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yEAR of the King: Washington celebrates Elvis’ 75th By Gary Tischler
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ELVIS PRESLEY by Red Grooms
mong the many words and phrases related to Elvis Presley that have entered the national memory and lexicon like particular glittering keepsakes is “Elvis has left the building.” As a phrase, it has a certain finality: the man is gone, out the hall, into a pink Cadillac, left the country and the life on earth. Performers use it often to let audiences know that an encore isn’t coming. Several years ago, Jerry Lewis, who used to tour with Elvis when they were both raw and young, used it at Strathmore, as in “The Killer has left the building.” To this day, the phrase is as American pop culture as apple pie and Britney Spears. And it doesn’t mean what it says. Don’t you believe it. Not a chance, not when he left, and not now, no how, no way. If the building we’re talking about is pop America, our collective memory, Elvis is still in the building, never left and never will. We may have heard a door slam shut briefly when he died over 30 years ago, but Elvis still has the key. Witness: thousands, literally, of professional and unprofessional Presley impersonators, the huge record sales he maintains regularly, the thousands upon thousands of visitors to Graceland, the movies, the books, the songs all the time somewhere in the world. Didn’t you hear “I’ll Have a Blue Christmas” at least once over the holidays? Witness: “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer,” a traveling exhibition put together by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition and by Georgetown’s Govinda Gallery and its owner Chris Murray, who organized and curated the show and wrote the introduction for the accompanying catalog. The exhibition, chronicling with electric immediacy the rising meteor that was Elvis, debuted at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and is making its way like a train across America before landing at the NPG in October. With stops at Boca Raton, FL, the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA, the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AR, Winchester and Richmond, VA and Mobile, AL, it conjures up visions of another Elvis tour, the roadies, the big mi-
crophones, the squealing and rock ’n’ roll. Witness: “One Life: Echoes of Elvis,” a small, one-room exhibition of art works done after the death of the king of rock ’n’ roll in 1977, a room that turns into a rowdy, pop culture celebration of memory and the music in our heads, the stories we tell or hear. Witness, too, the recent celebration of what would have been the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley, all that stuff in Graceland in Memphis going on there, and the celebrations the wide world over. And it doesn’t stop with that. In March, the NPG will hold what appears to be a quirky and scholarly symposium on Elvis while the Newseum will hold its own Elvis photo exhibition, “Elvis!” E. Warren Perry Jr., writer and researcher for the Catalog of American Portraits at the NPG, would appear to be almost the perfect curator for the “Echoes of Elvis” ex-
ing music of blues, gospel, country, blues and what was then called “race” music like a sponge. There’s the rising, fresh-asa-slap-in-the-face star, the swivel hips, the Hound Dog man, the catnip for screaming girls whirlwind so starkly documented by Wertheimer. There‘s the post-momma’sdeath-post-army-stint Elvis, careening off to Hollywood, morphing into grotesquerie, the sweaty, bling-loaded master of Graceland, prince of Las Vegas, and bloated king. And there‘s the death of Elvis, the dead Elvis and the Elvis afterlife. The funny about all of these Elvises is that they‘re all very much alive. “He’s an icon,” Perry says. “I think there’s very few souls alive that at least haven’t heard about him, heard his mu-
“He was one of a kind. He could sing the whole range of music. Heck, he was the king.” Glenn Mullen, Capitol Hill.
