Happy Birthday, Elvis

 

Friday, January 08, 2010

 

I don’t think of Elvis in January, so with all the hoopla about his being 75 today had he lived, I am drawn back to when I heard the news of his death during the summer of 1977, a feel the heat and the heart ache at his dying.

I’m a Beatles fan, not a great fan of Elvis, although it is impossible to divide the two since The Beatles owed so much to The King.

This may explain why I felt so acutely sad when the radio reported the death, something magnificent had passed out of my life, and I almost cried.

I was not yet used to death as a reality. My aunt had died two years prior to this, and my grandfather, slightly over a decade before that, and they stood out as monumental moments in my life.

The death of rock stars usually affected me differently.

I found out about Janis Joplin a few hours before the rest of the world when I worked as a messenger in New York City and had to deliver some documents to an apartment connected with her estate and found several hip music people there crying.

Hendrix was more tragic for my best friend, Hank, whose whole live revolved around him at the time, who had tripped through a performance at the Fillmore East and had nearly died of pneumonia at Woodstock, trying to hold out to see Hendrix’s performance there.

Morrison was more remote and came later not long before Elvis, and I was more caught up in the mystery of his death than in anything emotional.

Losing Elvis, however, felt like I had lost a family member, and this foreshadowed the even more acute emotions I felt when John Lennon died.

While some people claim you get used to death, I never did, and as the 80s and 90s and Oughts progressed, I lost most of my family, some of my friends – like Hank – and some of my heroes like George Harrison, each leaving me with the same ache I first felt when I heard about Elvis.

Harrison’s death came so close in time to my mother’s and 9/11 that the emotions all get mixed up inside of me so I can’t think of one without thinking of the others. But Elvis stands out in time, as that one singular moment when I realized not only are Gods like him mortal, but mortals like me are mortal, too.

So my waking to the news of Elvis’ birthday this morning brought me back in time to when I stood on the back of that truck and saw my supervisor waving at me from up front, yelling at me “The King is dead.”

What king? What was he talking about?

And then, we all huddled around the radio on the counter to hear the grim news and to bear witness to the beginning of an end to an era we all believed could never end – Rock and Roll dying before our ears, not in a plane crash, not even in a sudden overdose, although Elvis and Hendrix had much in common in this, but overweight and weary, a fat rock and roll that would age with us, grow fat with us, and would perhaps even die with us, and with Elvis leading the way.