Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died - Couverture rigide

Jones, Dylan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1468309676 ISBN 13 : 9781468309676

Editeur : Overlook Books, 2014

Synopsis

‘The King’ departed this world during the month of punk rock’s apotheosis. Punk had set out to destroy Elvis, or at least everything he came to represent, but never got the chance, as Elvis destroyed himself before anyone else could. Nearly forty years after his death, rock’s ultimate legend and prototype just won’t go away and his influence and legacy are to be found not just in music today, but the world over.
          
Elvis Presley has permeated the modern world in ways that are bizarre and inexplicable: a pop icon while he was alive, he has become almost a religious icon in death, a modern-day martyr crucified on the wheel of drugs, celebrity culture, junk food and sex. In Elvis Has Left the Building, Dylan Jones takes us back to those heady days around the time of his death and the rise of punk. Evoking the hysteria and devotion of The King’s numerous disciples and imitators, Jones offers a uniquely insightful commentary on Elvis’s life, times and outrageous demise.

Recounting how Elvis single-handedly changed the course of popular music and culture, Jones delves deep into the cult of The King and reveals the universal importance of what Elvis’s death meant and still means to us today.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Dylan Jones is the Editor of GQ. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and St. Martin’s School of Art in London before becoming the Editor of i-D magazine. He has since been an editor at the Face, Arena, Observer and The Sunday Times. Jones has won the BSME Editor of the Year award seven times, and was awarded an OBE in 2013. He has written studies of David Bowie and Jim Morrison, in addition to two anthologies of journalism and more on technology, popular culture, the war in Afghanistan and even Prime Minister David Cameron.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Also by Dylan Jones

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Cameron On Cameron: Conversations With Dylan Jones

Mr. Jones’ Rules For The Modern Man

iPod Therefore I Am: A Personal Journey Through Music

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Haircults

Copyright

From the Roxy to eternity, and back again

John Updike, from “Jesus and Elvis”

INTRODUCTION

Exit Stage Left

“Elvis Presley is like the ‘Big Bang’ of Rock’n’Roll.

It all came from there” – Bono

The phrase “Elvis has left the building” was used for the first time on December 15th, 1956, by the promoter Horace Lee Logan, telling the crowd at his Louisiana Hayride, broadcast from the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium, that the young star had left the premises through the stage door. This night, like so many nights in future, Elvis was accompanied by his police escort. He had played the Hayride two years previously, but now he was a massive star, and needed all the protection he could get. What Logan actually said was: “All right, all right, Elvis has left the building. I’ve told you absolutely straight up to this point, you know that he has left the building; he left the stage and went out the back with the policeman and he is now gone from the building.”

Logan was not in fact trying to get the crowd to leave, but to persuade them to stay and see the rest of the acts on the bill. After Elvis had given his final encore and left the stage, the crowd rushed for the exits, even though many other Hayride acts were still waiting to perform. Logan didn’t want them traipsing round the back hoping to get a glimpse of the new boy.

“Please, young people,” he continued over the tannoy, in desperation. “Elvis has left the building. He has gotten in his car and driven away … Please take your seats.” Later, the phrase would be used as a way to clear a room, to encourage people to leave, but this first time that wasn’t the case at all.

Even back then Elvis Presley was trouble.

That December night turned out to be the last time Elvis would ever play the Hayride. His manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, had just bought out his contract, and Elvis’s show there was never broadcast on the KWKH radio station again.

“Elvis has left the building …”

Throughout Elvis’s Las Vegas years, indeed any time he played a concert, the words would be delivered, matter-of-factly, after the encore, in order to calm the crowd down, or to get them to pick up their bags and their drinks and their posters and go home. Sometimes it was the MC, sometimes a backing singer, and quite often the promoter. But it was always said. It became the punchline to a thousand different jokes, some verbal punctuation, while baseball announcers on radio and television used the phrase as a way to signal a home run. When singing the closing theme to the television series Frasier, Kelsey Grammer would sometimes follow the last line with his own version: “Frasier has left the building.”

As the Chicago Reader’s Straight Dope column once put it, the meaning is clear to all: “the show’s over, the curtain has fallen, the sun has set, that’s all she wrote, the fat lady has sung, our work here is done, move along, nothing more to see … so long, hasta la vista, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here … Scotty, beam me up.”

The fateful words were said for the last time at the end of Elvis’s final performance, in Indianapolis on June 26th, 1977. On August 16th that year, Elvis left the building forever.

Like the murders of JFK and RFK, or the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley’s death is etched in our collective memory. Whether we’re fans or not. Everyone over a certain age can remember exactly where they were when they found out that Elvis was dead. For over twenty years, since the birth of rock’n’roll in 1956, Elvis had been part of the very fabric of American life. He was an object of desire and worship the whole world over. A life without Elvis was unthinkable, unimaginable. Yet the news was incontrovertible: on August 16th, 1977 he was pronounced dead, having been rushed to the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis.

We still feel his death today. A 2004 Samaritans survey of Britain’s most emotional memories, for example, placed Elvis’s death at No.20, after events such as the fall of the Berlin wall, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and the 9/11 attacks.

One man, who was barely ten at the time, remembered the moment vividly. “I’d been playing in the garden and when I came inside I found my mother sitting on the stairs, crying. I’d never seen her cry before. I asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Elvis is dead.’”

