Week Four: Elvis Aron Presley 1935-1977

October 21, 1957: Unlike previous forms of vernacular music, from jazz and blues to gospel and country-western, rock and roll from the start was manufactured with the help of a variety of technological gimmicks, propped up with electronic prostheses, and then disseminated, in more or less controlled contexts, through every available mass medium: radio, recordings, film, television, newspapers. No matter the superficial impression some listeners had of a kind of musical an­archy, rock and roll by 1957 could scarcely have survived apart from a large and growing cast of managers, publicists, directors, arrangers, and a new breed of audio fixers, able to airbrush away al­most any sonic blemish.

This mode of production transformed, in turn, the ways in which the music actually came to be made. In an earlier era, vernacular mu­sicians had learned how to play by performing with others (even if, by the 1920s, many musicians also learned how to play by copying what they heard on recordings and on the radio). Wynonie Harris' career—from vaudeville to barnstorming—was typical of the appren­ticeship served by musicians of the older generation.

But it bore no resemblance at all to the careers of many of the new rock stars. At the age of sixteen, with no previous musical experience and no claim to musical literacy other than the discriminating taste he showed in placing the coolest rockabilly recordings on a turntable, Ricky Nelson was handed fame on a platter—and this kind of story became increasingly common. Many of the young singers who first became famous on American Bandstand—Fabian is only the most notorious—had no real gifts, apart from moxie and a pretty face.

It didn't matter. The resources of modern recording technology were deftly deployed to dress up weak voices; and Dick Clark's prac­tice of having his television guests mime, or "lip-synch," their songs, meant that no one on the show really had to sing: they had only to synchronize their lips to their own prerecorded vocals.

In this respect, as in so many others, Elvis Presley was a transi­tional figure. A singer of undeniable talent, he had never served a se­rious apprenticeship as a performer, never worked extensively with older and more seasoned musicians until he was nineteen and had al­ready cut a record. It was, in part, Presley's sheer inexperience that explained the explosive freshness of his style: understanding in only the most inchoate and tentative terms the orally transmitted tradi­tions of the forms of music that he would inherit, and renew— gospel, bel canto ballad singing, rhythm and blues—he was free to find, and elaborate, a voice that was truly his own.

By 1957, he had come of age on stage. Ironically, the better he got at performing, the less he got to do it. The problem was the tumult he now routinely provoked. "Girls screamed and hundreds of flash bulbs popped," reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, describing a show early in 1957. "Presley clung to the microphone standard and staggered about in a distinctive, distraught manner, waiting for the noise to subside a bit."

The noise rarely stopped. And the risks kept mounting. It was not so much the possibility of injury to his star that worried Colonel Parker. It was, rather, the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that sooner or later some underage girl would break through the barriers protecting his boy and entice him into performing some unspeakable act. In such an event, if the public at large ever found out—and with the press paying close at­tention, it surely would—Presley's image as an eligible bachelor would be tarnished, his career possibly ruined, and so also Parker's livelihood. Parker had cut his teeth hawking patent medicines at carnivals be­fore he moved on to manage top country acts like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. His idea of industriousness was to stand outside a hall where Presley was playing and hawk glossy photos of his star at a 100 percent markup. (One wonders what he would make of the mar­ket in memorabilia surrounding a contemporary rock concert, where the sale of T-shirts and programs accounts for a huge percentage of an act's total gross.)

Behaving like a barker outside a freak show, teasing customers into paying for a quick peek, Parker jealously limited access to his at­traction. He reckoned, rightly in the short run, that the less people actually saw of Elvis, the more they would want mementos bearing his likeness, which by 1957 included, besides records in Elvis picture sleeves: Elvis belts, Elvis scarves, Elvis skirts, Elvis jeans, Elvis lip­stick, Elvis charm bracelets, Elvis statuettes, Elvis fan magazines, Elvis bola ties—the list of Elvis junk seemed endless. According to Variety, it was the largest merchandising effort ever aimed explicitly at teenagers.

