Pat McCurdy and I go way WAY back. He’s a brilliant songwriter and performer in the Milwaukee/Chicago area. I first saw him play in Chicago. (Well, actually, this isn’t true. I first saw him when I was 12 or 13 when he appeared on television with his band on Ed McMahon’s Star Search. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true. He went up against Sawyer Brown.) But anyway, 10, 12 years later, we became friends. I performed with him at his shows when he appeared every week in Chicago.
He wrote a duet for us (“You and I Are Just About to Fall In Love”) which appeared on his album Show Tunes. He had four of us (me, Ann Marie, Kenny, and Phil) perform with him on the main stage at Milwaukee Summer Fest, to this day one of the funnest experiences of my entire life. (Clearly.) If you live in the Wisconsin/Illinois/Minnesota area, you should definitely check him out. His live shows are like joining a cult. Everyone knows all the lyrics and sings along.
So there’s the preamble to what unfolds below, a free-wheeling conversation about our shared obsession, Elvis Presley. (One of the staples of Pat’s live shows is an extravaganza called “Elvis Elvis,” a mashup of songs by Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello.)
I haven’t spoken to Pat in something like 10 years. But last week we spoke on the phone. At first we talked about Twin Peaks: The Return because when you haven’t spoken to someone in 10 years you want to cover the most important topics first. Then we moved onto Elvis and I turned on my voice recorder (With Pat’s permission, of course.)
Here’s the Whole Shebang. By Pat McCurdy and Sheila O’Malley.
Let’s hope everyone can keep up with us. I decided to do a straight transcript, because it was funnier to me when I listened to it. Half the time we are finishing each other’s sentences or filling in each other’s blanks, but hopefully it’s understandable.
Sheila O’Malley: What year were you born?
Pat McCurdy: 1954.
SOM: Okay, so … that was the year of Elvis’ first moment. The year he recorded “That’s All Right.”
PM: Right.
SOM: When you were growing up, how did you know about Elvis?
PM: He was just something you knew about.
SOM: Right.
PM: But I first realized who he was when… We had one movie theatre in the town I grew up in and on Saturday they would play two movies in the afternoon. And I saw Kissin Cousins … [I start laughing.] And Elvis plays –
SOM: Identical –
PM: Yeah, identical cousins. One blonde, one brunette. And you gotta understand that I was the biggest Beatles fan, biggest British invasion fan, huge fan of the blues … We knew who Elvis was because we knew his songs. You couldn’t miss “Cryin’ in the Chapel.” His songs were hits when I was a little kid. But we thought Kissin’ Cousins was SO LAME.
SOM: It IS lame.
PM: We just looked at this guy and thought, This is so stupid, compared to The Animals or The Beatles – and here’s this guy with greasy shiny hair, in this totally awful movie – and you know a movie is awful when you’re 12 and think it’s awful. But like 3 or 4 years later, he was the coolest guy in the world to me.
SOM: How did that transformation happen?
PM: At the end of the 60s, and early 70s, when I was learning to play the guitar and wanting to play in bands, there was a huge resurgence of ’50s music. Sha Na Na came out, and they weren’t like the TV Sha Na Na. They were filthy and forbidden and so great, and so suddenly I decided we should form a 50s band. We needed to have some songs, so I bought Elvis’ Golden Hits, Volume 1.
PM: And the sound of that music just hit me somewhere so hard. And then I got that Kissin’ Cousins wasn’t the real Elvis. All of a sudden, this 22-year-old pop idol made sense. So that’s what got me into him. We were forming a band and playing his music and the songs aren’t that difficult to play and they’re also awesome. He had the greatest song writers writing for him of his time. I was also getting into Chuck Berry and Little Richard and he covered songs from both of them. But there was also his image … At one point in my life I had the exact outfit that he wore on the back cover of the first album. It’s a lightweight shirt with black circles on it and a black tweed coat. I had that exact outfit. I wore it all the time. I was a grownup by then, too!
SOM: Did you see his comeback special in 68?
PM: Lame. I thought it was the dumbest thing, even though I appreciated it later when I got older. “If I Can Dream” was the big finale of the show and it’s not really going to affect a 13-year-old kid. The Elvis obsession – being affected by HIM – started especially after he died. Then I started reading everything I could about his life and who he was. He was this dirt-poor kid, and how do you handle the fact that you’re the best known person in the world? His fame is so interesting.
SOM: Very interesting.
PM: Did you read the Goldman book?
SOM: I did. It’s horrifying and it makes me angry.
