“all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world” –Thoreau,
Cape Cod
 |
| (Graceland, August 15, 2012; Associated Press). |
Last week was the 35th anniversary of the official death of
Elvis Presley: after days of reclusion in the bedroom of his Memphis mansion,
Graceland, the King of Rock and Roll was said to have been found slumped and
unconscious upon his holy throne, by his girlfriend,
Ginger Alden. A last game of racquetball, a few gospel songs around a piano in
the lounge by the court, and packets of Dilaudid pills remain the scant details
available about the King’s last morning. By some accounts, Elvis disappeared in
the bathroom at 9:30 AM, on the morning of August 16th; by most
accounts, the arrival of the ambulance took remarkably long, and few emergency
personnel (if any?) attended to the lifeless body in the upstairs bedroom.
Presley was pronounced dead within four minutes of arriving at the Baptist
Medical Center in Memphis; within one hour, Presley’s father Vernon stood
before reporters and confessed tearfully to his son’s death. The King of Rock
and Roll had vanished from the public and musical sphere, long after his rise
to fame and the ignition of the pop genre he carried. Recordings of his final
concerts still ring of a Blues-Brothers-style massive orchestral rock outfit,
replete with male and female choirs, singing the words as Elvis fumbled around
lyrics and with the fans, his hair still slicked and black like his teenage
crooner idol, Tony Curtis. The innocence of the 1950s, with which Elvis and
others Rocked Around the Clock, had long been shattered by the postmodern and
the psychedelic: the fuel for the engines that carried the Beatles to America
in 1964—a diversity of pop music conceptualization—may have also been the fuel
used in the steam shovel that dug Elvis’ grave, in his backyard at Graceland. Had
he been reading Frank Adams’ The
Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, or The Shroud of Turin; was the National Enquirer’s cover photo, of
Elvis’ open-casket funeral and bloated face in repose, provide evidence of a
wax-figure forgery; did the limited recordings—the only gold and transparent
vinyl ever pressed by Sun Records—by a masked singer (“Orion”) following Elvis’
death actually contain sessions by Elvis, and who asked the Jordinaires to
attend a recording session of Christmas music in 1978, and whose voice got
layered over the tracks later?
[…] In 1976 Elvis had
become a part of a sting operation orchestrated by the FBI against the Mafia.
Vernon had needed to raise some extra cash since the private jet that Elvis was
leasing was a major hemorrhage in their expenses. Vernon was approached by
Fredrick Pro, president of Air Cargo Airlines out of Florida. Fredrick was
known to the FBI as Alfredo Poc, president of Trident Consortium in New York,
and under investigation for racketeering, fraud and other Mafia activities. An
agreement was reached between Vernon and Fredrick on how to refinance the
plane, lease it to Fredrick, and gain an extra $10,000 a month on the plane. AT
first Vernon was completely naive of what Pro and his cohorts were up to. As
checks that were promised to come in from Pro were either not appearing or were
bounced. Vernon had contacted the FBI.
The FBI had been
monitoring Pro and his other Mafia connections since the mid 1960's. The FBI
assigned two of their best Special Agents to go undercover in Elvis's entourage
to infiltrate the mob activities. Vernon and Elvis were briefed on the
continuing investigation and were excited to help the FBI in their operation.
By July 1977, the FBI
felt it had enough evidence to arrest and convict the world wide Mafia ring
that defrauded the Presley family of over one million dollars and many other
organizations around the world.
Arrest warrants for
everyone in the fraud ring were issued on August 16, 1977 […]
(elvis-is-alive.com, 2012).
These and other stories are ripe for the picking, across the ‘Net. There
has never been a full and serious documentary regarding the last days of the
King: perhaps Elvis Presley Enterprises, an unrivaled economic engine still
churning up wealth thirty-five years later, is too powerful, and has squashed
any attempts at the retelling of the Presley narrative (one film, “Elvis Meets
Nixon,” accomplishes—by way of Dick Cavett, and without the use of copyrighted
material—a telling of the tale about Presley’s White House visit; market value
of the out-of-print VHS on Amazon.com is typically close to $100). We thirst
for the truth, about what happened to the King of Rock and Roll, if only
because the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston have proven how callous
and indifferent we may be, when necessary. We heard the details—of the prophenol
tents, of Houston’s uncontrollable urges—and may perhaps feign a grin when we
see, upon a tall commemorative Pepsi can, the likeness of the King of Pop. We
are losing our ability to remember who we are, based on the scant few decades
of American idols available: it is the loss of someone to wonder and speculate
about, someone whose works and career are not fully substantiated, have not
been rooted in anything but the grainy and un-nutritious soil of shifting
sands. Electronic Dance Music has tightened its grip on too many eardrums, with
its bass resonance and skill coming not from any musical performance, but a
technical beats-per-minute guru who splices and cuts tracks together like any
given disco dee-jay.
I beg of you, Elvis, make your return: if all we are to endure is the
post-authentic, the former video game chip-turned music, the punk-grunge rehash
decades hence, the psychedelic legacy of the nomadic drug-enthusiast soundscape
jam bands, and the experiential electronic beat-thrashing gatherings that are
EDM (a scene Moby wants nothing to do with), we may be doomed to each being the center of our headphone'd universe. If the 1960s had “love-ins” and “be-ins”
as events of socialization and interaction, that accompanied and complemented
the latest pop music, one need look only as far as any given night on Phish’s
recent summer tour, to witness what could be called a “ME-in,” where one’s own entranced
and enraptured head bobs and nods to the shifting patterns of instrumental
interplay that all end up sounding basically the same.
Without clear narratives surrounding the makers of our popular music, we
risk becoming emboldened American Idol wannabes, waiting in lines standing on
concrete, waiting for our auditions and moment of fame in faux-participatory
schemes of celebrity and judgment. We need to know that there is more than just
the reiterations of other generations’ music, and more than emulation alive in
the characteristics and personalities of musicians: Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits
emerged first in 1980, after the band ripped off all it could from The New York
Dolls, and sanitized the punk movement. Stephen Tyler, the group’s big-lipped figurehead,
has (following a spat of unexplained in-concert moments when he couldn’t manage
to stay onstage) has come to be one of our culture’s literal prophets and
judges. At this rate, we risk losing all ability to know what we look like: as
if we never moved our chairs to avoid high tide at the ocean, and have found
ourselves neck deep in the waves of our own salt brine, in waters radiated by
cultures beyond our own, an experience we’re told is enjoyable. The taste of
the salt water, and the succumbing of musicians to asphyxiating and tides of
monetization, is what we name “culture.”
And so: Elvis, I beg of you, please emerge from behind the marketing
scheme of your disputed death; please, if you are out there, disavow the
Colonel’s eternal flame of commerce and the commercialization of legacy;
please, come out from beneath your witness-protection moniker after those shady
deals over airplanes between you, some Italians, and the US Government went
south. Let us know you are still there, if you are, and that the symbol of American musical
success might still be a truck driver from Memphis making a record for his
mother. We need to be reminded that any of us, who know three chords or thirty,
could still become heir to a new and unexpected fortune of evolution in music
and pop—that it can still, or at least once has, happened. We need you, Elvis,
to reveal yourself once again, if you are able, giving us
intrinsic reasons to once again pick up our guitars and strum.
Elvis-is-alive.com. (2012). “Proof: Elvis is Alive!!” Retrieved from http://elvis-is-alive.com/
Associated Press. (2012). "Gallery: Elvis fans gather for candlelight vigil." Retrieved from http://projects.accessatlanta.com/gallery/view/music/elvis-vigil-081612/
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