https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/take ... vis-review
I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What I am abundantly interested in is resurrection, which means there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when well illuminated, I find myself hovering over with fascination, or a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, drew me right in.
There is no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great, but what makes her work compelling, and what most informs my own writing, is that Willis—The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic—was never afraid to be overtaken by unexpected delight, even if it came at the expense of some preëxisting skepticism. Those two traits—skepticism and the potential for pleasure—exist at the intersection of Las Vegas and Elvis, especially during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweat-drenched singer laboring through the hotel residencies of the subsequent decade, sluggishly dragging himself along for the sake of a paycheck.
The Elvis whom Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead but from a long stretch of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led to film roles and soundtrack recordings and away, largely, from the stage. The previous year had marked a turnaround: there was the triumph of his comeback special, which was shot in June and aired in December. But to prove that he was fully back would require conquering Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.
There’s a striking moment in her piece, a sort of mini-twist, when you can sense Willis’s mode of observation shift from bewilderment to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright enjoyment. It happens after Elvis arrives onstage, when Willis takes him in for the first time. She’s amazed by his new, slimmer physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also puzzled by his hair, dyed black and no longer slicked into the famous ducktail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to look younger, he’s not interested in performing as he did in his youth. She marvels at his playfulness, becomes fixated on his earnestness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied.” Although Willis herself was only twenty-seven—the magazine had hired her the previous year—she appreciated his maturation. “He knew better than to try to be nineteen again,” she notes. “He had quite enough to offer at thirty-three.”
Willis’s Elvis column embodies one of her central gifts: her ability to walk you through an unfamiliar tunnel and lead you out the other side, into a bracing light, as surprised as she is that the destination looks the way it does. That this piece is not especially long causes the aforementioned twist to land even more forcefully. This is a writer saying, “We don’t have much time, and I’m not trying to change your mind, but I’m allowing you to witness how I was moved from one place to another.”
Reading Willis’s review of Elvis as he is shocked back to life reminded me that my interest in the singer goes beyond resurrection. Elvis was among the earliest of what I think of as the blank-slate pop stars, a lineage of performers, encompassing more recent figures such as Taylor Swift, who are so infused with meaning, for so many, that they become a stand-in for grand emotions and concepts whether they believe in them or not. What fuelled Elvis’s stardom was that he could contain all the projections at once, and even cultivate them. It takes a sharp critical eye to capture an artist like that, to write not about what he means but about what he is doing. That work isn’t about stripping away the romance of a performer’s appeal. On the contrary, I find it deeply romantic. Willis gave herself over to the spectacle of an Elvis who was not yet finished, an artist who remained as alive as he’d ever been. ♦
Viva Las Vegas: Elvis Returns to the Stage
The King’s first concert at the International Hotel.
By Ellen Willis
August 23, 1969
Las Vegas is more like Hollywood than Hollywood, because the money is changing hands right out front. Committed to veneer as an art form, over-thirty and relentlessly white in essence, if not always in packaging, Vegas is the antithesis of the cultural revolution. Its hopelessly reactionary nature is best exemplified not by the fountains in front of Caesars Palace, or even by the ethnic comedians, but by the existence of—yes—prominent citizens who want to Make Las Vegas Beautiful, which means toning down the neon on Fremont Street and creating vest-pocket parks. Andy Warhol, tolerant as he is, would have a hard time justifying that. Yet the metaphor of the crap game does have its application to rock: “Just give me money, / That’s what I want.” The crass determination to get rich has been one of the great unsung forces behind the cultural revolution. Of course, it has also worked the other way. In the past fifteen years, Hollywood and its variants have bought off plenty of rock performers: the Paul Anka types, who used rock as a detour until the nightclubs were ready for them; black people—like the Supremes—who identified success with whiteness; and, most important of all, Elvis Presley. Elvis, the very definition of rock and roll for its vociferous defenders and detractors, became the first rock-and-roller to switch to ballads for the whole family, and a pioneer (here he had some competition from Annette Funicello and friends) of the unalienated youth movie. You couldn’t blame Elvis. In those days, everyone kept speculating about what would happen to punks like him when the rock-and-roll fad was over. It took the Beatles to affirm the first principle of the cultural revolution: The kids have money, and kid music equals kid capitalism. Colonel Parker, meet Brian Epstein.