But what, exactly, would keep these consumers hungry for more? For guidance, Parker, like Presley, instinctively fell back on older models, figures like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra—pio­neers of popular singing who had sustained their careers for years.

In March of 1956, after a screen test hastily arranged just as Pres­ley was achieving fame with "Heartbreak Hotel," Presley was signed to appear in a period potboiler set in the Civil War South, released at the end of the year under the title "Love Me Tender," to tie in with Presley's recording of the movie's theme song of the same name. He also signed a long-term, though nonexclusive, contract with Hal Wallis—a veteran producer of films ranging from Little Caesar (1930) to Casablanca (1942), but by the Fifties a specialist in slick musical comedies with breezy plots and lots of upbeat song and dance routines. Wallis had made a fortune on his films earlier in the decade with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, a Presley favorite; follow­ing a similar formula, he would make equally profitable films for Presley, including his second and fourth feature films, Loving You (1957) and King Creole (1958), and also his most popular later film, Blue Hawaii (1961).

As Presley began to concentrate on his acting career, he cut back on live appearances. After doing well over 200 shows in 1955, and more than 100 the following year, in addition to eleven appearances on television, he did only twenty in 1957, in addition to one TV show—his last for several years.

For most people, the only place actually to see Presley—to behold his body in motion—was in a movie theater on a big screen. In effect, Parker was banking on the Hollywood pros to keep the image of Presley constantly fresh in the public mind, though he did not surren­der control completely. He had refused to sign an exclusive contract with Hal Wallis because that producer's preferred approach to musi­cal comedy risked ignoring the very things—the wildness, the sexi­ness, the air of sullen aggressiveness—that had gotten everyone excited about Presley in the first place.

When Presley's third feature film, Jailhouse Rock, was assigned to Richard Thorpe, a sixty-one-year-old veteran most renowned for cranking out his pictures on a tight schedule, the director was al­lowed to develop and shoot a script that played to the dark side of the Presley mystique.

In the film, Presley appears as Vince Everett, a happy-go-lucky singer stuck behind bars after punching out, and inadvertently killing, an obnoxious bully in a barroom brawl. Made callous by his experience in prison, where he is brutally whipped, the film's hero funnels his aggressive energies into his music, deciding to try a career in show business after his release. A raw talent, Everett reaches a dis­cerning audience of teenagers, who force the music business to take him seriously—and, at the same time, allow the singer to show the heart of gold behind his tough facade.

It was the kind of film role that Presley had long coveted. "You can't be a rebel if you grin," Presley had explained to a reporter in 1956: "I've made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I've made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young 'uns, go for us. We're sullen, we're brooding, we're something of a menace."

The songs written for Jailhouse Rock toyed with this persona. The coveted commission to write the songs fell to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Ironically, despite Presley's global success with "Hound Dog," neither man had ever met the singer before. For that matter, neither man particularly cared for his singing. But in a six-hour burst of creativity, they got the job done. The ex-con's spiritual redemption was expressed through Leiber's lyrics for "Treat Me Nice" (in which Vince Everett comes across as truculent but vulnerable), "I Want to Be Free" (plaintive), and "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" (tender and ecstatic). The first step in making the movie was to record the key songs. Years later, in an interview with Presley's biographer, Peter Gural-nick, Leiber and Stoller recalled their surprise when they finally met Elvis at the soundtrack recording sessions on April 30, 1957. "We thought we were the only two white kids who knew anything about the blues," Stoller said. "We thought he was like an idiot savant," agreed Leiber, "but he listened a lot. He knew all of our records."

