Culture Shock Fintan O'TooleThe cruel truth is that 30 years ago Elvis merely went from a living death to a physical death, his junk-filled body a symbol of the hype that swamped his real significance
In 1959, in the suburbs of Leipzig, teenagers took to the streets chanting: "We want no Alo Koll/ We want Elvis and rock'n'roll." (Alo Koll was a local bandleader endorsed by the authorities.) One leader of the demo would chant "long live Walter Ulbricht and the eastern zone" (Ulbricht being the leader of East Germany) and the crowd would respond "no, no, no". Another would then chant "long live Elvis Presley", evoking the response "yes, yes, yes". Similar demonstrations spread to a dozen other East German cities, until they were suppressed by arrests and detentions. It was one of the most striking examples of Elvis's real social and political importance. Unfortunately, the East German youths could not have known that "long live Elvis Presley" was an anachronistic slogan. Elvis was already dead.
He died a second time, of course, 30 years ago next week. But the Elvis who shook things up, who sent shockwaves into the world, ceased to exist as early as November 1955, when he left Sun Records and signed for bland pop label RCA. Everything after that is a kind of grotesque afterlife. The true followers of Presleyterianism, which is practically the state religion of the Deep South, are on to something when they maintain that he is still alive. For his actual death was only marginally a change in Elvis's state of being, from the dead living to the living dead. Dorothy Parker's great remark on the death of President Coolidge - "How could they tell?" - applies perfectly to Elvis's demise.
Two days after Elvis's physical death, his Svengali, Col Tom Parker, arrived in Memphis in a jolly Hawaiian shirt and announced: "Nothing has changed." Shortly afterwards, he announced that "Elvis didn't die, the body did. We're keeping Elvis alive. I talked to him this morning and he told me to carry on." Actually, what he had done was to sit Elvis's distraught father, Vernon, down and get him to sign a contract, giving the colonel the merchandising rights to Elvis bubblegum, Christmas-tree ornaments, perfume, belt buckles, medallions and anything else from which a buck could be squeezed. The colonel knew very well that Elvis's death had perfected his client, removing the last trace of human awkwardness from the marketing phenomenon he had long been.
Shortly afterwards, this insight became law when Parker won a case against a company that had produced a poster of Elvis two days after his death and the court found that "the market value of Presley's personality was in no way reduced by his death". If anything, of course, it was greatly increased. Just as his body ballooned in life, Elvis's status as a cultural icon has expanded to ridiculous proportions since his death and it, too, has been fed on junk. It takes some powers of exaggeration to hype someone of Elvis's real significance so much that he has become the most overrated figure of 20th-century culture. But Elvis attracts hyperbole as powerfully as puddles attract little children. Greil Marcus wrote in Dead Elvis that "He is the Big Bang and the universe he detonated is still expanding, the pieces are still flying." Sam Phillips, who produced the great early records, was more modest in 1982 when he told fans that "the two most important events in American history (sic) were the birth of Jesus and the birth of Elvis Presley."
The reality is that Elvis's cultural power was negated very quickly by Elvis himself, or rather by the Elvis industry that Parker invented. The disturbance of the racial order caused by a southern white boy singing black music was calmed by the obedient service in the army, the 27 dreadful movies in nine years, the careful washing out of his real identification with the mixed hillbilly heritage of Tennessee and Mississippi. In March 1955, six of the top 10 bestselling singles in the US were black R&B numbers performed by white artists. With Elvis as the "king of rock'n'roll", black music had become white property.
Does anyone seriously believe that Elvis would be the king of rock'n'roll if Chuck Berry was white? Berry ticked all the same boxes and more. He was a charismatic performer. He was, in both musical and racial terms, as much a crossover artist as Elvis ever was, playing white hillbilly music for black audiences and mixing country with R&B. But he was also a gifted lyricist, a witty social observer and a brilliant musician. He was copied much more directly by the British bands, the Beatles and the Stones, who shaped the 1960s golden era of rock. The first Stones single was Berry's Come On. John Lennon actually stole the opening line of Come Together from a Berry song.
But Berry was a black man and Elvis was white and the difference was, and remains, immense. Berry went to jail because of an accusation of an improper relationship with an under-age girl. Elvis's courtship of the under-age Priscilla was treated as a cute romance. Berry remained in constant trouble with the law. Elvis, in spite of his chronic drug abuse, was made a special agent for the Bureau of Narcotics by Richard Nixon. Elvis was built up in many ways as the anti-Berry and, for all his own cultural openness, the reason was race. Given that his true impact was at least as reactionary as it had been revolutionary, it is high time the Elvis myth left the building.