- Elvis was a rebel.
- People think Elvis is dead, but he isn’t.
- 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong.
- Elvis was known as “the pelvis” because of his erotic dancing.
- Elvis was a fat slob who ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
- Elvis was censored (filmed waist-up) by the Ed Sullivan show.
- Elvis served when his country called him.
- Elvis invented rock ‘n’ roll.
- Elvis made a ton of movies. Most of them were bad.
- Elvis was a truck driver from Tupelo, MS.
- Elvis and Richard Nixon met once.
There, I just listed all of the Elvis myths and clichés that I could get out in three minutes. All of these comments are familiar. Some are factual. Some are record-company PR. Others are the creation of rock ‘n’ roll historiographers. Some are romantic and optimistic, casting Elvis as a rousing pop-culture success and icon of rock’s “progress.” Others are rude, silly, or bitter, reminding us that the brightest starts burn out the fastest. Gilbert Rodman’s essay makes a strong point in saying that Elvis’s mythology looms large—perhaps, even, so large that it obscures his artistry, his musicianship, and his real life—but that point is hardly revelatory. It’s damn near a given. I don’t mean that as a criticism, because I’m advocating for Rodman. The fact is, all historiography is hard, and it takes a great deal of work, thinking, and research to divine the “facts” from the “fiction.” There’s something about pop-culture historiography, however, that seems harder somehow. How can you investigate a larger-than-life figure like Elvis when his record company put a concerted effort into making him look larger than life? When somebody has as many fans as he does haters (recall Guralnick’s anecdote about how Colonel Parker “was selling nearly as many ‘I Hate Elvis’ buttons as ‘I Love Elvis’ ones” [430]), how do you determine whether the public of the 50s fawned over Elvis or hated his guts? How can you critically consider the extent to which Elvis truly “revolutionized” music after having seen four decades of rock stars express that sentiment on MTV and Vh1? There’s something about pop music historiography that is really elusive and that lends itself to clichés and hyperbole. Have you ever heard of Allmusic.com? It’s sort of a music encyclopedia website that offers biographies of musical artists, their discographies, and reviews of their music. I often look up artists on this site, and sometimes I play a game with myself, trying to guess what the first sentence of their Allmusic bio will say. Take the Beatles, for instance. Will it say they were “the greatest rock band ever”? Will it say that Led Zepplin were “the group that invented heavy metal”? What about David Bowie? Will that first sentence say that he was androgynous or that he adapted to every musical style like a chameleon? Will that first sentence emphasize that the most important thing you need to know about ABBA is that they were a Swedish supergroup that invented disco? My point is that it’s hard to talk about something like pop music without leaning on common knowledge and cultural assumptions. And it’s hard to write about pop music when myths overshadow facts. Indeed, as Rodman tells us, sometimes myths are all we have. That’s part of why the rock critic Lester Bangs was such an interesting guy. Rodman quotes Bangs as saying that “rock ‘n’ roll comes down to myth. There are no ‘facts’” (460). Bangs was famous for…well…frankly…making shit up as he went along. In his music writing he would literally fill in the gaps of his knowledge with interesting, often highly plausible lies. For instance, he was really fascinated with a one-hit-wonder garage band from the mid 60s called The Count Five. The band had only one hit and one album, but that didn’t stop Bangs: in a 1972 article he wrote about the group, he provided a detailed retrospective of their entire (largely fake) career, going so far as to describe the cover art on their later albums (with titles like Ancient Lace and Wrought-Iron Railings and Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline) and even reviewing songs—none of which actually existed. Bangs wasn’t satisfied that this group he liked sputtered out after just one album, so he invented the career they never had. Rodman doesn’t try to rewrite Elvis’s history; he simply wants to investigate those two anecdotes about Sam Phillips’s and Elvis’s alleged racist comments. In the case of both, I feel the same way that Guralnick seems to: it seems to me that the preponderance of evidence suggests that Phillips and Elvis were not racists—indeed, that they were uncharacteristically accepting and even admiring of African Americans. Despite Rodman’s claim that, borrowing from Barthes, we can’t counter one myth with another, I would point out that the dominant opinion, or myth, about Phillips is that part of his and Sun’s mission was to pay tribute to black artists that other companies wouldn’t touch. If that questionable quotation from Phillips is a whisper, than his legacy as a man who “believed in the nobility of the American Dream [. . .] as it filtered down to its most downtrodden citizen, the Negro” (Guralnick 60) is a shout. The same sort of thing goes for Elvis. While those purported racist comments could threaten these men’s reputations, the dominant myths make them out to have a great deal of respect for black Americans in an age when, and in a place where, that sentiment wasn’t common. Besides, as Rodman suggests, the whole “who stole what from whom” issue is hard to pin down in rock ‘n’ roll. Although, it remains an interesting question. In closing, I want to mention an interesting media depiction of this issue in the 1985 film Back to the Future. A former professor of mine, Bob Miklitsch, has written about this scene in detail, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first to notice its strangeness, either. At the end of this movie, which was my favorite when I was a kid, 1980s transplanted teenager Marty McFly basically invents rock ‘n’ roll. What’s fascinating, though, is that, racially, it takes place in exactly the opposite direction as how most historians figure: having taken the place of the African-American guitarist with the injured hand, Marty, a white dude, plays Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” (which he calls an “oldie where I come from”) and, doing so, teaches the black pop group how to play rock ‘n’ roll. After he plays his crazy solo, Mary tells the audience, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are going to love it.” Only through the benefit of a time machine and Chuck Berry’s music, we might joke, could a white man teach African Americans rock ‘n’ roll! It’s a strange moment for those of us interested in the racial roots and exchange of rock ‘n’ roll music, and like everything else, it banks upon—and has become a part of—the mythology.
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