Even more surprising to Stoller was Presley's relaxed approach in the studio: "The thing that really surprised us was that there was no clock"—a harbinger of things to come. Instead of banging out a se­ries of takes with professional precision, Presley loosened up with gospel songs, experimented with different arrangements, and pa­tiently ran through new material in the studio, looking for the right song, the right sound, the right feel. By the standards of journeymen like Wynonie Harris or Fats Domino, Presley was a bumbling ama­teur, making up his music as he went along. Thanks to the unprece­dented scale of his popularity, Presley was able to do just that, working to his own clock, and setting a precedent for other popular rock stars, forced by the limits of their talent and experience to grope uncertainly toward a satisfying performance, letting free time, intu­ition, and sheer luck take the place of seasoned musicianship.

There is a scene in Jailhouse Rock that deliberately echoes what had first happened to Elvis in 1954 at the Sun studios in Memphis: the sudden, accidental discovery of a God-given gift for song. But the secret of Vince Everett's metamorphosis—and also of Elvis Presley's cultural balancing act—was perhaps best conveyed in the film's big production number, an intricately choreographed performance of "Jailhouse Rock," Leiber and Stoller's title song. The lyrics are droll, even faintly mocking (not unlike "Riot in Cell Block #9," the song -skit that Leiber and Stoller turned into a 1954 hit for the Robins, the vocal group that eventually became the Coasters). And the staging of the song underlined its satiric detachment. Working in front of a skeletal set evoking two levels of cell blocks, Elvis improvised a series of moves that were elaborated and amplified by a large cast of pro­fessional dancers. Spontaneous in feel, spectacular in execution, the film's treatment of "Jailhouse Rock" validates rock and roll on something close to its original terms, while at the same time integrat­ing its aura of menace into a classical piece of Hollywood stagecraft.

Jailhouse Rock premiered on October 21, 1957, at a time when the teen music marketplace was clogged with imitations of the kinder, gentler Elvis on display in Love Me Tender and Loving You. But when smartly wrapped up in a package like Jailhouse Rock, even images of sullen youth could be highly rewarding. Elvis Presley fig­ured in three of the top twenty films of 1957: Love Me Tender (num­ber ten, originally released in November 1956, grossing a cumulative $4.5 million at the box office), Loving You (number nineteen, re­leased in July 1957, grossing $3.7 million), and Jailhouse Rock (number fifteen, grossing $3.7 million by the end of the year). Low-budget films like Rock, Pretty Baby; Don't Knock the Rock; and Rock, Rock, Rock! also returned handsome profits.

By 1958, the long-term implications of these facts were just begin­ning to dawn on filmmakers. The taste of kids was going to play a large role in calling the shots in Hollywood, as it already did on Tin Pan Alley. A front page headline in Variety put it this way: "Film Fu­ture: GI Baby Boom." One of the experts that Variety quoted, Arno H. Johnson, vice president and senior economist for the J. Walter Thompson Company, predicted that "the growth of the 'teen market' is bound to make itself felt in many areas, but nowhere is it of greater significance than in the film field, both in terms of audience potential and as a guide to motion picture content. Not only are these the future homemakers, but they represent the 'restless' element of the population, the people who don't want to stay home and watch TV and who are still immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill screen offerings."

In other words, kids wouldn't care about a crappy film, they wouldn't know any better (being immune to "sophisticated dis­dain"—a great way to describe the discerning exercise of judgment).

But Mr. Johnson was right. And thanks to the mind-boggling mediocrity of almost all of his highly profitable films, Elvis Presley not only squandered the best years of his creative life on drivel and kitsch—he also can take credit for accelerating what one historian has aptly called "the juvenilization of American movies," from Blackboard Jungle to Star Wars, and beyond.

Part Two:

August 16, 1977: The news broke in the afternoon of August 16, 1977. Elvis Aron Presley, universally recognized as the King of Rock and Roll, was dead at the age of forty-two. To a lot of people, it seemed impossible. Presley had been the idol of a still youthful generation. Like a hero of Greek mythology, he belonged to a world apart. It was perhaps a delusion spawned by the mass media, but his fame seemed immortal—and his death therefore unimaginable.

