Fever (4 page)

… Until Elvis, “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” I was a boy with four brothers and no sisters. Elvis, like a fifth, did nothing to dispel the haze that mystified my every notion of what a girl was, but he taught me how to dance with one, how to touch her hip, and how to take the wild disapproval of parents and church, teachers and chaperones as a signal that these feelings, as much erotic as rhythmic, were rightly ours. Because of Elvis, I found myself belonging to a new group—not Catholics, the parish, school, or even family, not the military either, but “youth.”

… Eventually he would be called The King, but he was already king to me, my truest lord, the one in whom … I found my first identity, not as my father's kind of Catholic or my mother's kind of son or my siblings' kind of brother, but simply as me.

If Presley's early records can seem deliciously coy in the wake of what followed, it's only because the ensuing sexual frankness makes them seem innocent. After all, the beach scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr from
From Here to Eternity
(1953) was the
Last Tango in Paris
(1973) of its day. Where Wayne used restraint and inhibition, Presley exuded confidence through extroversion, reveled in the confusion about his own vulnerability, and delighted in the idea of himself as a sexual plaything. “That's All Right,” his Crudup cover, was a gauntlet tossed at the whole idea of Wayne's persona: Greil Marcus in
Mystery Train
wrote how Presley “turns Crudup's lament for a lost love into a satisfied declaration of independence, the personal statement of a boy claiming his manhood.”

One of the mainstays of John Wayne's code was how a man—whether he's a gentleman or a cattle rustler—was supposed to behave in front of a woman, an ethic that persisted even at the expense of her self-respect (like when he tries to flatter Vera Miles in
Liberty Valance
by saying “You sure are cute when you're angry,” a line that became a yardstick of macho insensitivity). Presley had no such qualms. What you hear in Presley's recording of “That's All Right” is a young man unleashing every impulse his father held in check. There's hardly a sound in the recording that isn't ecstatic—it's a young man sensing a bigger world for perhaps the first time, and letting that exuberance lift and carry him toward what he wants. This new style of manliness was far more than just the Saturday-night hillbilly kicking down the door of Sunday-morning respectability; it's a teenager at the peak of his physical powers getting his first taste of freedom—of sex, of self-determination—and gunning it. It kicked off what Greil Marcus called “the heyday of Sun Records and rockabilly music, a moment when boys were men and men were boys.”

Perhaps because “That's All Right” was such a disruption, a joyride that targeted prevailing ideas about “manhood” to their core, the next few songs Elvis cut were ballads, reassuring consolations like “I Love You Because,” “Harbor Lights,” “Blue Moon,” “Tomorrow Night” (the male precursor to the Shirelles' “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), and “I'll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin').” Here was an outpouring of feeling John Wayne would never catch sight of from the corner of his eye.

Frank Sinatra pitched woo with knowing sentimentality, but his songs and delivery all hewed to Tin Pan Alley's version of Wayne's code. Urbane, witty, and unflappable, Sinatra hung on to his mike stand as though it gave him strength, and wooed women with enough restraint and finesse to make up for his skinny physique. With Sinatra, vulnerability was acceptable inside a song, as long as that was the only place it got expressed. Presley, on the other hand, made openly falling apart for a woman seem attractive, enviable, even worthwhile. Who could refuse the man who sang “Heartbreak Hotel” as though a woman's rebuff meant a life sentence of misery, where loneliness equaled death? The very idea that a woman could drive him to such heights and depths was proof that these emotions were worth feeling. Where Sinatra kept a gentleman's check on his emoting—and kept it in the service of the music—Presley wallowed in it. Moreover, it would never have occurred to Sinatra to turn his own body into a sex object; the sex was all in the song. Elvis took what women wanted to hear further—the sound of a man doubled over with feeling—and redefined it as cool for all the men in his audience. This, too, was all in the service of the rhythm and blues he sang.

