Elvis Is Still Everywhere

By ROB PATTERSON

I was born in 1954, the same year that Elvis Presley entered Sun Studio and started recording. And had his first chart hit. As I like to say with a soupçon of jest, I’m the same age as rock’n’roll (though the style was percolating well before Presley).

So it’s only natural I have an almost obsessive thing about Elvis, not just a fellow Capricorn but with a birthday the day after mine. Yet it’s possibly not what you think.

I am not a devoted musical fan of Elvis. Don’t get me wrong. His early recordings were rock music’s Big Bang. He’s a hellaciously potent singer with an entertainer’s bat-like sonar for the cosmic groove. His finest stuff is transcendental. But it lives in a pool surrounded by his lesser moments and too much dreck (so much it even taints his gems).

Yes, to many I am committing rock’n’roll heresy. Shoot me (with a nerf gun, please). To me the true king of rock’n’roll is Jerry Lee Lewis. When it come to atomically-charged crooners that can rock and get soulful, I’ll take my man Tom Jones. To digress and be explored in other missives….

I have a friend and music journalism peer who would battle me on my POV to the proverbial death over Elvis’s stature, that’s how much he loves Elvis. Neither of us is right nor wrong. At that level of greatness, both ranking and wrangling over it misses the point. At the level where genuine greatness resides, it’s simply personal preferences and tastes that bring any difference.

Yet I’m still fascinated by Elvis. And what prompted this column is a three-episode series I recently watched on Prime, “Loving Elvis.” I’ve read many volumes on the man. I even spent a night at a nightclub table with much-maligned Presley biographer Albert Goldman, Olympic-level songwriter Doc Pomus, who co-wrote Elvis hits like “Viva Las Vegas,” Suspicion” and “Little Sister,” and Big Joe Turner, one of the men who invented rock’n’roll. To amend the song by the late great Mojo Nixon, in my life, Elvis is almost everywhere.

So I can say with assertive assurance that this doc gets him with love, empathy and understanding, if also disturbingly sad truths. It is the most revelatory source on Presley since Elaine Dundy’s 1985 book “Elvis and Gladys” that explored his early life and the bond it created with his mother strongly affected his mother.

Elvis’s twin brother who died at birth impelled his mother to embrace and almost worship his son. His father’s time in jail when Elvis was three and Vernon Presley’s inability to hold a steady job and truly lead his family created a Elvis/Gladys dyad exemplified by the fact that she walked him hand and hand to and from school until he was nearly 10 years old.

Their not-quite incestuous closeness, with much physical affection, is the primary skein within the doc’s exploration of Elvis’s relationships with women from when he rocketed to fame onward. Many of the (now older) women he loved and who loved him (and still do) talk about Presley, how much they loved and cared for him, and how none of them could ultimately fulfill his need for love … love that he lost when Gladys died just after Elvis entered the Army at age 23.

The most incisive assessments of Presley’s dysfunctions that it can be said killed him too young by another friend and music journalism peer, Alanna Nash. Coincidentally, new insights come from his stepbrother David Stanley, who I met some 20 years ago when we were seeing two women who were friends. And spent an evening talking Elvis with him. One thing I learned not in the doc or yet, as best I know, in the public record is that Presley was a pot smoker. Stanley would go cop it for him.

Most troubling aspect accented here above and beyond his man-slut promiscuity, albeit lusting to be loved, was his serial attractions to teenage girls – many more than Priscilla, who he wed after she aged, always with characteristics that resembled his mother when younger. Yes, he was in legal terms a sexual predator. Even if the girls were seduced into willingness by his Southern charm, sweetness, sincerity, and genuine love for him.

And all the love of so many women plus much of America and even the world couldn’t save Elvis. His story is the true hillbilly elegy.

Populist Picks

TV Documentary: “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary” – Even if Yacht Rock is a silly name for what was called soft rock, this does include some good interviews with artists like Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross and Kenny Loggins. My feelings on the genre rename are best expressed by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, who is heard here at the end of the doc hanging up on a phone call from the filmmaker when he say “Yacht Rock.”

TV Documentary: “Icons Unearthed: James Bond – A Spy is Born” – More silliness in the tone of how this doc that nonetheless does a fairly good job of tracing the interesting history of the seminal film franchise.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2025

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