UNTITLED (ELVIS AND PRISCILLA), FROM THE PORTFOLIO GRACELAND by William Eggleston
ELVIS PRESLEY by Ralph Wolfe Cowan
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hibition. After all, he grew up in Memphis, and walked to junior high school along Elvis Presley Boulevard, a former interstate highway. “Not everybody can say that,” Perry said. “In Memphis, you can’t get away from Elvis if you wanted to. The junior high was just a couple of blocks from Graceland.” “We’ve been working on this for quite some time,” Perry, a deceptively genial down-home Southern sort of guy with keen smarts and stories to tell, said. “The idea was to keep the entries to works that had been done after his death, to show, yeah, the echoes. And they go on forever, believe me. Elvis is pervasive, you can see that in the sections that are sort of pop culture, the lunchbox, the Elvis cookbook, the scrapbook, the Jewish Elvis, and car keys, all of that.” You can sort of section off Elvis‘s life into three or four parts: there‘s the gritty childhood, where he sucked up the prevail-
sic. There isn’t a rock and roll performer who wasn’t influenced by him. He was just huge. Perry pointed to the late Howard Finster’s two contributions. Finster was a great and prolific American artist, genus folk artist, who chronicled everything he ran across and interested him and his love for Elvis was abiding as is the portrait called “Elvis at Three is An Angel to Me,” a haunting image of a three-year-old Elvis with wings. “My favorite?” Perry mused. “I like that stamp portrait,
that famous stamp portrait, (500 million copies), I like Red Grooms Graceland thing, I like Ralph Cowan painting, it just knocks your eyes out. I think it captures him. But most people really like the bust, they’re drawn to it like flies, trying to figure it.” That would be the bust of Elvis after a bust of Julius Caesar, a big piece by the late Robert Arneson from 1978 made of glazed ceramic. It’s garish, a true Vegas image in some ways, the fake gold, the big wavy hair, and the imagery of rock and roll scattered like gold dust over it. “There’s a rock on the shoulder,” Perry said. “People figure it out, or they’re puzzled. With a lot of this, it depends who you are. I’m heading towards fifty, and I grew with my mother playing Elvis, I’d hear ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and you sort of get hooked. She’s a big fan.” Two couples you’d guess to be baby boomers wandered through the exhibition on a mid-week afternoon. “Any of you figure that rock out yet,” Joe Gegg, retired from the trade association business, asked. His wife Linda laughed. “Rock, rock star, am I right?” she said. All of them, the Geggs, Larry Jones, his wife Sharen, grew up with Elvis, and everything in the room is like a flashback to some other time and place: Iowa for Jones, Missouri for Gegg in the 1950s. “I used to work for a farmer when I was a kid,” Jones said. “I’d sneak into the guys’ pickup truck in the summer and I’d listen to Elvis. I’d be chasing chickens around and listening to “Hound Dog.” “We all remember him,” Gegg said. “All of us. That was the music then. Sometimes, some parents, they’d be shocked, didn’t want you to listen, especially the girls. He drove the girls crazy, and everybody knew it.” A man named Shola, an architectural designer and self-described musicologist originally from Nigeria, recalled the worldwide appeal of Elvis. “People, young people, everybody listened to him in Nigeria,” he said. “Like Michael Jackson. He was very important, the music was important, it was new.” A National Portrait Gallery tour guide was leading a group to the exhibition. “This is our One Life series,” she said. “Here, we honor Americans who were major figures in our history, and our culture. And Elvis Presley, let’s face it, was the king of rock ’n’ roll and that’s why he is here.” Not everybody, of course is a fan. If you look at the rabbit hole entries on Elvis on the Internet, you’ll find that Frank Sinatra — who had a similar effect on
his early female fans — detested the music on moral grounds. A young man who wandered through the one-room exhibition also wasn’t impressed. “Honest, I don’t like Elvis that much,” Paulo Ruff, 19, a student from Peru, said. “Me, I think Chuck Berry is the king of rock ’n’ roll.” One of the effects, of course, of Elvis, is that his own musical roots are a part of the lore of rock and roll. Berry, Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed and the like were already singing a blues-based rock and roll, but didn’t cross over until Elvis came along. “Me, I will always love that early Elvis,” Chris Murray said. “That’s so authentic, so alive, that’s the great genius musician and performer at his peak. That’s a personal feeling for me. The rest not so much, although, if you listen to say “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or “Are You Lonesome Tonight” or “In The Ghetto,” they’re pretty impressive. I’m starting to like and appreciate that a lot more. He had a great voice. But purists, you know, they get into that decline thing, that Hollywood stuff or Vegas and that’s not the genius of Elvis.” “I think it’s the music that’s most important,” Murray said. “But I think the persona and legend, they keep him alive, probably just as much, sometimes more.” “There’s so much we know about Elvis,” Perry said. “We seem to know his life inside out. His music is sustaining. It lasts. But the effect, it moves forward, time does that, it’s an evolving thing.” This writer remembers the screaming at a screening of “Love Me Tender,” his first movie. It was a black and white Western in which Elvis flat out fell in love with the wispy Debra Paget. We were just freshmen in high school, three guys in a theater in Ohio and when he first appeared on the screen, the girls in the audiences started squealing. It was scary, it made your hair stand on end. We knew what it was, too, guessed at it and wished we could be him. Elvis had something primal, but he also had musical genius, he could sing about dead dogs, broken hearts, kids in the ghetto, and frisky love in tones that swept up country, blues, gospel in amazing musical alchemy making something new. John Lennon, himself a man with a strong afterlife, said “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” That’s not quite true, of course. But Elvis hasn’t left the building either. “Echoes of Elvis” runs through Aug. 22 at the National Portrait Gallery. Stay tuned for “Elvis at 21,” slated for exhibition in Washington in October 2010. All photos provided by the National Portrait Gallery
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ELVIS, THE ARTIST, AND PINK CADILLAC by Donald Paterson
ELVIS IN ARMY UNIFORM by Howard Finster
ELVIS PRESLEY by Mark Stutzman
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