Elvis Presley’s enduring influence and appeal can’t be explained by anything as simple as the singer’s undeniable charisma, or even the quality of his unassailable music. Like any icon, Elvis matters because he conveys desires and ideas far larger than himself. So it makes poetic sense that on Aug. 16—the 25th anniversary of his death—the King was presented at The Pyramid in Memphis as a literal colossus, his image projected onto a screen several stories high.
During the first half of what the faithful call simply “The Concert,” the young Elvis—that is to say, his voice and gigantic video image—rocked through a set of early hits like “That’s All Right,” “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.” Live and onstage, a rockabilly trio (including original Presley drummer D.J. Fontana) provided swinging accompaniment even as it was dwarfed by Elvis’ monumental image. Later, a 50-foot, jump-suited Elvis stirred the crowd. Lean and tan, graceful and shockingly beautiful in the first years after his late ’60s comeback, these images of Elvis were synchronized to a thrilling live reunion of Presley’s incomparable ’70s rhythm section, the TCB Band; to an orchestra conducted by Elvis’ longtime musical director, Joe Guercio; and to the gospel harmonies of former backing groups The Imperials, The Stamps and The Sweet Inspirations.
Fans at the Pyramid were alternately reverent and ecstatic throughout the evening. They were also not a little awed to feel so intensely again, albeit via mere technology and familiar footage, the once only suspected freedoms that Presley revealed to the world. On the enormous video screen, Elvis again “led the charge” (as biographer Peter Guralnick puts it) to “the breakdown of categories” regarding music, dance and style, as well as those of race, class, region, age and gender; he broadened the possibilities for what, and who, could be sexy, cool and popular.
Meanwhile, the arena’s international audience—some of its members with bee-hive hairdos or graying and receding hairlines, others in baby-doll T’s or sporting freshly hip sideburns, a few not old enough to crawl—beamed and teared up and cheered. For Elvis, yes, but also for all that’s contained in his distinctively American saga. Elvis Presley’s music, his rise to fame and tumble into tragedy, embody nothing less than a quest for human freedom—our collective potential to achieve it and the obstacles that block our way.
No one can deny that Presley heralded a cultural revolution: “We are [his] ricochet,” wrote critic Greil Marcus in 1981. But for how long can Presley’s image loom as large as it has for the last half-century? As the baby boomers who first thrilled to “Elvis the Pelvis” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 die off—and as their children, who were wowed “via satellite” by the 1973 television special Aloha From Elvis in Hawaii, follow them to the grave—will the import of Elvis Presley likewise pass away? Will some not-yet-born teenager chance upon a black-and-white, seemingly prehistoric photo of Elvis, lip curled and hip cocked, and see only a figure as preposterous as, say, Al Jolson smirking and rolling his eyes?
The day before “The Concert,” 100 or so scholars, musicians, writers and other fans gathered at the University of Memphis to consider the question. The college’s annual seminar had been entitled “Is Elvis History?” months in advance. Yet by the time “Elvis Week” rolled around, the question appeared settled. Far from finished, Elvis had been everywhere this summer, thanks largely to the efforts of Elvis Presley Enterprises to hook younger audiences. The King’s music was featured in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, and a remixed version of “A Little Less Conversation,” one of Presley’s few worthwhile soundtrack sides from the late ’60s, became a Nike ad and then a No. 1 record in the U.K. Elvis’ original had anticipated the energy and soul of his famed comeback so well that about all Amsterdam deejay JXL needed to do was goose the rhythm track with a drum loop.
There was also the inevitable new box set designed to cash in on the big anniversary. It’s hard to tell if the title of the four-disc Today, Tomorrow & Forever is meant as a prediction of the King’s continued appeal or a threat from his record company. The RCA collection—yet another set of previously unreleased, and mostly indistinguishable, alternate takes—is for Elvis completists only. (For an essential purchase, find the DVD “Special Edition” of Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, a galvanizing 1970 portrait of Presley in rehearsal and onstage—and one that proves he reached his peak not as a boy but as a grown man.)
Still, disc one of the box does include a noisy and unpredictable seven-song concert, recorded in Little Rock in 1956. Here, Elvis is still discovering his dangerous mixture of roots music white and black, and he draws attention to the controversy surrounding such miscegenation by joking that his singles were hot “in some parts of Africa.” (His recordings were dismissed as “jungle music” at the time.) And this just a year before Little Rock Central High could be integrated only with the assistance of local police.
It must not be forgotten that, beyond the sincerity, humor and joy of his performances, it’s the context in which Presley worked that has invested his music with such weight for so long. And it is our decades-long distance from that context—or, rather, our contemporary unwillingness to admit how much remains unchanged—that leaves Presley’s future undecided. That’s why, despite this summer’s hoopla, seminar keynote speaker Greil Marcus bemoaned Elvis’ “disappearance from the cultural conversation through which a country defines itself.”
Which is what some people want. In the New York Daily News last week, columnist Stanley Crouch rehearsed a half-century-old complaint: Presley’s music was “adolescent,” a judgment that’s inadvertently insightful. As Sam Cooke biographer Daniel Wolff notes, “Grown-ups often mean by adolescence that age when people ask hard, essentially unanswerable questions. The corollary is, when we grow up, we don’t ask those foolish questions anymore. Yet Elvis asks not only ‘Where do black and white cultures meet?,’ but ‘Why is it we have to stop here and not push on?’ ”
Those who’ve heard the news have a tendency to talk of Elvis in such heady terms. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for those who knew Elvis personally to speak of him today in the style of testifying apostles. “Fear not the spirit of Elvis will ever go away,” Sam Phillips intoned at the “Elvis Week” seminar. “His presence is more around, with more permanence, than it ever could’ve been in his temporary bodily form.”
Phillips, the Sun Records boss who launched Presley’s career, no doubt benefits from a spiritual spin. For if Elvis is Christ-like, that makes Phillips God, a role he no doubt relishes. At 79, Phillips still speaks in a stentorian drawl and still presents himself as the wise and creative force that sacrificed his only begotten son—and for a mere 35 grand. But in exchange, the whole wide world received “the true essence of...a thing called freedom.” That, brothers and sisters, is a bargain. And a challenge too—one that yet towers above us, though not out of reach.
