Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

Why Elvis Presley Mattered, And Why He Still Matters

Chicago Tribune ~ August 03, 1997

The musicians are huddled together on a stage, and anticipation ripples through the room, a murmur on the verge of becoming a shout. A guitar is strummed, a tambourine rattles as the singer strolls into the opening lines: "I've been traveling over mountains, even through the valleys too/I've been traveling night and day, I've been running all the way/Baby, tryin' to get to you." As the second verse fades, the murmurs rise into cries of encouragement.

"Yeah, c'mon," one shouts. "C'mon!" And the singer explodes, no longer laying back, now letting it fly. It is a raw, ragged sound, but the singer is so far into the moment that he doesn't care, and neither does anyone else. "When I read your lovin' letter, my heart began to sink," he roars with ache and ardor in his voice. "There's a million miles between us, but they didn't mean a thing."

This glorious minute of "Trying to Get to You" is from Elvis Presley's 1968 television comeback special, one of 77 previously unreleased performances collected on a new four-CD box set, "Platinum: A Life in Music" (RCA).

It affirms that 20 years after his death on Aug. 16, 1977, after countless books, albums, tabloid stories, imitators and Graceland tours have wrung seemingly every drop of mystery from his legacy, there remains plenty to learn about Presley. Or, perhaps more precisely, relearn.

For in the last 20 years, the essential truth about Presley has been lost. Presley was an expressive singer but not much of a guitar or piano player. He didn't write music, and he had a fondness for dishing the corn. But the truth of Presley's 23 years of public music making is this: He was the most quintessentially American of singers, an artist who drew no boundaries between Saturday night blues and Sunday morning gospel, middle-of-the-road schmaltz and dirt-road hillbilly country. And he could swing a tune like nobody's business.

More than anything else, those two factors--his openness to just about any kind of music and his ability to personalize that music with his unique feel for rhythm--are why Presley mattered, and still matters. All the other stuff--the Vegas glitter suits, the bushy sideburns, the drugs, the extravagant tackiness of Graceland, the passion for fried peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches--may be how many Americans identify with him. But all of it is mere window-dressing on Presley's house of music.

Comb through the selections on "Platinum," which trace Presley's career from its beginning at Sun Studios in Memphis to its decline in the casinos of Las Vegas in the mid-'70s, and the music is wildly, frustratingly inconsistent. But Presley's vision remains constant: Class, race and musical genre made no difference to him; he saw only songs he liked and those he didn't. This meant his world was absurdly all-encompassing. Elvis threw his arms around everything from Arthur Crudup's blues shouts to Dean Martin's languid croon, Bob Dylan's art songs to Englebert Humperdinck's melodramatic ballads.

Out of this openness, a new way of looking at the world emerged. Though Presley is sometimes credited with "inventing" rock 'n' roll, he did nothing of the sort. "It's pretty clear to me that rock 'n' roll was invented by a number of black artists who came out in the late '40s and '50s, before Elvis got going," says Joe Ely, a Texas-based artist who says his early exposure to Presley's music "changed my life."

"Elvis emulated the people who invented this sound, but what he did was open it up."

D.J. Fontana, a Nashville drummer who joined Presley's original combo of guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black in the mid-'50s, says he never considered the music they played to be all that different, let alone revolutionary. "Scotty was coming out of a jazz and country thing, I liked Western swing, and I don't know where the people got the term `rock 'n' roll' to describe us," Fontana says. "For us, that sound came naturally because it's what we'd been playing all our lives."

But Fontana chuckles when it is suggested that it was all in the hips, that playing behind Presley was not unlike accompanying a go-go dancer. The joke goes that Moore, Black and Fontana were the first band in music history to be led by an ass.

"It's like we found that groove by accident because when we were on stage we could barely hear. It was just Scotty's little amp, a slap bass and one microphone against all those girls hollerin' and screamin', so we had to watch him: Lift a leg here, twitch a foot there, we'd know where he was in the song by the way he would move," Fontana says.

The rhythm revolution started in Sam Phillips' Sun Records studio in Memphis in July 1954. Moore, Black and Presley hit on the accidental sound that would change the world by giving the blues and country classics of the day a rhythm overhaul. It began with Moore's guitar playing; his driving, echo-laden counterpoint melodies complemented and pushed Presley's vocal melody line rather than duplicating it.

