ELVIS HAS ENTERED THE BUILDING

Yesterday, while flattened in the subway, I had one of those rare moments that makes your daily commute bearable: an eccentric passenger. I’m not talking about one of those run-of-the-mill fire and brimstone lunatics (thank heavens for the iPod), but something far better: a middle-aged man in chalk-covered working clothes, hard construction boots and the All-Time Best Elvis Hair circa 1972, with mutton chops included. I did what anybody would do in that situation: I slipped out my phone and took a few clandestine pictures.

I was particularly glad for this chance occurrence because it reminded me that the King’s birthday was today. This fact that was further reinforced by a picture I received of my best friend, an Elvis fanatic, covered in duct-tape—in imitation of Elvis’s iconic gold-lame suit. All over the globe, Elvis fans are doing just the same. Not even James Joyce commands such an army of devotees on Bloomsday. (Then again, Joyce never got all shook up in a sequined jumpsuit, although he was an accomplished guitarist and tenor, so I’m told.) I did my own bit of celebrating by going to Peanut Butter and Co in the Village and ordering “The Elvis”.

Now, I’m not a religious man, but I do worship Elvis (I made my Hajj to Graceland in ’99). As a kid, Elvis’s hit records were ubiquitous, so deeply woven into the national fabric that you couldn’t even imagine an America without him, or baseball or Mickey Mouse or McDonalds for that matter. One of my favourite Elvis stories is when songwriter Mike Stoller was greeted at the dock in New York—after being rescued from the disastrous sinking of the “SS Andrea Doria”—by his songwriting partner Jerry Leiber with the news that Elvis had scored a huge hit with their song “Hound Dog”, to which Stoller replied, “Elvis who?” Answering that question isn’t always simple.

It wasn’t until I was 19 that I finally figured it out for myself. I experienced that Elvis Moment—almost everyone has one. It was just before sunrise and a friend and I had just gotten off work and gone to his house. As he made breakfast, I looked through his records and the aptly titled Sun Records album caught my eye. The first track I played was Elvis’s version of the Rodgers and Hart classic, “Blue Moon”. I expected something along the lines of the familiar Marcels’ hit, but what I heard was nothing short of an epiphany. Bill Black’s upright bass lightly and lazily plucks the root notes in time with Scotty Moore’s muted giddy-up guitar figure, conjuring the sparest of accompaniments to Elvis’s quivering, reverb-drenched falsetto. Never has rock and roll ever sounded so beautiful or so intimate, so attuned to the night-time. I remain stunned that at the very creation of rock and roll in Memphis—always a rough and tumble affair, concerned more with high energy and attitude—Elvis was capable of this kind of alchemy.

Elvis’s accomplishment as a hit-maker and a pioneer now tends to be undermined by those that claim he was an imitator. This always strikes me as cockeyed. After the age of the singer-songwriter, we tend to overlook the art of the interpreter, of the performer who can take someone else’s music and make it his own, who can actually embody the music. A dozen artists had recorded “Hound Dog” before Elvis, but none of them came close to his signature version. Elvis has now passed indelibly into myth, but before he was a black-velvet joke, he was a poor kid who loved to play music. Hail to the King. ~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: theogeo (via Flickr)