BEFORE: This worked out pretty great, by adding in the Chuck Berry documentary on the fly, that also gave me a connection to this two-part HBO documentary about Elvis. Now I can go backwards a little and finish off rock from the 1950's before I move forward and tackle the 1980's and 1990's. It would have been a little ridiculous to cover Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse BEFORE Elvis, right? And I can also give a shout-out to Tom Petty (one of the narrators of this film), who I dedicated Year 10 to back in January, when I had no idea that I was going to be devoting over a month of my time to a look at rock music. Maybe that did influence me a bit, though - or set the tone for the year perhaps.
For my purposes, I'm going to count this two-episode series as one big movie. That means it's over three hours of my time today to finish off both parts, but I've watched longer in this chain - "Long Strange Trip" was almost FOUR hours! Once I get through this one, the movies should get shorter, I'll have crossed the two longest docs off the list, so it's downhill from here, I hope.
Bruce Springsteen carries over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" as an interviewed person. And coincidentally I'm also ripping my CD of Springsteen's Greatest Hits into iTunes today so I can listen to his music once again.
THE PLOT: Elvis Presley's evolution as a musician and a man.
AFTER: A little over nine months ago, my wife and I were in the middle of our BBQ Crawl across the south (Part 1: Dallas to Nashville) and there were only two things I wanted to do during our time in Memphis. One was to visit Graceland, because I felt it was the most truly kitschy American thing I could think to do, and the other was to visit Sun Records. Now, of course a lot of people had these same ideas, because they're both holy sites of rock and roll, and if you're going to make some form of pilgrimage (or take a break from your BBQ tour), there are many worse places to go. Now, I didn't take the full tour of the Sun Records studio, because we were headed out of town, and the place was very crowded with two generations of people - one generation was there because Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis all recorded there, and the younger generation was there because U2 recorded tracks for "Rattle and Hum" there, and they even left a drum set behind, so I don't know what Larry Mullen Jr.'s been playing with all this time, but the folks at Sun Studios would really like him to come back and pick up his kit.
But with Graceland, we took the full tour - the house, the grounds, the handball court, the garages, the stables, the office, and then the museums. One museum just for Elvis's cars, trucks, boats and motorcycles, another one just for his jumpsuits and other clothing, and so on. And each museum had its own gift shop, and then I think each gift shop had its own gift shop, and so on. You could buy Elvis shirts, Elvis socks, replicas of Elvis' belts, glassware, cookbooks, etc. etc. Hey, after paying to get in to the place, I really didn't have much money for souvenirs. We also paid the extra $5 to see Elvis' planes - yes, planes, plural. He traveled in one private jet, and Col. Parker traveled in the other, smaller jet, to get to each concert venue the day before and make sure everything was set up for the King. What, like I was going to travel all the way to Memphis and then NOT see Elvis's planes? That would be ridiculous...in for a penny, in for a pound.
After seeing all the, umm, everything at Graceland, my wife remarked that "this is what happens when you give a twenty-year-old a few million dollars", and of course, she was right. Think about what Justin Bieber's house and property probably looks like, and that was Graceland, only a few decades before. Now, it's not the world's biggest or most elegant house, but it was never supposed to be. Elvis bought it for his parents to live in, and then just sort of moved into it himself when he got back from military service, and it became a very comfortable place for him to live. There's not much space on the main level, but there was a second floor, and then down in the basement were the TV room and the billiards room, and I'll wager Elvis spent a lot of time down there. Our tour didn't cover the upstairs, and I believe that's because he died there, and you know, respect.
But I've stood in the infamous "jungle room", I've walked Elvis's shooting range, I've seen nearly all of his cars, and he had a LOT of cars. I stood by his grave, which is next to the graves of his parents, his grandmother, and the memorial to his dead twin baby brother. It feels like some kind of holy place, there's a reverence for what took place there in the 1960's and 70's. But with that comes a sort of a deification of Elvis, he's almost portrayed as a saint there, with no mention of any wrongdoing, or drug addiction, or divorce, etc. Like someone whitewashed his life story, and decided that only happy photos of Elvis and Priscilla could be displayed there, when obviously their marriage had its ups and downs. People love his music, I get that, but there's no reason to fool ourselves into thinking he was a choir boy. Oh, here's his collection of police badges from every state in the country. Great, but just think of what he could get away with in any state in the country with those.
