America Essay Pt I Elvis & America

Two weeks before 9/11 I was driving over the Williamsburg Bridge. Traffic was backed up and we were crawling at about five miles per hour, allowing me plenty of time to gaze at the Manhattan skyline. In my reverie I had an odd vision of planes flying into skyscrapers. I didn’t take it as an omen, but I did think long and hard about how America would change once we were hit by our first big terrorist attack.

I hadn’t taken a vacation outside New York City for many years, and I always wanted to drive across the country so a few days before 9/11 I evacuated Gotham to begin such a trip. I had no game plan. I just wanted to wander across the U.S. until I hit the ocean rumored to be on the other side.

I began by heading south through Pennsylvania and Virginia, where I picked up the Blue Ridge Mountain Highway. I didn’t have money for hotels so I slept in the back of my car. The first few nights I had a little trouble finding places to sleep where I felt safe.
The first night I slept in a gravel parking lot by an old railway station. The next I slept in the parking lot of a doughnut shop that had closed for the night. Neither seemed quite right. The railway station was too isolated and creepy. The doughnut shop was too public and I might have attracted the attention of the police or criminals.

The Blue Ridge Mountain Highway winds across the top of the Appalachian Mountains heading south through the Carolinas and into Georgia. It is a beautiful drive filled with majestic scenic overlooks, mountain streams, and grand rock formations. Nothing but green trees and blue skies for days on end.

When I got too hot I would pull over and bathe in the cool waters of a babbling brook. With a little searching you could find some old-fashioned bluegrass music being broadcast from a low wattage radio station that is too insignificant to be eaten up by Clear Channel or one of the other corporate behemoths.

The important thing was that I was free. Freedom is something we experience all too rarely. It is something many people never know. No clocks to punch. No appointments to keep. Nobody looking over your shoulder. If I was tired I slept. If I was hungry, I ate. If I saw a highway that aroused my curiosity, I took it. If I drove too far in either direction I would eventually hit an ocean, so I couldn’t get too far of course. If you have nowhere to be, you can’t get lost.

I did have a half-hearted goal of reaching Memphis before Sunday morning so I could get some religion courtesy of one of Al Green’s legendary revival meetings. Meandering as I was, even that goal soon had to be abandoned.

When I finally did roll into Memphis it was Monday morning on a balmy southern day like any other balmy southern day. Memphis, the home of Elvis, Sun Records, and rock n’ roll; it’s dilapidated streets and poverty stricken population seemed a fitting backdrop for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. A place where white-trash peasants and downtrodden blacks could commune in the knowledge that they have more in common with each other than they do with those who hold wealth and power and are the real oppressors of the poor.

Every great American art form has been birthed from the mixing of cultures. Blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll; those who say whites steal from blacks are correct, but they also miss the point completely. Musicians steal of out love. Every great musician understands that love of music trumps racial division any day of the week. All artists steal, it’s just the way it’s done. It’s those who imitate that should be avoided.

Elvis, James Brown, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the great ones are great because they are great. Those who love them for their talent and artistry couldn’t give a fuck what color their skin is. As a white-boy who worships the godfather of soul, don’t try to tell me I can’t play the funk because of my skin color. It is in me. Funneled into the core of my being through the love and ecstasy I feel when listening to those entrancing grooves and primal yelps. How many times have I been the one to tell a young black rapper that he needs to study JB or Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five so he knows his roots. Not his racial roots, his musical roots.

Where would rock ‘n’ roll be if some racist had told Jimi Hendrix that a black man can’t play hard rock guitar. But let the racists divide, musicians know better. The great music created from the mixing of cultures is something that should be celebrated.

The entire history of rock ‘n’ roll seems to be mapped out in the life of Elvis Presley. The purity, the gospel, the downtrodden kid who rises to fame and fortune through music, the controversy, the repressed sexuality, the taming to appease the authorities, the Hollywood sell-out, the Las Vegas parody, and the premature end brought on by hedonistic excess.

