Our reporter hits Ground Zero on E Day
by David Madison
In Tupelo, Miss., the town where Elvis Presley was born on Jan. 8, 1935, there's a McDonald's with Elvis images done in stained-glass. Leonard Piskoiski visits Tupelo and the McDonald's every year. He helps pack up the family minivan plastered with Elvis bumper stickers and hits the road, heading south from his home in Michigan.
Like many of the other pilgrims who gathered last week in Memphis to celebrate Elvis' birthday, Piskoiski stands out as an Elvis disciple. His shades are gold and his sideburns are thick. The rest of Piskoiski's hair isn't so lush, but his weathered features afford the slightest resemblance to Elvis. He's an older Elvis, perhaps even as old as the King would have been this year: 65.
Piskoiski is AARP Elvis, senior discount at Shoney's Elvis, Grandpa Elvis. He just joined an Elvis band back in Michigan and often croons solo, singing favorites from the Big E's Vegas years, songs like "It's Now or Never" and "I Can't Stop Loving You." But he's here today, like the others, to commune with the original spirit of rock 'n' roll.
Piskoiski says he never stops being Elvis. "This is me. This is always me. I never change," says Piskoiski, his stringy gray and black hair shifting in the breeze across the street from Elvis' lavish home and resting place, Graceland. He walks among other visitors on the Graceland grounds where Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout declares this day, Jan. 8, 2000, Elvis Presley Birthday Celebration Day.
Using words like "whereas," Rout translates Elvis' legend into the language of an official proclamation. He unscrolls the many influences that shaped Elvis, from "the gospel music he heard in church" to "the black R&B he absorbed on historic Beale Street as a Memphis teenager."
Then Rout mentions another milestone in Elvis' life—his birth as a rock star. "Whereas in 1954," proclaims Rout, "it was the beginning of his singing career with the legendary Sun record label in Memphis, which was to be the advent of an international sensation."
In several languages, the crowd cheers. Eyes water. The song begins: "Happy birthday to Elvis, happy birthday to you."
When the singing stops and the crowd breaks apart, clusters of middle-aged women continue to cling to each other. Dressed in gaudy Elvis windbreakers and wearing too much make-up, some appear moved by the echo of their own screams. They were once teenage girls driven to hysterics by the sight and sound of a gyrating young Elvis. They're now pilgrims. Every year, they celebrate the birth of their own fanaticism by visiting Graceland.
June and Colin Kirby came all the way from Essex, England. A thoughtful and articulate pair in their 40s, the couple attends Elvis fan club get-togethers once a month back home. This is their third trip to Graceland. Marking the occasion, they've placed a crepe paper wreath along the walk leading to Elvis' burial site.
Propped up by a stand like those used in funeral homes, the home-craft tribute reads: "Elvis. The brightest star in heaven... how great thou art."
For June, that greatness comes across brilliantly in a photograph of Elvis she saw inside Graceland. It's sometime early in his career. Elvis is a newborn star. June says, "He's laying on the stage with a microphone. In the 1950s, that just didn't happen, did it?"
Of course, hip shaking, shimmy-step rock superstars didn't exist before Elvis. Sun Studio put out what many consider the first rock 'n' roll record in 1951: "Rocket 88," which featured Ike Turner on piano. And while black musicians like Turner and Chuck Berry were among the first to advance the rock cause, Elvis is credited with stealing the show. The King had it all: He was good-looking, he was talented, and he was white.
On July 30, 1954, Elvis played his first live show at Overton Park in Memphis. "This was a hillbilly crowd," recalls biographer Peter Guralnick in his revered account of Elvis' early life, Last Train to Memphis.
"When Elvis went on stage, his knees were knocking so loud you could almost hear them," continues Guralnick, describing how Elvis broke into his first hit, "That's All Right Mama." The nervous 19-year-old raised up on the balls of his feet, leaned forward, and cut loose. "His lips twisted involuntarily into a sneer, as his legs began to quiver."
The crowd went wild.
Forty-six years later, it's still giving Elvis a standing ovation. Paying $65 apiece, they come in droves to "Elvis—The Concert," a multi-media resurrection of the King on stage. It's the climax of E-Day this year and diehard fans flock to the Mid-South Coliseum, not far from the Liberty Land amusement park where Elvis once threw lavish birthday parties for his daughter Lisa Marie.
Using a two-story video screen flanked by two other large screens, "Elvis—The Concert" offers fans a larger-than-life resampling of video footage from Elvis' concert specials such as Aloha from Hawaii and The Lost Performances. Unfortunately, at $65, the price of admission also seems larger than life—indulgent even, but that's Elvis.
