The Day the Music Died

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Was it 30 years ago? I think that’s what they said on the radio. I remember exactly what I was doing when the news came in.

I was sitting in a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—how I used to love drinking Jack Daniels and smoking in New York City bars!—when the nightly news announced that Elvis had died. Stunned, I went directly to the pay phone (no cells in those days, kids) and attempted to call my older sister in California. I say attempted because her number wasn’t lodged in my brain, and I didn’t have my address book with me. After failing to get the number from Information—I think I was a little drunk—I went back to my barstool.

This wasn’t an upscale swingles’ bar like Marvin Gardens a few blocks away. Nor was it a dive like a few others in the neighborhood. It was just a small, dark, neighborhood place with peanuts on the bar and rows of bottles shining like jewels. The clientele was mixed—mostly semi-lonely people like me, who’d wandered in for lack of anything better to do on a week night and ended up bonding over Elvis. We all had one thing in common: an emotional relationship to Elvis that went beyond the superficial. As Lester Bangs said in the Village Voice the next day: We have never agreed about anything the way we agreed about Elvis, and so instead of saying goodbye to him, I’ll say goodbye to you.

Elvis figured large in a favorite family story. The night he made his debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, my parents, my sister and I were all gathered around the television, as usual for a Sunday night. As soon as he opened his mouth (was it Hound Dog?), strummed his guitar and gyrated his soon-to-be-famous sexy hips, my sister let out a scream to pierce the as-yet undiscovered black holes of space. I, three years younger—only 11—took all my cues from her, and screamed along. My father’s round cheeks burned brightly as he shouted, Write down this jerk’s name and look at it ten years from now—I guarantee you won’t remember who he is!

Could he have chosen anyone more ironic to dismiss? We laughed, much to his embarrassment, for decades. I wonder if he and Elvis met in the afterworld, and if my father spoke to him. Maybe he apologized. More likely he cursed at the guy who made  a fool of him.

All too soon, the Army took Elvis away and messed him up. He looked incredible all buff and fit in the uniform, but when he came back he was never the same. Knowing the things we know now about our government, I wouldn’t be surprised if they brainwashed him, or planted a chip in his brain, or numbed his sexuality with drugs.

Everyone knows what he soon became: the puffy fat Las Vegas druggie—but he never lost his crooked, one-of-a-kind smile. I’m seeing it now in my mind’s eye, and my hormones are poppin’.

Elvis never died in the popular imagination, what with all the “sightings” and the look-alike industry. When I surfed the Internet just now for a picture–in plentiful supply–his voice emerged from my computer singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. My heart trembled, and I remembered: it wasn’t just his hips or his smile that was sexy and wonderful: it was his voice. Rest in peace, sweet king.

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Filed under Death, Elvis, Musings, celebrities, memoir, music