July 17, 2010

I’ve been on a bit of an Elvis Presley kick lately, so I’ve been digging through a copy of “The Rough Guide to Elvis,” a terrifically engaging series of writings on one of the three or four most important figures in rock & roll history. Broken down into eight sections (with titles like The Life, The Music, The Influences, and The Icon) “The Rough Guide” is as sharp and biting as anything I’ve ever read about the King, but still honors Presley at length for his achievements as both an unbelievably charismatic entertainer and as a simple-yet-towering presence in American life.

Regardless of what you think of him - or if, like me, you think his charisma eventually transformed into grotesque self-parody - Elvis is here, and he’s here to stay. Like war. And money.

The author, Paul Simpson, makes it clear that before the isolation, the pills, and the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches overwhelmed him, Presley, who was somewhat mystified by the stir he caused, was responsible for unleashing the hounds of rhythm and sex on an unsuspecting mass culture. What had previously been cordoned off in juke joints in the “bad” (i.e. “black”) part of town was now available for your kids’ perusal on the radio and on national TV!

No previous entertainer, including that skinny crooner from Hoboken, came close to rattling middle class mores the way Elvis did, and the narrative of the average American teenager was forever changed in the process.

Still, Simpson has no problem covering the banana sandwiches, and he shouldn't. He isn’t afraid to poke fun at Presley when it’s needed, only to grow breathless with enthusiasm over a rare B-side or a bootlegged live performance in the next paragraph.

Understand, I’ve been reading about rock & roll for over 30 years now, and a lot of that reading has pertained to Elvis. But this is simply the best book I’ve ever found about Presley, including Peter Guralnick’s far more intellectually weighty tomes, “Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley” and “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley,” which are indispensible but somehow rather inert.

There’s a whole bunch of fizz in “The Rough Guide to Elvis,” and, after a while, you realize it’s pointless to make a distinction between the champagne and the Mountain Dew. As in so much popular culture of real distinction, the fizz itself counts for a lot.

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Rather surprisingly, because I’m mortified by what they did to both his music and his spirit, I find myself fascinated by Simpson’s section on Elvis’ movies. It must be because I’ve never bothered to read up on them before. As a genuine film lover, why would I? But there’s a lot of interesting and often plain old entertaining information to be found here.

The whole movie thing didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to for Elvis, and it’s pretty obvious that the machinations of his carnival barker manager, Col. Tom Parker, and Presley’s own southern boy compliance, were largely to blame. It's also been rumored that Parker told Elvis it was easier to reach his fans in Europe through movies, as opposed to touring there, because Parker was an illegal Dutch immigrant and con man who would have been arrested had he set foot overseas!

Okay, then. You can't blame the Colonel on that count. But he had absolutely horrifying taste in movies.

Elvis admitted in a 1956 interview that his greatest ambition was always to be an actor; his hero wasn’t a singer, but that other icon of teenage cool, James Dean (Presley claimed to have seen “Rebel Without a Cause” 44 times, which is roughly 43 more times than I’ve seen it.) Even in the truly ugly years immediately preceding his death, Elvis often talked to friends about wanting to give up touring so he could try his hand at performing onscreen again, although I’m sure by then he would have known better than to appear in horse shit that was being squeezed out of a tube. Or at least one hopes he would have known better.

Elvis had surprisingly good taste in movies, actually. Some of his favorite, which were often played for him in private screenings at a local cinema, were “The Godfather,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Dr. Strangelove” (and anything else starring Peter Sellers), and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Can you imagine chortling over “Dr. Strangelove” and sharing popcorn with Elvis? Wow.

In the 1972 documentary, “Elvis on Tour,” Presley describes what he was up against once the wheels of Hollywood commerce started turning strongly in his favor and Col. Parker (in conjunction with producer Hal Wallis) saddled him with a seemingly never-ending string of cheaply-made quickies. “It was a job. That’s how I treated it,” Presley says. “But I cared so much I became physically ill. I didn’t have final approval on the script, which means that I couldn’t tell you, ‘This is not good for me.’ I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to harm me. It was just Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it, and couldn’t say anything about it, couldn’t do anything about it…they couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to feel some sort of self-satisfaction inside.”

The knowledge that movies meant so much to Elvis makes the fact that outlandish money demands scuttled his chance to co-star in Barbra Streisand’s 1976 remake of “A Star is Born” that much sadder. “A Star is Born” was a bad movie, to be sure (Kris Kristofferson eventually played the role). But it’s certainly not as bad as “Harum Scarum” or “Kissin’ Cousins” or any one of about 25 other movies that Presley did star in. Streisand was hardly Shelley Fabares or Donna Douglas, at any rate, and no one was being forced to sing “Song of the Shrimp."

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There are so many great movie tidbits in Simpson’s book, it’ll be easier to just list some of my favorites:

* Elvis was set to star with Robert Mitchum in the bootlegging melodrama, “Thunder Road,” but the Colonel nixed it for unknown reasons. It probably sounded too promising.

* Gene Kelly was on the set of “Jailhouse Rock” when they shot the famous dance sequence, and told Elvis he was very impressed with the choreography…which was concocted by Elvis himself.

* Elia Kazan wanted Elvis to star in a film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s “Walk on the Wild Side” but the Colonel once again shot it down because one of the characters was a - gulp - lesbian.

* Elvis had an affair with his co-star, Juliet Prowse, on the set of “G.I. Blues” at the same time Prowse was dating Frank Sinatra. Later, Prowse dumped both Sinatra and Elvis and started dating God (I made up that last part.)

* The famed playwright, Clifford Odets - see Odets lampooned in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” - was writing “Wild in the Country” for Elvis, but was fired two weeks before filming began!

* Angela Lansbury plays Elvis’ mother in “Blue Hawaii,” even though she was only three years older than her supposed son. What the hell? Were no actual old women available?

* The first cut of “Harum Scarum” was so obviously terrible, the Colonel suggested the movie be narrated by a talking camel, to make the audience think it was supposed to be ridiculous. So that’s what they did. And it worked.

* "King Creole" was co-written by Michael V. Gazzo, who played the doomed mobster, Frank "Frankie Five Fingers" Pentangeli, in "The Godfathr Part 2." "Bullshit," you say? No. Really.

* Sammy Davis, Jr. called Elvis and literally cried on the phone when the Colonel refused to let his meal ticket be chained to a mere negro in a remake of the prison escape picture, “The Defiant Ones.”

* The writing team that scripted “Tickle Me” previously wrote for The Three Stooges, which surely must have sounded like a good idea at the time.

* “Time” magazine said Elvis’ hair in “Spinout” looked like “a swatch of hot buttered yak wool,” which, frankly, sounds like something I would have said when I was writing reviews for CNN.

* There’s a shot in “Girls! Girls! Girls!” in which an erection can clearly be seen in Elvis’ extra-tight pants while he sings “The Walls Have Ears” to co-star Laurel Goodwin. Elvis saw it in the rushes and assumed they would cut the scene out. But no one did, and Little Elvis made his one and only big screen appearance.

* The dolphin in “Clambake” was played by Flipper. No one remembers who played the clam.

* Hal Wallis tried to get the Beatles to do a cameo in “Paradise, Hawaiian Style,” but couldn’t come to terms with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. Can you fucking imagine? At least “Help!” is supposed to be surreal.

* And finally, Elvis wanted to add backup singers to a song he sings while riding a motorcycle in “Roustabout.” When director John Rich didn’t want to do it, he asked Elvis, “So where would we put the backing singers?," to which Elvis replied “Same damn place you put the band.”

Touché, Elvis. Touché.

Paul Tatara