Prophetic

It only took me 6 years.

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27 Responses to Prophetic

  1. PaulH says:

    Well, I for one, am very happy that you’ve kept your promise. But my poor iPod doesn’t know what’s going on.

  2. sheila says:

    Paul – hahaha Thanks! What are you listening to? I am currently heavy into his gospel stuff.

  3. Paul H. says:

    I’m going to try the gospel next. But his live performances are mesmerizing. I watched the 68 comeback special at the week-end for the first time (I’ve got the box set with all the performances in full) and just sat in stunned amazement at the sheer magnitude of the guy’s charisma. And this was his first live performance for 10 years. Jesus.

    So I’ve been listening to that sound track a lot, and today tried Aloha from Hawaii which is also great. Elvis sounds like he is having so much fun. And when he starts “I’ll Remember You” after the introductions I had spontaneous tears in my eyes. Beautiful.

    Also, I can’t get ‘Hound Dog’ out of my head. I just know that I’m annoying people at work with my decidedly mediocre humming. Don’t care though.

    I admit that I was always one who shied away from Elvis. But really, that was from a position of ignorance, and now I’m slightly miffed that I have been missing out all these years.

  4. sheila says:

    Hooray! Yes, later Elvis is very underrated, still – his album The Promised Land is incredible. Some of those Vegas concerts EXPLODE with electricity.

    That comeback special still blows the roof off. Has to be one of the best live performances ever recorded. I need to own it – I actually don’t.

    One of the things about Elvis, with his untimely death, is that very quickly he became this Image. This Thing, unquestionable, like the Washington Monument or something. So the subtlety of his incredibly successful career is sometimes lost. I mean, not really, but … yes, kind of. People still need to be convinced that he wasn’t just some fat guy in a jumpsuit handing out scarves at his concerts!!

    Powerful guy. We’re lucky that we have so much of him.

    Amazing Grace is the double gospel album, which pretty much has everything on it. Some of it is a bit too lugubrious for me – but some of it … God, it’s as though he had never been so sincere. He just pours himself into it. I love the ones that really HOP – real gospel quartet stuff. It’s funny: he fit in in so many different worlds – first artist to be in three Music Halls of Fame – crazy – only Eminem now reaches that kind of universal appeal, and even he doesn’t touch everyone. Although it was when Eminem reached the white middle-aged crowd that his fame went postal. Nobody saw THAT one coming, least of all himself. Signing autographs for grandmas and stuff … never happened before with a white rapper, certainly.

    But to hear Elvis singing gospel … it’s as though you can really sense his roots. The true essence of who he is, and where everything else came from. It’s really powerful stuff. He plays it straight, no winking, no irony. How I wish I could have seen him live.

  5. sheila says:

    And just for the sheer overwhelming numbers – it’s interesting to casually scroll down the Trivia section of Presley’s IMDB page. Lots of personal stuff there – but I am more interested in all of the records he broke. Broke them so far it’s like an Olympic record no one will ever match. He’s still breaking records. It’s just insane his appeal.

  6. Paul H. says:

    The sit down shows on the Comeback Special DVD are something else. He’s there with his original band just jamming. He plays a couple of numbers twice – just for fun. Like when one of the band jokes about EP not having a strap for his guitar, preventing him standing up as he so clearly wants to, and the band member joke-sings the beginning of One Night as ‘One strap is all I’m now looking for’ and despite the fact that they had just done that number two songs before, Elvis gets into it and they do it again, even better – and I think that’s the version they use in the broadcast. It’s such an eye opener.

    And I somehow can’t get over how young Elvis was. Only 33 at the time, and yet already this near mythical figure.

    Look at me, banging on like an Elvis veteran.

  7. sheila says:

    Ha! I’m so proud!!

  8. sheila says:

    Oh, and about that 68 special: yes, you’re right, it is incredible even now to see how lOOSE they are, how loose they were allowed to be. MTV Unplugged tries to set up a similar low-key situation and while a lot of good things have come out of that series (love Katy Perry’s Unplugged, and Nirvana’s is classic) – the kind of looseness and really private improvisational feel is totally radical. It was radical then and it’s radical now. Amazing that they had the balls to do it. The story of Steve Binder (the creator) and how he came up with these ideas is really fascinating in and of itself (does it go into that in the DVD you have?) Elvis would stay up all night with his friends playing like that, and Binder saw them jamming in the dressing room and got the idea. The stage is so small, Elvis can’t even stand up … and while he had some talking points he was supposed to get to … other than that, it was totally a free-fall. AMAZING. Still. Radical television. The biggest star in the world. Hard to imagine any star of that magnitude today taking such a risk.

  9. PaulH says:

    The DVD booklet mentions about Binder and the rehearsal sessions, and the soundtrack CD actually has recordings if them. They’re even rougher than the sitdown shows – real warm up stuff, but it’s fascinating to hear these musicians jamming in private.

    I watched one of the stand up shows in its entirety this evening. Elvis comes on, launches into Heartbreak Hotel and then the mike cuts out. He carries on, looking a bit nonplussed, and when the sound comes back he stops and says to the crowd ‘right, shall we start the show now?’. It’s very intimate, and you’re right, most modern artists and producers wouldn’t allow that sort of stuff to happen. It’s too controlled.

  10. sheila says:

    And his strap falls out of his guitar – and at one point his guitar comes unplugged – and it’s all in there. Such CONFIDENCE. Despite his fame, he was never “armored up” as a performer. It’s difficult to explain or quantify – but it is that honesty that makes such an indelible impression, from his earliest recordings to his latest.

