Wild About Elvis

My introduction to The King... and music snobbery

By the time you’ll read this, the 88th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth will be fading quickly in the rearview mirror, along with all the usual annual posts, arguments and think-pieces about his continued relevance vs. his lack thereof, whether he was truly “The King” or merely a gifted opportunist and/or cultural appropriator, how his career and life might have unfolded with a better manager and without the drugs, etc, etc. Spoiler alert: This post isn’t any of those things.

I deeply love Elvis’s music, and make no apologies for it; I likewise make no apologies for loving the absurdly cartoonish and excessive aspects of his life and legend. Do I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Sun Records for the epochal July 5, 1954 recording session that produced “That’s All Right”? Yes. Do I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Graceland on the night of February 1, 1976, when Elvis got so amped up while discussing the Colorado Mine Company’s Fool’s Gold Loaf sandwich — an 8,000-calorie bomb containing a jar each of creamy peanut butter and grape jelly and a pound of fried bacon — with some visiting law enforcement agents that he decided right then to order 22 of them (at $49.95 a loaf) and fly himself and his posse to Denver on the Lisa Marie to pick them up? Also yes.

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Elvis’s music and legend has cast such a long shadow over rock n’ roll, it would be easy for me to say that I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of him, but that would be a lie. My introduction to his existence came when I was about five or six, and Dixie Riddle Cups were all the rage among youngsters like myself. I usually got the jokes that were printed on the cups, but the cup I pulled on this particular day just left me confused.

Q: What’s green and sings?

A: Elvis Parsley.

I misread the answer as “Elves Parsley,” which made even less sense to me than if I’d read it correctly. “Mom,” I cried out, agitatedly waving the cup in her face. “What’s Elves Parsley?” “Oh, it’s a joke on Elvis Presley,” she explained. “Who’s Elvis Presley?” I asked. “He’s a popular singer.”

Her explanation didn’t exactly send me running off in search of his records; I would remember his name from then on, but mostly just because it sounded weird to me. My first encounter with his music and image wouldn’t come until a year or so later, when this commercial was suddenly all over the TV on weekday afternoons…

Watching it now, I’m blown away by two things: 1) How absolutely shoddy it is, with just a small grab-bag of still images providing the “visuals,” and 2) How deeply those exact same images are burned into my brain in association with the songs. Fr’instance, whenever I hear “Jailhouse Rock,” I immediately think not of the epic dance sequence from the 1957 film of the same name, but of Elvis wearing what I now know as his “Comeback Special” leathers. Why? Because that’s the image the commercial uses under the brief burst of that song. And the same goes for numerous other classic Elvis tracks featured in the TV spot; hell, it has been years since I’ve seen the ad, and I can still fairly accurately anticipate which image is coming next.

So yeah, this commercial made a huge impression on me. And I loved enough of the song-snippets I heard in it to now consider myself an Elvis fan, despite his weird name and even though it would be many more years before I bought any of his records, or in many cases even heard the full recordings of the songs. (In first grade, I was so excited by the opening lines of “Hard Headed Woman” that I used to run around the school playground singing them over and over again. I was far less excited a half-decade or so later, when I finally heard the whole thing for the first time and realized that a trombone was the song’s most prominent instrument.)

Not long after I first began seeing that TV ad, a big dinner was held at our house in Ann Arbor that included my mom and her then-boyfriend and a bunch of their hippie friends, one of whom had invited a young woman that no one else at the health food-laden table knew. (In retrospect, I’m guessing that they had just started seeing each other.) Everyone was asking the “new girl” things about herself and her life, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly until she cheerfully volunteered that she was “wild about Elvis”. At that moment, a heavy cloud of hippie judgement descended wordlessly upon the room; I instantly recognized it as the same silent ’tude my mom’s friends would invariably cop whenever I prattled on about my G.I. Joe dolls or my army of toy soldiers.

Just why the mood in the room had suddenly soured at the mere mention of Elvis was something I couldn’t figure out. I knew damn well that my mom’s friends — and my mom, for that matter — disapproved of my war games because they were staunchly against what was currently happening in Vietnam. (I mean, I was too; it wasn’t like I was sending my G.I. Joes into rice paddies to take on the Vietcong. But such distinctions were often lost amid the rhetoric of the time.) But Elvis? What had he done that was so bad?

I didn’t understand at the time that early-’70s Ann Arbor was the very epicenter of Midwestern hipness, a world where Elvis was considered stodgy, “establishment” and totally out of date. If this young woman had said that she was wild about Janis Joplin or CSNY, or local heroes like The MC5 or Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, her hipness ticket would have been duly punched. But sorry, sister — the Revolution™ will not be Elvis-ized.

I don’t remember much else about that dinner; I probably excused myself from the table pretty quickly so I could get back to re-enacting the Normandy Beach landing with my army men. But I do recall feeling really badly for the “new girl”; I wanted to come to her defense and tell the room “I like Elvis, too!” but instinctively knew that support from a seven year-old warmonger wouldn’t have helped her case much with that particular jury. I never saw her at our house again.

In retrospect, this incident must have been my first encounter with music snobbery. Back in those early elementary school days, my friends and I judged each other by a wide variety of exacting criteria (how funny you were, how many swear words you knew, how far you could throw a rock, etc.), but taste in music didn’t factor into it at all. That would change as we got older and began seeing the music we liked as an extension of our identities — and, for many of us, a badge of hipness.

I have been on both ends of music snobbery countless times, and it’s admittedly only been in recent years that I’ve fully come around to the notion that people should be allowed to like whatever music resonates with them and makes them feel good. But that’s a lesson I really should have learned five decades ago, when I witnessed brown rice turning to ashes in people’s mouths just because someone made the egregious faux pas of mentioning Elvis Presley.

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