Details at first were sketchy. After being found unconscious at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Presley had been taken by ambu­lance to Baptist Memorial Hospital. He was declared dead at 3:30 P.M., after efforts to revive him failed. Later that evening, a local medical examiner met with reporters and announced that Presley had died of "cardiac arrhythmia"—in other words, his heart had stopped beating. There was no evidence of any other disease, he said. And, he added, contradicting a rumor that had started to spread, Elvis Presley did not die of drug abuse.

That night, two of America's national television networks broad­cast special reports. On ABC, the show's host, Geraldo Rivera, ex­pressed relief that Elvis at least "had not followed in the melancholy rock 'n' roll tradition of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix." On NBC, by contrast, David Brinkley, the moderator, explicitly broached the possibility that Elvis had in fact died of drug abuse, no matter what the examiner in Memphis was saying.

One of Brinkley's guests that evening was Steve Dunleavy. A pug­nacious tabloid journalist, Dunleavy had just published a lurid little book entitled Elvis: What Happened?, written in collaboration with three disgruntled former Presley employees, Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler. Seizing the chance to publicize their book, Dun­leavy retailed for Brinkley some of the book's revelations about "the dark side of the brightest star in the world": for example, Presley's fondness for fooling around with women half his age; his streak of paranoia that sometimes issued in outbursts of reckless gunplay; and his uncontrollable appetite for a vast array of different prescription drugs—uppers, downers, powerful painkilling narcotics. But perhaps the most mind-boggling thing in Dunleavy's best-sell­ing expose, the first of many devoted to Presley and his private life, was the evidence it offered, not of Presley's lust for girls, guns, and pills, but rather of his apparently earnest belief in his own supernat­ural powers. "While the rest of the world recognizes that Elvis Aron Presley is something more than an ordinary human being, the one person who believes that most passionately is Presley himself," wrote Dunleavy, summarizing some of the gossip he had been fed. "He is addicted to the study of the Bible"—a strange thing to label an ad­diction! He was also "addicted," Dunleavy asserted, to "mystical re­ligion, numerology, psychic phenomena, and the belief in life after death. He believes that he has the strength of will to move clouds in the air, and he is also convinced that there are beings on other plan­ets. He firmly believes he is a prophet who was destined to lead, des­ignated by God for a special role in life."

A great many of Presley's fans, certainly, regarded him with a rev­erence more befitting a prophet than a mere entertainer. By dusk on the night of August 16, a large and growing crowd of fans had formed outside Graceland to share their prayers and pay their final respects. Meanwhile, reporters with cameras and klieg lights roamed the scene and police struggled to maintain order.

Among a great many Americans of a certain age, a strange and confusing set of sentiments had been stirred up. "So that was his end," the writer Nick Tosches has recalled: "I was nonplussed. I had not known Elvis Presley as a man. I had never even met him. I started then to realize that, on some level of faint illogic, I had never truly thought of him as a creature of flesh and blood but rather as an ab­surd effulgence of hoi polloi mythology, an all-American demigod who dwelt, enthroned between Superman and the Lone Ranger, in the blue heaven of the popular imagination."

As dawn broke, mourners continued to pour into Memphis. Over­whelmed by the sight of the throng gathering outside Graceland, Presley's father, Vernon, announced that the casket would be opened for a public viewing that afternoon. By then, some 80,000 people were waiting to file past.

Elsewhere, mourners bought records and sent flowers, hundreds of thousands of flowers, producing the busiest day in its history for the floral company FTD, and forcing flower shops in Memphis to fly in five extra tons of flowers to fill the orders going to Graceland—tangi­ble evidence of the extent and startling intensity of popular sentiment. All through that evening, long after the sun had set, people contin­ued to snake their way up the hill to the room in the mansion where Presley's body was on display. The writer Roy Blount, Jr., had flown to Memphis earlier that day to see for himself what was happening. "Elvis in his coffin was fat, glowering, and surrounded by similar-looking but vertical heavies who pushed us viewers along," Blount recalls: "He didn't look cool. Neither did the thousands of people who gathered at the gates of Graceland. People fainted left and right, from the heat, the crowding, and the historical moment. And because if you fainted, you got carried into the grounds."

