So I just finished watching the Baz Luhrmann “biopic” (well, I use that word very loosely, because it was as much fantasy as it was about the truth) Elvis and let me tell y’all, my ass was totally blown away.
Not only does Austin Butler LOOK like Elvis, but he SOUNDS as much like as Elvis as pretty much anyone I’ve ever heard. And it blew my mind how beautifully he portrayed The King.
Music has always been a part of my life. I can’t ever remember a time when my parents didn’t have the radio on or a record or a tape playing and somebody was always singing. Not so much my mother, because she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and she knew it. Usually it was my stepfather who had an absolutely gorgeous baritone when I was growing up.
I grew up loving the shit out of music. Rock, country, outlaw country, gospel church music (which my stepfather has always been fond of), calypso, 60s and 70s folk and hard rock, punk, heavy metal, 80s pop…I grew up listening to all of it and it sort of just…attached itself right onto my brain and my soul like nothing in the world (except perhaps Disney, but in a slightly different way) has ever done. I don’t know how to describe exactly how music has always been a part of my life, how it sort of just became that THING that was always with me. I grew up singing in choirs, was in choir in middle school and high school and decided to do musical theater in my brief stint in junior college because at that point in my life, my brain was having a passionate love affair with both Stephen Sondheim and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Elvis was one of the first artists I ever remember hearing at home. My mom, being a Tennessee hillbilly herself, loved the SHIT out of Elvis. Although he was from Mississippi, he made Tennessee his home and there was nothing better (in her mind anyway) than a hometown kiddo, a poor hillbilly like herself, who done good. She put Elvis on a goddamned pedestal right next to Dolly Parton. So much so that I couldn’t help but fall in love with him at an early age.
I remember one summer, I was going to church camp and we’d been told to each bring one cassette of our choosing because they were going to have a dance party and the campers were supposed to supply the music.
I picked an Elvis album that I’d found in the clearance bin at Walmart or something. The 20something who was DJing looked at my tape, looked at me and then said “What are you, some kind of nerd?”. Well, yeah. No doy.
Elvis…moved me. He moved me to dance. He moved me to tears. He was…something else. Something that I just didn’t have words for at the age of 13. He was so raw and so sexy and just so…so…something. Something I STILL don’t have words for and I’m almost 44 damn years old.
I watch clips of his concerts from the International on Youtube and I just…I cannot describe how his music still makes me feel. Like I should’ve been born years before I actually was, just so I could see him live in person with my own damn eyes.
Yowza.
There was nobody like him before and ain’t never been nobody like him since. He died far too young, that’s for damn sure. If the Colonel hadn’t gotten hooked on pills and booze and god knows what else (which is what I believe happened, whether it’s entirely true or not)…who knows what Elvis could’ve done, what he could’ve become.
