Recommendations of the Editorial team
From Tupelo, Mississippi, from Memphis, Tennessee, came this womanizer with his shiny suit and painted eyes, a young white trucker dandy who was definitely risking a beating for acting so black and so gay. We’re not talking about New York, not even New Orleans, this was Memphis, Memphis in the ’50s. That was punk rock. That was revolt. Elvis Presley changed everything – musically, sexually, politically.
Elvis Presley It was all at once, it’s all there, in his supple voice, his flexible body. And as he changed, so did the world: He was a 50s icon, capable of everything the 60s could do.
Elvis Presley – “Jailhouse Rock”:
And suddenly it was over. In the ’70s he transformed from a rock star to a wrestler, but interestingly, the lower he fell, the more godlike he became to his fans. In his last performances his voice was even more powerful than his stomach, you cry real tears in front of the music messiah who pours out his heart and turns the casino into a church. Elvis is the prototype of rock’n’roll: the intoxicating – like in gospel. The dirt of the Delta, the blues. Sexual liberation. Controversy. Changing people’s worldview. Everything is there with Elvis.
The hips that swing from Europe to Africa
When I saw the “Comeback Special” in 1968, I was only eight and not yet capable of making judgments – perhaps an advantage. I couldn’t yet assign the various Elvises to different categories or find my way around their contradictions. It was just pretty much everything I wanted from bass, guitar and drums: a performer who was annoyed by the distance from the audience; a stage character who turns the wide-angle lens of fame into a prism; a sexuality that was only surpassed by his thirst for instructions from God.
The hardest thing to explain, however, is the elastic, spastic dance – the hips that sway from Europe to Africa, which, I say, sums up America. For an Irish boy, the voice might explain America’s sex appeal, but the way he danced demonstrated the simmering energy of this new world; how it would boil over and scald us all with new ideas, new understandings of race, religion, fashion, love and peace. These ideas were far greater than the man who would pave the way for them, ideas that would later confuse, perplex, the man who forever curled the stiff upper lip of the Anglo-Saxons. He was “Elvis the Pelvis”, the pelvis, the hip, one hand on the blues electrode, the other on the gospel, which is the essence of rock and roll, electroshock therapy for a generation, boys and girls, black and white.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival all discovered the blues through Elvis
I recently met with Coretta Scott King, John Lewis and several other leaders of the American civil rights movement, and they reminded me of the cultural apartheid that rock and roll faced at the time. I think the mountain they had to climb would have been much steeper without the paths that black music had blazed through white popular culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival all discovered the blues through Elvis. He did what the civil rights activists demanded: he tore down walls. Today he is not considered a political artist, but that is politics: changing the way people see the world.
In the ’80s, U2 went to Sun Studio in Memphis, site of the rock’n’roll Big Bang. We worked with Elvis’ sound engineer, Cowboy Jack Clement. He reopened the studio so we could record a few tracks in the same four walls where Elvis Presley sang “Mystery Train.” Jack found the old tube microphone that the King had howled into, and the reverberator was the same too. The room was a pure tunnel, but the sound in it had a certain clarity. You can hear him on the Sun records, and those are the most important ones to me. The King didn’t yet know that he was the King. It’s spooky, haunted music. Elvis doesn’t know where the train is taking him, and that’s why we want to be passengers.
Elvis swallowed America before it swallowed him
Some commentators say it was the army. Others believe Hollywood or Las Vegas broke him. I think it was more likely his marriage or his mother. Maybe it was just the fat ass of fame sitting on top of him. I still think the Vegas period is underestimated.
At that time, Elvis Presley had clearly lost control of his life, and there is this incredible pathos. The great operatic voice of later years. Why do we always want to see our idols die on the cross they made themselves? On the other hand, Elvis devoured America before it devoured him.