Conversations with Greil Marcus

Dead Elvis, or Long Live the King

63 Dead Elvis, or Long Live the King Geoff Pevere/1992 CBC radio, broadcast on April 5, 1992. Transcribed by Joe Bonomo. © Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Used by permission. It’s been over fourteen years since the death of Elvis Presley, but instead of being left to rest in peace, the King seems to pop up in the damnedest places. That’s right; no matter where you look, Elvis is everywhere. In everywhere from baseball games to Wild at Heart and This Is Spinal Tap, you will find Elvis. From songs by Mojo Nixon to TV programs like Twin Peaks, Elvis refuses to lie down and play—let alone stay—dead. There are people spotting him in burger joints and on the moon; his image pops up in comic books, and is tattooed on people’s flesh. Greil Marcus is a critic and journalist who’s covered rock and roll for many years, and who’s written extensively about Elvis Presley. And the aliveand -kicking nature of Elvis Presley’s posthumous career hasn’t surprised Greil; he’s even written a book about it, a book called Dead Elvis. Greil Marcus joins me from our studio in Berkeley, California, to talk about why the ghost of Elvis continues to haunt us all. Geoff Pevere: Hi, Greil. Greil Marcus: Hi, it’s good to be here. GP: Nice to have you. Do you remember when it was you first heard, or heard about, Elvis Presley? GM: No, I don’t remember the absolute first time. It was somewhere in 1956, and I had a classmate—I was in the fourth grade then, here in the San Francisco Bay Area— who was a rabid Elvis Presley fan. This was very early. This was before “Heartbreak Hotel” had come out; this was before he had become a national figure, before he’d ever appeared on national television. 64 CONVERSATIONS WITH GREIL MARCUS And he played his first concert outside of the South in Oakland in 1956. And this classmate of mine went to the show. And I remember, very clearly, all of us in class, particularly the boys, making merciless fun of her for going to see this weird greaser. That was essentially it. But what was actually going on was that we were envious of her for having the nerve to do what we all really wanted to do, for having the nerve not only to go to this concert, but to step outside of herself, step outside of her inherited, middle-class—in her case, Jewish—New York City identity (her parents were from New York) and make a leap, and confront something new and threatening and different. I think even as little kids, we understood somehow that a lot was at stake with this. And I remember for weeks after she came back, we teased her, and we taunted her. And we also tried to get her to tell us, without exactly asking her straight out, what was it like. GP: Now, as you became older and started to think more seriously about music and its role in American culture, what was it about Elvis that began to fascinate you? GM: Well, I’d been an Elvis fan in the ’50s. I’d bought his records; I’d loved his music. But I kept my distance. And it wasn’t until his comeback television show in pretty much Christmas time of 1968, when he appeared on TV sitting on stage dressed in black leather, with a guitar player—Scotty Moore, his original guitarist—a drummer beating on a guitar case with a couple of drumsticks, and sang his heart out, that I began to sense that there was so much more here than I had ever guessed. There was a great, heroic, potentially tragic story; I don’t mean that I foresaw his horrible end. I don’t mean that at all, but I mean someone who had gone so close to oblivion, and was now stepping back. That seemed, to me, quite a story. And it’s then that I dove into his music, and really began to hear a lot of it for the first time. That’s what set the fascination in my heart, and kept me going after he died, and made me so fascinated by the way in which thousands of people, all over the country and all over the world, were refusing to let this person go once he’d died. GP: Now, Greil...