The line I remember best about Elvis's undignified exit from this mortal coil on Aug. 16, 1977 was by Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the legendary Sex Pistols, who spat: "Too bad it wasn't Mick Jagger." :)

I toured Graceland in 1992. I still have a souvenir bottle of Elvis's Love Me Tender moisturizing lotion from that trip, along with a Graceland snow bubble and a way-cool pen that has a pink Caddy sliding in it. At one point, I had a plaster-of-paris Elvis bust, but it came from an Italian grocery story at Hallam and Ossington in Toronto (alas, it didn't survive my fourth-last move).

Porcelain Monkey A friend of mine who saw this blog posting sent me a sound file of Warren Zevon's Porcelain Monkey. Here's a sample of the lyrics: From a shotgun shack   singing Pentecostal hymns Through the wrought iron   gates to the TV room He had a little world, it was   smaller than your hand It's a rockabilly ride from   the glitter to the gloom Left behind by the latest   trends Eating fried chicken with his   regicidal friends That's how the story ends With a porcelain monkey

My summary of Graceland was that The King was one tacky hillbilly -- but you knew that, didn't you? But based on my love of kitschy trinkets, who am I to judge? In any event, the porcelain monkeys were something that freaked me out (why so many?!?!). It might also be a defence for the King, however weak, to note that garishness was good in the 1970s.

But regardless of his decorating taste, when you look at those miles of gold records on his hallway walls, you have to give him some respect. Not many people in the music business have accumulated that much hardware. He sold 300 million records to do it.

Sales alone, however, don't earn him an honoured place for me in rock 'n roll history.

For me, when I listen to That's All Right [Momma], Mystery Train or Blue Moon of Kentucky, I imagine a teenage Elvis instinctively figuring out how to fuse the creative energies and sounds of those two great underclass cultures of his world -- poor southern blacks and whites; gospel, blues, rhythm 'n blues, bluegrass and country music -- and create something new. When I do that, I instantly forget about the stuff that made him such an object of scorn in what had become his very unhappy life. Instead, I marvel at how those songs, primitive recordings from half a century ago, can still put a shiver in my spine, a smile on my face and a tap in my toe.

(A few years ago, I was at Graffiti's in Kensington Market when a local band called the Sin City Boys closed their set with Suspicious Minds. Everybody rocked out to it with a look of absolute, pure joy on their faces).

If you ever want to learn more about him, the definitive books are Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, both by Peter Guralnick.

Here is an excerpt from the first. It's about when Elvis and his boys first recorded That's All Right [Momma], a song by a minor blues singer named Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup. The day was July 5, 1954.

"Sam (Phillips, owner of Sun Records) recognized it right way. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup -- nothing in any of the songs he'd tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, "this is where the soul of man never dies." And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music he records -- it was 'different,' it was itself."

Musical historians will argue this point forever, but it could fairly stated that July 5, 1954 marked one of the contractions that led to the birth of rock and roll.

Since it's my blog, I can write pretty much whatever the hell I want, and what I want is to address some lyrics from 1989's Fight The Power, by Public Enemy:

Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me, you see
Straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain
Motherfuck him and John Wayne

In a 2002 interview (I believe with Newsday), Chuck D of Public Enemy clarified:

"As a musicologist - and I consider myself one - there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions. As a black people, we all knew that. My whole thing was the one-sidedness - like, Elvis' icon status in America made it like nobody else counted. ... My heroes came from someone else. My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes. As far as Elvis being 'The King,' I couldn't buy that."

For the record, if you can believe Last Train to Memphis, and I think you can, Elvis was far from being a racist. He was always welcome on Beale Street, the heart of black culture in the mid-south, and counted luminaries like the great bluesman B.B. King (then most famous as a Memphis DJ) as his friends.

Far from shamelessly ripping off black culture, he once publicly told King, "Thanks, man, for the early lessons you gave me." There were numerous other instances where he acknowledged his debt to black music. He rose from friend to hero status in the black community when he went to the Fairgrounds Memphis amusement park during what was designated 'coloured night' in those segregated times of the mid-1950s.

For that reason and others, Aug. 16 isn't a day for me to just enjoy a nasty chuckle at what Elvis became in later life, but to remember a genuinely nice, decent young man with a fearsome talent and burning ambition who helped create a music revolution.

Next Jan. 8 will mark the day when Elvis would have turned 70. I hope I remember to say, "Thanks, King. Happy birthday and rest in peace."

PS: Rent Bubba Ho-Tep. Now, if possible.

Addendum, Jan. 8, 2005: Here's my post Happy Birthday, King!

Addendum, Aug. 16, 2007: Check out Elvis's death day - The 30th anniversary edition