“My parents sat me down with very serious looks on their faces,” recalled a similarly young fan. “My grandfather, who I didn’t know very well, was ill so I assumed they were going to tell me he had died. When they said it was Elvis who had died, I was completely distraught and wished it had been my grandfather …”

In the words of another, “I was working as a lifeguard at an outdoor swimming pool in British Columbia. I was on the deck and another lifeguard, who was [another] huge Elvis fan, came running out of the guard shack waving his arms, yelling, ‘Elvis is dead!’ I remember the pool, which was very busy, fell really quiet.”

According to a British devotee, “I was fixing a TV set and listening to Capital Radio late in the evening. I was just wondering why they’d played several Elvis songs in a row when the DJ announced, ‘The King is dead.’ All of the pop stations played nothing but Elvis for the rest of the evening.”

As for me, I heard the news sitting in the saloon bar of the Nag’s Head pub on London Road in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where most of the punk bands in the area played at the time. The Nag’s Head was owned by Ron Watts, who also ran the 100 Club in Oxford Street, and everyone who played there played here. I was just seventeen. As the news spread around the bar, a couple of people appeared to cheer half heartedly, although after some stern looks from the barmen, mostly there was hush. Without access to anything other than secondhand information, the rest of the evening was spent in speculation. If it really was true, how exactly had he died? Was he alone? Was he naked? Was it true that it was a drug overdose? Could it have been suicide? I had just finished a dry run of packing for an imminent move to London, to Chelsea, and was about to start a new life. I wasn’t an Elvis fan, but this was monumental news, and my friends and I spent most of the evening absorbing its impact. If I recall correctly, that largely involved repeating the fact that Elvis was actually dead, “Fucking dead,” over and over again.

“Fuck, Elvis is dead!”

“Fuck me, you’re right. Elvis is dead!”

Media speculation about Elvis’s wellbeing – his mental state and health – had been so rife that for many his death was a tragedy waiting to happen. However it was no less shocking. After a while we began to feel as though this was our JFK moment, and that we would always remember where we were when the fat lady sang. There were the two Davids, Ross, Julian, and Russell in the bar that night, all of us around the same age, plus a couple of Americans who had just thrashed us at pool. They were more upset than anyone. They went to put some Elvis on the jukebox, but so many people were crowding around it, determined to play Thin Lizzy, Eddie & The Hot Rods and Dr. Feelgood, that they never got near it.

We were young, but there were people there that night – older men – who were far more affected than us, and their grief for Elvis clearly bound up with mourning their own lost early youth.

Then there was Sid, or “Syd” as he had rebranded himself some time before we all met him, thinking that the Syd Barrett/Pink Floyd connotations would play well in the saloon bar of the Nag’s Head. Sid was about twelve or thirteen years older than us – a lifetime when you’re seventeen – a light bulb dimmed by excessive drug consumption which, when we first met him, made him appear strangely exotic. He smoked dope all the time, and while this was appealing to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds like ourselves, even we found his habit excessive.

Being older, and owning a car, Sid became by default our driver. Whenever we were planning an excursion to Beaconsfield or Rickmansworth, or we thought we needed to spend a Saturday night at Skindles in Maidenhead, the Red Cow in Hammersmith, the Marquee in Wardour Street, or indeed the Nag’s Head; whenever we decided to spend all night up in the woods above Marlow smoking Red Leb, drinking cider and listening to The Faust Tapes, Gong’s Camembert Electrique or the first Stooges album (Sid loved the first Stooges album), Sid would be the designated driver, regardless of what condition he might be in, and regardless of what he intended to consume.

That was the thing with Sid: he didn’t outwardly change when he was under the influence of drink and drugs. He appeared to be stoned all the time, which I must admit we found appealing. “Sid’s Van,” a dilapidated old blue long-wheelbase Transit that had presumably seen better days, became the default response whenever any of our gang asked how we were going to get somewhere. “How? Sid’s van.” If one of us asked how we were going to get to and from the Reading Festival, Friars Aylesbury, the Hand & Flowers, the 100 Club or the Rainbow – or anywhere, come to that – Sid was immediately appointed our de facto chauffeur. He never volunteered, but it was always assumed that Sid would put down the bong, turn off the Deep Purple and leap up into the cabin.

Sid had a van, Sid could drive, and so Sid would drive us. It was as simple and as effective as that. He could navigate the B-roads of Buckinghamshire and the byways of Soho even when heavily self-medicated, and he would often stop and ask for directions in London with a huge and inelegantly rolled spliff hanging from his lips, attached simply by muscle memory. He was a lovely, sweet man, who went through life assuming that everything would turn out all right as long as he spent every waking hour out of his gourd, smoking roll-ups, listening to Hawkwind on the eight-track in his van and finding the funny side of almost every situation. A carpenter by trade, he would spend hours with a Rotring pen, drawing extravagant speaker cabinets that he would never find the time to make, proudly showing us all while we nodded and asked him to take us to Slough for the night.