As reporters scrambled to cover the story, new details about Pres­ley's death began to emerge. Unable to sleep, he had gone to the bathroom, taking with him a book, The Search for the Face of Jesus, about the Shroud of Turin. (Later, more authoritative sources would report that the book he took into the bathroom was really entitled Sex and Psychic Energy.) It was in the bathroom, while studying his book and "straining at stool," that Presley's heart had given out.

This was the official version. Meanwhile, rumors were flying. Ac­cording to one, Presley had not died a natural death at all. He had been killed. With a fine sense of poetic irony, as if to honor Presley's own fascination with the martial arts, the assailant, it was said, had felled the King with a lethal karate chop.

According to another set of rumors, Presley in fact was not dead after all. He had simply staged a death scene.

In the goriest version of this rumor, Presley had murdered a look-alike in order to make his escape. In another, even more improbable version, Presley had convinced an admirer, also a look-alike, to com­mit suicide so that the real Elvis could disappear into a life of happy anonymity.

Last but not least, there was the rumor that Presley's purported death was a hoax, staged with the complicity of the Memphis police and medical authorities. The corpse was really a wax dummy. This was the most benign version of the rumor, and its persistence formed the basis for the reports that cropped up a decade later that Elvis was in fact alive and well and living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places, where a series of witnesses in the late Eighties spotted him performing a number of reassuringly mundane chores, for example, standing in a grocery store checkout line, waiting to purchase a fuse.

On August 18, 1977, the day of Presley's funeral, the governor of Tennessee ordered flags flown at half mast. The cortege consisted of a white hearse followed by a color-coordinated fleet of white limou­sines and white luxury cars. Leaving Graceland, the cortege made its way across Memphis to the Forest Hill cemetery. There the singer was laid to rest in a mausoleum near the grave of his mother. After the formal ceremony was finished, tens of thousands of bystanders, frenzied in grief, poured into the site to get closer to the fallen idol— and, if possible, to snatch some memento or relic. By nightfall, Pres-ley's grave had been stripped clean of every last flower.

Over the next several weeks, more than one million people, by one estimate, visited the Presley grave site in Forest Hill cemetery. The site was impossible to secure. And after an attempt was made to rob the grave in October, Vernon Presley arranged to have the remains of mother and son moved to the Meditation Garden in back of Grace-land.

This was the first of a series of increasingly sophisticated efforts by the Presley estate to contain and control the wild outpouring of spontaneous sentiment. After Vernon Presley's death in 1979, Grace-land was incorporated as a tourist attraction. By the 1990s, the house and garden were attracting roughly 700,000 visitors annually, making it the most visited historic home in America, apart from the White House.

Shortly after Presley's death, Tom Parker, his longtime manager, is supposed to have said that "It don't mean a damn thing. It's just like when he was away in the Army." Even credited to Parker, the quote is almost too crass to be credible; but the prediction turned out to be true. Elvis in death has generated as much passion, and profit, as he ever did during his life.

Presley's posthumous career began in earnest that fall, with a grotesquely fascinating television special, aired in October. The show documented two of his last live performances, one in Omaha, Ne­braska, the other in Rapid City, South Dakota, on June 21, 1977— the kind of midsize heartland cities where Presley, to his dying day, was still the King.

