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Elvis Aaron Presley left the building, for good, forty years ago today, after suffering from a heart attack at the age of 42. In pop cultural terms, 40 years is a long time. When I was growing up, Elvis’ legend loomed large but had already started to suffer at the hands of irony and kitsch. There is a misguided notion that the best thing about Elvis was his voracious appetite for jumpsuits, jewelry and peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches, and that the Vegas-era Elvis, the outlandish celebrity, the man of the exaggerated snarl, karate moves and “Uh-thank-ya-very-much” clichés is all you need to know about the shy Southern boy who changed the world. Since it’s disrespectful to swear when discussing “The King of Rock and Roll,” let me just say, that opinion is a load of bunk.
Elvis was arguably the first rock n’ roll singer (his records charting a good year before Chuck Berry and Little Richard), inarguably the nascent genre’s first star, pretty much the first teen idol (though he was already in his 20s when fame hit) and recorded some of the greatest and most influential American music of all time. More than any other artist, Elvis Presley defined our very idea of rock n’ roll; not just how it sounded, but how it looked and what it was about, its attitude and its sense of self. For proof of his outsize impact, look no further than Elvis ’56, a 1987 documentary which compiles all Presley’s television performances from his breakout year and is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
Narrated by The Band’s Levon Helm, the film begins by backtracking through those other important Elvis years; 1973 – when he performed to over a billion people at the Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite concert, and 1968 – when he launched his comeback via the Elvis television special on NBC. We then arrive all the way back to 1956, year zero, when, as Helm explains, “a 21 year old kid from Mississippi exploded across America and changed the face of popular music forever.”
Starting in the summer of 1954 and throughout the following year, Presley had released a series of seminal 45s for Sun Records, an independent label out of Memphis, Tennessee. They were basically a small format country string band playing black R&B songs and the occasional pop ballad with a reckless, devil may care delivery. At the time, people called it rockabilly. Within a year, their sound would lose its breezy twang and harden into what is now commonly recognized as rock n’ roll. Despite some success, the output of Sun Records was barely known outside the American South, and the only place for white musicians with guitars to play on back then was the country music circuit. Whether due to nerves or the music’s breakneck rhythms, Presley would often shake his legs and hips along to the music and this, along with his burly good looks, drove the little girls wild.
They didn’t just sound different, they looked different. Early home movies show that while his famed backing band (the great Scotty Moore on guitar, Bill Black on upright bass, and drummer D.J. Fontana) resembled your average country band in matching Western-style shirts, Elvis looked like…something else. Sporting a grey sharkskin suit, mustard yellow shirt with giant lapels, and a greasy D.A. haircut – itself, influenced by the African-American conk hairstyle – he looked one part movie star, one part gangster. In the squeaky clean environs of the Eisenhower’s ‘50s America, he looked like trouble.
In 1955, Elvis hooked up with former carny and country music manager Colonel Tom Parker, who told him, “Right now you have a million dollars worth of talent. When I’m done you’ll have a million dollars.” By the end of the year, Parked landed him a new recording contract with RCA Records, and set up a series of television appearances that would break Presley nationwide and are the core of Elvis ’56. The days of playing state fairs and country shows were over, Elvis, and rock n’ roll music, were about to hit Middle America like an atom bomb.
From his initial, somewhat reserved performance of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show, to an over the top version of “Heartbreak Hotel” a month later, Elvis has the crowd of teenage girls eating out of his hand. Presley put down his Martin for his performance of “Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show that June. Sporting a white jacket, with dark slacks, white socks and black shoes, the band pounds out the boogie woogie riffs with a hillbilly flair, Elvis wiggling for all he’s worth, before he cuts the speed to halftime and grinding along to a beat more suited for a strip club than a nationally syndicated variety show. It wasn’t the kind of thing they’d let you do on The Grand Ole Opry.
Following that appearance, critics pounced. Elvis had no talent, they said. Elvis was a pervert, a juvenile delinquent, and someone whose influence on America’s youth would be calamitous, they said. To make amends, he would appear on The Steve Allen Show in a tuxedo, singing into the eyes of a basset hound to muffle critics. It almost worked. He eventually rehabilitated his image enough to appear on the staid Ed Sullivan Show, who famously only shot him from the waist up. It doesn’t matter, he still rocks too hard to be contained by the close-up, seeming to burst through the television set. As Twisted Sister sang nearly 30 years later, you can’t stop rock n’ roll.
It’s often hard to recognize how groundbreaking an artist or work of art is when so much of its DNA has been passed down through the years. Its familiarity renders its originality routine. Elvis’ influence can be heard in everyone from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Prince to fellow Memphis native Justin Timberlake. As you watch these performances, try to imagine it’s 1956. All you know about rock n’ roll is a rumor of something rougher than “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” Then you turn on your television set and see some brawny hillbilly in a zoot suit, hiccupping his way through an R&B song, and shaking uncontrollably while the lead guitarist throws down a series of short, sharp bluesy licks in between snare rolls that sound like a pack of firecrackers going off. It must have been like seeing a new race of human being crawl out of the primordial ooze or burst through a rip in the time space continuum. If you want to know why you should give a darn about Elvis Presley, listen to the recordings he made for Sun Records and then watch Elvis ’56. The King is dead. Long live The King.
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