Sid was our Gandalf, our guru, our sage, our man who had been there at the beginning. For Sid loved Elvis. Not in a cheap, ironic way, but with a genuine passion. We occasionally teased him about it, but we learned not to; this was one of the few things that would turn his mood, which would cause him to cross the central reservation on the M40 and drive back to High Wycombe. Sid was always good at digging up new music, and whether it was Tom Petty or the new Eagles LP, you could guarantee that Sid would have it before anyone else. He liked all the old head music – Greenslade, Soft Machine, Jefferson Airplane, the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac – but he was also deep into Iggy Pop and the MC5, and when punk came along he was one of the first of our gang to wholeheartedly embrace it. He felt no desire to dress like a punk – at his age it would have been ludicrous – but he got “where they are coming from.” But as we were driving back from some party in the small hours, as we were bickering over what eight-track to play next, squabbling yet again over whether Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn or Joni Mitchell’s Blue was the best thing to listen to when coming down from a massive speed binge, Sid would put on one of his favourites, either The Beach Boys In Concert, or an Elvis compilation tape largely made up of songs from his 1968 “Comeback Special,” when the King donned black leather and finally rediscovered his mojo. Sid’s van had an uncharacteristically sophisticated sound system, his own approximation of what we then referred to as “quad,” which was in fact just a bunch of randomly placed mini-speakers torn from several ancient Talbot Avengers.

Sid even had a tiny Elvis tattoo on his forearm, where everyone could see it. We thought it was pretty naff, but rather cool as well (none of us had tattoos at that point, and the whole idea was strange and exotic).

Though he looked nothing like him – Sid wore thick National Health glasses, had dank curly hair and never wore anything other than patchwork denim – he always reminded me of John Milner, the Paul Le Mat character in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, the cool kid who never left town, the drag racer who never went to college, and who never moved on. While Milner had a Ford Coupe, Sid only had a Ford Transit. But like Milner, Sid would spend every Saturday night with kids five, ten years younger than him, until they too moved on. Sid was destined to never grow up. That was what we liked about him, and why we would eventually feel we could live without him, too.

Sid went to pieces when Elvis died. He turned up in the Nag’s Head that night, having heard the news on the van radio, and instead of coming over to talk about it, just ordered a drink – he drank pints of snakebite – and went to sit by himself. We could all tell that he’d been crying, could all tell that while he didn’t especially want to be disturbed, he wanted everyone to know just how much he was suffering.

We all knew, even at that tender and callow age, that Sid had been left behind, and that with Elvis’s passing he could no longer spend his days in a state of perpetual adolescence. Now that Elvis was dead, Sid would finally have to grow up.

Although Elvis’s weight issues had started to turn him into a parody of his earlier self, in essence he had remained the same for so long that when he died it was as though the youthful enthusiasm of early rock’n’roll went with him. And this was written on the faces of all the greasy twenty- and thirty-somethings in the Nag’s Head that night. Even though most of the people in the two downstairs bars had long hair and were wearing denim – and most of them were men – you could tell that in their hearts they were seventeen, with big black quiffs and pink peg trousers. At last, this was their James Dean moment.

When Diana, Princess of Wales died almost exactly twenty years later, on August 31st, 1997, there was a national outpouring of grief, as through her immense capacity for empathy had genuinely managed to touch hearts. When she died, that was repaid, and on September 6th, a day of national mourning, three million people lined the route of her funeral procession. As Tony Blair’s New Labour government had only recently been elected, it took a form of ownership of the death, and out of tragedy came the prospect of a new political dawn.

Elvis’s death was completely different, and had a totally different effect on the US. His death was co-opted by no one. Everyone and their mother would try to exploit the death commercially, but the event and its aftermath were owned by an entire generation, a generation of baby boomers who had watched Elvis grow as they themselves had grown. By 1977 Elvis had been famous for two decades, twenty years in which he had lived his own interpretation of the American Dream, in spite of all the vast political, military and cultural upheaval around him. Elvis proved what might happen if you were a poor, good-looking Southern boy with an innate gift and a winning smile. His success was a manifestation of the national ethos, in which freedom encouraged prosperity, upward social mobility and a reward for hard work. If one were to believe the Declaration of Independence, and that all men are created equal, then Elvis was endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable Rights, including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This was a dream, however, that ended prematurely, that showed that life was finite, as was success, and that there was a price to pay for living so grandly, so badly, and so publicly. Some thought Elvis’s death was the result of divine retribution, and that he was being punished for his sins, which were obviously manifold. He didn’t just worship a false God, he was one, and in flaunting himself had paid the ultimate price before God.

If Diana’s death signalled the start of something, Elvis’s signalled the end.

For me, nearly five thousand miles away, Elvis’s death created smaller and smaller echoes, tinier and tinier ripples. After I got over the initial shock – the big old king of rock’n’roll was dead – I got on with my life, and the story quickly disappeared. Elvis may have passed on, but I was far more interested in my next visit to the 100 Club, in Elvis Costello’s next London concert. To me and anyone I knew, Elvis had morphed into the generic, anodyne Fifties shuffle-beat of Showaddywaddy or Mud. I didn’t associate Elvis with Sid Vicious’s gold lamé jacket or John Lydon’s pointed red Robot shoes. I saw him as an old fart listened to by taxi drivers, grandmothers and ageing Teds. For me, he was simply the butt of a hundred jokes, a corny stereotype, a clichéd archetype. By the summer of 1977, Elvis had already become a reductive fancy-dress staple, a crepe-soled joke, a man whose youth meant nothing to the youth of Seventies Britain. Elvis’s slipshod teenbeat was the music of TV toilet cleaner commercials, while his mawkish ballads were already Radio 2 staples, the kind of maudlin stuff your mother liked. Elvis’s records had been devalued by constant overexposure. By August 1977, there were no hard edges to Elvis’s music, only a soft, white underbelly.

