OVERVIEW
{slide= Click here for more} Paul Flynn
Before the truck driver swaggered up to the microphone in Sam Phillips’ tiny studio in Memphis in 1956, life was 40 shades of grey for millions of young people all over the world.
In the cultural sleepwalk of the Eisenhower administration, kids hunkered down for happiness as prescribed by a generation hardened by economic depression and war. Be home on a school night, salute the flag and listen out for the Russian missiles. And keep that music down.
In an era of square-jawed conformity, there was little space for the irresistible swamp magic of what was to become rock and roll music. Black American music was the elephant in the living room that Official America couldn’t bring itself to acknowledge.
Elvis Presley kicked the door off its hinges and changed the world. He was the rope bridge between the two Americas.
Born into gothic poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, he could have chosen to be the poster-boy for Redneck America. Instead, he chose to travel the South on the back of the tour bus with the likes of Chuck Berry, BB King and Big Bill Cruddup, learning his trade and absorbing the primal magic of a music no one had a name for.
For that alone we should honour the man who died alone and unfulfilled 30 years ago this week. But then we come to that voice. Contemporary crooners sold a scenario of saccharine compliance.
Presley threatened to steal your sweetheart then buy you a beer. When middle America choked on their martinis, the night Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, the world suddenly went technicolor. Outrage soon distilled into awe. What followed was a massive cultural gear-shift from which we are still reeling.
Presley led the charge for the sunlit uplands of feel-good America. Brando and James Dean followed, as did the criminally under-rated Marilyn Monroe, and suddenly the teenagers of the world stopped being invisible.
The man never played to an empty seat. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, worked Presley like a circus mule. He never complained. He never had a court of artists and intellectuals to inspire him as The Beatles did.
He had a great producer in the pre-army days, Sam Phillips, and he had loving parents, but that was pretty much all he had.
The constant swarm of hangers-on and middlemen fed off him before he had the chance to build on the creative renaissance of the ‘68 comeback tour.
Although constantly parodied by a contemporary culture which is happy to allow shysters such as Simon Cowell to be arbiters of taste, Elvis never actually fell into self-parody, despite what many critics lazily opine.
The startling beauty of the youthful face was transmuted into his voice as he got older and more tired. Disillusion never infiltrated the man’s voice even when it ate away his joy of life.
Not many sights sicken me so much as some bulldog-faced gombeen dressed up in a rhinestone jumpsuit, murdering those great songs and aping the mannerisms of such a genius of the human spirit. A man with pills in his belly but with God in his throat. Millions of people will lower their heads and look to you this week, Southern Gentleman.
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LOOKING BACK
{slide= Click here for more} Áine Ryan It’s May 1956 and young PJ Clarke is rushing home from his job at The Western People to catch a favourite radio programme on pirate station, Radio Luxembourg. It’s a Saturday, and since there was a half-day, he could listen to ‘those sorts of music programmes’ still remote from Raidió Éireann’s ethos.
A young singer from Memphis, Tennessee, is burning up the charts with songs like Don’t be Cruel, Hound Dog, I Want You, I Need You, I Love You. For budding artist PJ Clarke, however, it’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that is his favourite; although give him a few more months and the excitement of a first youthful romance and it quickly changes to ‘Love me Tender’.
He is singing it now, over 50 years later. “Love me tender/ Love me true/All my dreams fulfilled/For my darlin’ I love you/And I always will.”
We’re sitting in has back garden in Ballina, where, due to the unseasonal sunshine, Clarke has been able to make an altar out of lots of his old vinyl records and wander down a musical memory lane. His old pal and fellow Elvis fan, Noel Kelly, interrupts the reverie with his arrival.
PJ Clarke has just confessed that whenever he runs in to that old flame their mantra remains the same. “Do you remember dancing to Love Me Tender, PJ.” The twinkle in his eye is more ‘divilment’ though than ‘nostalgic’.
