Some Days In August
Elvis' birthday January 8, 1987, ten years after his death, was like one of those
shots heard round the world. Fans and curiosity seekers overflowed on the Graceland lawn to celebrate
it. This had been happening for nine years but a wave of interest had increased the numbers in attendance.
TV channels filled with Elvis movies; radio stations broadcast for a week, twenty-four hours a day, from
all twenty three years of Elvis music. On Oprah's show about the 'Elvis Phenomenon,' she confessed she
used to dream that she would marry Elvis until she grew up and knew she wouldn't. A book in which a
woman claimed to have a child by Elvis received much attention. The media picked up the message and ran
with it. So did I.
By the end of May I knew I would return to Tupelo and Memphis for several weeks
around August 16, Elvis tenth death anniversary. I wanted to see the friends I'd made in those
towns and what the festivities were like. I'd never met a bonafide Elvis fan face-to-face and I
was curious. The media went into such a feeding frenzy over Elvis that I wondered how it would all
end. And to be honest I did just wonder if Elvis might not give us some sort of Sign from Beyond.
Arriving in Tupelo August 6 I stayed again at the Ramada Inn which felt like an
old friend and spent the first days in reunion with people who now were close friends.
On August 10 the English Elvis Presley Fan Club some 2,000 strong arrived.
At breakfast the dining room at the Ramada was full of them. I felt as if I had arrived at a popular
English seaside resort. The women were dressed in the traditional English summer frocks of splashy
prints. The men with their Anglo-Saxon pink complexions, their white shirts, gray flannels and navy
blue blazers were smoking pipes and gave the impression of representing the conservative wing of fans.
The young folk--a surprising number of them--went in for the universal punk chic: boots, belts, jeans,
and T-shirts sporting frisky logos.
I joined the crowd at Elvis Presley Park for the opening ceremonies of Elvis Presley
week in Tupelo. Standing in the shadeless heat, bright red circles sprang before my eyelids.
Speeches were kept blessedly short but even so, by the end of them, twelve Brits, overcome by the heat,
had been carried off to be revived at the local hospital.
Among other fans, I met Daphne Brown from Wales who had been to Tupelo seven times.
It turned out that we had corresponded. I remembered her letter well, for it contained the information
that in the Northern part of Wales there lie the "Prescelli Hills" which figure prominently in
prehistoric Pembrookshire. And that in the Bronze Age the "Prescelli" Tribe was dominant over the
whole of Southwest Wales. Further, there is a Welsh parish called St. Elvis The coincidence of
meeting her reminded me that it is a small Elvis world as well as a wide one. It was extraordinary,
this coming together of perfect strangers finding we had not only Elvis and his music in common but a
shared history of years gone by: of WW II, of marriages and births and deaths, of good times and bad
times that have marked us all.
That evening at the Ramada Convention Center there was an all-Elvis disco for the
English contingent that lasted till dawn. I was struck by the variety of the kinds of dancing the
music lent itself to just as I was struck by the skill of the dancers. They slow danced to romantic
ballads, fast danced, disco-danced, jitterbugged and jived to his rock. Forming groups of eight they
country danced. They danced by themselves. Buck dancing it was called in Elvis' mother's time. I
remembered Gladys was crazy about buck dancing. In one group a girl wearing a leg brace danced no
less spiritedly than the others. I noticed for the first time two fans in wheelchairs.
Another night I attended a dinner in honor of the newly arrived Japanese fans,
some thirty-five of them. Across the table from me sat three of what must surely have been the
prettiest girls, flanked by equally handsome young men in neat horn-rimmed glasses and well-tailored
suits. We talked politely of favorite Elvis songs: from well-known ones like Hound Dog to special
favorites like Wooden Heart, to my favorite, his version of The Green Grass of Home and little played
ones like Way Down--then we discussed favorite movies. A quick consultation resulted in Gone With The
Wind, then another voice a few seats away came up with Out Of Africa. I thought: East, West, our most
pleasurable daydreams are Elsewhere.