By 1977, to me and anyone I knew, Elvis was no different from Jim Reeves, Cliff Richard or Al Martino, a soporific crooner who meant as much to me as Engelbert Humperdinck.

How little I knew.

This is a book about what happened that day, how it affected us all, how it changed our culture, and what it still means today. Elvis’s sudden and relatively early death served to fix the iconic status he achieved in his lifetime forever in place. Whether you live in the United States, Europe, Australia, Russia or the Far East, Elvis probably still means something to you.

This is also a book about Elvis’s conflicted relationship with punk rock, or rather punk’s conflicted relationship with Elvis. Elvis died the month of punk’s apotheosis, at a time when his own cultural relevance had arguably never been lower. Yet he was still considered to be rock’n’roll’s greatest totem, the lightning flash that sparked a musical, social, cultural, sexual and socio-economic revolution.

Punk set out to destroy Elvis, or at least everything Elvis had come to represent, but Elvis destroyed himself before anyone else could.

However, almost forty years after his death, the man just won’t go away. He has penetrated the modern world in ways that are bizarre and inexplicable: a pop icon while he was alive, he has become almost a religious icon in death, a modern-day martyr crucified on the wheel of drugs, junk TV and bad sex. Sure, he could jump from a mellifluous baritone to an imploring tenor in the space of a few bars, yet Elvis’s appeal was always about so much more than the way he could sing.

Elvis’s journey was the twentieth century’s defining instance of the Horatio Alger myth, even if rather than achieving the American Dream by leading an exemplary life, and struggling valiantly against poverty and adversity, Elvis gained wealth and success by catching sunshine.

The story of Elvis possesses the sort of narrative arc to which we all seem hard-wired to respond. It is a cautionary tale, one with no ambiguity: “What you are now, I once was; what I am now, you will become.”

Who could deny Elvis? Whenever we catch the melodramatic strains of an old Elvis hit playing on the radio, or in the back room of a downtown bar, who among us begrudges those elemental – if overplayed – cornerstones of popular culture a respectful nod, and perhaps even a secret inner-smile, irrespective of the fact that we have all heard these songs so often their power to move us has long since been diffused?

Who cares? It’s Elvis, and no one begrudges Elvis, right? Even if he has long since become Meta-Elvis.

“The death of Elvis Presley in 1977 provoked a gradual blurring of reality and myth that prompted cultural critics to ponder whether he might ultimately become the subject of religious frenzy,” wrote pop biographer Peter Doggett, although anyone with a passing interest in popular culture might have anticipated that happening anyway. Elvis may not have been culturally relevant in 1977, but he was still Elvis, and the only man who ever would be. Doggett continued: “By 1992, the BBC’s Religious Affairs correspondent could write a book, Elvis People, with a blurb that claimed: ‘It poses a serious question: are we witnessing the birth of a new religious movement?’”

However the cult of Elvis actually started on August 16th, 1977. Whether it was sharp-featured Elvis you wanted, or the latter-day idol in all his magisterial pomp, the King could supply it all.

There was just so much of Elvis to go round.

According to a 1993 CNN and Time magazine poll, one American in five thought that Elvis was, or might be, alive. The survey said that while 79 percent of Americans believed that Presley died in 1977, sixteen percent said he was still among the living, and five percent were not sure. Not only is Elvis the most enduring American icon of the postwar years, he is the pop god by which all others are measured. Elvis was there first, before the Beatles, before the Rolling Stones, before the Sex Pistols or Nirvana.

Elvis was there before everyone; and that’s why it felt so strange when he suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

1

God Save the Queen

“No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977 …”

– Joe Strummer

Until the death of Elvis Presley, the summer of 1977 had belonged to George Lucas, and Star Wars. Released on May 25th, the film had instantly become a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. Produced with a budget of just $11 million, it earned $460 million in the United States and $314 million overseas, easily outstripping the previous year’s blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, as the highest-grossing film of all time.

Lucas, a precociously talented director (and businessman) had made his mark with his own take on teenage subculture American Graffiti in 1973 before writing, directing and completing Star Wars over the next four. The Washington Post called it “A Spectacular Intergalactic Joyride,” suggesting that Lucas had supplied 20th Century Fox with a new lease of life. “George Lucas’ delightful science-fiction adventure fantasy is a new classic in a rousing movie tradition: a space swashbuckler” while Roger Ebert’s review hailed it as “an out-of-body experience,” comparing its special effects to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Star Wars started breaking records the moment it was released – even though it was originally only shown on 32 screens. It made $2.8 million in its opening week, but didn’t receive a wider nationwide release for another two months, and then only after huge public demand. So idiosyncratic was Star Wars thought to be that 20th Century Fox didn’t know how to market it; in the end it didn’t matter, as the public marketed it for them. For months there were lines around the block wherever the movie was shown; people just couldn’t get enough of it.

Groundbreaking. Pioneering. Paradigm-shifting. Star Wars was 24-carat popcorn, a blockbuster of such power and influence that it changed the nature of cinema completely, ushering in a new era of cinematic behemoths. It was so successful, so quickly, that critics didn’t really understand what had happened.

Star Wars drew a line under auteur-driven cinema, and waved goodbye to the likes of Easy Rider and Taxi Driver, as Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo jetted off into a galaxy far, far away.

