Chuck D in The King (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
The King pushes the metaphoric parallels between the life of Elvis Presley and American exceptionalism as far as the musician’s 1962 Rolls-Royce can go.
Forty years after the death of Elvis, director Eugene Jarecki interviews pundits, historians, and Elvis biographers (including Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus), friends, neighbors, and colleagues (Elvis’s guitarist Scotty Moore before he died in 2016) and also hits the road. The filmmaker invites musicians and the commentators into the backseat of Elvis’s Rolls to sing, play instruments, and explore locations intimately associated with the man and his music. (Although one passenger, singer/songwriter John Hiatt, surprisingly does not break into his “Riding with the King.”)
The car and the documentary symbolically break down several times on the road as the film makes heavy-handed historical comparisons. Jarecki is best when he travels in Elvis’s blue suede shoes and weakest when he tries to link the star’s trajectory to the election of Donald Trump.
Jarecki’s travels are particularly insightful when he can tease out the man vs. the myth. Most revealing is when he travels around Tupelo and Memphis and stops in to see the Presley family’s impoverished roots. Not all the current owners know they are living where Elvis did, including in a housing project that, in the Jim Crow South, put the Presleys adjacent to black neighborhoods.
However, Jarecki lets rapper Chuck D and TV commentator Van Jones react to the myth ad nauseum, with both claiming Elvis’s music was all about cultural appropriation of black culture. Jarecki tries to balance their insistent claim with those who remember Elvis as a genuine fan of gospel music and R & B radio and records. Emmylou Harris succinctly contradicts this argument by pointing out how he blended in country traditions. Another voice (the plethora of which gets confusing) chimes in that even Big Mama Thornton’s original version of “Hound Dog” was written by two Jewish guys, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
TV auteur David Simon points out that driving around in one of Elvis’s pink Cadillacs would have been more appropriate, especially for the symbolism. The frequent clips of Elvis’s mostly bland movies are enjoyable, though only in the early ones, like Richard Thorpe’s black-and-white Jailhouse Rock (1957), does Elvis seem at all revealing. But the films are a useful segue into how manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, took over the singer’s career in 1955—with an anomalous 25 percent cut—away from Sam Phillips’s rootsy Sun Records (where co-executive producer Roseanne Cash’s father, Johnny Cash, was also getting his start).
Parker took Elvis national, first to New York television shows and a major label and then to big Hollywood and Las Vegas paychecks. The money stream also conveniently covered up the truth that Parker was really an illegal Dutch alien who had no U.S. passport to travel outside the country. In Vegas, old-style restaurateur Freddie Glusman entertainingly recalls how Parker’s gambling debts also kept Elvis tied down there. This portion is more informative than Adam Baldwin’s tired reflections on Trump, though a moment when actor Ashton Kutcher, in the Rolls, is besieged by fans inadvertently demonstrates the entrapment of fame.
Even as everybody agrees that Elvis’s 1968 “comeback” TV special highlighted the rock ‘n’ roller underneath the Vegas crooner, Ethan Hawke has the shrewdest analysis, minus any sense of tragedy and pathos about Elvis’s overdose on prescription pills in 1977:
“Elvis at every turn picked money. You know, ‘Should I stay at Sun records? Well, there’s more money at RCA, I’ll go to RCA. Should I take this big, giant movie contract, even though I don’t have any creative control or any guarantees about what I’m working on? Well, it’s the biggest movie deal ever, let’s take it. Should I go on tour like I want to or should I take the biggest offer a live-performer’s ever had in Vegas?’ Every chance he prioritized money, and where did it put him? Dead and fat on the toilet at 42.” Surprisingly, some old friends say Elvis’s pill addiction went back to his brief Army service in Germany.
But this insight gets drowned out in the dissections and montages of the excesses of American capitalism and right-wing nationalism. If you are less interested in the obvious death of the American Dream and more interested in learning less-known facets of Elvis’s life and music, I recommend more Thom Zimny’s recent, much longer, two-part Elvis Presley: The Searcher, which premiered on HBO earlier this year. It has extraordinary archival footage and voice-overs of the Presley family and the musicians he impacted (including Bruce Springsteen, extensively).
Probably one of the few people who really understood Elvis Presley was Stephen Barnard. In his book “Popular Music, Volume I: Folk or Popular?”, a publication director Jarecky should have read before trying to make any metaphor, about anything, especially about Presley, he describes him as follows. And I quote ‘He never understood the artistic claims that were made for him, probably thought very little of the nature of his appeal or his music; yet, as author Greil Marcus points out in ‘Mystery Train’, it is possible to see (all that) as a positive factor; Presley viewed his music as for the body, not the mind, so he recorded and performed accordingly; and, if much of his music sounds superficial, it was thanks to his undoubted vocal talent and extraordinary charisma that, at least, it was all gloriously superficial and celebratory; he knew better than to take it seriously and, in doing so, he become the consummate music figure, one that defines its spirit by delighting in its very limitations. Unquote Too bad neither the documentary nor the reviewer realizes, that it was not just that Presley never took himself that seriously, but that the title of the documentary, as witnessed in 1974 by some 17,000 concert goers at the University of Notre Dame Athletic Center, was what he hated the most. So there is simply no metaphor to be found. It takes two to tango….