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The king will never die
This August market the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death at the age of 42. He'd always hoped to die on stage. In fact he was discovered on his bathroom floor, pyjamas round his ankles, buttocks upward in the air, after falling off the lavatory. He weighed 25o pounds and had become a bloated, drug-addicted wreck
For millions, his death was like learning of the assassination of President Kennedy or the murder of John Lennon. They will always remember what they were doing at the time they heard the news.
Anyone who loves pop music can't fail to warm to his early hits, when Elvis was wild and beautiful. Elvis, in the words of his first producer, Sam Phillips, had the great advantage of being a "white singer who could sing like a negro". As a result, he appealed to middle America and, very quickly, the rest of the world. He was mean and dangerously sexy. The parents of teenagers were alarmed by him. For a short time he was the perfect pop star.
But the depressing thing about Presley was just how quickly he abandoned rebellion for respectability. Within a couple of years of his first hits, he'd joined the US army and become a model recruit and, as John Lennon observed. "Elvis Presley died the day he went into the army."
When he emerged two years later, he had become a clean-cut, all-American hero, who traded rock'n'roll for sentimental balladry and an endless succession of terrible movies. Unlike the pop greats, he never wrote his own songs, and though there was a career revival of shorts in the late Sixties and early Seventies, his ridiculous, jump-suited performances in Las Vegas were the worst kitsch imaginable.
Presley's tragedy, and it doesn't seem too strong a word, is that he was never his own man. Born or impoverished "white-trash" parents in Tupelo, Mississippi (his twin-brother was still-born), he quickly became unhealthily obsessed with his mother, Gladys, and she with him. The relationship was a kind of emotional incest, and right up to his mother’s early death, when he was in his early twenties, the two talked to each other in a toe-curlingly embarrassing baby language which outsiders couldn’t understand. He called her Satnin, the brand name of a tub of lard. In later years, of course, he did his heroic best to become a tub of lard himself.
Presley never recovered from Gladys’s death, and his subsequent promiscuity often seems like an anguished search for companionshiptather than sex. Throughout his life, he desperately needed someone to help him make it through the night. In later years, female companionship wasn’t enough, and he sought oblivion in a variety of drugs, consumed, like his favoured cheeseburgers and peanut-butter sandwiches, in awesome quantities.
If Gladys destroyed Elvis’s personality, it was his manager, Colonel Tom Parker who wrecked what might have been a great career. A carnival huckster who wasn’t actually a colonel at all, Parkerconsistently went for the money rather than the artistically sensible course af action. It was Parker who insisted on all those worthless but lucrative movies, Parker who insisted that Elvis kept touring when it was clearly killing him. And he took up to 50 percent of the profits. the “colonel” was a typical showbiz monster.
What makes it particularly sad is that Presley was, fundamentally a decent, sweet-natured if terrifyingly childish man. A man crying out for help, when he knows help will not come.
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