People loved Star Wars in a way no film had been loved since Gone With The Wind.

In San Francisco, the manager of the Coronet on Geary Boulevard reported that “I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re getting all kinds. Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players. People with paints and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before. People loaded on grass and LSD. At least one’s been here every day.”

Novelist Jonathan Lethem saw the film 21 times that summer, and only stopped at 21 because the number seemed “safely ridiculous and extreme …”

Whether George Lucas was rekindling mythology in the Homeric tradition, or whether his inspiration lay in the pages of lower-brow Asimovian pulp sci-fi, the pseudo-mythical underpinning of Star Wars paved the way for The Matrix and Lord Of The Rings trilogies, where heroes struggle against the forces of evil. Lucas was no doubt influenced by Tolkien’s labyrinthine mythography in the first place, but pre-1977, moviemakers did not truly think in epic terms. He pioneered a new kind of epic, one that relied on rather old-fashioned ideas of what going to the movies should be like. It was designed as a family-friendly flick, with morally just heroes in whom everyone could believe. Tellingly, when the unfinished film was shown to Fox executives, World War II dogfights were shown where battles between TIE fighters and the Millennium Falcon would be.

Ridley Scott had just released his first film, a stately adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel, The Duellists, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. However the premiere was completely overshadowed by the release of Lucas’s film, which Scott queued to see at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. “The actual air was agog, the air was excited. I’d never seen so many crowds outside a theatre. To me this was what cinema at its best should be. A mass medium, a mainstream audience, and everybody standing outside, having queued for days. We got some pretty good seats, about thirty feet from the front, so I got the best sound and this picture was in my face, and frankly I couldn’t believe it. I’d done my little film, which I was happy about, but this film was massive. It actually changed my mind about what I would do next. I’d been developing one thing, and then decided, really, how can I go down that route? I must go in another direction and so instead I made Alien.”

Star Wars not only changed what kind of films people watched, but how they watched them. The film made such a fortune for cinema owners that it enabled them to build multiplexes. 20th Century Fox, which had been on the brink of bankruptcy, became a major studio, its stock prices tripling in 1977.

And as you drove to the movie theatre, you were probably listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

Released in February, Rumours topped the Billboard charts for over thirty weeks, and all three major US trade publications – Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World – eventually named it as their album of the year. By March, it had already sold more than ten million copies worldwide, including over eight million in the US alone. If you drove down any main street, in any town, in any city, the songs you would hear pouring out of the stores and the malls were all from Rumours: “Go Your Own Way,” “Don’t Stop,” “Dreams,” and “You Make Loving Fun.” It was almost as if the harmony-driven sound of Fleetwood Mac had taken over the whole country.

During the late Seventies, Fleetwood Mac’s only rivals in bottling the musical essence of Los Angeles and southern California were the Eagles, who had spent the best part of the decade working up to it; with Fleetwood Mac it sort of happened by accident. Before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined, Fleetwood Mac was a middle-ranking British blues band that had recorded a handful of already classic songs – “Black Magic Woman,” “Albatross,” “Man Of The World,” “Oh Well” – all written by the now-departed guitarist Peter Green.

Fleetwood Mac 2.0 were a different proposition altogether, able to fuse the singer-songwriter pretensions of the early Seventies with a slick pop sensibility (and a great drum sound) that sounded just fine on FM radio. Especially in your first car, with the top down, and four or five friends in the back, passing beers and smokes between them. Visually, the group played it safe too, their image synonymous with the leather and lace of singer Stevie Nicks – a look that originally consisted of a chiffon dress, a leotard, a small jacket, a pair of suede platforms and a top hat. All black.

Rumours cost over a million dollars to produce, was recorded in seven different studios, and took over a year to finish. Yet it turned out to be a bona fide classic, not so much a concept album as a soap opera, chronicling the convoluted romances of the band’s five members. The artists’ real lives became virtually indistinguishable from the songs they were singing, and in some respects the album was the apotheosis of confessional pop writing. The making of Rumours was tortuous as Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ relationship broke down during its recording, as did the relationship between John and Christine McVie. Then there were the drugs, which fuelled the band’s work ethic. “It was the craziest period of our lives,” according to Mick Fleetwood. “We went for four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I’m talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point, I thought I was really going insane.”

As one critic put it, Rumours articulated the conflicting morass of love, possessiveness, freedom and reflection that the end of a relationship brings. It had some great harmonies too, harmonies that suggested the Californian coast, even if you were actually just driving along the M40 after an evening spent at the Hope and Anchor.

In Britain, bands like Fleetwood Mac were meant to be on the way out in 1977, banished to the margins by the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, but though the zeitgeist might definitely be elsewhere, Rumours was as perfect a pop record as anyone could hope to hear.

Bossa nova also had an unexpected renaissance in 1977, in the form of Joao Gilberto’s extraordinary Amoroso album. The Brazilian “new trend” had been at its most fashionable in the early Sixties, yet Gilberto’s LP used lush orchestration to move the genre a little further towards the mass market. And in 1977 it was nothing less than a revelation. In particular his version of the Antonio Carlos Jobim classic “Wave” could be heard on beaches from Miami to Rio, from Puerto Banus to St. Tropez.