PM: Yeah. It is really bad. But for us, the band I was in, at the time, it was our Bible for about 6 months. We all had our hair slicked back and dyed. Then there was the book Elvis: What Happened?
SOM: By his bodyguards.
PM: Yeah, right. By Red West. We were OBSESSED with it. In 1981 or 82, my band was touring and the tour started in New Orleans. We left Milwaukee in the middle of the night so we’d miss traffic, and we got to Memphis at around 7 or 8 a.m., real early in the morning. We thought, What the hell, this may be the only time we’re gonna ever be here. (Which was wrong by the way.) We pulled off, and we found Graceland. Even then there were gift shops and stuff, but they were real cheesy. We hung around the gates taking pictures. This is at 8 in the morning. A guy comes up and says, “You want to pay your respects?” He opens the gates and we walk up to Graceland, just the 6 of us, and we paid our respects to Elvis. The place was rundown, the yard was all muddy. There wasn’t that shrine yet that they built. There was just a little grave with his name on there. The swimming pool had junk floating in it.
SOM: My God.
PM: It was amazing. And turns out, the guard who let us in was his uncle Vester.
SOM: Vester!
PM: He was the guard there every day until he died. I didn’t know that until later but I remember looking at him and thinking, Boy, he looks like Elvis’ dad.
SOM: So there weren’t tours through the house at that time.
PM: No! That came 4 or 5 years after that, I think. But that was an amazing day. I still have pictures of it somewhere.
SOM: That’s amazing.
PM: Yeah. [Long pause.] One of the best days of my life, actually.
SOM: Wow.
PM: Then we went on to New Orleans, and I was being a rock star, and I threw my back out. They gave me Percodan. [I start laughing.] The other guys in the band had two bottles of champagne and I gave them all one pill and they made this photo montage where they re-enacted Elvis’ death. They made our sound man shave off his beard and just keep the sideburns. He was like 270 pounds and he was Elvis. The guy who’s my manager now was Colonel Tom. They took pictures with a Polaroid camera, that’s how long ago it was. I still have the pictures of “Elvis” lying on the bathroom floor. There was a lot of black humor like that after he died. My friend worked in a hotel in Madison where Elvis stayed and he had to deliver a Diet Dr. Pepper to Elvis’ room and he said it was weird as hell in there.
SOM: Were you surprised and sad when he died?
PM: I mean, at the end you could tell he was deteriorating. There was that last concert, did you ever see that?
SOM: It’s so difficult to watch.
PM: He’s sweating like a pig. It’s awful. But we watched it, man.
SOM: Of course.
PM: We were all over it. Then when he died… I mean, the guy was only 42. But you gotta wonder: you take a dirt-poor hillbilly and you make him the most famous person in the world … I don’t know how many dirt-poor hillbiliies would have ended up any differently.
SOM: George Harrison was talking about Elvis and he said something about how fame is an assault on the ego, and the reason that the Beatles all survived that assault is they had each other. They could goof off and commiserate with each other about how insane it all was. But Elvis … He just took it on the chin. I mean, it sounds great, you’re the most famous person in the world, but … who could he commiserate with? He was so by himself in it.
PM: Even though he was surrounded by all these Yes Men, he had nobody. He had literally nobody. I’m still fascinated with him. That obsession is still in me. I was at Barnes and Noble a few months ago and Linda Thompson wrote a book and I sat in the bookstore and I read all the Elvis parts.
SOM: She was a good friend to him. He had so many women but very few of them – none of them, really – had anything bad to say about him … which is unique, if you think about it. If you sleep with 1,000 people or however many he probably did, you’d think that somebody would come out and say he was a horrible person, but none of them did.
PM: You’re absolutely right. I never even thought of that.
SOM: You know?
PM: I never thought of it that way.
SOM: And in the Hollywood years – that’s what I’m interested in writing about. Yes, Kissin’ Cousins was lame, but I like a lot of the movies, and I’ve read so much stuff about those years, and every director, every craft services person, every dancer – like Teri Garr tells some great stories because she was a dancer in all of those movies – they all just talk about how nice he was. Only one person said something bitchy about him, and everyone else comments on her comment, like, “Gosh, it sounds like she’s got sour grapes to me!” Like, it stands out when someone says something bad about him. He was raised well. His mother did a good job.
PM: He was a bastard to those guys around him, don’t you think?
SOM: Well, for sure, but considering —
PM: One of our running jokes is, [Elvis imitation] “Which one of you lard-asses is gonna get me a cigarillo?” Which turned into another routine we had: [Elvis imitation] “Red, Sonny, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar.”
SOM: Oh my God, I remember you saying that all the time.