There was some cosmic perfection in the fact that Elvis died in the same year that the Sex Pistols released their first and only cataclysmic album. The excess of the past dies to allow the rebirth of the original spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.

All these things flowed through my mind as I walked aimlessly past crumbling buildings, rusted cars, and half-abandoned strip malls. I got a bad haircut from a Dolly Parton look-alike named Winona and ate stale tamales in an empty blues bar. A stranger in an all-too-familiar land of urban decay.

Throughout most of my life I never cared much for Elvis. He was just an overweight cheeseball who made embarrassing movies. That is until I heard the Sun Session recordings. Suddenly I heard the spark that the New York record execs and Hollywood film producers had trampled into the ground. The raw brilliance that made teenage girls scream with a hysteria that made the devil smile and Eisenhower’s America tremble.

“This rock ‘n’ roll music is designed to pull white children down to the level of the nigger,” they said. ‘Amen and halleluiah,’ I reply. Bring it on.

But never underestimate corporate America’s ability to take a flash of light and life and mould it into something so safe and squeaky-clean that even the church elders patted his head with approval. Nothing seems to be too cheesy for the American public. Not Clam Bake. Not the whores of Las Vegas. If you want to wrench every cent of profit from an artist he must appeal to the lowest common denominator.

The next morning I drove to Graceland. I expected the tour to serve as little more than a funny gawk at bad tastes in tacky furnishings. Instead the experience turned out to be much more complex.

Outside we were all lined up waiting for the shuttle to take us into Graceland. The usual Graceland crowd is made up of aging tourists dressed in white shorts and pastel flavored polyester tops. On this day we were joined by a busload of downs syndrome patients, who took their space directly behind me in line.

Before you enter Graceland everyone has their picture taken in front of a white screen. The photo is magically doctored to make it look like you are standing in front of the hallowed gates of Graceland. (As I recall my ex-klu klux klan member grandmother had one of these keepsakes on the mantle in her house trailer.)


The photos are then placed all together on a wall. As the line moves past you are able to buy your photo for the nice price of $19.99. When I arrived at the wall I beheld a truly beautiful sight. My photo was placed dead center in the middle of the wall, surrounded by a mosaic of downs syndrome patients. At the moment when the flash went off I managed to look to the west with my left eye and squint my right eye giving my face a distorted look that made me fit right in with my new friends.

I had about four days of stubble on my face and my hair hadn’t seen a combs in months. All together we were a cockeyed looking bunch from head to toe. And we all came together to worship the great white Adonis.

Give Mecca to the Muslims, the Wailing Wall to the Jews, and send the Christians…well, wherever wealthy Christians go, but we children of a lesser God, who were birthed in trailer parks and backwoods shanties, in row houses and newly built prefab family units, we come to Graceland to commune with he who was all that we might hope to be in our wildest imaginings.

Once inside Graceland we were herded past zebra-skin living rooms suits, and leopard skinned bed-spreads, through hallways lined with gold records, past gold-lamay jackets and white-leather jumpsuits enclosed in glass cases, video clips of TV appearances on Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen flickered in grainy black and white. Throughout it all the king’s music played softly, seeming to come from everywhere, yet nowhere. His reverb-laden falsetto quivered as he sang ‘Blue Moon’ providing an eerie ambiance that haunted the lower levels of the shrine.

When we exited through the back door we found ourselves standing at his gravesite in the back yard. Laugh as we may at his gaudy excesses, one couldn’t help but to feel sadness, and even a bit of reverence after witnessing this hollow spectacle that is the sum legacy of an artist’s life.

In a way it is America, whose dreams are as pathetic as it’s sorrows. Whose achievements are as empty as its failures; once life’s vitality is drained from its shell. The go-kart races, the banana, bacon and peanut butter sandwiches, the karate heroics,
the guns, the drugs, the madness, they are all America.

Inside a video of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a confused basset hound loops endlessly. Outside we dream of a country-boy who became a king.