"We were all below-average musicians," Moore says in his new biography, "That's Alright, Elvis" (Schirmer). "Elvis didn't know all that many chords, but he had a great sense of rhythm. Sam . . . treated Elvis as another instrument and he kept his voice closer to the music than was the norm at the time. If you listen to the records that were being released then, the singer's voice was way out front. If he left Elvis' voice way out front, it would have sounded empty because we only had three instruments."

The sound the three created was monumental. Fontana recalls his reaction to hearing Presley's "That's All Right" on the radio: "How many musicians they got? Five? Six?"

"They had a great feel for rhythm, and the lesson I learned right quick was, `Don't overplay,' " Fontana says in an interview. "When I came into the group, I didn't want to clutter it up, so I held back on the cymbals and tom-toms and kept the tempo."

Although there are those who suggest Presley was little more than a puppet manipulated by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, Presley was in charge in the studio.

"I hate to say it, but most producers we worked with were clock watchers and note takers," says Fontana, who recorded steadily with Presley from 1955 to '68. "Elvis kept it loose. He wanted us to be ourselves, and it was a great atmosphere. He liked to record everything with everyone playing at once, in the room together, to get the feel of a song. He'd offer suggestions. Sometimes he'd ask me to try something and I'd say, `Elvis, I can't play that' because it would be beyond me. And he'd say, `Aw, hell, just do what you want to do.' He never got mad. I think he knew if he screamed and ranted, everyone would tighten up and he wouldn't get anything. The man knew how to make records."

It was a lesson imparted to Ely when he, along with a number of other second-generation rockers such as Keith Richards and Jeff Beck, recorded with Moore and Fontana recently for the album "All the King's Men" (Sweetfish), due out Aug. 12.

"D.J. and the producer had words, and D.J. ended up walking out of the studio in frustration over a song we were trying to do," Ely recalls. "When he came back, he just said, `Forget everything--just play it.' And we ripped into the song and it was like all the tension in the room just melted away. It was a great insight into this mystical thing that they had with Elvis. They would learn the chords until they didn't have to think about them. `Just play it.' "

Presley showed far less insight and compassion in more practical matters. Moore's autobiography details how while Presley was making millions in the '50s, Moore, Black and Fontana were subsisting on $200-a-week salaries. In 14 years with Presley, during which he performed on hundreds of songs, tours and movies, Moore was paid less than $30,200.

Presley, who hated confrontation, allowed Parker to handle his business affairs without interference, and this was the great blind spot in his musical vision. In consolidating his control over the singer's empire, Parker shooed away anyone who didn't play by his rules. If songwriters wanted to work with Presley, they had to surrender publishing rights and often give the singer a share of the credit. So Presley often found himself saddled with middle-of-the-road songs in the Colonel's quest to turn him into an adult entertainer.

But Fontana looks back on Presley's years in the '60s, when he was churning out dreck for a succession of mediocre Hollywood movies, without disdain.

"Elvis was a fanatic about doing the best we could with whatever we had," the drummer says. "When he was doing three movies a year, he didn't have time to really do anything else. That's why he made the TV special (the 1968 "Elvis" marked Presley's first appearance before an audience in more than seven years). People were wondering what happened to Elvis, and he was wondering too. He worked hard on the show and he was nervous. I remember we fumbled through the first few numbers, and then he relaxed. And when he relaxed, everyone did."

The "Platinum" box contains five performances from those sessions, including two songs cut in Presley's dressing room while the group was relaxing after a rehearsal. In this informal setting, Presley takes on an old soul number by Ray Charles, a song associated with a pre-rock vocal group, a Depression era ballad and a Memphis blues. He makes them all sound of a piece, an accomplishment that is easy to overlook because he made it seem so easy.

"He was a turning point in American music," Ely insists. But in a half-century will Presley's art be considered on par with that of accomplished songwriters like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones? Ely chuckles. "Elvis didn't need to write songs. He knew how to sing them."

The evidence is on "Platinum." From lean classics like "Mystery Train" to overblown cheese like "An American Trilogy," Presley sang everything like he meant it. His taste could be questioned, but never his heart.

pafret Loc: Northeast

Not being one who worshiped at the alter of St. Presley, I and my contemporaries were of the opinion that if Elvis practiced for fifty years he might make the chorus at the Met.

Rock and Roll had its inception in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle" starring Glen Ford, Anne Francis and one of the earliest appearances of Sidney Poitier. The sound track was dominated by Bill Haley and his Comets playing "Rock Around The Clock". This was the seminal moment of rock and roll.


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