And there's a bit of whitewashing history in this documentary, too. When it comes time to talk about her divorce from Elvis, Priscilla mentions that "family was very important to Elvis". Umm, OK, but apparently not enough to stop doing 120 concerts per year and stop traveling enough to spend TIME with his family. Why do I have to read between the lines to figure this stuff out? There is mention of drug use, but in this case, the U.S. government is given the blame - Priscilla claims that Elvis was given speed pills in the army, so that he could stay awake for sentry duty. Sure, sure, only as far as I'm aware, it doesn't sound like the army would condone drug use just to have more alert soldiers. It sounds more like the kind of lie that an addict tells to justify his addiction. Then when he was out on tour in the 1970's, he apparently turned back to drugs so he could maintain his busy touring schedule. Again, this is how it starts, when you need to get "up" for the show, and then take more drugs to come down after - and it's the schedule's fault, not the addict's fault, of course.
And let's go back to the army thing for a minute - doesn't there seem something weird about Elvis being drafted in 1957? When there wasn't even a WAR going on? I mean, I get it, back then it was like jury duty, you got the notice, you went and served - but why would the army want a big celebrity pop star on duty, when that would cause many more problems than it would solve? He was granted a brief deferment in order to make the movie "King Creole", but right there, that should have been a big red flag that military service probably wasn't necessary for him, and I think he should have skated. I know that many Hollywood stars and baseball players in the 1940's also served in the military, but that was different, because World War II meant that all hands needed to be on deck. What practical purpose did drafting Elvis for two years serve, unless it was for show, to prove to the public that nobody was above the law. Then immediately Col. Parker brought Elvis to the recording studio to make a bunch of records to be released while he was overseas, serving in Germany. Seriously, why didn't the army just ask him to play a soldier in a movie, that would have done much more for their cause than shipping him off to a military base, was this all done just to keep him humble? Or was someone at the Pentagon trying to kill rock and roll? Like, could you imagine someone like Justin Bieber going in to the army today? That would be ridiculous.
Then, while he was away, Col. Parker released new Elvis material, but not at the rate that it had been released before. Ostensibly this was done to make the public more "hungry" for his music, but it's quite possible that it had the opposite effect, causing his fans to get by without his records, and then turning their attention to the new faces of rock and roll, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles. By the time Elvis got back from Germany and got rolling on a new album, it was probably as if music had matured without him, and left him behind. So he turned to movies and gospel music instead, and if my memory serves, that's actually where he had the most success, at least in terms of Grammy Awards. By the time Elvis got back to rock and roll with the 1968 "Comeback Special", and then tried to record more modern music like "In the Ghetto" after that, it was almost too late for that.
On this date (OK, yesterday, July 31) in music history, 1969 to be exact, Elvis Presley started a four-week run at the Las Vegas International hotel. This was shortly after the Comeback TV Special, and was his first live shows played since 1961. Reportedly he earned $1.5 million for these shows, and this is portrayed in "The Searcher" as one of several key points in Elvis' touring career. What I want to know is, after getting over a million damn dollars for four weeks' work, why not take some time off? If, as we're told "family was very important to Elvis", why wouldn't getting a cool million then translate to a few months of quality time, at least, with his wife and daughter? Why go back out on the road the following year for another tour, and another, and another? Of course, since Elvis didn't write his own songs, he wasn't getting the full royalties from album sales, so maybe touring was the only way he could make money? Just speculating here - but when does a rock star have enough money, or is it never enough?
A very interesting fact was revealed in this documentary - Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager, who was rarely seen without a cowboy hat and a big, fat cigar, the stereotypical southern "Boss Hogg" type of manager, was in fact not a U.S. citizen. He was born in the Netherlands, so as Southern as he seemed to be, it wasn't the whole truth. And because he exerted control over Elvis, and always made sure that Elvis was dependent on him to arrange everything for his tours, that's why Elvis never toured outside the U.S. Col. Parker was afraid that if he left the U.S. to arrange a concert in another country, he would not be allowed back into the U.S., so Elvis never toured Europe, never did a show in Japan. And yet he became a superstar, but he could have been so much bigger, a worldwide superstar. Or maybe touring the world would have only killed him faster, it's very difficult to say.
