T
he fifty-three Australian Elvis fans on Northwest Flight 52 from New Orleans to Memphis, wearing white shirts that said: MEMORIES
STILL PLENTY/EVEN AFTER 20/AUSSIE FANS REMEMBER, had no idea that the crew on Flight 52 would run out of Elvis Pepsi cans halfway through the flight! They had no idea that half of the group would never get to carry back to the Australian continent the commemorative cans that said around the rim: STILL ROCKING ELVIS 20 YEARS, and down farther around the picture of the King, PRESLEY'S MEMPHISâ126 BEALE STREET: UNPRECEDENTED ENTERTAINMENT & CONTEMPORARY CUISINE. WWW.ELVISPRESLEY.COM. INSPIRED BY THE KING OF ROCK âN' ROLL: ELVIS AND ELVIS PRESLEY ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF ELVIS PRESLEY ENTERPRISES. VISIT PEPSI WORLD ON THE INTERNET.
This isn't the first time we find Pepsi at the cutting edge. In 1965 in a small communist country behind the Iron Curtain, I read a typewritten poem by Allen Ginsberg, in translation. It said in this poem, “You're in the Pepsi generation.” One year later, when I emigrated to New York, I saw this in a subway in three-foot letters: YOU'RE IN THE PEPSI GENERATION. What a grand country, I thought, they are quoting the poets on the walls! One year
later, my teacher in things American, Ted Berrigan, pulled me aside and said proudly: “I am the first American poet to put Pepsi in a poem!” Ted drank a lot of it. It probably killed him. I didn't have the heart to say that Allen did it first. Or maybe he didn't, I don't know.
Around the same time Allen Ginsberg was putting Pepsi in his poetry, my Australian seatmate had heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then, as she put it, “I had to get married next day.”
She had to. Dig it. Elvis gave millions of women around the globe their first orgasm, the reverberations or aftershocks of which are still with us. Their fidelity forty years later testifies to the magnitude of the earthquake and, as Douglas Brinkley put it, the coming groundswell of the sixties. In fact, had my Aussie seatmate been ten years younger she might have gotten her first orgasm from Jimi Hendrix and would have found it unnecessary to get married the very next day. So, yes, Elvis did that thing by saying “It's all right, mama,” but then most of the girls
did
get married. Eisenhower world was all shook up but it didn't fold. Ten years made a lot of difference to Elvis and to America: He was so startled by what he'd wrought that he wrapped himself in the American flag when he heard that hippies were making love on it.
What the Aussie fans did not know was that, in addition to the lamentable dearth of Pepsi cans on Northwest Flight 52, they were traveling to Memphis with a professor going to the third annual International Elvis Conference at the Memphis College of Art. Had my seatmate known, she might have felt that small pangâlike a needle through the eyeâthat feels like nothing at the time but a few moments later, bang, there is a huge loss. Her Elvis, the people's Elvis, was being taken over by academics and theologians.
At the Memphis College of Art during the Elvis conference, two representatives of the people's Church of Elvis, a modest congregation of fans headquartered on the Internet, demanded the removal of two paintings in the exhibit downstairs. One of them was a representation of Elvis sans loincloth, feeding greedily at the Pamela Andersonâlike breast of a saucy madonna. The other was also a Christlike representation of the King crucified sans cloth. The organizers of the conference accommodated the protesters and removed the pictures. Bravo, and good for the humble reps! Had this been some seriously secular-humanist dwelling, they might have had to bring with them their fellow Christian fundamentalist kin and start praying
on the steps. As it was, their predicament was well understood and the madonna holding the Christ-child Elvis and the crucified hunk in the other picture were repudiated. The crucified hunk was rather well hung, which brings up the rather interesting question of Elvis's penis. At a time when America's national imagination was filled with penisesâincluding that of the presidentâElvis's penis, Elvis's sacred penis found itself repudiated by the very people to whom it, through gyrations and writhings, granted liberatory orgasms in 1957.
