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Blue Moon (Over Memphis)
Aug. 16th, 2007 04:20 amI've reached the stage in my life where I can now remember what I was doing on a day thirty years ago. Don't laugh, whippersnappers--it'll happen to you.
My grandma Pat married and divorced the same man three times. One of the marriages was of dubious legality, but that's a story for another time. During the third marriage, they had a house in downtown Phoenix, around 12th street and Indian School road, and in the summer of 1977 I spent a lot of time there. Unlike my great-grandma's trailer (where I lived most of my childhood) Grandma Pat's place had incredible luxuries like air conditioning, insulation, and this amazing new service called "HBO". It only broadcast at night; during the day, it was this channel called WTBS from Atlanta--and it wasn't just a station, it was a Superstation. At the time, Phoenix had five TV stations, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12. Oh, there was 21 if you wanted to watch Davey and Goliath (I often did that) and 33 if you wanted to watch Mexican soap operas (Hice a menudo eso). To my young TV-addicted eyes, HBO and WTBS were like cathode rays reflected off heaven.
It was mid-afternoon. I was watching My Favorite Martian and waiting for Wallace and Ladmo, when they interrupted this program to bring me a bulletin from Memphis: Elvis Presley was dead. Everything stopped. No one could believe it. Even Grandma Pat and Grandma Owen stopped what they were doing and came in to listen. We had just made our annual summer trip back from Omaha, where a few weeks earlier my frequent babysitters and teenage-girl role models Terri and Giselle had just seen Elvis perform. They spent the weeks before the show in breathless anticipation, showing me the tickets, playing his records, talking about him, and when they got back they filled my head with stories about the concert, what a great performer he was, what he sang, the energy, the fans, the scarves. And it had really fired my imagination (and got my little preteen girly heart all aflutter). I knew very little about Elvis besides the few beat-up 50s and 60s-era 45s I inherited from my mom and played constantly, and his movies that aired on channel 5 at all hours of the night, so to me he was eternally young and eternally technicolor-cool. And idolizing Terri and Giselle as I did, I really wanted to see Elvis too, to be a part of that. I dreamed of the day I'd be 16 and swooning at an Elvis concert. And then, a handful of weeks later, he was dead. It seemed so weird and coincidental that I almost took it personally, as if something had deliberately been taken away from me. I had no sense of him as a human being. To me he was this icon, this stunningly handsome and vibrant mythological thing, James Bond, Captain Kirk, only way beyond that, and real. How can that just be gone? I needed an Elvis!
In some sense Elvis was almost a forgotten man at that point. It had been a few years since he'd had a sizeable hit, and his last great moment of cultural significance had come around the time of the '68 comeback, or maybe Aloha from Hawaii. None of that mattered. One almost got the sense that the business people were glad he was dead. I remember seeing Col. Parker soon thereafter, and even though I was just a kid, I knew right away that was a bad, bad man. It's been 30 years but I'm satisfied with my first impressions there.
Elvis mania kicked up again in earnest, fueled by RCA and Col. Tom's marketing machine. In death Elvis was, as Mojo Nixon aptly noted, everywhere. And it just felt weird to me, from my kid perspective-- wait, so now that he's dead everybody loves him and wants a piece of Elvis? Where was all this Elvis stuff last year when he was still alive? It just bugged me. People seemed to be nuts. They didn't love Elvis for the right reasons, like I did, they only loved him because he was dead. How can that be right?
Ah, but there it was. Human nature in a nutshell, laid out for my careful observation. Strange.
I've been a fan of Elvis for a long time. Like a lot of elitist music snobs I tend to stick to the early stuff. "Blue Moon", "Mystery Train", "Don't", "Tomorrow Night". The more I learned about his life and career, the more I wished he hadn't been destroyed by fame or the unchecked id or whatever it was. What happened to Elvis Presley the human being shouldn't happen to anybody.
But as much as I feel for the human being, I miss Elvis the icon. Not the marketing machine, not the brand, but the actual immutable guy, live and in person. When I finally turned 16 I had to settle for swooning at a Howard Jones concert. Somehow it just wasn't the same. I worked in the music business for a while, and now in film, and I've met a lot of celebrities. Some of them are interesting, some are really nice, some are weird as hell, but they're all just people. Presley was bigger than that, and he still sparks something in me I can't name. Maybe he's a kind of shorthand for lost potential, for all my girlhood dreams that never came true, the life I never had, the places I never got to go and the people I never got to see. A lost love. 30 years later, I still kinda need an Elvis.
