20 A.D.

Reconstructing Elvis 20 years after his death

by Carly Carioli

"If love truly is going out of fashion, which I do not believe," wrote Lester Bangs on the occasion of Elvis Presley's death, 20 years ago this week, "then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. . . . 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's. But I can 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."

The fragmentation of popular culture that was already beginning when Elvis died -- on August 16, 1977 -- has, as Lester predicted, continued at an advanced rate. Not only have we never agreed again as we agreed about Elvis, we don't even agree about Elvis anymore. He's been -- subculturally speaking -- sliced and diced, with dozens, even hundreds of factions laying claim to a piece of his legacy. Tabloids, punks, academics, camp fetishists, talk-show hosts, trailer trash, Afrocentrists (to name just a few) have cast him as prophet, savior, thief, bad joke, sellout. The veg-o-matic deconstruction of Elvis's iconography has been reflected in the major Elvis reissues over the past couple of years. Which Elvis do you want, RCA's recent boxes have asked. '50s Elvis? '60s Elvis? '70s Elvis? Gospelvis?

So it's rather remarkable that on the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death -- an affair marked by massive media and retail saturation, from an enhanced Death Week festival in Memphis to the video rack at your local rental joint -- all the King's horses and all the King's men seem to be trying to put the icon back together again. Or at least that's one of the most interesting subtexts to the four-disc, 100-track Platinum: A Life in Music (RCA), the first box set in more than a decade that attempts to present Elvis from beginning to end -- from his second (and previously unreleased) Sun acetate to a live recording of "My Way" a few months before his death -- all in the same place. (The last two career-spanning box sets were released in 1980 and 1984, respectively, and lapsed out of the catalogue; neither was ever issued on CD, though they're both rescheduled for re-release later this year.)

Granted, the holistic approach has more to do with commercial aspirations than cultural ones. RCA's stated goal was to create a product in the vein of the massively successful Beatles Anthology, with enough rare goodies to lure the fanatics while presenting a one-stop-shopping overview to appeal to general consumers. Still, it's hard to see the cultural goals as completely incidental. Including everything from studio masters and outtakes to television appearances, movie soundtracks, concert performances, rehearsal tapes, and -- the biggie -- recently unearthed private home recordings, Platinum presents the King in all his ragged glory and morbid melodrama, from his most dramatic culture-defining moments (doing "Love Me Tender" on The Ed Sullivan Show, his voracious "Tryin' To Get to You" from the '68 TV Comeback Special) to private moments sitting around with his buddies harmonizing on old gospel standards, to his convalescent '70s easy-listening schmaltz.

In the introduction to his definitive 1994 biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick speaks of his desire to rescue Elvis "from his detractors and admirers . . . from the dreary bondage of myth, from the oppressive aftershock of cultural significance." And if Elvis's home recordings fail to offer new insights into the King's creative process -- which would be a tall order for the most scrutinized catalogue in pop history -- they at least hint at leading him out of bondage. Although these quickie bites make up only a minute portion of Platinum, they provide the most significant recorded evidence of what Elvis played for his own pleasure.

Which, no surprise, isn't markedly different from what he recorded in the studio. We get Elvis and Memphis-mafia alumnus Red West screwing around with "When the Saints Go Marching In." We get a medley of Elvis during his Army stint in Bad Nauheim, including a paltry three seconds of the song that would become "It's Now or Never." There's harmonizing with friends around the piano in the '60s on the traditional gospel number "Oh How I Love Jesus." There's even a version of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," though it's an obvious tossoff, and anyway, everyone already knew Elvis dug Dylan from his recording of "Tomorrow Is a Long Time." The tossed-offness has a voyeuristic appeal; it also encourages us to think about Elvis -- as Guralnick would have us do -- as a living, breathing entity instead of simply the sum of his separate sequined parts.