Woody Allen also owned 1977, propelled by Annie Hall into the mainstream as a writer, actor and, most importantly, a director. The movie turned his nerd alter-ego into a sex symbol, a man who was finally saying goodbye to the Sixties. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall may have kick-started a fashion for big hats, baggy trousers and waistcoats, but Allen’s lovable loser became the archetype with whom most people identified. The film won four Academy Awards, was adored by critics, and managed to convince its audience that New York was the most sophisticated city in the world. It was pretty funny, too.

Elsewhere, in Michigan to be precise, Led Zeppelin set a new world record attendance for an indoor solo show at the Pontiac Silverdome when 76,229 people attended a concert there on April 30th. On March 10th, five days before Luciano Pavarotti made his first appearance on American television, the rings of Uranus were discovered. This was the year when music went truly universal: when NASA launched their Voyager unmanned probes, each spacecraft carried a golden record containing sounds and images representing life and culture on Earth, including the first movements of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” American Bandstand celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special hosted by Dick Clark, including an all-star curate’s-egg of a band, made up of the Pointer Sisters, Booker T and the MGs and Gregg Allman among others, performing another Chuck Berry song, “Roll Over Beethoven.” Elvis wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but then he never was, unless he was performing alone.

1977 was also the year in which Spain held its first democratic elections for over forty years, General Franco having died in 1975; the US Supreme Court ruled that states were not legally required to spend Medicaid funds on elective abortions; and South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in police custody, aged just thirty.

The United States was still recovering from Watergate, keen to see their new president, Jimmy Carter, wash away the paranoia and indignity of Richard Nixon’s reign. Carter offered a new dawn, a new hope. And then just as the country appeared to be forgetting its troubles, and indulging in some good old-fashioned American science fiction, one of its most revered, most treasured folk heroes went and died.

Elvis had left the building.

There were two enormous television events in 1977. In January, the twelve-hour, eight-episode TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots was screened on consecutive nights. Among the most emotive series ever made, it traced the capture and enslavement of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka born in Gambia in 1750, and the emancipation of his descendants after the Civil War. It was an enormous hit, breaking US audience-rating records and winning nine Emmys and a Golden Globe.

Later, in an extraordinary journalistic coup, David Frost broadcast four ninety-minute interviews with disgraced former President Richard Nixon in May.

In March, KLM flight 4805 crashed into taxiing Pan Am flight 1736 as the KLM jumbo jet attempted to take off from Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, killing 583 people. The airport was crowded with diverted planes following the detonation of a terrorist bomb at Las Palmas’ main airport for the Canary Islands. Fog had made the runways unmanageable, and not only could the aircraft pilots not see each other, neither could the air traffic controllers. At the time it was the world’s worst air disaster, and remains so to this day.

In the fashion world, the TV show Charlie’s Angels was all enveloping. The principal star was Farrah Fawcett, whose long feather-cut and big flicked hair, as well as her well developed body, made her a pin-up for both men and women. Other big hairstyles of the day included the pageboy and Vidal Sassoon’s wedge.

On June 5th, Apple launched its first personal computer, the Apple II.

Britain, meanwhile, had by 1977 appeared to lose not only its pride but even its ability to manage itself, after over half a decade of unwieldy inflation, strikes, flip-flopping governments and even a three-day week. After all but running out of money in 1976, and having to negotiate a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the country was perceived to be the sick man of Europe, a term once reserved for the Ottoman Empire. What it needed was a massive celebration, a year-long street party – and it got one, in the form of the Silver Jubilee.

A couple of months before Elvis’s death, the week of festivities celebrating the Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s accession to the throne began when she lit a bonfire in Windsor Great Park. That was the first of a hundred beacons that lit up the sky all over the country. There were street parties everywhere, even in places that didn’t strictly have streets. On June 7th, more than one million people lined the streets of London to watch the Royal Family make their way to St. Paul’s at the start of the official celebrations. The Queen, dressed in pink and accompanied by Prince Philip, led the procession in the golden state coach. At St. Paul’s, 2,700 selected guests joined in the ceremony. It started with Vaughan Williams’ arrangement of the hymn “All People That On Earth Do Dwell,” which had been played at the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

For a while, people in the UK discovered a new sense of belonging, and while the economy was still in disarray, and the unions still playing up, the anniversary was a much-needed fillip.

However, in the UK, above all else, 1977 was the year of punk, the anti-Jubilee cult. Punk was an oratorio of aggression, with everything calibrated to annoy. Although opinions differ as to the precise provenance of punk, the Economist got things pretty much right in its obituary of Johnny Ramone: “The counterblast began on August 16th 1974, in front of a tiny crowd in a seedy New York bar called CBGB. Four young men – Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone – walked on stage. The concert they gave was shambolic; they spent as much time shouting at each other as playing. But they improved rapidly, and it soon became clear they had hit on something.”

Punk, basically.

Predecessors had included the Velvet Underground (1966), the Stooges (1968), the MC5 (1969), Jonathan Richman, and Richard Hell (whose “Blank Generation” was written in 1974), while Patti Smith soon followed with Horses (1975), but it was the Ramones who first made punk flesh, who ushered in a sense of the Zeitgeist. The Ramones’ first album was released in 1976, and a fusillade of British records swiftly arrived in its wake, namely the Damned’s “New Rose” in November 1976, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK” the same month, and the Buzzcocks’ “Spiral Scratch” in January 1977.

