I've been sick, the last few days, and have found myself reduced to randomly toodling through youtube in search of entertainment. There's an increasing breadth of stuff available on that thing. I found something that kind of blew me away -- a clip of Elvis Presley live in Detroit (March 31, 1957 -- he wore the jacket from famous gold suit there for at least one of the two shows he did that day).
There're many reasons why many in the American mainstream vehemently hated and feared the kid from Tupelo back in the '50s, especially once he left the relative safety of acceptance and regional fame in venues around east Texas and the like (seems like Texans were the only people who accepted him, just about) and went national and then international. They hated his look; his long hair (by '50s standards) and his flashy clothes. They hated his moves, for damn sure...they hated the unleashed sexuality of it (well, at least, that's how THEY saw it) and there's no doubt that much of the repulsion was tied in with latent racism. On that subject, Elvis crossed (
smashed through, actually) the color barrier in his personal life and in the sound of his music, and the influences on it, and THAT did not go over well even outside the still-segregated South.
As an aside, here's some '50s gentlemen's opinion of the evil influence of the 'jungle music' known as rock 'n' roll:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U17vvQC2lXEIt's possibly a bit hard to believe now, but they
hated him back then. They weren't keen on rock 'n' roll, in general, but Elvis was the Public Enemy Number One to them, and not just because he was the leading proponent of this new musical mélange. To some, he was also a white boy from the South who betrayed his own race. It didn't matter that he was traditionally polite to his elders, had a passionate love for and interest in all forms of gospel music, and included in his record collection songs by Dean Martin, Mario Lanza, and even Caruso. He couldn't do anything right -- he even got lambasted for singing gospel when he first produced sacred recordings in 1957 ("blasphemy!") and his version of "White Christmas" that same year was widely banned (and characterized by the
Christian Science Moinitor as a disgusting, "barnyard version" of the song) to the point that a DJ who locked himself in the studio and played it back-to-back was fired. I mean, come on...it's "White Christmas," for freak's sake. It's not like he said he was bigger than Jesus while biting the head off a flying animal. For that matter, when he was sent to patrol near the East German border, when in the Army, the communist propaganda rags printed claims that he was sent there by the US government to destabilize their country by warping the values of their East German youth. I find that one hard to top, myself.
A lot of it is the same old story -- the kind of "oh, these kids today!" thing that's afflicted everyone from the Beatles to Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson (and, yes, I don't have any time for Mr Manson's act but I fully appreciate his context and he's intelligently stated the valid parallels between the attacks on him and those on Elvis 50 years before) -- but there were also more case-specific reasons to hate Elvis, most notably the racial aspect and what looked like the antics of sex maniac. They'd never seen anything like him. And they were afraid. Think
Pleasantville -- if you look at this 1956 appearances on TV (tame by today's standards, of course, albeit still riveting), and are lucky enough to get hold of a complete show that includes all the innocuous variety acts that were on the bill with him, you might begin to get a sense of how
different he was, and perhaps even how much of a
threat this unintentional rebel was to the '50s middle-class white American sensibility. Not everyone over 18 hated him, of course, but he sure was a shock.
What he received at the hands of the national press and in the tirades of local bigots was, in some ways, a larger-scale repeat of the kind of drubbing he'd received from certain quarters back home, most notably the beatings and attempted beatings he'd taken in Memphis, as a high school kid who did not look like the others at his school in crewcut 1953 Memphis and later on the road at the hands of jealous boyfriends and assorted beefy rednecks. I've seen a lot of these editorial remarks about Elvis, from all quarters of the country, and they were unbelievably vicious. Even Frank Sinatra chimed in, claiming that "His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." Frank changed his mind, three years later, after Elvis returned from the Army and he and his Rat Packers hosted a welcome-home television extravaganza that paid Elvis a fee so generous that it made the record books for years thereafter (he'd have been less charitable, I'm sure, if he knew what Elvis and Frank's then girlfriend, Juliet Prowse, were getting up to in their dressing rooms on the set of
GI Blues). SImilarly, Ed Sullivan once said that he wouldn't let his daughter cross the street to see Elvis Presley but then he saw the ratings for Milton Berle's hugely controversial second airing of Elvis and the rest is history. It's the American way.
Anyway, here's the clip I mentioned...it's really quite mind boggling how insane the audiences were at the height of '50s Presleymania. It'd never been seen before, not like that. His audiences in '70s concerts were boisterous enough, at least on tour, but this is total madness and it's kind of scary and intimidating even to see and hear in its grainy, indistinct 1957 8-mm film glory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTMX5myYKakAnd, on the off-chance that you might want to actually
hear the man, here's a clip from Tupelo's Mississippi-Alabama State Fair the year before...I'd seen much of the silent footage before but someone very carefully matched audio from that show and made rather a nice little time capsule that begins to hint at why Elvis became such an icon, and is still a hot topic even now. The most apparent thing, to me, is that Elvis is having a lot of fun here -- the thing not understood by people who criticize his later performances for his fooling around on certain songs is that Elvis
never took himself (or his image) too seriously, from the start to the end, and I think that's (combined with the very contrasting traits of innate charisma and intensity as a performer, as well as a serious dedication to singing the inviolable songs dead straight with all the energy reserves available) still one of the most appealing things about him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlHY4u8eskI
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