By now, many of the moments in which his humanity shone through brightest are already familiar: "Mystery Train," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "How Great Thou Art," "Trying To Get to You," and many of the '70s highlights, where his song selection grew increasingly self-reflexive (as if he could prevent any song he sang from becoming etched in our minds as autobiography). With 77 unreleased performances -- mostly alternate takes -- Platinum tries to avoid being too familiar, and in omitting the first-string performances RCA risks settling for second best. Inevitably there are some questionable inclusions: does anyone need a couple of outtakes from the Sinatra/Elvis Timex special? But on the whole the approach works well, and on occasion there are spectacular revelations.

Some of these are telling in subtle ways -- like an alternate take of Little Richard's "Rip It Up," one of Elvis's fiercest rockabillies, in which Elvis keeps Richard's original line about how they're gonna "shag on down by the union hall." As Colin Escott mentions in the liner notes, the released version refers instead to the "social" hall. The Teamsters might be startled to learn that in the estimation of Elvis's public-opinion-savvy handlers, unions were considered more of a threat to the public than illicit sex.

Other revelations are more visceral. Disc three opens with a pair of recently discovered tracks that find Elvis in his dressing room before the taping of the '68 Comeback TV special, fooling around with Scotty More and Bill Black on "I Got a Woman" and "Guitar Man." Producer Steve Binder happened by and got the impromptu rehearsal on tape. These numbers are even more invigorating than the show's frenzied performances. After a long day of rehearsals, Elvis's voice is verging on hoarse, but he's suddenly caught up in the occasion. In the background there's laughter and someone egging him on, "Take 'im on home!" And he rises to it, vamping the ending, then going back and doing it again, hitting the kind of rawness he hadn't displayed since before his Army days. "Guitar Man" is even hoarser, but by then he's laughing along. Certainly more than any of the home recordings on Platinum, this is Elvis at his most informal, natural, and transcendent. And it might be his finest (previously) unreleased moment, though the alternate take of "Trying To Get to You" from the first of the two unplugged segments filmed for the Comeback Special is arguably on the same level.

It wasn't lost on the compilers of Platinum that a great deal of the most significant cultural transformations wreaked by Elvis were facilitated by television. The rise of the small screen paralleled the rise of rock and roll, and one of the biggest collisions between the two forms the groundwork for Elvis from the Waist Up, a new documentary written by Guralnick that premiered on VH1 last Monday. Narrated by U2's Bono, it takes as its subject the performances and events that led to Elvis's unprecedented television coup on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956 -- more than 80 percent of television viewers tuned in, the highest percentage in TV history.

Unfortunately, Elvis from the Waist Up becomes little more than another excuse to drag out the Sullivan, Milton Berle, and Stage Show tapes. Nothing wrong with that, they're still fascinating. But it backs off from what might have been some interesting questions, such as what effects Elvis had on the future of television and the promotion of music (something VH1 should know a thing or two about). Even as Bono enunciates Elvis's stats with exaggerated wonder -- when he says "the most watched television broadcast of all time," you can almost see the network executives salivating -- what goes unstated is television's inability to make anything remotely similar ever happen again. Cable's multichannel narrowcasting is symptomatic of the kind of subcultural fragmentation that guarantees we will never agree as we agreed about Elvis. Even the televised celebration of the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death has been divvied up; the Death Day treats include Elvis '56 on PBS (8 p.m.); his movies on TNT (a marathon: Clambake at 6 a.m., Jailhouse Rock at 8 a.m., a six-hour Elvis drama at 10 a.m., Speedway at 4:15 p.m., Follow That Dream at 6:30 p.m., Viva Las Vegas at 9 p.m., Kid Galahad at 11 p.m., The Trouble with Girls at 1:15 a.m., and an Elvis documentary at 3:30 a.m.); From the Waist Up (1 p.m.) and the '68 Comeback Special (9 p.m.) on VH1; and a dramatized Elvis Meets Nixon on Showtime (8 p.m.). Which just goes to show that in the 41 years since Elvis was on Ed Sullivan, television, and to some extent the pop culture promoted therein, has become much better suited to saying goodbye than it is to saying hello.

Carly Carioli can be reached at ccarioli[a]phx.com.