Elvis-Forum - An essay

I believe this is one of the finest essays ever written about Presley: Daniel Wolff’s “Elvis in the Dark.”

Wolff is the author of the excellent http://www.amazon.com/You-Send-Me-Times-Cooke/dp/0688124038/sr=1-1/qid=1168270063/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5634389-6034564?ie=UTF8&s=books and of http://www.amazon.com/4th-July-Asbury-Park-Promised/dp/1582345090/sr=1-3/qid=1168270150/ref=sr_1_3/102-5634389-6034564?ie=UTF8&s=books. He has also collaborated a few times with photographer Ernest Withers, including on the wonderful http://www.amazon.com/Memphis-Blues-Again-Decades-Photographs/dp/0670030317/sr=1-2/qid=1168270486/ref=sr_1_2/102-5634389-6034564?ie=UTF8&s=books. (You can read the review of that book on Living in Stereo’s http://livinginstereo.com/?page_id=3.)
Originally published in the Fall 1999 issue of Threepenny Review, “Elvis in the Dark” is ostensibly a review of Peter Guralnick’s http://www.amazon.com/Careless-Love-Unmaking-Elvis-Presley/dp/0316332976/sr=1-1/qid=1168269836/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-5634389-6034564?ie=UTF8&s=books. More than that, however, the piece makes an argument for a particular sort of criticism even as it demonstrates what great criticism can be: “Elvis in the Dark” is a model of humanist values, of close listening and of the value in establishing a context that is not only personal but public, social, political. The result is revisionist in the best sense: Wolff lets us see fresh what we were already certain we knew by heart.
Elvis in the Dark
by Daniel Wolff
It is April 4, 1960, a little after four in the morning, in a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee, and Elvis Presley is sitting in the dark. Since his first record, “That’s All Right,” appeared on the tiny Sun label, six years earlier, he’s had a string of more than thirty hit singles. Ahead of him lie another seventy, but he can’t know that. In fact, the twenty-five year old doesn’t know for sure if or how his career will continue. He’s just back from a two year hitch in the army. Yes, his new record is doing amazingly well, and, yes, he’s fresh from a triumphant appearance on a Frank Sinatra TV special. But as he sits in the dark, there’s no reason to think that his phenomenal success — or rock & roll itself, for that matter — will last. Using Sinatra as an example, he’s recently told Life magazine, “I want to become a good actor, because you can’t build a whole career on just singing.”

For some, Presley’s military induction did, indeed, mark the end of an era. “Elvis died the day he went into the army,” John Lennon would declare. According to this mythic version of rock & roll history, the music was born in a blinding flash in July, 1954, when country-western, blues and gospel music mutated in the body of a truck driver from Memphis. The resulting strain lasted four years. Then, Elvis was drafted, Jerry Lee Lewis gutted his career by marrying his 14-year old cousin, and Buddy Holly went down in a plane crash in early 1959: “the day the music died.”

This version goes on to claim a resurrection, four years later, when the Beatles release “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But, the legend continues, Elvis never again equals the quality of his first, wild, revolutionary sound. He becomes, instead, an institution, carefully handled by his manager, the crafty but crass Colonel Tom Parker. The rest of his career amounts to bad movies, bombastic music, and self-parody (with the brief exception of his 1968 “Comeback Special”). Various excesses follow, and an early, drug-induced death caps the story.

This familiar narrative forms the basic structure of Careless Love, the second volume in Peter Guralnick’s biography of the King. Where the first covered music Guralnick cared about, this book’s subtitle sums up the story: “The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.” According to the author’s note, that process “could almost be called the vanishing of Elvis Presley.” [author’s italics] And, indeed, as the young star sits in the Nashville studio, he has literally disappeared. “I turned around,” reports the session’s co-producer, Chet Atkins, “… and the lights were all out, and I couldn’t see what the hell was going on, and then I hear the guitar and the bass and the Jordanaires humming a little bit, and Elvis started to sing.”

The song they’re working on is worth looking at in some detail, not only because it typifies a kind of music Presley would pursue in the last half of his life, but also because it seems to support Guralnick’s central thesis. It’s a ridiculously old-fashioned and inappropriate ballad, which had first been a hit for Al Jolson (!?) more than thirty years earlier. Supposedly, Presley agreed to record it only because it was one of Colonel Parker’s favorites. If you buy the thesis put forward in Careless Love, here’s a beginning to the downward slide: Elvis as the Colonel’s puppet, the wild boy tamed.

The trouble is “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is a great record — and a great rock & roll record…

Read the rest of Elvis in the Dark, here.

Taken from:http://livinginstereo.com/?p=293