The king of rock 'n' roll died alone and lonely 25 years ago, aged 42. Although he has spawned a multi-million dollar industry - and a cult following - he was, above all, a singer. And it was the singer that became an American god, not the industry which created one, writes Anna Mundow, as Elvis fans gear up for a celebration of the legend's life and music
In the early hours of August 16th, 1977, Elvis Presley died. He was 42 years old. He died alone, probably on the toilet. When his young girlfriend woke up, wondering where he was, she found his naked, bloated body lying in a pool of vomit on the bathroom carpet. Presley's heart had finally succumbed to the nightly cocktail of prescription drugs that the singer needed to reach oblivion.
"I swear to God no one knows how lonely I get," he told a confidante, Larry Geller, in 1966, "and how empty I really feel." It sounds like a line from a Hank Williams or a Jimmie Rodgers song. And it should. Williams died at 30, Rogers at 36. Like countless country singers - black and white - they knew the lonesome blues. Peter Guralnick, the acclaimed Elvis biographer and music historian, calls it "an aching kind of vulnerability, an unspecified yearning" in the voice. Record producer Sam Phillips saw it in the 18-year-old Elvis who walked into Sun Records in Memphis with the four dollar fee required to make his first record in 1953.
But Phillips - who recorded many black musicians - called it something else. "He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way; his insecurity was so markedly that of a black person."
These things and many more will be discussed next weekend in Memphis - and all summer long across the US - as the 25th anniversary of the King's death brings together scholars and hustlers, down-home believers and sophisticated voyeurs. There will even be some musicians.
A gigantic marketing wave emanating from Elvis Presley Enterprises at Graceland has churned out every imaginable product - from MacDonald's Elvis Happy Meals to a range of blonde-wood furniture. His life has become the subject of a commemorative Monopoly game, a musical created by Priscilla Presley and a BBC 1 television documentary. (The Elvis Mob concentrates on Elvis's "dark side" while Priscilla's musical takes the sunnier view.)
This is a peak moment for a worldwide industry that has made Graceland the most visited home in the US, after the White House, with approximately 600,000 tourists each year enhancing Memphis annual city revenues by $150 million.
The 25th anniversary concert in Memphis may be the summer's highlight. More significant, however, is the candlelight vigil which begins at 9 p.m. on Thursday and which will continue into the early hours of Friday as pilgrims file silently pass Elvis's grave, each holding a lighted candle. Admission is free and numbers are unrestricted. "This is not a commercial event," says Dr David Rosen, professor of Jungian psychology at Texas A&M University and author of The Tao of Elvis. "This is a living religious event."
It is easy to sneer. That is why so many clever writers visit Graceland. They can roll their eyes at the décor and comment ironically yet profoundly on the emotional kitsch: the icons, the candles, on the misshapen, weeping Americans mourning their rhinestone King.
The sneering is nothing new. It was nothing new to Elvis himself. In 1958, a few days after his mother's death had caused him grief that bordered on insanity, the singer accepted a visitor's condolences and then diffidently asked an odd favour. "Mrs Hofman, I don't know if this is the right time, but the newspapers have made my house so laughable. They have made it sound so laughable, I would love to have your opinion of my home." After the tour, Mrs Hofman declared the house "beautiful" and when Elvis was asked if he ever thought he might "have all this" he replied, "Mrs Hofman, I never thought I'd get out of Humes High".
To understand any of it - the devotion, the religion, the Elvis sightings, the velvet paintings - you have to understand the beginning. Not just Humes High School in Memphis but the real beginning in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aron Presley was born on January 8th, 1935, in a two-room shack, 35 minutes after his stillborn twin, Vernon - named after his father.
"That's the creation myth right there," says writer Mark Winegardner, whose personal account of an American road trip is titled Elvis Presley Boulevard. "In a Southern shack the size of a tiny garage a twin survives who will become enamoured of black culture in a completely colour-blind way and in whom all the major cultural strands will come together."
Today, when we hear a name like Tupelo, Mississippi, we automatically hear a blues guitar or Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey album. American vernacular music, like the Irish ballad, has bestowed poetry and romance on the dreariest places - the backwater, the bogland, the delta. Today, if we see images of Southern poverty at all they form the grainy backdrop to a fashion shoot or a film noir.
But not then. "There were times we had nothing to eat but cornbread and water," Vernon Presley, Elvis's father recalled shortly before he died. "But we always had compassion for people. Poor we were, I'll never deny that. But trash we weren't. We never had any prejudice. We never put anybody down."
In 1938, Vernon Presley was sentenced to three years on a prison farm for altering and cashing a four-dollar cheque. He served only eight months but the shame endured. "My daddy may seem hard to you," Elvis often said, "but you don't know what he's been through."
Poor but not trash. Shamed but not criminal.
These were important distinctions not only to the Presleys, who moved to Memphis, Tennessee, when Elvis was 13 but also to the myth that formed around the Mama's boy who first brought a guitar to school as a shield for his shyness but who politely told his music teacher that she "just didn't appreciate his type of singing" when she gave him a C.
White not black was another important distinction. Many of the radio stations that played Elvis's first single - That's All Right Mama - mentioned his high school as a way of denoting his race. They had no category and no shorthand for what he was doing.