His final years were of course a far cry from his heyday in the mid-Fifties, and an even bigger change from his years of hibernation in Hollywood, when Parker had hidden his boy from public view and put him to work doing a series of dreary star turns in light comic films. But in 1969, shortly after appearing on an American television network for the first time since his show with Frank Sinatra in 1960, Presley had made a ballyhooed return to public performing. Buoyed by the adulation of the audiences, he came to depend on the income the concerts produced, turning himself into a one-man musical circus that traveled to over 130 cities, doing more than 1,000 shows from 1969 to 1977. Venturing ever farther afield, from New York and Las Vegas to Omaha and Rapid City, Presley performed in smaller and smaller venues in smaller and smaller cities where he was still virtu­ally guaranteed to sell out the local coliseum, if only because the fans there had never before had a chance to see him, or any other living legend, live, in the flesh, on stage, for one night of carnival bliss. An appearance by Elvis Presley was, for the fans in a town like Rapid City, a truly extraordinary event, something to anticipate, experi­ence, and remember.

The idea of using such a concert as the pretext for a network tele­vision special had been sold by Parker to CBS earlier in the year. But when executives at CBS initially previewed the footage from Omaha and Rapid City, they balked at airing it. Monstrously overweight, Presley had been stuffed like a sausage into one of his custom-tai­lored jumpsuits, powder blue, lavishly embroidered, clasped tight with a gigantic studded belt that doubled as a girdle.

Sweating profusely, often singing with his eyes shut, as if to blank out reality, Presley looked dazed and confused, like a necromantic Doughboy: chin doubled, belly bloated, his face the color of flour, ashen white. David Bowie may have enacted a rock 'n' roll suicide at the end of his Ziggy Stardust revue—but this was Bowie's conceit brought vividly, brutally to life.

In the two concerts captured on film for posterity, Presley gave desultory renditions of classic rock hits like "Hound Dog." But when the spirit moved him—when the lyrics to some appropriately ba­thetic ballad like "Unchained Melody" suddenly seemed to grab his interest—his voice came flooding forth, astonishingly intact, still a controllable instrument, as if the singer, by straining every fiber, could momentarily convey in song a raw passion that was, and re­mains, even years later, truly awful in its concentrated beauty.

The highlight of Presley's last television special was an especially painful and pathos-filled version of "My Way." When it was released as a posthumous single, the recording of this live performance be­came Presley's last major international hit, turning a treacly ballad into a paradoxical monument to rock and roll as a form of transcen­dental self-immolation.

"My Way" had first been recorded a decade earlier, by another mythic singer, Frank Sinatra. Based on the music to a French song, "Comme d'Habitude" ("As Usual"), the new English lyrics had been written, with Sinatra in mind, by Paul Anka—one of the most suc­cessful of the early rock and roll teen idols inspired by Presley and featured on American Bandstand. Sinatra himself regarded "My Way" as a piece of fluff for kids—he first recorded it at a time when he was still trying to pitch some of his recorded music at the teen market. But by 1971, when Presley first took a stab at singing the song in a studio (a recording that remained unreleased until 1995), Sinatra had turned "My Way" into the climax of his concerts. As writer Will Friedwald once put it, hearing Sinatra sing "My Way" at the end of a show became like "standing in front of Macy's on Thanksgiving morning, watching the Frank Sinatra balloon float by. Nothing gets in the way of this choreographed exhibition of bur­geoning ego."

Given the totemic association of the song with Sinatra, it took a certain nerve (mixed with arrogance) for Presley to integrate "My Way" into his live shows, featuring it on the most popular of his later albums in the United States, Aloha From Hawaii via Satellite, a live recording made in January 1973. Obviously drawn by the mythic largeness that the song had acquired, Presley at first could scarcely match the bombastic majesty of Sinatra's rendition. But in his last performances, after Presley had become all too visibly unwell, the song took on an altogether darker hue, quite different from anything evoked by Sinatra, or even by Presley himself four years earlier.

Anka's lyrics were meant to convey magisterial self-command. But as Presley sang the familiar words on June 21, 1977, in the live ver­sion that became a posthumous hit single, the lyrics conveyed a mood of stately disintegration, evoking the morbid pride of a man taking solace from the certainty that he is, as if in a dream, slowly, and not without pleasure, killing himself.