*   *   *

Presley's films are numerous and, sadly, ludicrous. But he worked out his persona through his singing, and the show-business industry couldn't emasculate him nearly as much through recordings as they did on film. Presley's vocal agility became analogous to Wayne's physical control. A lot of listeners cower at the way Presley played the romantic wimp, but his sentimentality was really just another strand of how he rewired manhood: why not get on your knees and plead to a woman, if that would make the difference? And if women liked the scatting and riffing just as much, what were Presley's aching tremolo and swooping low register good for if not some slurpy ballads? Where Wayne played romantic scenes with diffidence, as if antsy for the more heroic encounters with other men, Presley gave romanticism a rockabilly fool's glint. You could hear the self-consciousness in the music—with lines this drawn out, this exuberantly extended, his romantic pitches were full of play. Listen to the wordplay intro to “Baby, Let's Play House,” which was really another way of saying, “What are we waiting for?” Or the way he steers “I'll Never Let You Go” into a lascivious rockabilly coda (like “I Got a Woman” in reverse).

By contrast, Wayne labored at his soft moods and avoided soapboxes of desire. Even though his acting was shallow, Presley would have uttered that line (“You sure are cute when you're angry,”) with comparative panache, with the self-possession that told you how corny it was—and let the lady share in the sheer effrontery of it. And there are simply no Wayne analogs to the unbridled vocal freedom in Presley numbers like “I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine” or “Just Because,” or hard rockers like “Good Rockin' Tonight” or “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” Perhaps to many, Wayne rocked hard on the inside, but Presley made sure all that presence was front and center: in the song, onstage, in his body.

It was in blues numbers that Presley began refining how (white) men could reimagine the idea of manhood: outbursts like “Trying to Get to You,” “His Latest Flame,” or “One Night.” This last number, the Smiley Lewis song about an orgy (available with the original lyrics on
Reconsider Baby
), got edited from “One night of sin” to “One night with you” to assuage the RCA censors. But this edit doesn't suggest that Presley was “cleaning up” his image as much as it reveals how he buffed up the surface to let the ulterior motives shine through. The song's emotional hangover reflects the two singers' differing racial attitudes toward sex: Presley brings a touch of guilt to what Lewis recalls with pure glee. But even without the dirty lyrics, nobody has much question what he's singing about. In “Ain't That Loving You Baby,” Presley lets loose with a beguiling sexual energy, the kind that tells you he would beat Wayne in any contest for any woman.

Presley turned seduction themes into metaphors for the way he inveigled his audience and for the fame and money that trailed his every move. Part of Wayne's (and his ilk's) resentment against Presley's fame was surely about how easy the young King made it all seem. Wayne's ethic was about earning your pride, winning your standing among men by proving yourself through valor, heroism, and good deeds; sex was an invisible footnote. Presley's response was all about instant satisfaction, the pleasure of now, and a lack of anxiety about what's “proper.” In other words, Presley's sound is the saloon party Wayne left early to go on Indian lookout.

*   *   *

Hollywood tried to hitch its fortune to rock 'n' roll's locomotive, but the train was already barreling out of town, leaving screenwriters and actors in catch-up mode for at least a decade. Beginning with Elvis Presley gyrating his hips unlike any man before or since, and Jerry Lee Lewis shaking his ducktail loose as he roared out “A Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On,” rock songs poured from jukeboxes with new gender poses. From hairstyles to lifestyles, extremes were the rule: a whole generation of performers who came of age after 1955 either confronted the bland Norman Rockwell male-female stereotypes with bold poses of eccentricity or twisted the norms beyond recognition. Audiences weren't far behind.

Almost immediately, it seemed, the fault lines were everywhere. David Halberstam makes a crucial point about how TV father Ozzie Nelson tried to turn his son Ricky's music into something that profited the
Ozzie and Harriet
show in 1957. Ricky Nelson loved rock 'n' roll for its independent spirit and powers of self-definition, and he was reluctant at first—at sixteen, he just didn't feel ready. But once he sang Fats Domino's “I'm Walkin,'” he became a sensation, and had to grow up as a musician in public. “Rock was the critical issue with which the young could define themselves and show that they were different from their parents,” Halberstam notes. “Now here was his father taking what was truly his and incorporating it into the show, giving it, in effect, an
Ozzie and Harriet
seal of approval … Because his father had pushed him so quickly and made him play on the show before he was ready, he was a joke to real musicians—whose approval he desperately sought.” Here was another father-son conflict writ large in the American psyche: the father whose narcissism overwhelmed even his notoriously bland taste. Ricky Nelson became that much more of a rock 'n' roller because of the way he wrote songs as deathless as “Lonesome Town” in spite of this demeaning situation.