"We often forget that he is the template," says Winegardner. "When he started out, there was no example for him to follow. He could look to Sinatra. But there's a big difference between growing up in the Mississippi delta and growing up with a view of Manhattan. Rock and roll was considered a fad back then. He was constantly asked what he planned to do when the fad was over."
In a 1958 interview, Elvis acknowledged this: "I happened to come along at a time in the music business when there was no trend. The people were looking for something different and I was lucky."
He was also a phenomenon - organic not manufactured. When 19-year-old Roy Orbison first met Elvis in 1955, he found: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it to".
The women from dusty little towns in Arkansas, Texas or Mississippi did not know what to make of it in 1955 either. But they responded instantly and uncontrollably to a raw sexuality they had never seen on public (or very likely, private) display. "It reminded me of the early days, of where I was raised in east Texas and going to these 'Holy Roller' Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people get religion," Tom Perryman, a Texas talent promoter told Peter Guralnick. "You'd see it in the later years with the big sound systems and the lights, but Elvis could do it if there wasn't but 10 people there."
After the creation myth comes the rags-to-riches myth, again perfectly embodied in the boy who leered, spat and writhed on stage but who arrived in Hollywood in 1956 to make his first movie, Love Me Tender, having memorised not only his own lines but everybody else's as well because he thought that was how it worked. "I hadn't been around anyone who was that naïve or that religious," Natalie Wood later observed of her new country companion. "He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He thought it was something he had to protect. He had to be nice to people. Otherwise, God would take it all back."
By then the Mephistophelean Colonel Parker was in control. But Elvis did not become instant merchandise. "I've rarely seen such a tale of innocence as you see in Elvis's embrace of fame in 1955, 1956 and 1957," Peter Guralnick remarked in a recent interview. "And I know of no sadder story. He constructed a shell to hide his aloneness and it hardened on his back."
The final panel in the triptych - the unhappy king myth - slips neatly into place beside the other two. "He became the lonely king in his castle," agrees Winegardner. "When he wanted to ride the carousel, he had to rent out the entire amusement park for the night."
The courtiers who catered then to his increasingly gross appetite for young women, for comfort food and numbing drugs happily tout their grotesque reminiscences now, recalling how they wrapped the bloated King in cling-film before a concert to fit him into his jumpsuit, how they cleaned up after his rages.
The 25th anniversary has predictably lured many back out of the woodwork.
At an upcoming University of Memphis seminar, Is Elvis History?, former Graceland insiders will share the podium with historians and musicologists while the Memphis Jungian Society will introduce Dr David Rosen who explains Elvis's life through the structure of the Tao Te Ching.
Rosen writes: "Elvis could have channeled his rage into killing his false self, then undergone a symbolic death of his self-destructive self and rebirth of his creative true self." The deconstuctionist critics will observe the peculiar Memphis convergence with ironic detachment while the lumpy faithful in their official anniversary T-shirts plod along the Elvis Presley Boulevard pilgrimage route.
Elvis is an industry. But he was, above all, a singer. And it was the singer who became an American god, not the industry which created one.
'Princess Diana was a concept. Elvis was not a concept," Winegardner argues, contrasting the public reaction to both deaths. "When Elvis died, it was not a given that every TV channel would cover the funeral. His death was probably not the lead story on any news broadcast. Of course he was a celebrity. But it's the difference between then and now: Michael Jackson is part of pop culture. Elvis Presley is part of American culture."
Strip it all away, dismantle the monolithic Elvis Presley Enterprises owned by Lisa Marie, purge the planet of every impersonator and the music would still matter.
"Elvis is part of a continuum of great American vernacular music and that's what he set out to be," Guralnick concludes. "He aspired to offer a contribution that was as great as that of James Hess, Little Junior Parker, Roy Hamilton, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters. There's no question of his influence, no question of his originality and there's no question of the extent to which he offered a vocabulary to a generation that was waiting for a language with which to express itself."
Sam Phillips, the Sun Records impresario with an avowed mission to record black musicians in Memphis and the first person to record Elvis, put it more poetically.
Placing the young singer's innocence alongside "the quiet nights, people living on plantations, never out of debt, hoping to eat, lights up the river - that's what they used to call Memphis. That was where it all came together. And Elvis Presley might not have been able to verbalise all that - but he damn sure wasn't dumb and he damn sure was intuitive, and he damn sure had an appreciation for the total spirituality of human existence, even if he would never have thought of the term. That was what he cared about."
• Saturday night is Elvis Night on RTÉ, from 8 p.m.
• Other events include: The Elvis Presley Story at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, from Monday to August 18th; Elvis Spectacular at the Grand Opera House, Cork, from August 13th to 16th; Elvis: The Way It Was at the Olympia, Dublin, on Thursday; Derek McEvoy is Elvis at the Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin, on Thursday.
• Charity events on August 18th include: 25th Anniversary Elvis Charity Spectacular, presented by the Irish Elvis Presley Fan Club, at the Hilton Hotel, Charlemont Place, Dublin,details 01-6211314, www.irishelvisfanclub.com; and 25th Anniversary Charity Extravaganza, presented by the Irish Elvis Social Club, at the Red Cow Inn, Dublin, details 01-4593650/elvissocialclub@elvis.com