickey Mantle
was God number two.
Most mornings, a few blocks from
my bedroom window, you could smell sun-baked roughage flowing down the Ohio –
the stench of cooking Jack Daniels, the odor of baking Wonder Bread, and
witness piles of tortured driftwood catch shoreline near the falls across the
river from Louisville, Kentucky.
Then one day life-monotony was
interrupted – “Heartbreak Hotel,” by this young singing sensation far-south
pushed Nat Cole, Patti Page and Perry Como to the sidelines and everyone was
talking. Who is this guy Elvis? What kind of name is that? Men laughed, women gossiped
and teenagers rage-worshiped. Everyone had an opinion and everyone watched.
Good church folks are always the
first to condemn. It seems whenever there’s change, those in the “Jesus know”
have to operate fast; judge and condemn. Oh my, those fire breathing
evangelists were everywhere.”Take those Elvis records to the dump and burn – or
we should do it in the church parking lot and make an offering to our Lord,
Jesus Christ.” Most men just scratched their skulls, talked and laughed – to
them this was just a silly boy whose popularity would soon pass like that silly
Davy Crockett ‘Alamo’ record.
Girls fainted, boys greased up.
That sound – that mix of country
blues, gospel, and rhythm & blues hit white folks in a different way. They
never bought into the rough-edged street blues of black folks with those
suggestive lyrics. This new take was easy to absorb. There was a fat-back beat
which rocked and swung at the same time. There were new ways to dance around
that beat – you just had to invent or wait to see what Philly was doing on the
dance floor and adapt.
Elvis was the chief salesman;
sweet-faced, soft spoken, humble, and thoughtful – a boy every momma would love
to nurture and marry off.
Small town America loved his
radical side but had to get past the sex part. You knew everyone was doing it
because babies kept coming like they’d been assembly line produced direct to
homes; yet talk of such things attracted morbid guilt. I mean Playboy Magazine was
around but mostly read in the fields back of barnyards, men’s washrooms or frat
parties. There were a few liberal leaning families in a community where the man
of the house proudly displayed in his private man cave.
Elvis was big talk in our house.
Pops called him a three-chord wonder.
Dad owned a guitar but could
never wrap his head around a seventh-chord besides he knew jazz great Jimmy
Raney and there was no way this new music would rival his sacred jazz God.
I had no opinion – just too
young and mostly trapped by spirituals. Grandma looked after us during daytime
and mostly played upright piano and sang about Jesus. I’d occasionally slip my
hands under her fingers and weasel a few bars of ‘Chopsticks.’
One day the big announcement
arrived – Love Me Tender Elvis’s film
debut was coming to The Grand in New
Albany, Indiana. For the life of me, I would never expect my stern dismissive
parents would choose to go. That we did!
As the curtain opened, dad
mostly talked. He sounded off through the movie and glanced around at other men
looking for affirmation; a laugh and a nod. Mom stayed fixated on dad. She
never really watched anything but him most days. If he said – ‘that was awful –
she’d respond – “that was awful.” That was what life was for women in the ‘50s.
Love
Me Tender caught fire.
People went repeatedly to catch the young man seen sawed in half on Ed Sullivan
Show– guitar bouncing – legs screen-amputated.
Black and white makes every
aspiring actor look credible –Elvis pulled it off. The song was so rich and
gorgeous to hear in the movie theatre, young and old talked about for weeks.
The local record store couldn’t keep his music in stock. Every young girl
papered her bedroom with that beautiful face – boys imitated. Elvis not only
conquered vinyl, he was now on a mission to claim a major roll in the celluloid
world of music history.
Love
Me Tender was far
different from cameo appearances of the great bands of the day – this was the
beginning of mysterious brooding young lead man, who lived in the edgy world of
rock & roll. Marlon Brando gave us a sample of how magnetic a young man of
the time could hold our attention in The
Wild One. He oozed sexuality, burned
with deep passion and rebelled against the previous decades of social
confinement. All Elvis had to do was find a zone between Brando and himself and
James Dean and look the part on screen. James Dean struck after Brando in Rebel Without A Cause, then six years
later Warren Beatty in Splendor in the
Grass; all young attractive men who could sell a young audience on radical
change and the discomfort of growing up in the suffocating ‘50s – and a
alternative lifestyle.
Rock n’ Roll was here to stay!
The soggy sounds of yesterday seem to disappear over-night; boys toughened up,
girls got all mouthy. Kids began to punk out in school. James Dean, Brando,
rebellion, retaliation, uprising was playing to the same beat. Meanwhile, the
young man who started it all was just a plain-old country boy who loved his
mama and a good song.
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