“Ah! they were the good old days. When you would head off to the Pavilion Ballroom, it was out the Newport Road, in Westport, or The Ideal, that was on James Street, I think. The dances on St Stephen’s Night and New Year’s Eve went on from 10 o’clock until four the next morning,” recalls PJ.
By the 1960s Ballina had its own dedicated ballroom, the Moyland on the Crossmolina Road, which was opened by former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds’ family. Admission was ten shillings and the Tom Kelly Trio – of which PJ Clarke was a member – was one of the first bands to support such main acts as famous Irish crooner, Brendan Bowyer and the Royal Showband.
PJ Clarke clearly remembers all these bands putting their own individual stamps on Elvis songs: Hugh Toorish and the McCartans (who used to play in Enniscrone) and Johnny Quigley’s Band.
“You see the one thing about Elvis was he had hits in all the different charts: the Billboard, Country and Rhythm and Blues. No question about it, he was King. He broke that orchestral sound made popular by such artists as Doris Day and Tony Bennett. If you listen to the music, it was the off-beat all the time,” muses PJ.
He believes that Bill Haley and the Comets brought Presley’s legacy a little further, while Britain’s Cliff Richard was the main artist to which he was compared by Clarke’s generation.
Coincidentally, during the six decades during which Sir Cliff Richard has been recording, he is the only artist along with Elvis Presley to make the UK singles charts every decade from the 1950s – 2000s.
It was the mid- to late-1960s when drummer Noel Kelly discovered The King. He was living in Britain and playing with bands that blended rock with folk around the many Irish venues in London.
“I was driving from Hayes in Middlesex to Acton the day he died. I got such a terrible shock when the radio [announcement] said: ‘The King is dead.’ I was on Ealing Broadway, the traffic was very heavy and I just pulled up the car and stopped. I really thought it was a joke,” said Noel Kelly.
Both men are emphatic that it was ‘The Colonel’ (Colonel Parker, Elvis’s long-time manager) and his coterie of ‘hangers-on’ at Graceland that ultimately proved to be his undoing.
“It was just terrible seeing him get fat and all those hangers-on around him, He was such a special man. There was no one who could take his place. He was the Sinatra of rock and country,” reflects Mr Kelly.
Kelly breaks into a medley of ‘Wooden Heart’…‘The Wonder of You’…and ‘In the Ghetto’…PJ Clarke provides the back-up. “Treat me nice/Treat me good/Treat me like you really should/ ‘Cause I’m not made of wood/And I don’t have a wooden heart.”
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LIFELONG FAN
{slide= Click here for more} Michael Swords
I was reared on Elvis as it was the music of the time when I was growing up. I would have to say that Elvis was to the music industry what Alex Higgins was to the snooker world. He had 18 number one hits from 1956 to 1969, which, when you think of it, was unreal stuff and a phenomenal achievement.
He had fantastic energy and charisma as a performer and that is what made him so special and so appealing. In every song he had a story and that is what brought me to his music. There was a story in his songs and he adapted the gospel music and made it popular.
His fall from grace related to many factors. I mean, when you look at where he came from – a two-bedroom shack in Tupelo – to achieve such wealth and fame. Basically, he was the first of his kind to live that type of showbusiness life and he had no one to advise him. His mother was a huge figure in his life and when Gladys (his mother) died, aged 42 years, he had no guide and I suppose everything spiralled out of control.
In today’s terms, he would have been a multi-billionaire but, unfortunately, he could not cope. He had a lot of ‘hangers-on’ as well – the Memphis Mafia – while Colonel Tom Parker managed the money-making side but did not really manage any other part of Elvis’s life. There was no such thing as rehab back then either to help him cope with his problems.
I had the opportunity to visit Graceland a few years ago and it was absolutely fantastic and something really special. We went to Tupelo first and it gave us a real sense of what Elvis achieved. Graceland was really special. We saw the graves, his car collection, trophy rooms and costume collection.
When Elvis died in 1977 it was like losing family, he meant that much to me and no other music artist has replaced him in my world since.