Even though the song's melody presents few real challenges, Pres­ley had to work, and work hard, to hit his notes. On camera, he sweats and wobbles as he sings, like a punch-drunk boxer on the ropes. When the public first saw and heard this performance, Presley had been dead for almost two months. The nature of his fate, visible in his face, balanced the bathos of Anka's lyrics. The song's opening lines were delivered with grim aplomb: "Now the end is near, and I face the final curtain." Elvis was singing his own epitaph—as surely he must have known. a banquet of pills that beggared belief. Analysis revealed toxic levels of Quaalude and near-toxic levels of Codeine, Valium, and Placidyl, not to mention traces of Valmid, Pentobarbital, Butabarbital, and Phenobarbital—a lethal cocktail of sedatives and narcotics.

So Elvis was a soul mate of Sid Vicious, after all: the legendary momma's boy had died a junkie.

Yet at exactly the same time, the dead singer was undergoing an altogether different, superficially unrelated metamorphosis, emerg­ing—amazingly enough—as some kind of saint in the minds of countless enthusiasts. For every story about Elvis as a drug-addled slob, there were dozens more that seemed to demonstrate his undy­ing love for his mother, his kindness to strangers, his acts of unstint­ing charity.

Moved no doubt by their memories of the "good" Elvis, five peo­ple gathered outside Graceland on the evening of August 15, 1978, to mark the first anniversary of Elvis's last, dark night of the soul. According to the lore that has grown up since, each one solemnly lit a candle and placed it on top of the stone wall that borders the front of Graceland. Throughout the night, the five kept vigil. So began what today is called Elvis Week—a ritualized outpouring of reverent affection for the fallen idol.

Every August, tens of thousands of pilgrims converge on Mem­phis, to tour Presley's mansion, to visit the Meditation Garden, to gawk at Elvis imitators, to visit museums and galleries, to attend a memorial service, to buy trinkets and souvenirs. But the most dra­matic moment always comes at sundown on August 15. The simple vigil of 1978 has been turned into an annual procession up the hill to the grave site, where mourners bearing candles briefly commune with the dead man's living spirit.

While they wait their turn, the pilgrims can read the latest mes­sages and prayers inscribed in Magic Marker and paint on the outer stone wall of Graceland:

ELVIS LIVES IN US

ELVIS, YOU ARE MY BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

I DID DRUGS WITH ELVIS

THERE IS ONLY ONE KING AND WE KNOW WHO HE IS

ELVIS IS LOVE

ELVIS DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE WHITE

ELVIS, IT TOOK 20 YEARS TO GET HERE. NEXT STOP, HEAVEN.

The graffiti (which is periodically scrubbed clean so that new visi­tors can join the conversation) suggests that something more than a hobby is at issue. For many participants, Elvis Week has obviously become a quasi-religious occasion. The Meditation Garden is an American Lourdes, a place where miracles sometimes happen. Every year on August 15, the sick and the lame hobble up the hill, full of hope. As every one of the faithful well knows, on the first anniver­sary of Presley's death, a fan aimed his camera skyward and pho­tographed a cumulus cloud forming a familiar profile, right down to the famous pompadour. Elvis is watching over them.

Addressing co-religionists in a letter printed in an Elvis fan club publication, an enthusiast from Belgium put it this way: "Dear friends, our LOVE and RESPECT for Elvis are unlimited . . . and we are in touch in full appreciation of our personal battle to do the best for Elvis. . . . Let's continue to work hard for him, because his LIGHT on our world today is the guarantee to give HOPE and PEACE for the next generations. . . . We believe in Elvis just like we believe in GOD . . . and I'm sure that we are on the right way."

Presley might have thought so, too. On more than one occasion, he expressed his own hunch that he was someone blessed with divine powers. "I don't mean to sound sacrilegious," George Klein, a Mem­phis disc jockey, longtime Presley crony, and media factotum re­marked ten years after his death, "but he was Jesus-like. One time, when we were on the road, Elvis stopped the car. 'See that cloud,' he said. 'I'm going to move that cloud.' And the cloud moved. Maybe the wind blew it, I don't know. Elvis just looked at us and smiled."