What I'm considering now is the contrast between Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and now I'm doubly glad that I watched their documentaries back-to-back. Both were born and raised in the South, in working-class families, but that's about where the similarities end. Chuck Berry played clubs with vigor and then knocked on the door of Chess Records in Chicago, while Elvis drove past Sun Records many times before he got the nerve to visit Sun Records in Memphis. Chuck chased after fame, while it almost seems like Elvis had to be dragged into it before he played a session. Chuck was the bad boy who'd been to jail several times, while Elvis was the mama's boy whose only crime seemed to sneaking into black churches. Chuck drew his sound from the blues, while Elvis was more of a fan of gospel, it seems. Chuck Berry was the first real singer-songwriter of rock and roll, while Elvis worked his way through the Lieber-Stoller songbook and other standards, and I don't think he wrote any of his songs. They both toured extensively through the 1970's, only Chuck would show up at the last minute, drive himself to the concert with just a guitar case, and Elvis had a whole entourage, a manager that would arrive the day before, and require massive road crews, costume changes, hair, make-up, towels, etc. But together they're somehow the co-founding fathers of rock music, and yet now I don't think they could have been more different.
Of the people interviewed, I found both Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen's comments on Elvis to be incredibly insightful - in a way, it takes a couple of rock stars to help us normal people understand what it's like to exist and produce art in that kind of bubble. Plus their musical knowledge helped take us all through the various stages of Elvis' recording career. I'll get back to both of these guys later on in the chain - for a long while this film was being used as a link between another doc with Petty and one with Springsteen, but things changed - I'm sorry I couldn't keep the two Tom Petty appearances next to each other, but c'est la vie.
Once again, it appears to be up to me to save mankind by properly making adjustments to the cast list of a music documentary on the IMDB. Before I got involved, the cast list on the IMDB listed only 8 people appearing in a three-hour documentary that covered over 20 years of Elvis' life, when in reality interviews were conducted with over 30 people. Those interview subjects were all listed in the closing credits, why couldn't someone associated with the production of this film, or someone at HBO, make sure that they received proper credit in the movie database that we ALL rely on? I also kept track of people who appeared in archive footage, and those were ALL missing from the IMDB. So now after I made several submissions to the IMDB this afternoon, the cast list is up to 55 people, and I still have a way to go. (I can't understand why the IMDB believes me when I say that Dean Martin is in this film, but doesn't believe me when I say that Frank Sinatra also is, for example...) I'm listing the more notable people below, but there were plenty of other people (like Elvis' parents, for example) who appeared in footage - it just might take a while longer to submit all those names, especially if they haven't appeared in other movies. I'm trying to leave the world of cinema just a bit more organized than it was when I found it, but it's not easy. After tomorrow's film I'll give a brief recap of who's appeared in the most music docs so far.
Also starring Priscilla Presley, Tom Petty (last heard in "Appaloosa"), Emmylou Harris (last heard in "Ricki and the Flash"), Robbie Robertson (also carrying over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"?), Cissy Houston, Chris Bearde, Steve Binder, Hal Blaine, David Briggs, Tony Brown, Nik Cohn, Bill Ferris, D.J. Fontana, Anthony Heilbut, Bones Howe, John Jackson, Ernst Jorgensen, Jon Landau, Preston Lauterbach, Alan Light, Victor Linn, Bill C. Malone, Dave Marsh, Portia Maultsby, Scotty Moore, David Porter, Norbert Putnam, Jerry Schilling, Mike Stoller, Larry Strickland, Ronnie Tutt, Red West, Warren Zanes and archive footage of Elvis Presley (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"), Howlin' Wolf (ditto), Dean Martin (ditto), Col. Tom Parker, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry (also carrying over from "Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"), Little Richard (ditto), Jerry Lee Lewis (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (last seen in "The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), George Harrison (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"),Aretha Franklin (ditto), Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, Sam Phillips, Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - the Touring Years"), Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph, Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child"), Ann-Margret, Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Robert Kennedy (ditto), George McGovern.
RATING: 6 out of 10 gold records on the wall
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