From the other end of the room, music started up. It was The Country Three Plus One
Band, consisting of keyboard, bass, with one man doubling on fiddle and guitar, plus, for this
evening's entertainment, drums. It is the kind of band that Elvis would have heard in his boyhood.
The Japanese were listening to the real thing, in the real place, played in a style that Elvis grew
up with. Their attention was rapt. Their feet began tapping. Willie Wileman, a well-aged country
musician, third cousin to Elvis, (the news flew around the room) sang Love Me Tender accompanying
himself on an acoustic guitar. The original song Auralee dates back to the Civil War. Willie, with
his homespun inheritance and his blood kin connection, achieved a syncronicity of past and present
which left no one in the room unmoved. Way back then had become here and now. It was even better
than Elsewhere.
We went back to our meal which was fried chicken, baked potatoes, and a variety
of vegetables. "A typical meal of your South?" someone asked. "Very typical," I assured him. I now
met Reiko Yokawa, disc jockey, music critic, and lyricist. With her fluent English she was serving
as interpreter for the group. She told me of the larger-than-life bronze statue of Elvis recently
unveiled in Tokyo and how fans from all over Japan donated the money for it. I also learned of
this particular group's interest in jazz. After paying their respects to Elvis at Graceland (through
the years the Japanese have laid exquisite fans and kimonos on his grave), they go on to
New Orleans.
When Buddy and Kay Bain performed I heard again as in Southern Holiness churches
that raw, pulsating throb of "white soul," that joyous noise that sounds the heart-breaking blue notes
as well.
We were all clapping to the music now along with tapping our feet. Wildly we
applauded each number. Buddy and Kay, aware of the visitors' travel plans, sang about New
Orleans in "Jambalaya." The Japanese knew all the words and joined in. The room became a sea of
rhythmic thrumming, the clap upon clap detonated like staccato bursts of spontaneous combustion.
Later we all sang holding hands. At the end, our joined hands reached skyward. And afterwards we
were smiling and smiling at each other
Then Reiko rose to speak; first in Japanese and then, for our benefit, in English
"Take this opportunity of being in Tupelo," she urged the group "to study its nature well: its trees,
its flowers, its grass, its hills and its lakes, its earth and its sky. For they all went into the
creating of Elvis." I marveled: how Japanese, how Zen-like to know Elvis' background was really his
foreground.
Afterwards we met the Australian contingent just landed. It was led by the tallest
of their number--a six-foot-four Rocker exuding antipodean warmth with his bushy Australian sideburns,
his outback-weathered skin, his Australian shirt open to the waist and his gold chain from which
depended a shark's tooth. We, Japanese and Americans, our numbers swelled by the other Tupeloans now
reached out to yet another continent.
With new blood the party got its second wind. Groups collected, melted, regrouped.
The noise level rose. I kept moving, making my way from clump to clump. A college girl from Tupelo
said to me, "The Australians love our Southern accents and we love theirs. We go up to each other and
say 'I'll talk to you if you talk to me.' "
Phyllis Harper, who had been with us the whole evening, came up to me looking
thoughtful before going off to write her column. "You know what?" she said in parting, "I've just
discovered something about myself. I love people. I must remember that." I stood aside and let the
animated crowd filter through my eyes and reached the only conclusion I could. How easily Elvis unites
us all.
An hour away in Memphis, where I arrived the next day, its media, TV and print
reporters, greeted the fifty-five thousand pilgrims pouring into the city not quite as graciously
as it behooved the hosts of a city which gains millions of dollars yearly from these incursions. I
heard a young reporter describe the fans as "middle-aged, over-weight, with mortgaged homes" with a
smirk that implied we could dismiss them. My first sight of a section of the crowd gathered here for
Elvis Week revealed a different story. Strolling up and down Elvis Presley Boulevard, in an
atmosphere made unique by the sound of Elvis music on a loudspeaker, I saw ages from eight to eighty,
stout middle-aged couples more often than not accompanied by skinny teenagers. I didn't bother to ask
them if their homes were mortgaged. Isn't everyone's? I felt the restorative power of his music, which
evaporated the hot weather and the soreness of my feet.
