Ich bin im Internet auf einen ausgezeichneten Artikel über Elvis gestoßen, der als Rezension von Peter Guralnicks Carelese Love quasi einen alternativen Überblick über Elvis Leben nach seiner Rückkehr von der Armee bietet ... der Artikel ist in Englisch, aber sehr verständlich geschrieben ... vielleicht kennen ihn ja schon einige von Euch ... der Author heißt übrigens Daniel Wolff ... da er ziemlich lang ist, werde ich ihn am besten in mehreren Portionen posten ... enjoy



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. It not only shows an astonishing young singer at work, but its popularity on the various, segregated music charts suggests that it struck many of the same chords that Presley’s early Sun sides had. On the mainstream pop charts, it made the biggest one-week Top 40 jump in history, going from #35 to #2, and Presley’s fans helped keep it at #1 for six weeks. Over on the country charts, where the audience was typically seen as white, rural and conservative, it became a #22 hit. And on the rhythm & blues chart, designed to track Negro music, the white Southerner singing an antique ballad reached #3. The record also went to #1 in England, with worldwide sales estimated at four million.

The song begins with an acoustic guitar and a simple stand-up bass line, then the harmonized “oooo’s” of the back-up singers, the Jordanaires. The rest of the musicians — drums, electric guitar, saxophone — sit out. This, clearly, isn’t the Elvis who tore it up with “That’s All Right [Mama]” or “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” songs which Guralnick lavishly praised in his first volume, citing “a sense of daring, high-flying good times almost in defiance of societal norms.” Here, Elvis enters low in his range and, within the first line — the title line — ascends to a near-falsetto. To Guralnick, this kind of singing is “Italianate” and defines “pop” rather than rock & roll music.

That definition only makes sense if you’re willing to exclude from the rock pantheon Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, the Platters, Roy Hamilton, the Everly Brothers, Jackie Wilson and a number of other artists who produced melodic, sophisticated hits in the early 60’s, after the music “died.” Their songs were not only good for slow dancing (as essential to the rock & roll phenomenon as the rip-’em-up sound), but they had a bravura emotional quality that could, indeed, be traced back to Jolson by way of Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, and — one of Presley’s favorites — Dean Martin. For a purist, this doesn’t count as rock history. What’s it got to do, after all, with leather jackets and shaking up the staid, Eisenhower years?

By the end of the second line, Elvis has established his right to this ballad legacy. Listen how he phrases “Do you miss me tonight?” ending in a breathy tenderness that’s almost scary in its intimacy. With the song barely begun, the quality and conviction of his voice has pulled you into the darkness and answered each question as it’s asked: yes, you’re lonesome; yes, you’ve missed him.

It is an antique vehicle he’s trying to ride, and that becomes obvious in the first verse, when he sings about the “chairs in your parlor.” But if the King of Rock & Roll sees anything ludicrous or inappropriate about this setting, he overcomes it with a hint of anger, a low growl to his voice, which passes so quickly, you can’t be sure it was there. What you do know, by now, is the basic structure of the song. Each line goes from this low range (which reads, if not as rage, certainly as deep passion) to a high note of vulnerability and tenderness. And the sense follows the sound, as each line asks an increasingly emotional question, culminating in the ultimate — “Shall I come back, again?” — before returning to wondering if you/she/we are lonesome tonight.

Any song directed towards an unnamed “you” works on several levels. There’s the specific person the singer seems to be addressing, a “sweetheart” he kissed “one bright summer day,” now departed. Then, there’s the listener who puts her or himself into the role. For the screaming Elvis fans or the casual listener spinning the radio dial, this intimate voice makes a direct connection. But the “you” is general enough to include more than that. If we accept that Elvis is an artist (something that even his fans and admirers have often found hard to do), then we can conceive that the singer, sitting there in the darkened studio, might be addressing that amorphous thing, his public. Choosing to record this ballad and to do it straight, with almost embarrassing conviction, was bound to send a message. He’s been gone two years, the papers have been full of speculation on whether he’ll be able to regain his rock & roll crown, and he sings, “Shall I come back, again? / Tell me, dear, are you lonesome, tonight?”

The singer Guralnick describes would never be that self-aware. Part and parcel of the myth is that Elvis didn’t really know what he was doing; he just was. Those early Sun years were the product of an astonishing, inexplicable, instinctual creativity. If there was someone with a vision, Guralnick argued in volume one of his biography, it was Sam Phillips, the owner and producer at Sun Records. It’s Phillips and Chester Burnett (a.k.a. Howling Wolf) who are, according to Guralnick’s dedication to an earlier book, “the real heroes of rock ‘n’ roll.” In Careless Love, that position is filled by the Colonel. Guralnick doesn’t always agree with his decisions, but he regularly refers to Parker’s “carefully conceived strategy” surrounding this or that career move. He’s the brains of the operation.

In contrast, when Guralnick praises Presley, it’s usually Elvis reverting to his feeling, unthinking self. In a 1961 performance in Hawaii, Guralnick says, “he forgets the words, even loses the structure of the song, but embraces the moment with pure, uninhibited feeling.” When Presley succeeds within a song’s structure, it’s because he “poured himself into it in a way that had nothing to do with craftsmanship, nothing to do with professionalism ….” While the performances that Guralnick finds to commend in the last nineteen years of Presley’s life are rare enough (”Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is not one of them), the criterion — Elvis as an unselfconscious force of nature — is remarkably consistent. So, “If I Can Dream,” the stunning conclusion to the 1968 come-back TV special, is “… one of those rare instances where Elvis pays no attention to formal boundaries ….” The special itself “all comes down to that one moment in which not just self-consciousness, but consciousness itself, is lost ….” And as the star ages, Guralnick reminds us that “honesty, sincerity, the purely instinctual gut-level response — that was what his music was all about, it was what it had always been about.” [author’s italics]

In later years, Presley would make fun of the next part of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and it’s certainly ripe for it. Just when his sweet, secure singing has won us over, he drops it for a spoken recitation. “You know,” he intones, “someone said, ‘The world’s a stage, and each must play a part.’” The melancholy Jacques, in As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, actually says: “All the world’s a stage, // And all the men and women merely players….” Never mind. We get that it’s the metaphor of life as a scripted, fated thing, with an additional hint of falseness — of acting as opposed to feeling. It’s our first indication that the song might be about more than lovesickness.

As it turns out, the narrator has been betrayed. His sweetheart never really cared about him; she’s been “reading her lines” from the first. And, hokey as the technique might be, the song calls for Presley to illustrate that she’s been acting by acting himself. He drops the seductive quality of singing to speak directly to her. Which means, of course, directly to us. A month after this recording session, Elvis is scheduled to go out to Hollywood to shoot “G.I. Blues,” the first in a series of post-army movies that will occupy him for much of the next decade. Like Sinatra, he’s going to sustain his career by becoming an actor. Here, in this song, is a sample of how it might work: a combination of dramatics and singing.

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