Quotes of the Day

Does Elvis go online? Computers were the size of 18-wheelers in 1977, when the King "died"; the World Wide Web was 15 years in the future. Today is his 68th birthday, and if he were to type "Elvis Presley" into a search engine, he would find 794,000 links on Google, 872,589 on AltaVista. That's about 856,000 more than my name elicits, and I've kept pretty busy the past 25 years with the writing thing. The Hillbilly Cat has taken it easy since his supposed demise.

Then again, why should he work? He was a showman who had 18 great months, from early 1956 through "Jailhouse Rock" in 1957 — a year-and-a-half of musical artistry and social impact rarely matched in pop culture — followed by 20 years of treading water in a gold pond. Followed by 25 years, the dead years, in which his reputation is restored. His estate earns 10, 20 times more than he did when he was alive. His albums, as we used to call them, often sell better. In his first miracle year, 1956, America's hottest star received 282 teddy bears as Christmas presents from fans. But that's nothing compared to the thousands of pilgrims in 2003 who are offering the greater gift of their time and effort: visiting Graceland to wish him happy birthday. And, so far as we know, he isn't even home.

He's not in the studio either, though you'd hardly notice. This week four reissues, all newly remastered from originals, hit the racks: "Elvis 56" (documenting his miracle music year), "Heart and Soul" (a collection of ballads), "Can't Help Falling in Love" (numbers from Elvis' movies) and "Great Country Songs." These follow the September release of the CD "Elvis: 30 #1 Hits," which ruled the Billboard chart for weeks — Presley's 10th top-ranked album in 47 years! OK, so in 1987 RCA issued "The Number One Hits," and that one contained only 18 songs. So they had to raid other lists besides Billboard's to pad it out. So who's going to kvetch about 12 free songs?

Make that 13. Last year the Dutch DJ Junkie XL (Tom Holkenburg) slapped a ferocious backbeat on "A Little Less Conversation," a sassy but obscure Mac Davis-Billy Strange composition that Elvis recorded in 1968. The Presley Estate sharply agreed to let Junkie apply his remix to a Nike commercial, on the Ed Sullivan from-the-waist-up condition he change his name to JXL. The result: a #1 single in 22 countries, and the singer's first chart-topper of the 21st century. The cut is included on "30 #1 Hits," and most Presley fans approve.

With one prominent exception. On the amazon.com page devoted to the single, a ringing negative comes from a correspondent who ID's himself as "Elvis Presley's Gap-friendly Ghost." And this King is pissed. "As I return from the grave," he writes, "I hunger for a new approach to my music, but seriously, this is going a bit far." He adds, with sepulchral sarcasm, "Please, drown out my vocals and produce a video that blasphemizes my ?Jailhouse Rock' dance sequence. No, I'm begging you. Please, make me into a joke as you fill your pockets. I'd really appreciate it. I really want this tacked on the end of my legacy."

Calm down, O Ghost of Elvis Past, and think of the old days. Thanks to Colonel Tom Parker and the suits at RCA, you didn't have that much to say about your music when you were alive. Don't expect final-cut privileges now that you're "dead."

Some folks believe that Elvis never died, though they can't explain how one of the world's most recognizable people could remain incognito all these years, or why he'd want to. But let's assume for a second that the Big E is still around. Why, this very evening, perhaps in Argentina at a reunion of nonagenarian Nazis, or in Bin Laden's cave, or deep in Area 51, some thoughtful soul will stick 68 candles into a Twinkie and lead a chorus of "Happy Birthday, Dear Elvis." You can join in from afar.

THE CHURCH OF ELVIS

Elvismania transcends the usual devotion to a white-hot celebrity, even one who has died before his time. Rudolph Valentino, Will Rogers, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Bob Marley — these stars may have left indelible niches in the hearts of their fans, but few built shrines to them. Rumors of their survival rarely blossomed into testimony of posthumous visitations. Nor did their homes become cathedral theme parks. Yet each year Graceland, Presley's residence in Memphis, welcomes more than half a million Elvisitors, and many are true believers: call them Presleyterians. Like the Christian liturgical calendar, the Presleyterians' has two crucial dates. Today, the star's birthday, is their Christmas; and August 16, his death date, is their Good Friday. A star may have died, but something is being born. Maybe the Church of Elvis.