The cult of Elvis poses perhaps the ultimate riddle of rock and roll. How could such a simple and sometimes nihilistic type of music strike such a deep and essentially religious chord among so many lis­teners?

Perhaps the answer lies outside rock and roll as a cultural form. Perhaps the cult of Elvis, like the cult of Jim Morrison, is best under­stood as the latest chapter in a much older story: the emergence of music in the modernizing West as a substitute for religion. In an ele­gant essay, the historian H.G. Koenigsberger has surveyed "the rise of music to a quasi-religious status and cult, as a psychological com­pensation for the decline of all forms of traditional religion." Feared by the medieval church and also by puritan reformers for its poten­tially wayward effects on the soul, music gradually came to be seen in the West as the most divine of art forms, and a fitting medium for the worship of God. Once the Promethean rebels of the early nine­teenth century had severed music from its liturgical moorings, a path was cleared for the deification of music and the musician. "Here the gods are at work," said Goethe of Beethoven, expressing sentiments obviously shared by more than one Elvis Presley fan. "Just as Chris­tianity arose in the international civilization of the Roman Empire," Wagner declared two generations later, "so music emerges out of the chaos of modern civilization. Both proclaim: 'Our kingdom is not of this world.' "

In 1957, at a time when Elvis Presley was still a young man and superficially on top of "this world," he expressed a telling ambiva­lence about the immensity of his worldly fame and the enormity of the carnal passions he had so visibly provoked, perhaps because he had not entirely purged himself of the old puritan distrust of music and its potential for exciting errant raptures. After Easter services that year, Presley approached the pastor at his church. According to someone who overheard their conversation, "He said, 'Pastor, I am the most miserable young man you have ever seen. I have got more money than I can ever spend. I have thousands of fans out there, and I have a lot of people who call themselves my friends, but I am miser­able. I am not doing a lot of things that you have taught me, and I am doing some things that you taught me not to do.' "

He struck a similar tone of anxious bewilderment in comments to a reporter he made at roughly the same time. "I never expected to be anyone important," the twenty-two-year-old rock star said. "Maybe I'm not now, but whatever I am, whatever I will become will be what God has chosen for me.

"Some people I know can't figure out how Elvis Presley happened. I don't blame them for wondering that. Sometimes I wonder myself."

It is something like this sense of wonder at the marvelous creative abilities of a simple country boy, tinged with awe at the reckless power of that boy's imagination and appetites running wild, that Elvis Aron Presley evidently managed to convey to millions of people round the world. And it was a similar sort of wonder, at the essen­tially mysterious power of a song with a big beat, even the simplest of songs, to uplift and transfigure the soul, that surely helped fuel the rise to global prominence of rock and roll, from Elvis to the Beatles and beyond.

If the desires and yearnings nourished by that cultural form were as often as not puerile and self-destructive, just like those that Presley, at the end of his life, indulged without inhibition or limit, a tran­scendental aura still surrounds him, as it surrounds every other avatar of excess consecrated by the rock culture industry, from Jim Morrison and Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain to rappers like Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., both gunned down in the 1990s.

In the world turned upside down by Elvis Presley, it was as if the sinners had become saints, ignorance had become bliss, and the free­dom of a child at play was the very image of true happiness. Even better, the feeling of bliss conveyed by the music, like the image of freedom the idol embodied, could be bought and sold and shared. For the faithful—the young and the forever young at heart—atten­dance at concerts and the collecting of recordings functioned as sacraments, the key elements in a novel kind of consumer religion.

To an outsider, the kind of cults that have formed around Elvis Presley and the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Ziggy Stardust and Bruce Springsteen may well seem absurd. But such was the regime founded by the King of Rock and Roll—the once and fu­ture Messiah of a new cultural form.

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