“The army can do anything it wants with me,” remarked Elvis
Presley upon leaving for basic training in 1958. “Millions of other
guys have been drafted, and I don’t want to be different from
anyone else.” But Elvis was not like anyone else.
He wore sideburns and greasy long hair in the crew-cutted
fifties. He played black music in the segregated South. He appeared
in foppish fashions — ascots, satin pants, pink shirts — in
t-shirt-and-jeans Memphis. As a teenage steady remembered, “I knew
the first time I met him that he was not like other people.”
This did not sit well with other people. Classmates cut the
strings to his guitar. Other kids pitched rotten fruit at him. The
coach kicked him off the high school football team, and a boss
threatened to fire him, for refusing to get a haircut. “I felt
really sorry for him,” noted a classmate, who had defended Elvis
from bullies. “He seemed very lonely and had no real friends. He
just didn’t seem to be able to fit in.”
Elvis never fit in. He stood out. Greatness isn’t about meshing
with the crowd. Greatness requires the courage to stand apart. In
an era derided as conformist, Elvis was an individual. He dared to
be different.
One gleans just how much of a pariah the guitar-strumming
teenager was from reading Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to
Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. If the 20th century’s most
popular singer appeared as a show-business cliché at his death 35
years ago today, he projected so eccentric an image in his pre-fame
Memphis days that the idea of him conquering the entertainment
world would seem as bizarre to Memphians as Elvis appeared to them.
If Elvis doesn’t strike us today as outlandish, it is because we
live in the world that Elvis made.
The individual who initially threatens the crowd eventually
pleases the crowd. Mockers became imitators. “What he did,” Grand
Ole Opry member Jimmy “C” Newman told Guralnick, “was he changed it
all around. After that we had to go to Texas to work, there wasn’t
any work anywhere else, because all they wanted was someone to
imitate Elvis, to jump up and down on the stage and make a fool of
themselves.” Thirty-five years after his death, the high school
outcast remains the world’s most impersonated person.
“I don’t sound like nobody,” the inner-directed Elvis, to borrow
David Riesman’s famous fifties phrase, told Sun Records. His unique
style extended from his dress to his art. The postwar star defied
categorization. Critics labeled his music bebop, hillbilly, folk,
country, and r&b, until finally settling on rock ‘n’ roll. Like
his classmates, they sneered like snobs. The New York
Times judged, “Mr. Presley has no discernable singing
ability.”
America disagreed. By late 1956, the phenom sold two-thirds of
RCA’s 45s. Between “Heartbreak Hotel” hitting #1 in April of 1956
and the induction of recruit #53310761 in March of 1958, the King
reigned atop the singles sales charts for more than a year. Only a
force as powerful as the U.S. Army could stop him.
Rather than overthrowing the American social order, Elvis was a
product of it. Before his singing career, he mowed lawns, served as
a theater usher, worked as a machinist, and drove a truck. He
repeatedly affirmed his love of God and belief in the Bible. In
these early years, he steered clear of drugs, alcohol, and
cigarettes — but not food or practical jokes. And even though
girls literally ripped the clothes off his body, he generally
stopped short of doing the same with his many dating partners.
Above all, he loved his parents, lavishing a pink Cadillac and a
mansion upon his mother before her death. The journey from the
Lauderdale Courts housing project to Graceland was the American
Dream on steroids.
Elvis enthralls 35 years after his death in part because of his
contradictions. A mama’s boy/rebel, the loner amidst the entourage,
and the painfully shy performer who confidently commanded audiences
remains an enigma. Thirty-five years from now, the world will still
be talking about, imitating, and singing along with the King.
Americans loved Elvis because he was unique. Americans loved
Elvis because he was America.
