Elvis never cut
it for me. A defensive heterosexual, I failed to respond to his swivelling hips
and his lush blue-black hair (clearly a wig). And that globular voice, like
methane bubbles emerging from a marsh. So strange. They said he was the first
white to sing like a black man. Then why not listen to a black man and cut out
the intermediary?
To be fair Elvis
faced problems not of his making. I’d just discovered posh music and he wasn’t Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau. His songs persecuted me as noise during RAF national service.
During a brief period when I listened to pop driving to work in Philadelphia he
came up with the relentlessly maudlin In The Ghetto. And Heartbreak Hotel was a
perfect target for the musical satirist Stan Freberg (“Too much echo – echo –
echo. Turn me off – off – off.”).
One thing in his
favour: he did his national service like
a man, instead of claiming to have flat feet or a social disease. And there was
a mild hint of self-mockery about Blue Suede Shoes. Other than that I let him
be and rather cruelly regarded his ignoble death as a slap in the face for his
deifiers.
But with pop,
context is all. Often status is achieved in contrast to what went before. I
have dwelt on the sheer wetness of Radio Luxembourg output during the very
early fifties and perhaps if I’d been limited to that I might have regarded
Elvis differently. People whose music I enjoy and whose integrity I admire (eg,
Paul Simon) say Elvis was seminal and that I therefore profit from his role as
a stepping stone. That he shouldn’t be scourged for interfering with my reading
in B Block, RAF Yatesbury, Wiltshire.
Oh, I don’t know
though.