PM: Ken wrote that on the wall at Graceland.
[Dammit, I wish I had known that! I would have tried to find it. Note to self for next visit.]
SOM: No way! You’ve seen the John Carpenter Kurt Russell movie, right?
PM: Oh yeah.
SOM: There’s a scene where he’s standing outside and he takes out a cigarette and 6 hands come to light it. And you can tell that he knows something’s off, at least the way Kurt Russell played it, that he knows that that’s not normal. All of those guys, man, were just along for the ride. They just wanted —
PM: Reflected glory.
SOM: Totally. Jerry Schilling was someone he was really close to and George Klein, too. They weren’t dependent on him for salary and they were really good genuine friends.
PM: I read their books too.
SOM: I like both of their books a lot.
Jerry Schilling and Elvis
George Klein and Elvis
PM: I like them a lot, too. George Klein has his own show on Elvis radio. But the problem with Elvis radio is, they rarely play anything good. I want to hear the Sun sessions.
SOM: That stuff never gets radio play, which is amazing to me. I wonder why is that? “My Baby Left Me” is one of my favorite recordings ever.
PM: I love “Trying to Get to You.”
SOM: Oh God, “Trying to Get to You.” He’s so YOUNG.
PM: That’s what made me an Elvis fan was the sound of his records from 1954 until he went into the Army. Elvis is Back is a great album too.
SOM: Yeah. One of my favorite albums.
PM: Did you ever read that book that came with a cassette, Elvis is Alive?
SOM: I don’t know that one.
PM: You should have that.
SOM: What is it?
PM: It’s a paperback. Oh man, we loved it. The book said he faked his death because he was tired of the rat race. There was a cassette attached to the book, and it’s supposed to be Elvis, on the phone, and he’s still alive. I’m sending you my copy because you’ll appreciate it.
SOM: Who is it on the tape, Pat??
PM: I don’t know! I’ll send it to you. The tape is still taped to the book. It was something we were obsessed with for a good 6 months when it first came out.
SOM: I have to get a tape recorder now.
PM: Yes. That might not be so easy.
SOM: I’ll figure it out. Greil Marcus wrote a very funny book called Dead Elvis, have you read it?
PM: I think I have that book. I haven’t read it though.
SOM: It’s interesting. It’s about the cult of Elvis that exploded after his death, all of the “Is he alive?” rumors, and the impact that his death – even more so than his life – has had on American culture.
PM: At the time he died, the only place he could have gone was rehab.
SOM: Speaking of Elvis being alive, there’s an Irish illustrator named Annie West, and we’ve become friends online. She wrote a book called What If? She reached out to a bunch of different writers and we all pitched to her different scenarios, like “What if the apple didn’t fall on Isaac Newton’s head?” How would that affect the world? So I pitched, What if Elvis had lived? She did an illustration for each of the entries. I had so much fun thinking about what would have happened if he was alive. I wanted to give him a happy ending. He did go to rehab, by the way.
PM: Good.
SOM: He’s been in a couple of Quentin Tarantino movies. [Pat’s laughing.] He did an album of duets with women. Because one of the things that I’m sad about is that he didn’t do any duets, outside of the movies. He was a solo act. Because the Colonel didn’t want any competition —
PM: Right.
SOM: But the thought of him doing a duet with Barbra Streisand or Diana Ross … is so tantalizing to me. He was an extremely giving performer. When you see Elvis That’s the Way It Is —
PM: I love that movie.
SOM: It’s so good! But it really shows what a collaborator he was, how into other people’s talent he was. That’s also true with Elvis On Tour.
PM: Is that the one where he says “I had my face buried in a beaver”?
SOM: Yes! Beaver!
PM: He’s in the limo after the show —
SOM: And his Dad is there –
PM: [Elvis imitation] “I had my face buried in a beaver.” He looks great too.
SOM: He does!
PM: Man. I gotta tell you, as I talk to you, I’m remembering more. Aloha from Hawaii was a huge event in our lives.
SOM: Yeah. I’m not crazy about that concert.
PM: Yeah, the concert stinks, but it was still such a cool thing for him to do, and we listened to it constantly. He was at the peak. But then he sang “The American Trilogy” and we thought it was lame.
SOM: But that trilogy was so important to him, Pat!
PM: We were a bunch of rock guys, though, who were into the New York Dolls and David Bowie. We were like, what the hell is this. When you compare the two …
SOM: You know they had the same birthday. I’m sure that you know that.
PM: Who?
SOM: He and David Bowie.
PM: [really surprised and impressed voice: I was impressed myself that I knew something he didn’t know.] No kidding. January 8th.
