The King is Dead (Try to tell that to his fans)

I don't like Elvis. I never have.

There, I've said it. I've been wanting to say it for years, but could never muster the courage. However, I realize that Omnibus is a fairly safe forum for making this confession. I doubt it has very many Elvis fans among its readers. But if word somehow filters out to the wrong people, I may soon be sharing an apartment with Salman Rushdie.

It's not that I have a personal dislike for Elvis, the person. It's his music, his style, his showbiz persona that I always found less than appealing. In fact, if I were asked to rank Elvis for entertainment value on an ascending 1-to-10 scale, I probably would place him at number 2—just above Dick van Patten but right behind Charro.

Blasphemy, you say? Un-American at least? In some quarters, no doubt, both descriptions are apt. If I were to satnd at the corner of Rivers Avenue and Remount Road with a large Elvis Slept with Cale Yarborough sign next to an Iraqi soldier burning an American flag, the soldier would have enough time to run two blocks toward safety, while I was being tire-ironed to death.

Of course, it would be absurd for me to deny that Elvis had a great voice, that the majority of his pop music would proclaim him "King of Rock and Roll," and that he was apparenrly not just an immensely talented guy but also a very nice one. (Nowhere in the mountainous volumes of posthumous print about Elvis do you ever hear an unkind word about him.)

So how could I not like him?

Maybe it had something to do with the first time I saw him on TV. I think I was about 15. Here was this guy with sideburns, a grease-gun-style hairdo, a tacky looking shirt, tight pants and blue suede shoes. I couldn't relate, although the media reported Elvis and instant hit with teenagers across the country. I sure didn't have any friends who looked like that.

In fact, to me, Elvis looked a lot like what the adults called a "drugstore cowboy." I think I first heard the term at 8 or 9 when my mother pointed out this guy walking down Meeting Street. And sure enough—perhaps only by coincidence—he was headed toward the Central Drugstore. Up to that point, I had been somewhat impressed. I had mistakenly thought this person and other like him were real cowboys. And in 1948, Roy Rogers was my ultimate hero; so anyone in cowboy garb really got me excited. I never got a satisfactory definition of "drugstore cowboys." I was only told they weren't "real" cowboys; they probably came from Nashville or even North Charleston.

But Elvis was no real cowboy either. Cowboys didn't wear black leather jackets. He also looked a lot like some of the thugs I'd see at high school dances or football games hanging around their motorcycles or cars, checking under each other's hoods. (Hey, maybe that's why we called them "hoods.")

So I guess I saw Elvis as a kind of combination Drugstore Cowboy/Hood.

As his music evolved, and his celebrity exploded, I continued to find each new hit more offensive than the previous one. Sam Cook, Fats Domino, Johnny Mathis, now those were people whose songs became entrapped within my musical memory bank, very much to my enjoymen! "Sentimental Reasons," "Blueberry Hill," "Chances Are," I could listen to their tunes to the exlusion of all other sounds—especially Elvis renderings such as "Blue Suede Shoes" (I never knew anyone who wore them), "Heartbreak Hotel" (Motel would have been more appropriate, or "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hounddog" (Why?).

I didn't like the way any of his music sounded. His style was outrageous—for those days at least. But then I liked Little Richard's music and he had no competition when it came to outrageous performances. Perhaps it was the Hillbilly tinge. But in those days there were some songs by Ferlon Huskey and Faron Young that I liked, so that really doesn't explain it either.

Elvis made a lot of terrible movies in the 60s. This was sort of overshadowed by the emerging British rock groups in the mid-to-late 60s. In the 70s, Elvis discovered Las Vegas, and it was the uniting of these two show biz Leviathons that finally made me see what it really was that I didn't like about Elvis: the while rhinestone-studded, crotch-hugging suit with the flared pants, the 1-foot-high collar open to his navel, the gold chains and the equally garish cowboy boots. Here, with the longer, blacker and better-lubed hairdo, performing at the neon and sleaze capital of show business was the essence of tawdriness, the epitome of bad taste. This was the tackiest human being on the face of the planet.

Thank God, being an American citizen, I was allowed the right not to listen to or look at him. And being a fervent supporter of the First Amendment, I never tried to prevent others from revealing their low thresholds for entertainment.

Then at the zenith of his tackiness, after having produced one of the worst songs of all times (even for him) "A Hunk of Burning Love," Elvis died, under very tragic circumstances. I felt sad that a genuinely well-liked human being and music legend had passed on prematurely. I also felt relieved that there would be no follow up to "A Hunk of Burning Love."

Little did I know that his demise would cause an even greater sensation than his life For in death, he somehow spawned a malevolent pod, a seed that grew into an entity more grotesque, more foul than the sum total of all his horrific melodies, movies and outfits—the eternally grieving, forever worshipping, insufferably obnoxious Elvis Fan.

Indeed, he may have provided me with yet another reason to dislike him—his legacy. These people are a sort of "Night of the Living Dead" sub-culture or maybe even sub-species.

I think I first noticed them on the first anniversary of Elvis's death. The TV news showed thousands of them moving en masse toward Graceland. I don't think there were that many then. They seem to be multiplying though.

It's my theory they rise up from the bowels of trailer park septic tanks. I don't know how else to explain these people who all seem to be in the same age range (late 40s to mid 60s). Most of them are women. My theory here is that most of the males are charged with protecting the Elvis paraphernalia in their trailers during tornadoes, while the females take shelter elsewhere. Tornadoes, incidentally, are one of only two ways to destroy an Elvis fan. The other is to trap one and force him to listen to a Doors album in Dolby for at least 45 seconds.

These are truly wretched looking people. The women wear either bouffant hairdos or greasy, stringy long hair. The men wear caps advertising automotive parts. They all smoke or have a chaw in their cheeks incessantly, unless there's a tornado alert, since they must then focus their limited mental abilities on the emergency.

Unfortunately, they can never afford to move out of their doomed trailer existence because they spend every last cent on collecting the ever-increasing volume of Elvis memorabilia and making pilgrimages to Graceland.

This group is also responsible for the proliferation of another cultural blight. Tabloid magazines. These were once on the decline due to limited subject matter—UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. Then came stories about Elvis ghosts and Elvis sightings. Can't you imagine the "editorial" meeting?

Editor to staff: "You won't believe this but I have a group out there that is infinitely more stupid and more gullible than our regular readership."

And the music industry quickly followed with its perpetual market saturation of Elvis music. We now have Elvis Day, week and month. We have Elvis film festivals and TV movie reruns. Sometimes in changing my car radio stations, I'll run into an Elvis song on two or three stations simultaneously.

And not to be forgotten are the millions of Elvis impersonators, who enter every talent show from the Citadel's to Ed McMahon's. And, of course, they have become such a formidable force, they have their own conventions now. Maybe one day they will align with the more mundane Elvisphiles and form their own country—right there at Graceland.

It would be fine with me if we could just give them the entire state of Tennessee. It would be the world's largest trailer park. I and my fellow non-Elvis fans could have the rest of the country and all the Elvis freaks could all live happily, together, where they could inundate their existence with Elvis music, movies, books, newspapers, impersonator contests and séance groups. None of that would be allowed in the relatively normal remainder of the country.

Oh, of course, that will never happen, but I can dream, can't I? As a matter of fact, I had a very salutary dream last night:

Elvis, being the nice guy everyone always said he was, appeared during the halftime ceremony of the world monster truck demolition derby with this very succinct announcement: "I'm dead, people. Get a life!"