Elvis Presley “Moody Blue”
Elvis wore the white jumpsuit on stage for seven straight years. It flexed with his changing size. If it didn’t, he got one that did. He was the first rock star and the original past prime poster boy. Celebrity is rough. He was only 42 when he died in 1977. But in the cultural memory, he was a bloated, pill popping monster who died on the toilet. He must have been 100. It was really not long ago that he was just the boy from Tupelo. The one who didn’t like to perform in public but had the golden voice.
His last year was well documented.
March 12: Elvis cuts his vacation short, complaining of sand in his eye, and returns to Graceland to "recuperate" before his next tour begins.
Sand can be insidious.
March 26: Producer Felton Jarvis, desperate for new material to fulfill Elvis' contract, begins recording selected songs from the tour on a rented eight-track machine, suggesting songs to Elvis he has never performed before.
This material became “Moody Blue”. It’s like many of his albums, a product pushed on him, snuck from him, extracted. Elvis was an industry, supporting an ecosystem of leeches that lived off his voice. Maybe he was complicit, but he wasn’t steering the ship. The last record is cobbled together from three live tracks, four tracks from his last Graceland recording session and three left over from the previous session. It’s an album of ten songs, because ten songs make an album and we can sell it. The cover hides RCA’s cash cow in shadow under a stage spotlight. In prime, art springs from some newly discovered ore. Someone, in this case, the costumed villain Colonel Tom Parker, finds a way to turn the ore into product. Past prime, the vein is near dry, but the familiarity of the product fills in for its deficits and the markets’ demand for the product takes the place of the inner fire that pushed out the product in the first place. Maybe there’s something to be said for comfortable music, as long as it isn't killing the person making it.
April 1: Elvis checks into Memphis' Baptist Hospital for "exhaustion."
He had bad moments on stage, forgetting his lyrics, wandering off stage to go to the bathroom, but that is not what’s on “Moody Blue”. This is all pleasant American music. Not urgent, but comforting. I could imagine “Pledging My Love” sung in a High School musical by the most talented boy in school and “He’ll Have to Go” sung by local favorite in a bar on a stool, with some drunks slow dancing in the dark and “It’s Easy for You” performed by the town entertainer at the Church fair, while the little old ladies swoon at the raffle ticket table. These are earthy AM tunes to listen to from your armchair. The band is tops and they’ve still got one of the great voices out front.. Listening to these songs fulfills some middle-aged desire for the world to be more familiar, less new, less shocking. There is a communal quality as well, the live tracks evoke a revival, a coming together over shared experience. Vitality replaced by community. Are we all remembering our green, green grass of home, when we were young and skinny like Elvis?
April 13: The singer vacations in Vegas with a twenty-year-old bank teller he's just met, Alicia Kerwin. While there, he complains of labored breathing, and his Vegas doctor is flown in. Kerwin soon leaves the King after finding his mental state "too depressing."
Eleven years earlier Elvis had found his mid-career voice after burning out from making terrible movies and their accompanying terrible soundtracks. He summoned his fire again and tapped a new vein for the 1968 comeback special. He was reinvigorated. He put together the TCB (Taking Care of Business) band. The music pulsed again. Listen to his rendition of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” on the comeback special. “Ohhhhhh…..that’s what all the fuss was about”. He’s carnal, and he’s not a boy anymore; he’s a big bad man in black leather. He sang “If I Can Dream” that night and showed what it sounds like when you commit to a song. He let that big bear of a voice just shred through our struggles. When he sang “Please Let My Dream Come True” it sounded legitimate. But why should it? This man had all his dreams come true. He’s the biggest star in the world.
May 6th: A distraught Elvis fires a gun out of his bedroom window, shattering it.
“Moody Blue” the single, went to #1. It’s a fun song, rolls easy. The single was released on blue vinyl, a sales gimmick. Did sales kill this singer? The relentless grind of it? Or was it the impossible strain of taking a poor country boy and giving him everything in the world? Back in Tupelo he would sing “Blue Moon” out on the porch. Can you imagine that sound? Out there amongst the crickets with the moon rising? When I first heard Elvis sing “Blue Moon” on record, it really shocked. The discovery of a truly singular voice is always a shock. My God, I thought we’d heard all of the voices, but no, another birth, another miracle. When he’s in the right space, when he gets back to Tupelo, he can get inside a song and take off. In his version of “Unchained Melody” he pulls this feat off again towards the end, belting out “a long, lonely tiiiiiime”. Did he sense the crowd going? Did he sense he didn’t have long left? You can’t even hear the lyric, just the soar, the force of will shooting up to that high note. You have to grab on to it. How could you turn down a chance to lift off the ground? It’s worth sitting around in the armchair for a moment like that.
August 16, 1977: Elvis Presley closes his eyes and goes home.