Across town, not far from Sun Studio, a younger set of fans gather at a bar called Last Place On Earth. For $7, the bill promises another breed of multi-media experience. The main draw for those who actually know it's Elvis' birthday is a short film titled Elvis Meets the Beatles. But for many in the crowd, the anniversary of the King's death—August 16—upstages E-Day on the list of rock 'n' roll holidays.
"Everyone's on vacation in August, so more people come," explains Mic Walker, a Last Place On Earth regular and tour guide at Sun Studio. Of all the sideburns shielding cheeks this night in Memphis, Walker's are maybe the largest. He explains that the distance between the base of each chop and his mouth is equal to the width of one razor blade. In beard lingo, Walker's look might be described as an inverted goatee. All chops, no tee.
Walker mingles among other indie music scene loyalists. As Müller, a German singer/songwriter who transplanted to Memphis a year ago, begins playing yet another Bob Dylan cover, Walker perks up.
"He takes Dylan songs, changes the lyrics, and sings with an accent," says Walker. "I don't know, I just find that hilarious."
Others find it annoying, but in a backhanded, tone-deaf kind of way, Müller's presence on stage offers an odd tribute to the King. Elvis wanted the kingdom of rock to become a sprawling and varied territory—a place big enough to accommodate all comers.
It's true that at Graceland, Elvis didn't always embrace variety. There was a six-month period where he ordered his cooks to prepare meatloaf every day. But down in the basement, with his hi-fi, three TVs, and a blue and yellow lightning bolt painted on the wall, Elvis devoured an array of musical styles. As the voice of Priscilla Presley informs headset-clad tourgoers at Graceland, "He really did appreciate other people's talents."
The King may have appreciated the success and song-writing skills of bands like The Beatles, but he certainly wasn't very chatty when the British rock gods met the King in 1965. The Fab Four managed to arrange the meeting at Elvis' apartment in Bel Air. They showed up with their instruments hoping to jam with the King. It didn't happen.
"He just kind laid there on the couch watching TV. He didn't say much," says Walker, whose work at Sun Studio requires a flash card command of obscure rock history. "He had a Fender bass guitar in his lap and he just sat there picking at it. He just kind of ignored them."
The short film, Elvis Meets the Beatles, allegedly recreates this gathering of modern rock almighties. Unfortunately, the filmmakers could not figure out how to free their finished product from a computer editing system in time to show the piece on Elvis' birthday.
The crowd at Last Place On Earth doesn't seem to mind the last minute cancellation. On stage, the star of the film jams with his punk band Vegas Thunder. He's a young, paunchy, Elvis-the-fat-years replica. He looks like he could be Elvis' son. Call him Little E, the imaginary child celebrity washout who bounced from boarding school to speed addiction.
In the crowd listening to Little E wail is an attractive blonde woman named Tasha Reynolds. She claims to be a Priscilla Presley look-a-like. Or at least, that's what some people say.
"I was working at this mall in Los Angeles," says Reynolds, "and this guy would come by the store and yell, 'Hey Priscilla! Hey Priscilla.' It was the funniest thing."
Later, when the conversation changes to the significance of Elvis' birth, Reynolds argues that the beginning of a person's life should be marked by the day they are conceived.
"Because that's when it really begins. We are all really nine months older than we say we are," insists Reynolds, smiling and moving her hand across her belly. "Before I had my daughter, I could feel her moving inside me."
This most basic movement of life may be what Elvis was tapping when he first walked out on stage and allowed his lips to quiver, his legs to quake, and his hips to swivel with delicious force. What he did was unprecedented. It hadn't been conceived by many Americans before he became a star. Elvis taught white America how to party from the waist down—in public.
Before he was born, Elvis shared his mother's womb with a twin. Jesse Garon Presley was delivered stillborn, while his brother seemed to possess an untamed life force. As bandmate D.J. Fontana remembers in Last Train to Memphis, "Elvis was one of those guys that had a lot of energy. A superhyper guy—superhyper."
His fans watched this energy flare up on stage, on the Hollywood screen and then on stage again during his 1970s comeback shows in Las Vegas. Before his death in 1977, Elvis' energy began to dwindle. On his birthday in 1975, he reportedly told friends that he was "fat and 40" and didn't want to see anybody.
That day, Elvis took refuge at Graceland, the colonial mansion he bought when he was 22. Since then, the home has provided a constant backdrop for his life as a celebrity. That life continues, moving inside every rock 'n' roll fan. It takes shape as sideburns on men's faces and as an excuse to trek to Graceland once a year. The draw to this place is great because Graceland is a building Elvis never left.
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