"From Tupelo, Mississippi, from Memphis, Tennessee, arrived dressed in a suit womanizer green sharkskin, with eye shadow makeup (a dandy hat that was played on skin behaving like a black and dressed like a gay). not talking about New York. Not even in New Orleans, talk about Memphis in the fifties. It was punk rock. It was rebellion. Elvis changed everything, musically, sexually, politically. I met everything, everything was there, in the elasticity of that body and voice. As changed shape, the world changed with it. It was a style icon of the fifties which brought all the things that the sixties were able and, suddenly, no longer. In the seventies, became famous in a blood sport, but, curiously, the most advanced in the destruction of his own myth, grew more divine status which he enjoyed among his fans. In his recent performances deployed a voice more impressive than ever, making mourn as the messiah of music left her tired heart on stage, transforming the casino in a temple. Elvis is in the embryo of rock & roll . Greatness. Sexual liberation. The controversy. Changing the way people see the world of others.
was barely conscious when I saw the special with her back in 68. I was eight years, which in a sense is an advantage. Did not have enough critical faculties to be divided into different categories the different Elvis, or realize its contradictions. What I expect from the guitar, drums and bass and was in Elvis. A modest artist by the distance that separated him from the public, a comparable sex only with their yearning for divine instruction.
But what was more difficult to explain this form of dance: the hips to sway from Europe to Africa, which is just what America is, I suppose. For an Irish child, the voice might explain the attraction of the United States, but the dance explained the energy of the new world that was about to boil and blanch them all with new ideas about race, religion, fashion, love and peace. Ideas were bigger than the man who broke the ice to make way, ideas that would later devour. Elvis the Pelvis was , one hand in the blues and the other in the gospel, that is the essence of rock & roll with a flash of light running through the spine, electroshock therapy for a generation about to refuse to go numb.
I recently met with Coretta Scott King, John Lewis and others U.S. leaders of the movement for civil rights, and I recalled the cultural apartheid against which lifted the rock & roll . I think your task would have been much more difficult had it not been for racial raids of black music in white popular culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence ... were interested in the blues through Elvis. Was doing what he demanded the civil rights movement: breaking down barriers. Nobody thinks of Elvis as a political activist, but what he did was political: it changed the way we perceive the world.
In the eighties I went to U2 to Memphis at Sun Studio, where we work with the engineer Sound of Elvis, Cowboy Jack Clement. He opened the studio so we could record some issues between the same four walls where had recorded "Mystery Train" . It was a small place, but the sound came with a peculiar clarity, the same you hear on those records. The king still did not know what it was. It is a music obsessive, creepy. Elvis does not know where to take his train, so we want to be passengers. Jerry Schilling, one of the "mafia" in Memphis that did not sell, I told a story about the time he lived at Graceland. When Elvis was upset, went down to a small gym where he had a piano. There, alone, always chose the gospel, lost and found himself in the spiritual music. But he did not stay in the shelter long enough. The self-loathing was waiting back home, where Elvis was caught firing on TV, with the Bible open beside the page ode to the love of San Pablo.
Some say it was the army, others were Hollywood or Las Vegas you emotionally shattered. The world of rock & roll did not like to see their King following orders. In my opinion, the fault was probably his marriage or his mother (or a previous trauma, such as having lost his twin at birth). Or perhaps only due the big ass of fame that he sat on it. Still, Elvis ate America before America will devour him. "
Bono - U2 Singer
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