Fine, but why Elvis? Not just because he was rock's first superstar, but also because as the pawn of Parker his manager, he was the last pop idol who did not control his own career. In 1956 he released his first million-seller, "Heartbreak Hotel," and became the biggest music idol since Sinatra, and loads weirder. Then, too soon, he was devoured by Hollywood's make-over machinery, steered into a rut that would lead to nearly three dozen low-mediocre films. Parker's determination to slip Elvis into the old showbiz mainstream effectively neutered the emperor of sexual and musical threat.

By 1964, when the Beatles conquered America, Presley was still in his 20s but already an anachronism. When he was 33 (Jesus' age at His death), Elvis made his comeback (resurrection?) with the NBC concert in 1968. But that was a false rebirth, for in his later, Vegas years, he often looked the pathetic, self-parodying porker. He was a prisoner of his own eminence — the King in exile.

All this was essential to the creation of a cult religion. Presley had to suffer in the only way a celebrity can, through self-humiliation. This soldered the bond between a onetime poor boy from Tupelo, Miss., and his blue-collar, blue-haired or red-white-and-blue fans. He was both beyond and beneath — above them and one of them. And if Elvis didn't die, how could he come back to life, in the Resurrection of the one true King?

"WIGGLIN' HIS ASS AND SINGIN' 'HOUND DOG'"

There was something feminine about Elvis. His mouth formed the pout of a sullen schoolgirl; his hair was swathed in more chemicals than a starlet's; his hips churned like a hooker's in heat. Presley was manly too, in a street-punk way. For him, the electric guitar was less an instrument than a symbolic weapon — an ax or a machine gun aimed at the complacent pop culture of the 50s. Performing his pansexual rite to a heavy bass line, Elvis set the primal image for rock: a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute. He also established the androgyny of the male star. Who needed girl singers, when a guy could provide his own sexual menace, long hair, coquetry and falsetto singing?

Decades after the fact, John Lennon remembered the impact Elvis had on kids in the 50s, who naively turned on their TVs and saw "a guy with long, greasy hair wigglin' his ass and singin' 'Hound Dog'." The weirdness was watching not just a white kid who sang black, but a man who moved like a antsy woman. And sometimes sang like one. Around his 19th birthday, a year before he hooked up with Sam Phillips' Sun Records, Elvis did a demo tape he recorded a noble-masochism ballad called "I'll Never Stand in Your Way." (The cut appears on RCA's four-CD, 100-song set "Platinum: A Life in Music.") Here his voice is thin, nasal, with an attack of naked innocence and, yes, a feminine vibrato.

Male or female, man or child, he sounds great on the early RCA sides. The record company brass was frantic that Elvis' first session produced only "Heartbreak Hotel," a slow 12-bar blues. But he knew that — with a verse requiring some robust tenor work, a chorus in the "lonely" baritone register and a cool segue allowing for sexy filigree work — the song would be a swell showcase. He also knew its melodrama and eroticism in the song, because he'd been there when he performed it.

We are startled, on the amazing "Blue Moon," by his trick of shifting, in a heartbeat, from saloon baritone to pants-too-tight wailing. We are reminded of his daring enunciation: all those words that suddenly began with h ("Hi want you, hi need you, hi-hi-hi love you"), the occasional glottal addition ("Glove me tender...") and his near Hawaiian avoiding of consonants ("Ya-hoo A-know Ah can be fou'/ Sittin' home all alo'"). That's from "Don't Be Cruel," a song that comes close to redefining the art of the pop vocal. It's gentle and amused, with a cute quaver in the "at" when he pleads "At least please telephone" and the octave drop on that lusty "mm-mm" before the third verse. On one of the 1956 TV shows, he proudly called "Don't Be Cruel" "my biggest record," adding "'Course they're all the same size."