When I heard that Presley had accepted an engagement at the new International Hotel in Las Vegas and was to give his first concert in nine years, I knew the confrontation had to be interesting. Elvis was at once old money and young money, sellout and folk hero. How would he play it? In his television special last winter, he wore a leather jacket and wiggled his hips. But then he recorded “In the Ghetto,” which was weak on beat and strong on slush. It was a No. 1 hit—except in the ghetto—and no doubt met with the approval of the Make Las Vegas Beautiful folks. Now Kirk Kerkorian, who owns the International and apparently wants to become Nevada’s other famous tycoon, was energetically promoting Elvis’s return to the stage. He invited all the New York rock writers to come out in his plane—the first privately owned DC-9, remodelled to seat twenty people and make the usual first-class accommodations look chintzy. The press releases for the hotel promised that all its features would be the largest, the newest, and the most expensive. Ordinarily, invitations to junkets—a traditional Hollywood institution—are no problem. Who wants to fly to Houston to see Tony Bennett? But in this case I was faced with a dilemma familiar to observers of revolutions and nuclear particles. To participate would compromise my objectivity; to hold aloof would falsify the experience. In a medium as sensitive to context as rock, the hype is an essential part of the message. The story was not just Elvis but Elvis and all of us in Kerkorian’s womb. I flashed yes, and, along with other refugees from the cultural revolution, armed with long hair, giant sunglasses, and artificial euphoriants, I set out to dig Babylon: Garish is beautiful. There was something to be said for the Las Vegas thing. At the same time, I hoped Elvis would be crude and surly and stomp all over the veneer with his blue suède shoes.
The opening took place in the Showroom Internationale, a two-thousand-seat nightclub whose sublimely irrelevant décor included relief carvings of Greek temples and winged gods and goddesses, and whose menu that night consisted of such tasty items as Aloyau Roti à l’Anglaise Périgourdine and Pointes d’Asperges au Beurre. The audience was 99.44 per cent white and predominantly middle-aged and moneyed; the celebrities present ranged from Fats Domino and Phil Ochs to Pat Boone and Henry Mancini. I was surprised at how seriously people were taking the occasion. They seemed to feel that Elvis was theirs, not just a progenitor of the music their kids listened to. A woman of fifty who had come from Los Angeles whispered excitedly, “My husband thinks I’m real silly, but I always wanted to see Elvis in person.” It was obviously the raunchy Elvis, not the Hollywood Elvis, that she wanted to see.
We had to sit through the Sweet Inspirations—a great black gospel-rock group that persists in wasting its talent singing “Alfie”—and one of those unmentionable comedians. Then Presley came on, and immediately shook up all my expectations and preconceived categories. There was a new man out there. A grown man in black bell-bottoms, tunic, and neckerchief, devoid of pout and baby fat, skinny, sexy, totally alert, nervous but smiling easily. For some reason, he had dyed his hair black. It was the same length as ever, but combed down instead of back into a ducktail. He started with “Blue Suede Shoes.” He still moved around a lot, but in a much different spirit. What was once deadly-serious frenzy had been infused with humor and a certain detachment: This is where it began—isn’t it a good thing? Though the show was more than anything else an affirmation of Presley’s sustaining love for rhythm and blues—we knew it all the time, Elvis—it was not burdened by an oppressive reverence for the past. He knew better than to try to be nineteen again. He had quite enough to offer at thirty-three. He sang most of his old songs, including a few of the better ballads, and a couple of new ones. When he did “In the Ghetto,” his emotion was so honest it transformed the song; for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied. “Suspicious Minds,” an earthy country-rock song about jealousy, which is going to be Presley’s new single, was the highlight of the show. Almost as exciting was his version of “What’d I Say.” The only mistake he made was to sing the coda from “Hey Jude;” once a gimmick has been picked up by Eydie Gorme on a cerebral-palsy telethon, it loses something. But the gesture was understandable. Elvis was clearly unsure of himself, worried that he wouldn’t get through to people after all those years, and relieved and happy when he realized we were with him. As the evening went on, he gained in confidence, and the next night he was loose enough to fool around with the audience, accepting handkerchiefs to mop his forehead and reaching out his hands to women in the front row. During both performances, there was a fair amount of sighing and screaming, but, like Elvis’s sexual posturing, it was more in fun than in ecstasy. It was the ritual that counted: “Of course I screamed. I’m not dead yet.” At the opening-night press conference, I asked Presley if he had had trouble relating to an audience of mostly older people. He shook his head and smiled. “The older people have learned, you know. They can do it, too.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If Elvis continues to perform—he says he wants to—and “Suspicious Minds” is as big a hit as it should be, he could have a significant impact on pop music in the coming months. It remains to be seen whether he can transcend either his grand-old-man image or the Hal Wallis years, but he seems to want to try. I wonder if Colonel Parker approves. Is Parker just an ectoplasmic projection of Presley’s Hollywood side? Will he now shrivel up? The night before I left Las Vegas, I saw him drop five hundred dollars at roulette. You can’t win ’em all. ♦
Published in the print edition of the August 30, 1969, issue, with the headline “Rock, Etc..”
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