Surfin' the drift

Some nights I wake up dreaming I'm Elvis

The King is dead, long live the King.

So Elvis gets his 1,000 No. 1 hit single and he’s not even around to hear about it. Unless that is if you are one of the readers of the News of the World who believes that Elvis is alive and living in Bognor Regis or some other washed up British sea side resort.

Assuming that Elvis really is dead and although would be impolite to speak ill of the dead, nobody can really claim that he died at the height of his popularity. His last No. 1 before he died had been some seven years before and although there were probably hundreds (but not thousands) of die hard fans present every time he performed at some hotel in Las Vegas, he was hardly an icon of the Seventies (now is that a compliment in a backhanded way, I wonder).

Yet it is the fat, aging has-been former rock god rather than the teenaged pelvis gyrating pop idol who is, for me, the real King. His voice damaged by amphetamines and the deep fried peanut butter and mashed banana sandwiches, he had taken to crooning ballads which hardly taxed his reduced range and there was certainly no danger of any pelvis gyrations even if he still knew where his pelvis was.

Still it was through these ballads (much favoured by middle-aged Elvis impersonators all over the world) with largely forgettable lyrics that Elvis communicated his pain - the memories of what he could do in his younger days, the unfulfilled promise in what he could have done and most of all, the anguish which he probably just about felt at the edges of his bloated, drugged induced existence but could not in all probability even put into his own words.

There’s a song made popular by Roberta Flack called Killing Me Softly with His Song - one of the lines in the chorus goes something like “strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words”. I think you have to feel the pain before you can make it resonate in someone else. That’s why the best Blues singers who go on about how their women have left them, how their dogs have died and the rain keeps raining on them are precisely the ones whose women have left them, whose dogs have died and upon whom the rain, well - keeps raining.

The King communicated the pain. About five years after Elvis died, I read somewhere that there were busloads of middle-aged and overweight Americans turning up at Las Vegas, not knowing that he died, asking to buy tickets for the next performance. Shocked and disappointed, they had spoken about how they had travelled halfway across America and how much they had been looking to watch him perform but most of all, how much they had wanted to come in the hope of sharing the pain. They all said, “His pain is our pain”.

I sniggered when I read that - I was sixteen years old and in the midst of the New Romantic revolution. Duran Duran was all about mascara, rouge and dodgy lyrics but they certainly had nothing to do with pain. Now perhaps I can begin to understand. And there is another reason why the later Elvis has a fresh appeal these days - slow ballads with minimal vocal range. Perfect karaoke fodder - even I can do that.

Are you lonesome tonight?

posted by porcorosso @ 1:13 AM