While it was rooted in garage rock – these new bands were happy to use the familiar tools of rock – punk’s determination to eschew the musical and lifestyle excesses of the previous generation resulted in a “Year Zero” mentality. Punk bands made accelerated, hard-edged music, with aggressive lyrics and stripped-down three-chord instrumentation. There was a DIY ethic, with most bands turning their backs on the multi-layered, overdubbed pop symphonies favoured by the likes of Fleetwood Mac. Punk served as an apocalyptic catalyst to so many Seventies teenagers; it shook them around, threw them up in the air, and – when they bounced back down again – forced them to confront their preconceptions about life, the universe and everything in it. Well, at least the records they bought and the clothes they wore.

Though the music may have originated in the US, it was the UK where the youth cult started. By early 1977 the centre of each and every British city, town and village was full of young people dressed as the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) or Johnny Ramone – complete with a floppy pudding-bowl haircut, drainpipe jeans, plimsoles, a matelot top and a (plastic) leather jacket. Overnight thousands of young men turned from being neurotic boy outsiders in oversized overcoats and hooded brows (clutching their Genesis, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell albums under their arms), into the personification of Soho yobs or Bowery punks. The Johnny Ramone option was certainly less confrontational, and actually quite appealing: how could you not fall in love with a group who displayed such a blatant disregard for sophistication as the Ramones? Whose bare-boned playing was matched only by their idiotic singing – the lyrics to their song “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You” were four lines long, three of which were the same. When Joe Strummer, the frontman of the Clash, as The Economist’s obituary of Johnny Ramone relates: “approached the Ramones after seeing them play in London in 1976, he was worried that his band’s musicianship was still too rough for them to start recording. ‘Are you kidding?’ said Johnny. ‘We’re lousy, we can’t play. If you wait until you can play, you’ll be too old to get up there. We stink, really. But it’s great.’”

In the UK, London was the epicentre of punk, as the city became a metaphor for the whole movement: urban decay, anarchic fashion (safety pins and monochromatic severity), backstreet violence, fast drugs, silly hair. The town became vaguely mythical, a magnet for future punk royalty: the Jam’s Paul Weller was so obsessed he would travel up from Woking to the West End just to record the traffic (one of the band’s earliest songs was called “Sounds From The Street,” and their first two albums are so poorly produced they don’t sound much better than Oxford Circus at rush hour). The Jam’s urban fixation showed in “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight,” “In The City” and “A Bomb In Wardour Street,” each of them a little snapshot of tough city life. Pop has always needed the city’s shroud to make it cool – how could you be a market-town punk or an East Anglian mod? – and the urban backdrop of London in 1977 was the most perfect shroud of them all. One of punk’s defining rationales was reinvention; nobody who’d made it in London wanted to admit they had actually been brought up in Henley or Swindon. And Woking? Puh-lease …

The Clash also made a point of writing about London. In fact they seldom wrote about anything else, although they tended to concentrate on Notting Hill and points west. Pop archaeologist Jon Savage once called their debut album, The Clash, “virtually a concept album about North Kensington and Ladbroke Grove,” which contained “White Riot,” “London’s Burning” and “48 Hours.” While they went on to cast their concerned eyes over the Middle East, South America and any imploding quasi-Stalinist state they could find, for a while London was their world, inspiring their two finest songs: “White Man (In Hammersmith Palais)” and, of course, “London Calling” (of which Joe Strummer said, “I want it to sound like it’s coming through fog over the Thames”).

As I have said before in my Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music the early days of punk were analogous to present-day activity on the web – scattershot releases, limited edition rather than viral, but still with an urgent guerrilla sensibility. Records were released without great fanfare, and often you only knew where to buy them… if you knew where to buy them. You needed to read the right papers, know the right people, and shop at the right stores.

Singles were the only recognized currency. Oddly, albums, LPs, were for a while considered to be distinctly “old wave,” an indulgence too far. It was decreed by the cognoscenti that everything had to be short, Spartan, and almost devoid of adjectival subjectivity. Pop culture appeared to be moving so quickly that each new release came complete with its own promise of Zeitgeist-defining authority.

The British punk scene was the result of many things – the influence of the early American groups, a generational rebellion against aging pop-cultural forces, and the natural cycle of fashion. There were also various calls-to-arms in the media, one of which appeared in the NME. At the end of January 1976, the music paper felt compelled to run a cover that asked the question, “Is rock’n’roll an old man’s game?” The accompanying feature, by Max Bell, included the likes of Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and Keith Richards and lots of other “aged” members of the rock aristocracy whose lifestyles involved limousines, private jets and unimaginably expensive recording studios (where, the paper said gleefully, they would make lavish-sounding double albums).

“It’s about time 1976 launched a few more of its own teenage heroes,” wrote Bell, “instead of leaning on the main men of an earlier generation.”

Punk was a world away from Elvis. Hell, Elvis didn’t even get the Beatles, so how on earth was he going to understand the Sex Pistols, the Clash or Elvis Costello? Punk was all about connecting, all about the guy on top of the speaker stack or in the middle of the crowd who runs up on stage. Elvis may have said that going back to live performances in Las Vegas was all about connecting with his fans, but after a while he was simply going through the motions. Everything he had done since becoming famous involved some form of repetition. As soon as he left Sun, each of his RCA records started to sound similar to the next; his movies became interchangeable after a while; and his Vegas concerts were all versions of the same performance. Elvis wasn’t inquisitive in the usual way for a performer, or at least one with his monumental powers. He was the co-custodian of his own downfall, much of which was caused by his inability to stretch out, whether by working with better record producers, better writers, better movie directors or better orchestral arrangers. Of course, everything might have been different had he worked with a more considerate manager than the notorious “Colonel” Tom Parker – the other custodian of Elvis’s career – but then if that had happened we would all be living in a parallel universe.

