Worshipping the King

By ANDY GILL

Nearly a quarter of a century ago - at 3.30am on August 16, 1977 - Elvis Presley was pronounced dead at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. His girlfriend, Ginger Alden, had found his body a little more than an hour earlier, collapsed on the floor of his Graceland bathroom. He had had heart failure while seated on the toilet, reading a book entitled The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42 years old.

Within hours of the announcement of his death, vast crowds of mourners were assembling outside Graceland; when the gates were opened the following afternoon to allow them in to pay their respects, the queue stretched back more than a mile.

When Elvis' body was transported in a cortege of white Cadillacs to the city's Forest Hill cemetery, more than 100 vans were needed to carry the flowers from fans. It was a send-off fit for a king.

In the following weeks there was a feverish burst of activity from his record company, RCA, as it struggled to accommodate the most extreme example so far of that peculiar ghoulish affection that spurs fans to rush out and buy something, anything, by the recently deceased, as if struck by guilt for not having bought more during the dead star's lifetime.

The label bosses, and especially Elvis' manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, must have been delighted at their cash-cow's posthumous performance. But their efforts to determine the manner in which Elvis would be remembered were rudely brushed aside by the public, who asserted a kind of collective ownership of this most distinctive of American icons.

In its own way, this public reclamation of Elvis was a long-overdue snub to the way in which Parker, particularly, had mishandled Presley's career, insisting on presenting him as some kind of bland, airbrushed matinee idol.

From the moment he died, Elvis was suddenly liberated, free to assume all manner of disguises and manifestations, from comic to sinister to religious.

Within weeks of his passing, the first sightings were reported of the supposedly dead Elvis, waiting in a supermarket queue, driving a truck or filling up at a gas station - revealingly, usually involved in the mundane, blue-collar situations routinely undertaken by most of his fans. Though in life he had become a rich recluse, a person apart from his public, in death he could become one of them again.

The proliferation of Elvis sightings has since become a collective joke. Sometimes the jokes are quite funny: only a few days ago some punter laid a 5p bet at odds of 20 million to one that Elvis would one day ride into London on Shergar to play tennis against the fugitive toff murderer Lord Lucan in the Wimbledon finals.

Always one for a laugh - he could apparently recite various Monty Python routines by heart - Elvis would probably have appreciated the gag.

The Colonel, one suspects, would have been rather more appreciative, were he still around, of the marvellous new promotional opportunities afforded by TV commercials and the zombie-reanimation effect of disco remixes on tired old material, which have thrust his boy back to the top with A Little Less Conversation, 46 years after his first hit and 25 years after his passing.

Perhaps the obsessives are right: Elvis will never die. Or, to paraphrase the more religious obsessives, he died only to rise again. But then, they're nuts.

Everybody knows the story of Elvis, even if they haven't seen any of the largely lamentable biopics and timid documentaries about his life and career. The son of archetypal poor white trash, twin brother to a stillborn sibling, Jesse, Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, drove a truck, and loved his momma Gladys with a passion. Such a passion, in fact, that he decided to record a tribute to her as a birthday gift, at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Services, where he was spotted by Phillips' secretary, Marion Keisker.

When he returned a while later with his band to record a few demos for Phillips, he changed the course of popular music by fusing R&B and rockabilly together, became a huge star, got drafted into the Army, starred in some rubbish movies, made a great comeback, then declined into a bloated wreck and died. The End.

For some, the tragedy of Elvis was simply one of physique, as if his decline was just a byproduct of his taste for burgers. When the US Postal Service, a few years back, announced it was to bring out an Elvis stamp, a huge public debate ensued, with fans voting on whether it should be the young, svelte Elvis or the old, obese Elvis depicted on the stamp.

The young Elvis won hands down, of course, but a few more thoughtful types took the opposite view, seeing in Presley's defiant later performances a courage and nobility denied to his younger self.

In any case, Elvis himself appeared disgusted by his surplus pounds, undertaking the most drastic weight-loss programme ever devised when scheduled for a season in Las Vegas.

Unable to bear the hunger pangs of dieting, Elvis would be given a knock-out shot on arrival, in his private jet, at Las Vegas airport, and taken to a hotel suite where he would remain, unconscious, for three weeks, sustained only by a drip-feed of vital nutrients. After three weeks he would awake, many kilos lighter - and, one imagines, ready for dinner.

In truth, Elvis was always in denial - about his physical condition, his addictions and, more tragically, his art. This is a man who once visited Richard Nixon at the White House to try to persuade the President that he, one of the most recognisable people in the world, should be made an undercover narcotics agent because he could speak to the young in their own language and counter the damaging influence of the likes of the Beatles and Jane Fonda (Nixon, no fool, kitted him out with a badge and eagerly assented to the photo-opportunity).

Yet his own corpse was found, on examination by Bio-Sciences Laboratories of Van Nuys, to contain an extraordinary cocktail of 14 different drugs, including codeine, morphine, Valium, Valmid, Amytal, Nembutal, Carbrital, Demerol, Elavil, Aventyl, Sinutab, a "close to toxic level" of Quaalude, and likewise of Placidyl.