It's a knot of mystery. We have, on the one hand, a sexualized generation that has grown old and conservative and which has emasculated its liberator. On the other hand, we have a younger, liberal theological-scholastic institution that is hosting a conference dedicated for the most part, if I heard right, to restoring the scepter to the King. Yet this latter camp feels so unsure about the depth of its faithâwhether in art or in its subjectâas to cave in to the revisionists. Is this an art issue or a religious one?
Well, it is neither. It is a case of agreement. The job of institutions, notwithstanding the hopeful scholars, is to emasculate God, in whom they don't have much faith anyway. So the aims of the pious Elvinists and the Memphis Art theologians coincide in the end, no matter what their class differences. The two groups have the same aim: to deprive Elvis of his penis. The very material of both institutions is composed of God's chopped-up penis. Lest you think that this is an idle metaphor, let me remind you that Napoleon's penis was sold at auction in London in the nineteenth century and was bought by an English collector who cooked it and ate it. This was no mere English grudge-gourmandise but a concrete ritual of empowerment.
Of course, Elvis himself had offered his penis to the masses, who used it to sexually empower themselves. By so doing, he divested himself of it and became something else, a transformed being who had no choice but to become a gender-ambiguous icon. An Elvis without a penis is a saintâand the tabloids aren't shy in saying so. The elasticity of gender, indeed!
And once again, lest you think me fanciful, I saw a concrete instance of it myself. Patti Carroll, bless her heart, took me into the Elvis impersonator world, a worldwide competition taking place in conjunction with the conference. One particular Elvis impersonator was a wheelchair Elvis, a handicapped Elvis with a beautiful voice. He was paralyzed from the waist down, having no practical use of the very part that made Elvis Elvis. The audience applauded him heartily in the generous spirit of the nineties, just as they
had applauded, wildly, an impersonator from Japan. So Elvis impersonators and their fans have reached a level of understanding of their craft, which involves parody, tolerance, and quite a distancing from the source.
The Elvis impersonators' audience was composed in equal parts of self-consciousness and nostalgia. For some of the older folk present, the impersonators were the Doors of Meat which led to their past. They hurled themselves relentlessly against these Doors of Meat, hoping to dislodge them and return to paradise. The younger audience self-consciously appreciated the campiness of it all.
Now, clearly, the fundamentalists who succeeded doing away with the art here do not have the degree of self-consciousness or good humor of the impersonators' audience. Or perhaps it is just a matter of degree. I have ascertained, on the basis of first- and secondhand reports, that, from the point of view of the principals, it was an Elvis issue, not a God issue. That is, the people who wanted the pictures removed thought that they were an insult to Elvis, and the people who removed them thought that might be true. Which makes it an Elvis issue for everyone involved except for the artists who thought that the separation of church and state in this country is real. I believe that for the artists it is an economic issue: The people who allowed their pictures to be removed were not very good competitors in the marketplace because they folded before the agents of fundamentalist Elvis kitsch.
But enough of this. I have been told, by other shaky liberal humanists, to stay away from eschatology, so I will. I will say only one more thing about it and then move on to other issues. When the Christian God exploded at the end of the nineteenth century, his shards landed and continue to land on fourteen-year-old prepubescents. I have no doubt that one of these landed on Elvisâand he was created from that Big Bang. When Elvis himself exploded, a number of shards landed all over the place, entering hundreds of impersonators and others. We can call this second Big Bang the Gang Bang. This mystery continues to generate more and more Elvis all the time at an increasing rate. Eventually the whole world will be Elvis.