My grandma Pat married and divorced the same man three times. One of the marriages was of dubious legality, but that's a story for another time. During the third marriage, they had a house in downtown Phoenix, around 12th street and Indian School road, and in the summer of 1977 I spent a lot of time there. Unlike my great-grandma's trailer (where I lived most of my childhood) Grandma Pat's place had incredible luxuries like air conditioning, insulation, and this amazing new service called "HBO". It only broadcast at night; during the day, it was this channel called WTBS from Atlanta--and it wasn't just a station, it was a Superstation. At the time, Phoenix had five TV stations, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12. Oh, there was 21 if you wanted to watch Davey and Goliath (I often did that) and 33 if you wanted to watch Mexican soap operas (Hice a menudo eso). To my young TV-addicted eyes, HBO and WTBS were like cathode rays reflected off heaven.
It was mid-afternoon. I was watching My Favorite Martian and waiting for Wallace and Ladmo, when they interrupted this program to bring me a bulletin from Memphis: Elvis Presley was dead. Everything stopped. No one could believe it. Even Grandma Pat and Grandma Owen stopped what they were doing and came in to listen. We had just made our annual summer trip back from Omaha, where a few weeks earlier my frequent babysitters and teenage-girl role models Terri and Giselle had just seen Elvis perform. They spent the weeks before the show in breathless anticipation, showing me the tickets, playing his records, talking about him, and when they got back they filled my head with stories about the concert, what a great performer he was, what he sang, the energy, the fans, the scarves. And it had really fired my imagination (and got my little preteen girly heart all aflutter). I knew very little about Elvis besides the few beat-up 50s and 60s-era 45s I inherited from my mom and played constantly, and his movies that aired on channel 5 at all hours of the night, so to me he was eternally young and eternally technicolor-cool. And idolizing Terri and Giselle as I did, I really wanted to see Elvis too, to be a part of that. I dreamed of the day I'd be 16 and swooning at an Elvis concert. And then, a handful of weeks later, he was dead. It seemed so weird and coincidental that I almost took it personally, as if something had deliberately been taken away from me. I had no sense of him as a human being. To me he was this icon, this stunningly handsome and vibrant mythological thing, James Bond, Captain Kirk, only way beyond that, and real. How can that just be gone? I needed an Elvis!
In some sense Elvis was almost a forgotten man at that point. It had been a few years since he'd had a sizeable hit, and his last great moment of cultural significance had come around the time of the '68 comeback, or maybe Aloha from Hawaii. None of that mattered. One almost got the sense that the business people were glad he was dead. I remember seeing Col. Parker soon thereafter, and even though I was just a kid, I knew right away that was a bad, bad man. It's been 30 years but I'm satisfied with my first impressions there.
Elvis mania kicked up again in earnest, fueled by RCA and Col. Tom's marketing machine. In death Elvis was, as Mojo Nixon aptly noted, everywhere. And it just felt weird to me, from my kid perspective-- wait, so now that he's dead everybody loves him and wants a piece of Elvis? Where was all this Elvis stuff last year when he was still alive? It just bugged me. People seemed to be nuts. They didn't love Elvis for the right reasons, like I did, they only loved him because he was dead. How can that be right?
Ah, but there it was. Human nature in a nutshell, laid out for my careful observation. Strange.
I've been a fan of Elvis for a long time. Like a lot of elitist music snobs I tend to stick to the early stuff. "Blue Moon", "Mystery Train", "Don't", "Tomorrow Night". The more I learned about his life and career, the more I wished he hadn't been destroyed by fame or the unchecked id or whatever it was. What happened to Elvis Presley the human being shouldn't happen to anybody.
But as much as I feel for the human being, I miss Elvis the icon. Not the marketing machine, not the brand, but the actual immutable guy, live and in person. When I finally turned 16 I had to settle for swooning at a Howard Jones concert. Somehow it just wasn't the same. I worked in the music business for a while, and now in film, and I've met a lot of celebrities. Some of them are interesting, some are really nice, some are weird as hell, but they're all just people. Presley was bigger than that, and he still sparks something in me I can't name. Maybe he's a kind of shorthand for lost potential, for all my girlhood dreams that never came true, the life I never had, the places I never got to go and the people I never got to see. A lost love. 30 years later, I still kinda need an Elvis.