The next year would consolidate his growth as a vocalizer. For his first movies, he even got good songs, which would rarely be the case in the 60s. On Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" for "Jailhouse Rock," he shows his eerie ease in shifting from high to low registers, and runs supple variations on the "Baby, I don't care," making it a promise of the naughtiest behavior. The uptempo "Got a Lot of Livin' to Do," written for "Loving You" by Aaron Schroeder and Ben Weisman, keeps him in tenor-shout mode; it's as if he can't wait to dip into the tag "I don't know what or who I'd rather to it a-with than you." He has masterly fun with three other "Loving You" songs: "Mean Woman Blues," "Party" and especially the Kal Mann-Bernie Lowe "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear"

This song isn't a classic, but Presley's rendition is — an Elvis apotheosis and an Elvis parody. (Everyone else was imitating him; why shouldn't he?) Grateful for a jaunty tune about his favorite stuffed animal, and perhaps for the marketing tie-in to the official Elvis Presley Teddy Bears on sale at better chain stores, he turns it into a children's song; he could be a father crooning silky nonsense to a first-born. He lends a seductive petulance in "I don't wanna be your tiger/ 'Cause tigers play too rough." He plays with the title words as if they were Silly Putty, altering the stress and length of the vowels. It's a great, blithe performance.

"A WORKHORSE IN THE STUDIO"

The ad line for "30 #1 Hits" reads: "Before anybody did anything, Elvis did everything." He certainly knew his job — all of them. He was also a fine instinctive musician, a fast study with a gift for synthesizing what he'd heard into his own style. "He sucked up influences like litmus paper," writes Peter Guralnick in "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley," the first book in a meticulous two-volume biography. "He was SERIOUS about his work. Whenever [Elvis' first manager Bob] Neal went by the house, he found him with a stack of records — Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton and Arthur ?Big Boy' Crudup — that he studied with all the avidity that other kids focused on their college exams. He listened over and over, seeming to hear something that no one else could hear..."

A raw recruit when he entered the Sun Records studio in Memphis in late 1954, Elvis learned enough so that, when he joined RCA, he was soon the de facto producer of his own sessions. Steve Sholes was RCA's A&R representative, but, as Phillips insisted to Guralnick: "He was NOT a producer. Steve was just at every session, and he kept his fucking mouth shut." Sholes would propose songs, and Elvis would dispose. In 1957 Leiber and Stoller, the L.A.-based singer-songwriters whose "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" would be prime Presley calling cards, took over as producers. Stoller: "We thought we were the only white kids who knew anything about the blues," Stoller told Guralnick, "but he knew all kinds of stuff." Leiber added: "We thought he was like an idiot savant, but he listened a lot. He knew all of our records. ... And he was a workhorse in the studio — he didn't pull any diva numbers."

He was there to sing, of course, though he played a vigorous rhythm guitar, ceding the fancy solos to Scotty Moore. But on one 1957 session, when slap-bassist Bill Black walked out in frustration after being unable to master the rumbling electric-bass intro for the Leiber-Stoller "Baby, I Don't Care," Elvis picked up the instrument and played the line perfectly. He would also push for extra takes to get a song right. He insisted on 31 stabs at "Hound Dog," then listened pensively to the playbacks and said of the final take, "This is the one." End of discussion. Elvis was the boss.

ELVIS AND BRANDO

Elvis had wanted to be James Dean; he saw Dean's signature movie, which he called "Rebel Without a Pebble," a dozen times. He was touched by Dean's sensitivity, stricken by Dean's early death (in September 1955, about the time Parker bought Elvis' contract from Phillips). In fact, though, Elvis was the Marlon Brando of pop. Everyone saw this; I did, and I was 11. Brando and Elvis both had sullen good looks: hooded eyes and full, sensuous mouths that easily formed a sneer-smile. They semaphored their menace in their movement: Brando the prowling predator, Presley the sex machine. Most important: both men, virtually by themselves, caused a redefinition of what was acceptable in their fields. And soon, because of their seismic influence, their strange styles became the standard.

Pauline Kael wrote that changes in art almost always seem at first a mistake. The new initially looks like the old, done poorly. The status quo, when affronted, thinks it's watching some that wants to be the status quo, but can't. Brando didn't mean to talk in that mumbling, meandering way, did he? And Elvis, windmilling his legs and unleashing those pelvic spasms that were all his — purely Elvic — what the heck was he doing?