So much has been written about punk that it has become almost impossible to imagine what it was really like at the beginning. It has been decoded and mediated in such a way that it doesn’t really mean anything any more. “Punk” as an idea was gelded long ago; it has been emasculated in the same way that Motown once was – devalued through heavy rotation on commercial radio, kick-started by its repositioning in the Eighties as acceptable music for television advertisements.

Yet punk remains the most vibrant, most divisive cult of them all. Back in 1975 it was possible to tell that things might be going to change, that something might be about to happen, even though no one knew exactly what it was going to be when it eventually arrived. The first group who indicated the approaching storm to me was Dr. Feelgood, who I saw that summer at the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe. Although it took a while for this to alter how I consumed music, when it came, it came like a tsunami: the Clash, the Jam, Adam and the Ants, the Damned, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Slits, the Buzzcocks, Wire, Elvis Costello, Deathwish and so on – dozens and dozens of bands seen in sweaty basements in a two-year period that pretty much changed how my generation viewed the world.

Everything was about connection, about intimacy. We were encouraged to hate Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones because they played huge pop warehouses like Wembley Arena and Earls Court. The new doctrine required us to see bands in clubs above pubs that were the size of wardrobes. Back then, small was good, and big was most definitely bad. Who wanted to see a band in an aircraft hangar? Who wanted to see a band from the last row in the stalls, when they looked so small they could have been anyone? No. Back in the day, small was cool.

One of my favourite memories from that period is of a concert at Friars in Aylesbury in the spring of 1977. We had come to see the headliners, the Ramones, and had never heard the support act, Talking Heads. We’d read about them in the New Musical Express – everyone read the NME at the time – but didn’t know what they would be like. At all. Obviously they were extraordinary, dressed as preppies, playing like lab technicians, and introducing every song thus: “The name of this song is …”

The Ramones, who came on after them, attempted even less communication with the audience, simply diving into each song as though it were a fait accompli, with a simple “One-two-three-four!” Watching the Ramones on stage was to witness a barrage of sound, and songs played so fast and with such little fanfare that you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between the end of one tune and the start of the next. It remains the most extraordinary concert I’ve ever seen, and one that was summed up when Graham Lewis of the punk band Wire described seeing the Ramones perform at Dingwalls, then one of the coolest venues in London: “I couldn’t believe it. It was glorious. They came on stage and it was semi-lit, and they just stood there for what seemed like an age. Joey Ramone said, ‘Woman, shut your mouth.’ And it all started, and it didn’t fucking stop, this delirium of noise, you walked in and out of it, a physical environment of noise.”

That was what punk was like for me, as it was for many: a physical environment of noise.

To Elvis, it would have been just noise, and noise only. Of course, he appeared to understand the finer elements of certain types of American music, and he certainly liked, and knew a lot about, rhythm and blues, country and gospel. Insurrection, anti-establishment behaviour, and anything to do with the counter culture were all beyond him, though, as they were anathema to his understanding of the world. Punk’s raison d’être was nihilism, plain and simple, regardless of how some of those involved like to dress it up with politics or bondage trousers. Being for something would have been against its principles; at this point in the arc of post-war popular culture, being against something – anything, frankly – was far more fun.

Punk harked back to the time when the idea of the teenager was just beginning, at least in its modern sense. The distillation of punk could be traced back to a line in The Wild One, the Marlon Brando outlaw biker movie from 1953, a time even before Elvis. When a girl asks the Brando character – Johnny Strabler, the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, who is dressed in blue jeans, leather jacket and cap – “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?,” he answers, “Whaddaya got?”

Johnny Strabler was the first popular rebel of the decade, and, like a lot of boys, Elvis was smitten with him. He loved Brando – loved the way he spoke, the way he looked, and the way he dressed. The actress Jan Shepard played Elvis’s sister in 1958’s King Creole, and was responsible for Elvis meeting his hero that year in the Paramount commissary. She and Elvis were taking lunch together one day when Brando came in and made a beeline for a table just behind Elvis, who didn’t notice him. She continued the story: “I said, ‘Elvis, Marlon Brando is sitting right behind you,’ and he almost put his face in his sandwich, he was so shy. He wanted to hide. I said, ‘Keep it cool, but when you get up, your chair is going to hit his chair, and he’s going to get up because I know he wants to meet you as much as you want to meet him.’ And that’s exactly what happened. Elvis played it cool, very cool, but when we got out of the cafeteria, he jumped about four feet in the air, and said: ‘My God, I met Marlon Brando!’”

Brando didn’t turn out to be the biggest Elvis fan. Never worried about speaking ill of the dead, Brando commented long after Elvis’s death that “It seems to me hilarious that our government put the face of Elvis Presley on a postage stamp after he died from an overdose of drugs. His fans don’t mention that because they don’t want to give up their myths. They ignore the fact that he was a drug addict and claim he invented rock’n’roll when in fact he took it from black culture; they had been singing that way for years before he came along, copied them and became a star.”

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Overlook Books
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1468309676
• ISBN 13: 9781468309676
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible