Where Were You When Elvis Died? - By Lester Bangs

    Where were you when Elvis died? What were you doing and what did it give
you an excuse to do with the rest of your day? That's what we'll be talking
about in the future when we remember this grand occasion. Like Pearl Harbor
of JFK's assassination, it boils down to individual reminiscences, which is
perhaps as it should be, because in spite of his greatness, ect., ect.,
Elvis had left us each as alone as he was; I mean, he wasn't exactly a Man
of the People anymore, if you get my drift. If you don't I will drift even
further away from Elvis into contemplation on why all our public heroes seem
to reinforce our own solitude.
    The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience. Those
who indulge in it will ultimately reap the scorn of those they've dumped on,
whether they've live for ever like Andy Paleface Warhol, or die fashionably
early like Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Charlie
Parker, and Billie Holiday. The two things that distinguish those deaths
from Elvis' (he and they having drug habits vaguely in common) were that all
of them died on the outside looking in and none of them took their audience
for granted. Which is why it's just a little bit harder for me to see Elvis
as a tragic figure; I see him as being more like the Pentagon, a giant
armored institution nobody knows anything about except that its power is
legendary.
    Obviously we all liked Elvis more than the pentagon, but look at what a
paltry statement that is. In the end Elvis' scorn for his fans as manifested
in 'new' albums full of previously released material and one new song to
make sure all us suckers would buy it, was mirrored in the scorn we all
secretly or not so secretly felt for a man who came closer to godhood than
Carlos Castaneda until military conscription tamed and revealed him for the
dumb lackey he always was in the first place. And ever since, for almost two
decades now, we've been waiting for him to get wild again, fools that we
are, and he probably knew better than any of us in his heart of hearts that
it was never gonna happen, his heart of hearts obviously not being our
collective heart of hearts, he being so obviously just some poor dumb
Southerner boy with a Big Daddy manager to screen the world for him and
filter out anything which might erode his status as big strapping baby
bringing home the bucks, and finally being sort of perversely celebrated at
least by rock critics for his utter contempt for whoever cared about him.
    And Elvis was perverse, only a true pervert could put out an album like
"Having Fun With Elvis On Stage," that album released three or so years back
which consisted of between-song onstage patter so redundant it would make
both Willy Burroughs and Gert Stein blush. Elvis was into marketing boredom
when Andy Warhol was still doing shoe ads, but Elvis' sin was his failure to
realize that his fans were not perverse--they loved him without
qualification, no matter what he dumped on them they loyally lapped it up,
and that's why I feel a hell of a lot sorrier for all those poor jerks than
for Elvis himself. I mean, who's left they can stand all night out in the
rain for? Nobody, and the true tragedy is the tragedy of an entire
generation which refuses to give up its adolescence even as if feels its
menopausal paunch begin to blossom and its hair recede over the
horizon--along with Elvis and everything else they once thought they
believed in. Will they care in five years what he's been doing for the last
twenty?
    Sure Elvis' death is a relatively minor ironic variant on the
future-shock mazurka, and perhaps the most significant thing about Elvis'
exit is that the entire history of the seventies has been retreads and
brutal demystification; three of Elvis' ex-bodyguards recently got together
with this hacker from the New York Post and whipped up a book which dosed us
with all the dirt we'd yearned to see for so long. Elvis was the last of our
sacred cows to be publicly mutilated; everybody knows Keith Richards likes
his junk, but when Elvis went onstage in a stupor nobody breathed a hint of
"Quaalude...." In a way, this was both good and bad, good because Elvis
wasn't encouraging other people to be a walking physicians desk reference,
bad because Elvis stood for that Nixonian Secrecy-as-virtue which was passed
off as the essence of Americanism for a few years there. In a sense he could
be seen not only as a phenomenon that exploded in the 50's to help shape the
psychic jailbreak of the 60's, but ultimately as a perfect cultural
expression of what the Nixon years where all about. Not that he prospered
more then, but that his passion for the privacy of potentates allowed him to
get away with almost literal murder, certainly with the symbolic rape of his
fans, meaning that we might all do better to think about waving good-bye
with one upturned finger.
    I got the news of Elvis' death while drinking beer with a friend and
fellow music journalist on his fire escape on the 21st Street in Chelsea.
Chelsea is a good neighborhood; in spite of the fact that the insane woman
who lives upstairs keeps him awake all night every night with her rants at
no one, my friend stays there because he likes the sense of community within
diversity in that neighborhood; old time card carrying communists live in
that building, alongside people of every persuasion popularly lumped as
'ethnic." When we heard about Elvis we knew a wake was in order, so I went
out to the deli for a case of beer. As I left the building I passed some
Latin guys hanging out by the front door. "Heard the news? Elvis is dead." I
told them. They looked at me with contemptuous indifference. So what. Maybe
if I had told them Donna Summer was dead I might have gotten a reaction. I
do recall walking in this neighborhood wearing a T-shirt that said, "Disco
Sucks" with a vast unamused muttering in my wake, which only goes to show
that not for everyone was Elvis the still-reigning King of Rock 'n' Roll, in
fact not for everyone is Rock 'n' Roll the still-reigning music. By now,
each citizen has found his own little obsessive corner to blast his brains
in; as the sixties were supremely narcissistic, solipsism's what the
seventies have been about, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in
the world of 'pop' music. And Elvis may have been the greatest solipsist of
all.
    I asked for two six packs at the deli and told the guy behind the
counter the news. He looked fifty years old, graying, big belly, life still
in his eyes, and he said, "Shit, that's too bad. I guess our only hope now
is if the Beatles get back together."
    Fifty years old.
    I told him I thought that that would be the biggest anti-climax in
history and that the best thing the Stones could do now would be to break up
and spare us all further embarrassments.
    He laughed and gave me directions to a meat market down the street.
There I asked the counterman the same question I'd been asking everybody. He
was in his fifties too, and he said, "Y'know what? I don't care that
bastard's dead. I took my wife to see him in Vegas in '73, we paid fourteen
dollars a ticket, and he came out and sang for twenty minutes. Then he fell
down. Then he stood up and sang a couple more songs, then he fell down
again. Finally he said, 'Shit. I might as well sing sitting as standing.' So
he squatted on the stage and asked the band what song they wanted to do
next, but before they could answer he was complaining about the lights.
'They were too bright' he says. 'They hurt my eyes. Put 'em out or I don't
sing a note.' So they do. So me and my wife are sitting in total blackness
listening to this guy sing songs we knew and loved, and I aint just talking
about his old goddamn songs, and he totally butchered all of them. Fuck him.
I'm not saying I'm glad he's dead, but I know one thing: I got taken when I
went to see Elvis Presley."
    I got taken too the one time I went to see Elvis, but in a totally
different way. It was in the autumn of '71, and two tickets to an Elvis show
showed up at the offices of Creem magazine where I then worked. It was
decided that two people who'd never gotten to see Elvis before would get to
go see this show. That's how me and art director Charlie Auringer wound up
in nearly the front row of the biggest arena in Detroit. Earlier Charlie had
said, "Do you realize how much we could have got if we'd sold these fuckin'
things?" I didn't. But how precious they were became totally clear the
moment Elvis sauntered onto the stage. He was the only male performer that I
have ever seen to whom I responded to sexually; it wasn't real arousal,
rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire
and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as
far back as 1964 and twice in '65 never even came close.
    There was Elvis, dressed up in this ridiculous white suit which looked
like some studded Arthurian white castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle
on his belt was larger than your head, except that your head is not made of
solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spitting image of a Neil
Diamond damn fool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn't? No
matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued
mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash leftover from the days
when,...well I wasn't there so I won't presume to comment. But I will say
this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual
frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself,
since putting 'popular arts' and 'America' in the same sentence seems almost
redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a
black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in
terms of cultural impact. But what's more crucial is that when Elvis started
wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country
went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent
which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was
the sixties.
    I mean don't tell me about Lenny Bruce, man--Lenny Bruce said dirty
words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which
Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing,
whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who
worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis
altered America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had
been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as
repressed as ours and how much you could get away with it, but Elvis kicked
"How Much Is That Doggie In The Window' out the window and replaced it with,
"Let's fuck." The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos
still reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and
harmony. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to
ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls
in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally,
every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter,
tens of  tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger,
not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria
among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of
making a point of not trying.
    If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe,
then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more
contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought it
was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to
speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains
and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because
solipsism holds all the cards at present: it is a king whose domain engulfs
even Elvis'. But I guarantee you one thing: WE WILL NEVER AGAIN AGREE ON
ANYTHING AS WE AGREED ON ELVIS. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his
corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

    Well, that's the article. I don't know why he remembers Elvis as being
heavy in '71, and I don't know what to make of that meat couter man's
opinion of an Elvis show in '73. I was also offended by his comment that we
should wave good-bye with one upturned finger. I didn't go through any of
the sexual things he talked about when I saw Elvis, but then again I hadn't
even reached puberty yet. lol. but I do like the way he ended the
article,...the part about how we will never again agree on anything as we
agreed on Elvis, because I agree with that sentiment. Wait a minute,...if I
agree with him,...doesn't that mean that his statement is wrong? Nah. I
guess I'm being too cynical on that one.
    As for his belief that Elvis had contempt for his audience, I don't
think he was taking into account how much control over Elvis Parker had, and
I doubt he would have cared even if he did take that into account. We'll
never know exactly why Parker had that kind of control over Elvis, we can
speculate, but we'll never know. I was hoping that after the Colonel died,
some kind of truth would come to light. But it never happened. And until it
does, we can assuredly expect Elvis to continue taking the blame in the
press for all of Parker's horrid decisions throughout the 60's and 70's.