Elvis made his national TV debut in January 1956 on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey "Stage Show," preceded by a number in which 12 chorine danced while playing xylophones. Just before he came on stage, Cleveland DJ Bill Randle uttered these inflated but prescient words: "We think tonight that he's going to make television history for you. We'd like you to meet him now: Elvis Presley."

It made history, all right, but not of the Stanley-vs-Livingstone variety. More like King Kong rattling his chains before the tuxedoed first-nighters. Singer and audience eyed each other across a gaping cultural divide. Figuring Elvis out was part of the pop-cultural challenge or threat he posed. Elvis' own challenge was figuring out how to work the audience. He knew his approach worked on tour, in the South. But New York was alien to him, as he at first was alien to it.

On the singer's early TV appearances, you can hear gasps of incomprehension. They may have been shocked by his gyrations, but even more they were confused. (Berle, sensing audience resistance during at the end of the "Hound Dog" number," rushes out, whistling enthusiastically and shouting, "How 'bout my boy! I love 'im!") Occasional reaction shots of the adult, white, middle-aged studio audience reveal people with annoyed, derisive or baffled looks on their faces.

Watching the Berle-show "Hound Dog," we can feel the career-threatening danger of his burlesque moves, see his hip-level guitar wagging insolently like the first electric phallus. No wonder the onlookers gasped and giggled. They knew they were present for a cultural sea change; and their animosity was a necessary impediment for the invader to overcome. Exactly the same abrasion is evident in the 1951 film of "A Streetcar Named Desire," in the moment when Vivien Leigh's fluttery Blanche duBois is first confronted with Brando's brutish Stanley Kowalski. It is the instant, epochal collision of old and new, of refinement and feral energy, of a sensibility on the way out and an attitude crashing through, ready to take over.

FROM KID TO KING

I suspect that Brando's mannerisms were thought out, an expression of the Stanislavski Method, while Presley's were symptoms of his nervous energy and naivete. To look at the young Elvis exposed, and exposing himself, on national TV (they can be seen in Alan and Susan Raymond's 1987 documentary "Elvis '56") In his first TV shows, he puts the mask of insolence on his stage fright. He rarely smiles. He seems simultaneously determined and stricken. While introducing a song, he audibly cracks his knuckles. His singing voice, so at home in the recording studio, shivers audibly behind the TV microphone. At the end of one number ("Baby Let's Play House"), he wipes his mouth with the cuff of his jacket. It looks like the gesture of the lion who, in his performance, has just devoured the lambs in the audience; but I bet it was nerves and sweat.

I think, too, that Presley's sexy swiveling was as much an anachronism as an innovation. Elvis was, at heart, a song-and-dance man. In the Big Band days, singers would come forward after the band's opening refrain, perform the vocal and sit down. Country stars kept busy strumming guitar; blues shouters had the piano to bang on; and crooners like Bing Crosby and Perry Como ("Perry Coma" in Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug parody of America's most popular TV star of the mid-50s) just stood around and smiled. Elvis, in the instrumental interludes between his singing, simply did what countless showbiz troupers had done on music-hall, vaudeville and Broadway stages: danced. His gyrations weren't exactly the old soft-shoe. But it was a dance: St. Vitus'.

The kids got it: they picked up on Elvis' sexuality, his vitality and fun. Adults thought kids picked up an infection too. The same cultural paranoia that had parents burning horror comic books in 1954 had them calling for a TV ban on Elvis the Pelvis, and Presley was obliged to tone down his moves when, on "The Steve Allen Show," he sang "Hound Dog" in a tuxedo to an actual hound dog (in a tuxedo). In a revealing press comment in Charleston, S.C., the week before the Allen show, Elvis put his music and his performance style into cultural contest: "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up."

After the guest shots on "Stage Show" and with Berle and Allen, Elvis was ready for Ed Sullivan. (Sullivan had previously averred he would never sign the singer for his program. But when Elvis' Allen turn creamed Sullivan in the ratings, Ed and Col. Parker made a deal: a precedential $50,000 for three appearances.) These were the from-the-waist-up shows, though Elvis was usually shot from the breastbone up, to keep his legwork from corrupting America's youth.

