Blue Moon (Over Memphis)
Aug. 16th, 2007 04:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badatapologiesI'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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 12:59 pm (UTC)The 70s Elvis was this weird seven-year-long two-way communication between Elvis and his fans -- he seemed so intent on squandering his gift and destroying the edifice of his legend, while at the same time blowing his concerts up into ever-more monumental ego-trips. It's like he was having a going-out-of-business sale, trying to give it all away. Which, in the end, he did. A strange and indelible capper to the career of the most significant American artist of the 20th century.
Check this out: 1977 -- Elvis Presley dies, Star Wars, the Sex Pistols, the New York City blackout and riots, Son of Sam, the peak of disco. Sheesh! What a summer.
My daughter Kit knows Elvis, of course, through Lilo and Stitch, and the other day an Elvis Death Special came on and they showed a clip from Loving You, and even though Kit had never seen Elvis on film before or heard this particular song she still lit up and called me and said "Dad, look! It's Elvis Presley!" Then the song ended and somebody else came on and was just talking so she changed the channel to Boomerang.
An exchange from my play Jane Faust:
FAUST: I wish to have 24 years at the top, with you as my servant.
MEPHISTOPHELES: 24? You aim high. 23 was good enough for Elvis.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 01:15 pm (UTC)It was a heady time to be eight years old, I can tell you that. And terrifying. Son of Sam was an entire United States away and I still had nightmares. The music, the movies--an amazing, overwhelming time for me. I'll spare you the personal drama in my wee life, but the Elvis thing felt like an added personal attack, and I was like hey! knock it off! Put my Elvis back! I was too young to understand it all then. Maybe at this point I'm simply too dumb to understand it all.
Clearly Kit has her priorities exactly right. Elvis, yes. Chattering commentator, switch to classic cartoons. I completely concur.
I'd love to read/see the musical sometime, of course. And Jane Faust for that matter.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 03:42 pm (UTC)You, too?
Well, I guess, yeah. It was Phoenix in August. What else are 8 year-olds gonna do around 2:30ish in the afternoon. Sit in an airconditioned house and watch TV.
Mrs. Brown you've got a lovely Martian
Date: 2007-08-16 11:02 pm (UTC)Re: Mrs. Brown you've got a lovely Martian
Date: 2007-08-17 10:19 pm (UTC)I was sittin' on the floor watchin' My Favorite Martian when chanel 3 broke in with the news. I was kinda, "huhn...that's too bad." My sister asked, "Who's Elvis?" I told her, "He's the king of Rock 'N' Roll." Of course, this was before Leo Sayer proved his worth to later OWN that title.
My mom was doin' up the bathroom in their bedroom in our new house. She came out to the living room and said, "What'd they say?" Told her, she was kinda ...wow... about it, then went back to the house setting up.
Then about a month later we meet. Coincidence, or some kind of cosmic convergence? You decide.
I DO NOT like that things I remember clearly are now, or coming up on, 30 YEARS AGO!!!! I'm not old enough for that yet.
Re: Mrs. Brown you've got a lovely Martian
Date: 2007-08-19 05:11 am (UTC)Randy Vanwarmer. Say it was Randy Vanwarmer. Sayer doesn't have the chops.
It's hard for me to accept the premise that you existed before I met you. I always kinda figured you existed only in my head, like that friend of John Nash's in A Beautiful Mind.
I know. The 30 year thing...yeah. Is this adulthood? Just having not died?
Here's some Elvis for ya, ma'am.
Date: 2007-08-16 08:18 pm (UTC)Re: Here's some Elvis for ya, ma'am.
Date: 2007-08-16 11:02 pm (UTC)Sorry, I couldn't help myself. :)
Long story short:
Date: 2007-08-17 02:20 am (UTC)Sure enough, as the final encore begins, Paul Stanley belts out, "This one's for the King!" and KISS breaks into a rockin' version of Jailhouse Rock.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 10:34 pm (UTC)wait, wrong elvis. D'OH!