Celebrity

Tim's Favorite Blogs

Eschew Obfuscation
IM Earthling
Silk Road
The Huffington Post
Media Matters
American Progress
Citizens For Ethics
Crooks And Liars
Common Cause

Media Matters

Blog Directories

Sunday, January 10. 2010

Elvis!

Friday, January 8, would have been Elvis Presley’s 75th Birthday! Eh, but he kicked the bucket, as all recall, August 16, 1977.
Or so they say!

The best line I’ve heard about Elvis “leaving the building” in the past 32 years was delivered by Tommie Lee Jones in the movie, Men In Black:
 Jay (Will Smith): “You know Elvis is dead.”
 Kay (Tommie Lee Jones): “No, Elvis is not dead. He just went home.”

Elvis Presley is an alien!

Elvis changed pop music forever. Saturday Morning some friends and I got into a short discussion about Elvis and of course it turned to the music of today. Just for the record, I like Linkin Park and System of a Down, to name just two. But what these other people, all slightly older than me, were saying were the same things being said about rock’n’roll when it was in its infancy — when Elvis ruled the airwaves: Can’t understand what the singers are singing, it’s all too sexual. I had to laugh. Music is music and as it evolves the older generations are offended by the music of youth.

Not all of us old people anyway.

There’s some Elvis on my iPod, along with vintage James Brown and Chuck Berry. Listening to Chuck right now as a matter of fact, but since this is about Elvis, let’s click on those greatest hits! But I gotta love Check Berry’s guitar playing.

With age comes wisdom they say. Don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but over the years my taste in music has become far more expansive. I wouldn’t call it eclectic, but I like everything from Bach to Alicia Keys, an interesting spread. Keys is a classically trained pianist.

But it was Elvis who made rock’n’roll what it is today: the popular music of choice. That popified country we hear now and then makes a bit of a splash, but really, rock is still the predominant music, if you consider hip-hop to be a rock’n’roll genre.

For the longest time in the 60’s, Elvis didn’t perform live and the only albums he released were the soundtracks for his mostly forgettable movies and the odd Christmas and Gospel albums. But that all changed in 1968.

Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s first wife and the executor of his estate, says Elvis would probably be singing Gospel music and doing a little preaching on the side were he still alive — or on this planet, if he is an alien.

We got our first live performance from Elvis on television when he aired that groundbreaking TV special, ELVIS! December 3, 1968. Man! He was great! Anyone who watched it that night on NBC felt the same way. This was the real Elvis, not the hokey movie character we became so familiar with in the previous seven years.
 Viva Las Vegas was pretty good though. It featured Ann-Margaret!

Elvis Aron Presley finally died alone from a drug overdose August 16, 1977, less than eight years after his big comeback special on NBC. If you remember the movie Bladerunner, there’s that fateful meeting of the replicant Roy Blatty (Rutger Hauer) with his creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkell) in which Dr. Tyrell says the most memorable line from the film: “The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long — and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy!”

Elvis Presley’s light flared twice as brightly as the rest of the music world and like the fictional character of Roy Blatty, Elvis lived half as long. He was but 42 years old when he died. I was off in Okinawa, Japan when Elvis died and the news was a shock. He had become the overweight character that is often ridiculously impersonated by fat guys with lamb chop sideburns and too-tight white bejeweled jump suits, but he was still the King of Rock’n’Roll.

To this day my visual memory of Elvis is from that TV Special, when he was in his prime. That’s the way I’d like to keep it.

•••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• ••••

The other great event that occurred on January 8: my friend Danielle Richardson made her debut as a Playboy Cyber Girl in 2007. She’s pretty nice, very naughty in a not-so-harmless way and isn’t easily offended by the likes of me. Dani has actually embarrassed me on occasion!

Danielle has never been caught up in all the girly stuff of the modeling profession; she still works a day job that she loves and for which she is quite handsomely paid. In other words, Danielle is a pretty down-to-Earth person, not your typical celebrity, nude model type.

And she’s much better looking than Elvis!

Posted by Tim Forkes in Celebrity at 00:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

(Page 1 of 10, totaling 10 entries) » next page