By this time, teenage girls had figured out how to get into a TV show that had Elvis. They had also learned to Elvis was a mature TV performer. His hair now dyed jet-black to look better on camera, he wishes a speedy recovery to Sullivan, recently injured in a car accident. He sings ballads, mostly, and behaves himself from the waist down, mostly. For a second he shouts, "You ain't nothin'..." as if to launch into the heretical "Hound Dog," but that's just a goof; he stops and quickly grins. At the end of his final appearance, Elvis offers a prayer for the viewers: "May God bless ya, as He's blessed me."

That would have required quite a few blessings. since a record 83% of the viewing audience was tuned in to Elvis on Sullivan. It was official now: the kid was King.

THE WORLD'S PRICIEST LOUNGE ACT

Brando had it easier than Presley; for in pop, more than in acting, it's tough to remain in the vanguard. Consider the four overlapping phases of Elvis' music. Phase 1: At Sun Records, he borrowed blues from blacks and country songs from rednecks, passing them along to the huge middle-class. Phase 2: He got sharp material from top young songwriters (primarily Leiber-Stoller and Otis Blackwell) that he could make his own. But early rock didn't allow for much variety: 12-bar blues, 16-bar pop song. Phase 3 began in late 1957, when every songwriter was handing him drab variants on Blackwell's "Don't Be Cruel" By the end of the 60s, Phase 4, Elvis was redoing mainstream songs, ones everyone had heard a hundred times before. A lot of his later hits — "Crying in the Chapel," "The Wonder of You," "My Way" —had already been hits. This made him the world's priciest lounge act. Even before Elvis played Vegas, he was Vegas.

Sadly, the pulverizing novelty of sexual danger was quickly domesticated, as Elvis jumped into mainstream show business. Like Brando, Elvis helped America realize it was dying to be hip. But having educated his audience to get hipper, he seemed to get squarer simply by standing still. He had segued from being Elvis to doing Elvis: playing him on TV and in movies. He'd become his own parody, stunt double, postage stamp — the first Elvis impersonator. In the new era of the singer-songwriter, the "mere" singer was an anachronism, dependent on others to write "Elvis-style" material. The Beatles left him for dead; and his darling, deviant version of "Blowin' in the Wind" (from a Graceland basement tape) shows he didn't exactly get Bob Dylan. This should have been Elvis' prime; but his movie producers, and the Colonel, called the shots. He didn't rebel; he did it their way.

So what's left? A terrific crooner who was closer, in intonation, vocal virtuosity and care for a song's mood, to Bing Crosby than to any top singer of the rock era. We have to entertain the possibility that Elvis was exactly the anachronism he wanted to be. In the 1956 Charleston interview, he'd been asked what he would do after the rock 'n roll fad faded, as many adults thought or hoped it would. "When it's gone," Elvis said, "I'll switch to something else. I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money. Would you change if you was me?"

Eventually, he did change. He did what Crosby, Como, Sinatra and Fisher had done before him: sing strong, sing pretty. Toward the end, he couldn't hack the rock material (his vocals on "Burning Love" and "Way Down" are thin, ragged, spindly), but he still had it as a balladeer. His spectacularly intense rendition of "I Believe," excerpted on the recent NBC special "Elvis Lives," proves that his inside the bloated body was the soul of a gospel-tinged Caruso. The under-the-balcony tenorizing of "It's Now or Never," the final detonation of pain and taunt in "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", the choir-soloist power of the hymn "He Touched Me" — his voice breaking poignantly at the end of the hymn, as if he had just seen Jesus — these still thrill and haunt. So does his desire to please an audience of kids and grandmas instead of comfortably occupying a niche, as almost every pop star has done since.

At the end of the "Platinum" CD is a speech Elvis made in 1971. Quoting Vincent Youmans' 1929 "Without a Song," he says, "So I keep singin' the song." The impulse to sing raunchy, corny, beautiful songs trapped Elvis; and in that trap, he sometimes found triumph.

Doesn't a star of such prominence and poignancy deserve a happy 68th birthday — dead or alive?

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the King's legacy