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MUSICAL HERO
{slide= Click here for more} Henry McGlade
I AM a huge Elvis fan and have been for well over 40 years. To this day, I still make sure ‘The King’ is part of all the sets I play and if I don’t include an Elvis song at a function, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes up and requests one.
I still have loads of Elvis memorabilia, which I collected during the sixties when Elvis was in his prime, but my prized possession is an autobiography which I managed to get signed by Elvis’s uncle, Vestor, when I visited Graceland and Vegas back in 1979.
I suppose one of my biggest regrets was not getting to meet the man himself. I met other greats like Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristoffersen and Rod Stewart down through the years.
Because of my involvement with the internationally-renowned Castlebar Song Contest, I had planned to go to the States to meet up with some of the world’s top songwriters like Neil Sedaka and Paul Anka. However, I didn’t get to go until 1979, two years after Elvis’s death, which was a pity.
However, it’s still a trip I will always remember. I met with Brendan Bowyer out there, he was a big star on the Vegas circuit and he took me to all the places Elvis played. He also told me a story about how he used to play an Elvis medley as part of his live show in Vegas. Elvis himself apparently heard about this and came along one night to watch Brendan perform. Now that’s what I call pressure.
Another great memory I have in relation to Elvis is getting the chance to interview his backing group, The Jordanaires. They were ever-present with Elvis throughout his whole career, through the good and the bad times. I did a full hour interview with them, I still have the mastercopy, and they had some brilliant stories to tell. It was great to get to talk to people who knew ‘The King’ in person and worked up close with him.
I still remember vividly when I heard that Elvis was dead. In those days, I always listened to Tony Prince on Radio Luxembourg and on the morning of August 16, 1977, I heard him make the announcement. I was working in Fitzgerald’s Record Shop, Main Street in Castlebar at the time and I remember before I went to work I bought every paper I could get my hands on. I also remember everyone who came into the shop that day, no one could really believe he was gone.
I still think to this day he was the best gospel singer there ever was; his Southern roots meant those gospel songs were very important to him.
I suppose because he broke the mould, Elvis will always be remembered when it comes to music greats. He really was The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, one of a kind.
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THE IMPERSONATOR
{slide= Click here for more} Anton McNulty
THE King may have long since gone to the Graceland in the sky but his music lives on, with Elvis impersonators still belting out the hits and bringing in the crowds in droves every weekend.
Elvis never played in Europe, never mind Ireland, and for many who grew up listening to his vinyl LPs on the record player, the impersonator is the next best thing to seeing him play live. Still to this day, hundreds of Elvis fans cram into dance halls around the county to catch a glimpse of a middle-aged man in a white suit pay tribute to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
One of the best known of these impersonators on the Irish cabaret circuit is Greg Traynor – who came to national prominence with his ‘I’m not dead baby, I’m just havin’ a break’ performance in the Kit-Kat ad on television. Greg plays all around Ireland and is no stranger to Mayo, with a loyal following in Westport and Achill in particular.
Greg told The Mayo News that he has been playing Elvis for the last six years and every time he puts on the white Vegas suit, his hips start to move and his persona changes to that of Elvis. The reason he feels that Elvis Presley’s music is still as popular as ever is because it is recognised and appreciated by young and old.
“There are thousands of Elvis fans out there and they are still coming to the shows. It is not just the older generation who turn up, we get a lot of young people too. Only last week, at one show there was a child as young as five dancing to the songs.
“Elvis is recognisable to everyone and that’s why his music is so popular, he is like Coca Cola,” he said.
One of his regular stomping grounds in Mayo is the Achill Head Hotel in Achill and the manageress there, Gillian Patten, said that every time there is an Elvis night in the hotel it draws big crowds.“He puts on an excellent show and does all the moves and really engages with the audience. Greg draws a really good crowd and we love having him here. The audience would be mixed, with locals and tourists, but everyone would join in the dancing and singing. There would be a lot of Elvis fanatics who would know all the words and would be there rain, hail or shine.”
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