When I first got to Memphis, I walked from the Peabody Hotel to the Memphis College of Art on Poplar Avenue. I walked past the county jail, the juvenile detention hall, ten bail bondsmen, fenced-in vacant lots, the boarded up Tri-State Liqueur, six pawn shops, one psychiatric hospital/ prison, two halfway houses, the Alcohol Drug & Treatment Center, the AIDS-Support Services headquarters, two very unsettling housing projects,
and the most lively business, something called Joe Gins, advertising CANADIAN HIGH TEN MILE. Not an Elvis in sight, but surely a place for the blues. I had the vision that Jesus himself did in fact sing his parables. The music was lost. Still, there wasn't a taxi or an Elvis in sight on Poplar that Sundayâthey were all at Graceland or at the Memphis Museum of Art or being interviewed.
Which brings me to El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, whose hip appropriation of Elvis music to the cause of the downtrodden was well analyzed at the conference. I like El Vez because he really rocks and has a good voice, but I can't say that I'm so crazy about his message-lyrics. There is an authoritarian cast to them. Their radicalism is only subversive in the white world of Elvis fans. If I were one of the subjects of his lyrics, I'd feel condescended toâlike, do I really need to get my Chicano Pride 101 from rock ân' roll? I would demand more mystery, more detail, less sloganeering. This is just carping, though, because in the world of infinite white Elvises, El Vez's activity is quite Christ-like. He is not so much an Elvis devotee as an Elvis competitor, the Antichrist.
The academic Elvis we've been setting up here all week, the meta-Elvis, the all-encompassing, revolutionary Elvis, the subsuming Elvis, is also the Antichrist. Many brilliant comments have been made for the purpose of restoring the “real Elvis” from the rumbling belly of consumer culture where he's been more than half digested, sequins and all. Some of us feel that the postmortem Elvis metastasis has nearly obliterated an American revolutionary. We are attempting to cleanse, purify, and restore a precise Elvis for classroom use. However, I am afraid that this Elvis is just another in a long series of postmortem Elvises.
Several things mattered to me, significantly, that week. Foremost was the music. I always liked Elvis songs, but I was too late to feel orgasmic about any of it. Hearing the songs there, contextualized by all this fever and color, I really, really dug them. Second, I gained a healthy respect for both the historical Elvis and the phenomena he represents. I mean respect in the sense that provocative ideas were generated, worthy of further reflection. I particularly like Professor Vernon Chadwick's notion of “trans-cultural localism,” because as a trans-cultured Southerner, I feel included. If the conference was about liberating Elvis the liberator from the tabloids, it was quite successful. I was equally interested, however, in the impersonators' contest, where the pathos of aging in America was brought to me more forcefully
than at our academic discussions. I saw the whole vast vistas of face-lifts, the palliatives of Las Vegas, the fidelity to that first orgasm stretch into the future like the mega-retirement communities of Florida and Arizona. Watching the grandmas throw themselves at the sweating gyrating hunks, hoping to break down the Doors of Meat to the past, is enough to make me cry.
In the end, Elvis is a kind of measuring device, an E-meter that registers class, age, and humor in America. One of our chief sources of cultural torment in this country is the fake class distinctions brought about by consumerism. The relentless production of ersatz goods attempts to fool the working poor into thinking that they live just like the rich: The stuff looks the same, even though it's Naugahyde instead of natural fiber. Until, of course, Naugahyde acquires chic value, and then the poor have to go to the next ersatz level. The E-meter is a palimpsest of images: the original is working-class Southern white trash and the Liberator, then there is Elvis (still living) parodying himself pathetically in a simulacrum of patriotism, the ersatz Elvis of Vegas, and then come all the high and low postmortem Elvises. Incidentally, Patti Carroll introduced me to a Mrs. Hunt who lives in Rome and has discovered, in a well-known Giotto fresco, a pre-Elvis masquerading as St. Francis. So there is that.
I will end this by revealing to you the contents of a note found by a friend of a friend in Elvis's wastebasket, shortly before he died. He gave me this note because he trusted my academic credentials and knew that I'd be going to the conference. The note says: “Give me a break.” That's all. “Give me a break.” I think we have done that, literally: broken off another Elvis from the Elvis tree. “Give me a break.” Yeah, right. Elvis, you're not in charge. You never were.