Word: presleys
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...Before Elvis there was nothing," John Lennon stated in one of his last interviews. The exaggeration was permissible; Elvis Presley, a Memphis hillbilly shouter, did, in fact, radically transform popular music in America. Prior to "the Pelvis," the rhythms of rock were buried in the funk of "race" music. In his wake came the generations of rock compounds: -abilly, acid, punk, and, inevitably, Beatlemania. The first to mesmerize the millions of white teen-agers of mid-'50s America, Elvis all too soon degenerated into rhinestone rumbling, and his act, his records and films, even his bloated, tragic end, contained...
...this fascinating, perverse study, Albert Goldman struggles to take Presley beyond the familiar Late Show caricature. But the author's attempt, like his earlier Ladies and Gentlemen-Lenny Bruce!!, is filled with portentous speculations and lofty pronouncements about the American Dream and its dreamers. What Goldman does provide, however, is a telephoto focus on life behind the mansion wall of Presley's Graceland. Like the histories of those two other native recluses, Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner, Presley's private existence was a medley of ritualistic fetishes. The public persona, however, was pure stagecraft...
...emerged complete with teenagers who tried to contact his spirit and were convinced that somehow he'd come back. It was one of those weird flashes of fusion, where some source, regardless of its quality, taps into some undercurrent that everyone else has ignored. Witness Kerouac. Witness Kesey. Witness Presley...
After Elvis Presley died in August of 1977, there was in the media what could only be described as a massive breach of taste. There were five miles of crowds in Memphis. Tennessee, at Elvis's mansion, Graceland. In Nashville, when Elvis's father died, there were two miles of crowds. His father. His father didn't sing a note in his life. But he sired the King. He had proved that aristocracy could live, even in a place as retrograde as the Memphis of the 1950s...
...Elvis Presley came out of the South, came out, as a truck driver once told me, "singing the pants off songs," but still, he came out of the South. If the furthest south you tend to get is D.C., then Elvis might not make a lot of sense, except as some sort of defiant yahoo, some blazing anachronism. After all, by the time most of us got to him, he looked pretty silly in those white jump suits with the high collars, and that plasticene pompadour. He was singing in Vegas then--our most improbable city--or out in Honolulu...