SOM: January 8th. And they were both on RCA —
PM: Yup.
SOM: David Bowie said some cool things about Elvis, because of the same birthday and because he was on RCA, too, that Elvis was passing on the torch to him. He felt a mystical connection with him.
PM: Elvis, man … He’s responsible for so much second, third, fourth, and fifth-hand … a lot of music.
SOM: I’ve always wondered about the genetic accident that he was that beautiful to look at …
PM: Oh yeah.
SOM: I mean, Carl Perkins was handsome, but there was something about what Elvis looked like that was so extraordinary. Have you read Lester Bangs’ stuff on Elvis?
PM: I probably have.
SOM: He wrote the obituary in the Village Voice which is kind of famous —
PM: Oh yeah, I read that.
SOM: But he wrote this other really insane piece that was not published until after Lester Bangs died, and Bangs is trying to understand the Elvis thing, and at one point he says, “The only credible explanation is that Elvis was from another planet.” Mitchell has some interesting things to say about this. He said that boys who are loved like that by their mothers have a confidence that other people don’t, which I think is very interesting.
PM: VERY interesting.
SOM: He was so loved and pampered and babied by his mother that when the spotlight turned his way, he accepted it because he already lived that way at home. I think he had a lot to prove, obviously. “I’m poor and I’m 15 years old but I’m going to go to school in a pink suit, and I’m gonna get a perm” – I mean, he curled his hair in high school. It was that poverty thing where you have to look your best always. He wasn’t going to be wearing blue jeans. So he had a lot to prove in that way, but in other ways … I don’t know if he expected the world to love him, but he grew up so surrounded by that mother love that when the world loved him it was all part of the same thing. He was the only person in her whole world.
PM: Let’s be honest. He was a total freak. He was otherworldly. You couldn’t see it on black-and-white TV, but I took this to heart: He used to wear stoplight colors. So you see early color footage of him playing live, and he’ll have on a red jacket and a yellow shirt and green pants. I love that! I still have a red jacket because of Elvis. My original band, all of these Elvis obsessives – we just had a reunion – and I wore a red jacket for that.
SOM: You know Peter Guralnick, right?
PM: Yeah, I read that biography.
SOM: He just came out with a biography of Sam Phillips, which is a little bit different than the Elvis one because Guralnick was friends with Sam Phillips. It’s fascinating, because Sam Phillips was ….
PM: Another freak.
SOM: TOTAL freak.
PM: When you were in Memphis, did you go to Beale Street?
SOM: Oh yeah! I befriended a band called Memphis Jones. They’re awesome. They don’t write their own stuff, their whole thing is evangelizing for the Memphis music world and playing music by Memphis musicians. They know everything about everything, not just Elvis. I follow them on Twitter. They play at Beale Street every week, so I’ve seen them a couple of times now. I also went and found Elvis’ high school–
PM: Humes.
[Hilarity ensues. If you’re an obsessive, and a part of your brain is taken up with the name of a random high school in Memphis, and you feel slightly alone in the sheer DETAIL of your useless knowledge, you’ll get why we both started guffawing.]
SOM: Humes High School! Oh my God.
PM: I know. What is wrong with us?
Picture I took of Humes in 2012
PM: I’ll tell ya, Speedway was on the other day and I had to sit and watch 15 minutes of it. It’s in my blood. It’s not going anywhere. You know how my mind works, though. I think about weird stuff. The other day I was singing “That’s All Right” and I was thinking about how the DJ had him say on the air what high school he went to so that people would know he was white.
SOM: Right. And his name was weird, it didn’t “sound white”, apparently.
PM: I know. Wow.
SOM: That whole night is so fascinating to me, when they supposedly played the song and Elvis was hiding in the movie theatre because he was nervous?
PM: How much of that do you think is made up?
SOM: I think a lot of it is mythologizing. Sam Phillips is such an unreliable narrator, which is definitely part of his charm. He said in some interview that Elvis said to him, “Sam, how do you get your hair that way? I want hair just like yours!”
PM: Yeah, right, Sam.
SOM: Don’t take credit for Elvis’ hair, Sam! So, earlier, you said you were fascinated by Elvis’ essence. How would you describe that? What was it?
PM: His essence … To me, he seemed … he seemed like a guy who was trying to be cool but underneath was still that kid in high school that everybody was laughing at, which is very appealing to me. I like his weirdness. I like his flaws. He conquered all of the mediums. There will never be another Elvis. It’s not possible anymore.
Update
And look what arrived in my mailbox a week later.
