Back then, everybody in his life wanted him to be something: Sam Phillips wanted him to be a white negro; Vernon and Gladys wanted him to be a movie star as big as The King, Clark Gable; Colonel Parker wanted him to be a younger Dean Martin who shat gold; the fans wanted him to take every girl in America between the ages of fourteen and nineteen into his bed; the TV censors wanted him to stop shaking his hips while he played and sang; Jerry Lee Lewis wanted him to die tragically and make way for a new King of Rock 'n' Roll; the Hollywood moguls wanted him to be the new James Dean, the new Marlon Brando, the new Cary Grant; Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart wanted him to stop, period, even if he swore only to sing Gospel, claiming the Sin wasn't so much in the words as it was in the music; and Mr Seth…well, Mr Seth wanted something he wasn't talking about…maybe, Mr Seth wanted his soul. Only the army seemed to be interested in him being just plain Elvis A. Presley, US 53310761.
He had all his records, boxed up and locked away, but he almost never got them out. He didn't even have a system that could play the 78s. Nobody else remembered any more, so why should he? If you turned on the rock stations, all you got was Petya Tcherkassoff, Vania Vanianova and all the other Soves who had copy-catted his style. America had lost rock 'n' roll sometime in the '60s floundering under the weight of British heartache drivel, and the Russians had bulled in with the beetroot beat. Good luck to them.
He had got out of the army in 1960, having risen to buck sergeant, and the Colonel had a whole life waiting for him. Hollywood movies, a TV show with Frank Sinatra, a stack of songs. And a new contract which gave Elvis nearly half of what he earned. It was time for the chicken to dance again. He had seen what was coming. An endless procession of fluffily idiotic scripts, no-balls songs, willing women in bikinis, a mansion which was less of a home than the old Presley shack. And throughout it all there was Colonel Parker, raking in the money, forcing him to bow his head, tying him up with contracts that would outlive him. Mr Seth wasn't around much any more, but his grinning skull photograph remained with all the others in Parker's office. The Colonel turned his family against him, bought off Mama and Papa with the comforts they had never had, and paid friends to spy on the valuable bird. The hot plate was heated up regularly, and the Dancing Chicken screamed unheard pain while the audiences called out for more.
He turned on the teevee, without watching or listening, flicking the channels at random.
The crisis had been in October, 1960. Everybody remembered where they were when they heard the news about JFK. Elvis had been in the back seat of his mama's pink Cadillac with a prom queen. When the news came on the radio, interrupting Connie Francis' "Among My Souvenirs," the girl, her hair set solid in a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, broke down and cried. Then, the whole country seemed to be falling apart along with the Kennedy marriage. Elvis remembered that awful, public struggle as more traumatic than any of his own heartbreaks. After all, when Jackie found her husband, the Democratic presidential candidate, in bed with that Hollywood blonde, the world had been shaken. Suddenly, no-hoper Richard Nixon, who had looked like Boris Karloff next to Kennedy's Errol Flynn on the televised debates, was in the White House, and things were different .
On the pornochannel, a hairy-legged satyr was extensively coupling with a green-gilled underwater nymphet. The pounding close-ups reminded Elvis of a documentary about open-heart surgery, and he skipped channels.
Rock 'n' roll was out of favour in 1960, anyway. There were insurrections against it, against the Devil's music. There was mass burnings of records in major cities, and stem parents forced their teenagers to renounce the Devil's music. Buddy, Eddie, Ritchie and Gene were dead in cars or planes and then, in January 1961, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart led a march against Madison Square Gardens in New York, where Alan Freed, Mr Rock 'n' Roll, was welcoming in a rockin' New Year with nineteen acts and twenty-five thousand fans. Elvis shuddered to think that he had nearly topped that bill; only the Colonel's ridiculous demands had kept him out of the bloodbath. The National Guard had had to be called in to quell what everybody called the Rock 'n' Roll Riots. They had raged for three days, and President-Elect Nixon branded the Devil's music as a greater threat to the moral fibre of the nation than communism, organized crime and poverty rolled together. When the riots were over, Freed, Chuck Berry, Harvey Fuqua, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard and three thousand others were dead, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Swaggart's cousin, was crippled for life. Elvis imagined Lewis sitting angrily on his piano stool, dead from the neck down, straining to move his hands, bashing his forehead against the keys.
To the Colonel, the wave of anti-rock 'n' roll feeling that swept across the country just meant more tuxedo tunes, bubblegum movies, and Las Vegas lounges. He said that Elvis Presley could outlive rock 'n' roll and that "nobody likes that nigra yelling no how." He could have been right. Suddenly, the Billboard charts were full of Pat Boone singing milk-and-water gospel, nice white girls singing nice white songs about nice white dresses, and crappy English Invasion mush from Ken Dodd, Mrs Mills, Matt Monro and Valerie Singleton. Some senate sub-committee set up a ratings board for all music recordings, handing down rulings like a national school principal about what was and was not permissible. The record companies all caved in and drew up their own code, enforcing a strict ban on electric guitars and saxophones that would only be overturned in the early '70s by David Cassidy, decreeing that all live performers should stand up straight like schoolchildren giving a recital. Frankie Avalon, Fabian Forte and Bobby Zimmermann scraped through; Sheb Wooley, the Platters and Tuesday Weld didn't. There was a sudden dash for the milquetoast mainstream, and performers who couldn't adapt to the new style were out of the business.
He had a meeting with the Colonel, and Mr Seth, back from overseas, turned up with a new contract the size of a telephone book. For hours, they explained it to him. There were TV specials, a film in Hawaii, the rights to cover "Tears for Souvenirs" and all Dodd's vomit-making hits, an income for life. And in the background, while the Colonel was talking at him and Mr Seth was just sitting there behind his dark glasses, Elvis could swear that he heard Robert Johnson singing about the hellhound on his trail, about meeting the Devil at the crossroads, about taking the Greyhound Bus to Hell. That had been his crossroads, and he had walked away from it without dipping the pen into a vein and signing his name. He had been set to star in G.I. Blues for Paramount in the spring, but it had been put off for over a year while the Colonel tried to put one over on Hollywood. After the rock 'n' roll riots, studio hatchet men had been through the script with a scalpel, taking out anything that might possibly be construed as rock 'n' roll-esque, substituting pure pap. Two days before he was due to report to the Paramount lot, where he was supposed to sing cute songs to puppets, babies and Juliet Prowse, he had hitch-hiked from Hollywood to Los Angeles and found a recruiting office where he could sign up again. He was immediately switched to OTC and started going for his captain's bars.
On the teevee, the world was going to Hell faster than Johnson's Greyhound Bus. That foxy Lola Stechkin was standing beside more smoking ruins, trying to look sympathetic but gorgeous as she interviewed the survivors of another catastrophe. It was space aliens in flying saucers, a survivor was claiming.