  11. sheila says:

    I particularly love “Baby What You Want Me To Do” in the sit-down sessions. That is some powerful shit.

  12. sheila says:

    Here it is. He makes this grunt sound at around the 27 second mark that shows how … crazily open he is. Totally a sex noise. But not ironically done, or a “bit”. It’s in the music, it’s what it makes him feel. Women are screaming spontaneously – and the four guys are just sitting there. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to have been right next to them as this was going on. Damn.

  13. PaulH says:

    It’s a great moment. At the end when he sits on the edge if the stage to sing Memories he’s between two women and gives most of his attention to the one on his left. The other woman looks so dejected. Sitting right next to Elvis Presley and he’s looking at someone else!

  14. sheila says:

    A while ago, I posted a link to Lester Bangs’ famous obituary for Elvis Presley. Have you read it? It’s certainly one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read. Difficult, with a lot of negative feelings about Presley, but it packs a huge huge punch – and captures that … THING … he had as a performer. I’ll see if I can find it if you haven’t read it. Boy could WRITE.

  15. sheila says:

    Here it is, in case you haven’t read it. Get ready. It’s a powerhouse.

  16. sheila says:

    (It’s a pretty brutal assessment, but that seems to come from heartbreak, not cynicism.)

  17. PaulH says:

    Wow. “then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence”. I’m going to have to think about this piece. It delivers a hell of a slap in the face. Thanks for the link.

  18. sheila says:

    Powerful stuff. That last line.

    It’s a sucker-punch. I am blown away that he wrote this immediately upon the news of Elvis’ death. He didn’t wait to percolate. That’s why it bristles with anger and feeling. I can only hope someday that I can write something even half as good.

  19. sheila says:

    // I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. //

  20. PaulH says:

    It’s a challenging piece. Taking what Bangs perceives as Elvis’s contempt for his audience as indicative of a collective loss of humanity. It’s now quite a common view of what happened in the sixties, the replacement of community with self. But in 78, and to see it starting with the reaction to one singer is still quite sobering.

    I love how he decides that the 60s was caused by Ed Sullivan’s censorship of Elvis’s hips:

    “the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.”

    Those were some potent hips.

  21. sheila says:

    My friend Mitchell put it in a pretty blunt fashion. “For the first time, women openly admitted a performer made their vaginas wet.”

    THAT was the revolution, in my opinion – although he obviously had male fans, too. I mean, Lester Bangs admits that he was turned on by Elvis. But women throwing themselves into a public sexual fantasy every time they saw the guy … I mean, who else had that effect? Maybe Rudolph Valentino (and Elvis loved Valentino).

    The commentary during the 50s about the screaming girls was patriarchal and contemptuous – one reporter said that he thought all of those girls should be “smacked in the mouth”. But the girls didn’t CARE that people may have thought they looked ridiculous/bad – that they lacked propriety. Everyone knows that “boys will be boys”, boys are indulged, it’s expected that they will try to make a pass, that they want to get laid, that they are animals – but girls were forcibly left out of that picture. It was up to girls to maintain decorum, to uphold the mores of the civilization – it was all on their shoulders. With Elvis, an entire generation of girls was like, “Oh, fuck that, I want to fuck THAT MAN.”

    It may be crass, but as a woman – I really get that. The power of that.

    And I have always said: Those who scorn what Tween girls scream about are barking up the wrong tree – because Tween girls are the most loyal fans on the planet. They will follow a performer anywhere. I STILL love Ralph Macchio, for example. I’ll see anything he does, because I fell in love with him when I was 13.

  22. sheila says:

    They are the most powerful demographic in the world. You tap into that, and you’ve got it made.

  23. PaulH says:

    Haha. I love Mitchell’s phrase. Almost poetic in its conciseness.

    What strikes me with Elvis, and yeah I can definitely feel his sexual attraction, is that he seemed to enjoy it – even in the early footage from the 50s, you can see he loves the reaction he provokes. Nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. That in itself is attractive.

    Oh, and you know that Ralph Macchio’s on Twitter, right?

  24. sheila says:

    Yeah – Presley’s sex-thing was pushed outward, it was all there for everyone to see. Steve Binder was interesting in his comments on that – Binder told Peter Guralnik that although he himself was “a straight male”, he saw that Presley’s personality was the most “blatantly sexual” thing he had ever seen – not in person, in person Presley was generally shy and polite – all “yes, sir” and “no ma’am”, but onstage this whole other thing came out – something that his movies really tried to control and sanitize. So he wanted to let that cat out of the bag, give Presley an opportunity to show it.

    I think the sexual attraction thing for men in terms of Elvis came out of wish-fulfillment and projection. Women wanted to fuck Elvis, and guys wanted to BE Elvis. That kind of cross-gendered appeal is still very rare.

    and excuse me?? Ralph Macchio is on Twitter????

  25. PaulH says:

    He is. And very active too.

  26. nightfly says:

    I like the photos of the prior “prophetic” post. Turns out that Elvis was also the damned Pinball Wizard too. The bastard’s EVERYWHERE.

  27. sheila says:

    Nightfly – that was taken on the same trip, by the same photographer, as the photo in the banner. That series of photos from 1956 are my favorite photos of Elvis in existence. They’re in a book, too. Just a couple of weeks on tour with him, he was 21. He didn’t know how to wash his socks yet. Literally. His bandmates would see him take off his sweaty socks (he was always drenched after a performance), roll them up and throw them in his suitcase. He’d just buy more. But he wouldn’t throw the old ones out. So he’d open the suitcase and his bandmates would faint from the stench. One of them said something like, “He really stunk. But the girls didn’t mind.” hahahaha

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