Most of the pilgrims were in groups, but a sizable amount of people (mostly men)
were alone. They did not look lost, nor were they. They were here, at this time, remembering Elvis
in their own chosen way. Another much larger group that needed sub-categories were the women. I saw
in Tupelo and Memphis single women, groups of women, married women, women with and without their
husbands, and pregnant women. Another much larger group were the mothers and daughters who come from
all over the world. Elvis has become a generational thing.
The Candlelight Service was held the night before the anniversary of Elvis' death.
It was organized by the Elvis Country Fan Club of Austin, Texas and had become an increasingly
popular event. At 11:00 p.m. the gates of Graceland were to open, the visitors with their candles
would light them by two torches carried by members of the fan club who had lighted theirs from the
eternal flame in the meditation garden where Elvis is buried. After a brief program the Austin club
would sing "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" and the visitors would join in the song as they
walked towards Elvis' grave.
When I arrived around 10:30 p.m. the police on foot and on horse were out in force
and the crowd had grown to thousands. Wedged in on all sides I noted uneasily that among the crowd
were the very elderly and some in wheel chairs as well as very young babies in the arms of their
mothers. What would happen in the event of some accident blowing up into a full scale riot? But
gradually, as the sweat rolled down me in rivulets, I became aware that my close quartered neighbors
radiated heat but not anger. When the gates finally opened the bottlenecks created by only one
entrance and exit made progress painfully slow. It was 3:00 a.m. before the last pilgrim got
through, the crowd passing the time joking, exchanging good-humored comments on their plight and
offering information about each other. It was as though they welcomed--or rather transcended--their
physical discomfort for the opportunity it gave them to know their fellow beings of all
nationalities.
As one of the speakers at the annual Memphis State University Memorial Service.
I scrapped most of my planned speech and instead talked to the fans about themselves. I told them
they could no longer be viewed as a sideshow, or as examples of the culturally retarded. "It is you,
who through the years since his death have kept Elvis alive so that millions more people every year
are able to hear him and see him."
Later I met a group of French fans who had also read my book and soon I was holding
forth in French, reveling in my role of the moment as the world's-greatest-authority-on-Elvis, and
it was at that point that I said to myself, Right now I am at the epicenter of civilization as the
whole world knows it.
I became interested in what all of these Elvis fans who had made him so much part
of their existence did in their daily lives. With the help of some fans, especially Pat Geiger,
mother of two and recently retired executive assistant from Vermont, I compiled a brief on-the-spot
list of jobs and vocations: a bakery owner and a bakery cake decorator, elementary school teachers.
junior high school teachers, director of a 2,000 member tenants association, owner of a popular
New York restaurant, Walden Book store manager, two high-grade government employees in Washington,
(one at the Housing and Urban Development the other at the Department of Transportation), radio
engineer, switch-board operator, manager of a florist shop, several graphic artists, accountants,
practical nurses, newspaper employees on production, advertising and writing staffs, an aerobics
instructor, an instructor in yoga, a lawyer. And two blackjack dealers from Vegas.
I stared at this list, so full of variety, and pondered long before it occurred
to me what it was that they all have in common. They are all reliable people. They have to be
because their jobs demand that they show up on a daily basis. One thing is sure: they are not
Woodstock and they do not riot. They are, in fact, one of the largest peaceful international
fellowships.
At the end of August I left Memphis and returned to Los Angeles. On TV I watched
thousands of people who came together in a vast stadium to see the Pope and saw him. I thought of
thousands of people who went to football games and baseball and hockey games, and saw them; and of
the thousands that went to concerts of rock stars, and saw them. Then I thought of the fifty-five
thousand people gathered in Memphis for a man whom they did not see, who died ten years before: a
man they held so firmly in their thoughts that he did, in essence, come back.