His art, too, was largely a matter of denial. Legend has it that it was RCA, or the Army, or Colonel Tom, that emasculated the naturally rockin' Elvis and set him to recording the sickly ballads with which he continued his career after the Army. But the scissor-wielder was actually none other than Elvis himself; he wanted nothing more than to sound like Dean Martin; to that end, the epochal 1954 sessions that first teamed Presley with the guitarist Scotty Moore and the bassist Bill Black began with limp attempts at ballads such as I Love You Because and Harbor Lights.

It was only during a coffee-break that Elvis started horsing around with That's All Right, Mama, and only when the astute Sam Phillips took an interest that Presley started to rock'n'roll seriously.

Likewise, it was Elvis the gospel fan who requested the Jordanaires as back-up singers for the sessions that resulted in Don't Be Cruel. They would serve, for the rest of his career, as the background sense of order, maturity and paternal security against which he promised such youthful potency and sexual abandon; they would also ruin some of his best work with their staid, conservative sound.

It was Elvis, too, who hankered after getting into the movies, visualising himself as a serious actor like James Dean; but when his minders acceded to his demands for a non-singing role (as the half-Native American Pacer in Flaming Star) the results proved less popular than the same year's GI Blues. Elvis was condemned to a decade of bland musicals that would in effect destroy his reputation.

It is convenient to place all the blame for an artist's decline at the door of his business associates, but Elvis was essentially a self-made man. Even as a youngster, he had definite ideas about the way he wanted to appear to the world: long before stage duties demanded such flamboyance, the teenage Elvis would have clothes run up by Memphis' top tailor to his own outlandish designs, and had already discovered how to accentuate his saturnine good looks with eye-shadow.

His hairstyle, too, was the result of diligent experimentation with various pomades. In the end, Elvis settled on a combination of three different types of hair dressing - "butch wax" for the front, to get the most effective "flop", and separate oils for the back and top. Even by the narcissistic standards of today's product-conscious youth, that seems a tad obsessive, to say the least.

To a (white) teenage audience Elvis was the liberator, the one who opened up a whole new set of possibilities about the way you could live. And in his unashamedly black-inflected vocals was an equivalent liberation from the white-bread middle-of-the-road schlock that dominated post-war American pop. As Bob Dylan would later admit, "Hearing Elvis for the first time was like a jailbreak - and I didn't even know I was in jail."

Within months of his arrival on the national stage, the godlike Elvis had destroyed the old showbiz order, rewritten the rules on young desire and initiated the era of the teenager.

Before Elvis, there were no teenagers - older children were just adults in training; after Elvis, there was youth culture, the most powerful commercial force in the history of the world.

He gave an entire generation an idea of itself as a generation, rather than an afterthought of history. "It was like he came along and whispered a dream in everybody's ear," said Bruce Springsteen, "and then we dreamt it."

Strangely, though, the dream did not end in 1977, but became weirder and more surreal with the passing years. The rash of apocryphal sightings of Elvis was ironically proven true, as a proliferation of Elvis impressionists brought his presence to second-hand life around the world.

Before long, Elvis had become an iconic American presence, as integral to the national character as Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy, Twain, Thoreau and Melville - though, unlike them, one accorded no intellectual gifts. Instead, like John Wayne, he is acclaimed as a force of nature, a man of action rather than reflection, more endowed with pioneer spirit than the smarts to comprehend his own position.

Andy Warhol, no less, affirmed Elvis' ascension to the pantheon of global icons by featuring him in one of his multi-image screenprints, alongside the likes of fellow mononyms Mao, Marilyn and Che.

The extent of the underground Elvis artefact industry, meanwhile, was demonstrated a few years ago, when the Royal Festival Hall hosted American installation artist Joni Mabe's Traveling Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis, a mind-boggling accumulation of Elvis ephemera, from lamps in the shape of an Elvis bust, and bottles of "Love Me Tender" Moisturising Milk Bath, to such grisly artefacts as putative Elvis toenails, and what she claimed was Elvis' wart.

"I honestly believe it is Elvis' wart, yes," she affirmed, when I asked her whether she was serious. "I thought it was a joke at first, but then I looked at pictures and realised that, yes, he really did have a wart on his hand before 1958, and in pictures after 1958, it's gone. Everything adds up."

By far the most popular appropriation of the late star's image is that of Elvis Christ, a notion that draws much of its potency from the way in which Elvis has demonstrably "risen from the dead" to assume an almost sanctified status.

In Portland, Oregon, there is a Church of Elvis, offering true believers the opportunity to be blessed or married by Elvis. The shop window contains a prayer-wheel with alternating images of Jesus and Elvis; as the wheel spins, the images merge.

Blasphemous to some, maybe - but as the former Eagle Don Henley noted in If Dirt Were Dollars: "I was flying back from Lubbock/ I saw Jesus on the plane/ Or maybe it was Elvis/ You know, they kinda look the same ... "

- INDEPENDENT