Book review: \"Elvis Presley\" by Bobbie Ann Mason

Book review: "Elvis Presley" by Bobbie Ann Mason



I missed the dawn of Elvis. I was just a bit too young, only four years
old in July, 1954, when the King recorded "That's All Right (Mama)" for Sun
Records and, as Bobbie Ann Mason writes, "it was as if the nebulous,
unformed kid was a genie let loose from a Coke bottle."

By the time I became aware of the world outside our family home in Chicago,
Elvis was a major fixture in the American culture. Rock 'n' roll was
already established.

I heard stories of how shocking Presley had been, arriving on the scene,
but that was old news. He was a name, like Ike and like Mickey Mantle,
that everyone knew. He was — in that alchemy of celebrity — part of my
life and the lives of everyone else.

Mason's short biography Elvis Presley, part of the Penguin Lives series,
was sort of remedial reading for me.

Mason, a Southerner, is a novelist and short story writer, and she spends
her book looking at how it felt like Elvis, how he arose out of the fabric
of the South, how his personality was formed by poverty and crushed by the
expectations his talent and success unleashed. Like genies out of a Coke
bottle.


"Risk and trembling"

For me, growing up, Elvis was simply Elvis. Mason explains what it meant
for those who experienced him as a new phenomenon:

Elvis swept up marginal groups of people with a promise of freedom,
release, redemption; he embodied a yin and yang of yearnings; he took
people close to the edge and brought them back again; with his
stupendous singing talent, he blended all the strains of popular
American music into one rebellious voice; like Walt Whitman, he was
large — he contained multitudes; he created a style of being that was
so distinctive it could be made into an icon; he violated taboos
against personal expression and physicality; he opened the airwaves to
risk and trembling.

Elvis exploded the past, broke down walls. He was the epitome of the
rebel. But Mason notes that he wasn't radical in the way most of his
listeners were.

Though supercharged with riotous energy, he was not resisting the same
things his new fans were. He rebelled against poverty, not affluence.
He wanted acceptance, not alienation….Elvis wasn't in the beat
tradition and he wouldn't be in the next wave: the hippies. He was a
representative of the marginalized who fight their way into the
harbor, not the disaffected who jump ship.

Indeed, Mason makes clear that Elvis was "a fearful person by nature,"
afraid of the dark since childhood, who "lived his life as if he were
hiding in a storm shelter, surrounding himself with people who could
protect and insulate him."


"The way life was"

One of those people was Colonel Tom Parker, the confidence man who wheedled
himself into the good graces of Elvis and his family and became the
singer's manager for the rest of his life.

What's striking about the story Mason tells is that, unlike Bob Dylan or
the Beatles (or many other cultural leaders), Elvis didn't have control of
his career. Throughout much of his career, his musical genius was tamped
down and squelched by Parker in order to make a quick, safe buck.

Who knows what sort of music we lost because of that? And, yet, it seems
apparent from Mason's book that only someone who wasn't Elvis could have
broken away from Parker's clutches.

The Presleys knew they needed a guide, someone of their own kind who
could maneuver among the bankers, lawyers, company executives — none
of whom were to be trusted. The Presleys probably considered
themselves lucky to find a con man who could challenge the big dudes,
because they knew the big dudes would just stomp on them. That was
the way life was.

Once the Colonel was in charge, Elvis saw him as his boss and also the man
who was negotiating contracts that would bring the King unheard of riches —
$150,000, for instance. Elvis didn't know, and had no one around him, that
he could have made tenfold, a hundredfold, that with better business and
music advice.

Elvis behaved like many other poor Southerners, accepting the heel of
oppression when they should have been thinking more radically. This
is characteristic Southern passivity and fatalism, which often belies
an inner fire — a rebel sneer, at least.


"The life force"

Several times in this biography, Mason describes Elvis as expressing and/or
epitomizing "the life force." There was something primal about his music
and performances (discounting the tame and tepid movie soundtrack albums).

Here, Mason describes the reaction of the public to his early recordings:

People didn't know if it was rhythm-and-blues, country, or what.
Whatever it was, listeners clamored for it. Many people said Elvis
sounded black, like the sounds of the race records. In an era when
daytime radio was dominated by tepid crooning, quirky novelty, and
chirpy innocence, here was a record ["That's All Right] — by a white
boy — that had the flavor of juke-joint music. It had the thumping
abandon, the driving energy, of the life force itself — a thrusting
and writhing and wallowing and celebration.

Yet, how does a mere mortal cope with being the bringer of the life force —
with being the life force.

I suspect that John Lennon and his bandmates, that Dylan, that others
shackled with the celebrity they sought, learned how to keep their fame
from swallowing them whole by watching Elvis — by watching how he got it
wrong.

For Mason, the tragedy of Elvis's life "arises from the earnestness of his
endeavor to be the superhero he believed he was supposed to be."

Who could ever be that superhero?

Yet, Mason writes, Elvis tried. "He was addicted to being Elvis."

Patrick T. Reardon
5.7.15