In sport
people represent their countries. In
music it seems, Elvis Presley was and is still, now more than ever, everything America represents. He optimized the
‘American Dream’ but the tale of the man who changed not only music but culture
forever, plays out more like a Greek tragedy than an American classic.
There have
been many great documentaries on Elvis but few have matched the scope of “The King†mainly because its tapestry onto
which Elvis was sewn is America itself. Both follow similar paths.
There’s a
moment when Ethan Hawke, one of the many key figures in this film says “when my
grandfather was alive, America’s greatest export was agriculture. By the time
my father grew up it was entertainmentâ€. This one line sums up the entire
film. Elvis, like America, started off with humble beginnings and worked hard
to reap the harvest that the dry soils and endless toil could produce. When the Presleys lived in Tupelo
they didn’t have a cent to pay their bills and Elvis’s father was incarcerated
for changing the value of a check in the hope of buying a few weeks extra food. The analogy
of Elvis’s life and America’s own growth in the boom during the post-WW2 world
go hand in hand; from the lean to the bloated. Elvis grew up in Memphis, a
cultural melting pot and there is good reason to say that if the Presleys
hadn’t moved here, then the world would never have heard of Elvis and Rock ‘n
Roll as we know it would never have happened. When record mogul Sam Phillips
said “If I had a white boy that sounded black I could make a million dollarsâ€
he wasn’t white-washing music as some people allude to here. What he was hoping
for was that he could find a singer who could break down barriers and introduce
the world to a new sound, based on old Delta blues, the definitive American musical heritage. In Elvis, Phillips found
the perfect mix of beauty and danger, sweat and cologne and more importantly,
black and white. The stars and indeed, the stripes, were aligned right
there in the tiny Sun studio in Memphis with Elvis simply tearing up the rule
book and playing the music he and Sam loved and admired. It changed music
forever.
Chuck D,
another key figure in the documentary does his usual “Elvis stole from the
black artists†monologue but did he really? Did he not merely celebrate it and
introduce it to others as anyone wants to do when they fall in love with
something or someone? Would the world have even heard of Little Richard or
Chuck Berry or Fats Domino, great artists in their own right, if Elvis hadn’t
kicked down the doors that taste and indeed racial boundaries had kept
segregated up to that point? Elvis took the choice
to spend his childhood in Gospel churches and his teens in predominately black
areas such as Beale Street where BB King played. Thus, I find Chuck D’s diatribe
all a bit tiresome these days and think that he will be more famous for his
line “Elvis was a hero for some but meant shit to me†from Fight The Power rather than any of his other contributions to
music. If only James Brown or Jackie Wilson, who were there first hand and knew
Elvis, were still around to clarify it all. However, it’s the link between
Memphis and Elvis that again sums up the analogy that Presley was the spark
that lit the fuse, the plunger to the dynamite that enabled the great Memphis music
explosion that followed, both culturally and racially. Memphis was, like the
country itself, a place of extremes. Not only is it the birthplace of Sun and
Stax Records, two of the studios that made some of the greatest music the world
has ever heard, it was also the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the
shining light who broke down political racial barriers in the way Elvis had
done musically, was assassinated. Memphis is America in a nutshell and when
Memphis burned in the riots of the 1960’s, both Sun & Stax were left
standing. There may have been war on the streets but the places where entertainment
emanated from still stood tall and unscathed, their neon still flickering and lighting
up the night long after the flames had turned to ash.
It is the
parallels between Elvis and America that make this such a fascinating
documentary and so it’s strange that Elvis seems to have lost himself to the
entertainment industry he optimized. He was the Dr. Frankenstein who couldn’t
control or gain the respect of the monster he’d help create. In parallel
worlds, while Elvis suffered through those ‘60’s movies, American youth
suffered to a far greater extent through Vietnam. The 1970s brought the soul-draining
Vegas years for the singer while America itself took a long hard look in the
mirror when the Watergate scandal broke. Both brought artist and country to
their knees.
The King is an intriguing film that transcends
its subject matter into something that would interest not just Elvis and music
fans alike but to those who have an interest in current affairs, as there are certainly parallels to be found. One key thing
I found very strange, as one of the musicians also pointed out, was why the
film makers chose Elvis’s Rolls Royce as the tour bus to travel across America
to visit the places and people of importance in Elvis's short life, rather
than one of Elvis’s own American made Cadillac’s? Surely the synergy and irony
of one of the Cadillac’s he bought or was gifted breaking down before it
reached its destination would have made for a far more powerful analogy that
that of a British car overheating. It’s a strange choice.
If you
really want to see what made Elvis great then watch his return from the
Hollywood wilderness in his 1968 so-called “comeback special†that celebrates
its 50th Anniversary this December and will no doubt be shown again the world over.
However, if you want to see the story of the man and the country that made him,
then look no further than The King,
brought to us by director Eugene Jarevki, Stephen Soderbergh, Errol Morris and
Rosanne Cash and starring a whole host of famous faces and places. The fact
that the closing credits don't feature Elvis’s version of America or indeed the singer’s heartbreaking American Trilogy was another strange choice, as his is what the film
is all about: Elvis’s America. Is it just luck that two of America’s greatest
brands, Levis and Elvis share the same letters but just a small change can make
them one? It’s just another link as to why both Elvis and America remain
inseparable.