It's always been a measure of Hollywood unease with the rock sensibility that it never picked up on its frank sexual energy until the late 1960s, with Warren Beatty's
Bonnie and Clyde
(1968). Jack Nicholson, the first big star whose persona extended what Brando, Clift, and Dean set in motion, didn't break through until
Easy Rider
(1969). There were certainly no male characters analogous to Elvis Presley on television, unless you stretch things to count Eddie Haskell, the conniving smart aleck on
Leave It to Beaver
(who was played for comedy), or Rod Serling, so suave in the face of the
Twilight Zone
paranormal. Brando, Clift, and Dean had new ideas about how men could behave on screen, but Presley was the gate crasher for a brigade of like-minded performers on the rock circuit, and soon, in the rest of popular culture.

Rock music's grand themes surround the quest for identity: how it felt to be an adolescent walking in John Wayne's enormous shadow. Once Elvis Presley shook free from old postures, a colorful parade of rock figures—from Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry to Bo Diddley and Little Richard—offered teenagers tempting and adventurous new attitudes about postwar adolescence. Rock characters cast new prototypes for their listeners in search of post-Victorian ways of being sexually candid adults.

John Wayne's sensibility was so broad that there wasn't the rich variety of male role models available then the way there came to be—in simple terms, you were either a romantic lead or a newfangled tough guy/rebel; your allegiance was either with Wayne or with Presley, with Eisenhower or with Marlon Brando in
The Wild Ones;
your sidekick was either Dean Martin alongside Wayne in
Rio Lobo
or Sal Mineo alongside Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
; you preferred either Tin Pan Alley craft like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra or new songwriting sharks like Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, Smiley Lewis, Lieber and Stoller, and Buddy Holly. The argument in Barry Levinson's film
Diner,
set in 1959, posed this question as a decisive matter of taste: Who's the greatest singer of all, Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis? Mickey Rourke trumps the others by saying simply: “Elvis.”

The ripple effect from Presley's impact leads to increasing gender conundrums throughout 1950s pop music. Frankie Lymon's curious appeal transcended gender—not just as a youngster, but as a young man whose very emotional makeup seemed feminine and childlike, not yet burdened by the adult male ego. With his hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” in early 1956, Lymon scored a top-ten hit at the age of thirteen (fronting the Teenagers). The sound of his voice, especially when it flipped up into an effortless falsetto, was a phenomenon: it was a boy singing a man's song, which was half its appeal. But it was also a boy suffused in the conventions of doo-wop, eager to participate in the larger pop world he imagined for himself. So in a way he was romancing pop itself. No matter what the facts were, Lymon's voice told you that he was too innocent to conceal anything he didn't believe in. This wasn't a boy you would mistake for a girl, but neither was it a boy you'd mistake for a man. Soon there was Neil Sedaka, a Juilliard pianist who sang in a sugar-high tenor and wrote like a girl-group devotee right as the genre was getting started (“Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Oh! Carol,” inspired by Carole King).

Lymon influenced ambitious future preteen singers like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson to simply be themselves as youngsters—preadolescents—unafraid NOT to be grown-ups (Jackson, of course, looms large in rock's gender byways—more on him later). But unlike Jackson, Lymon wasn't a freak show, a boy paraded around in front of adults as a novelty. Instead, his sincerity and longing epitomized the doo-wop aesthetic in its purest form. Doo-wop paralleled Presley's ascent and, as an offshoot of R&B crooning for vocal groups, had its own parallel universe of male customs: high falsetto swooning, in homage and imitation of the female voice, let street-corner guys revel in effeminate qualities they were supposed to keep under wraps.