So, like the entire world right now, I’ve been watching a LOT of television. HBO recently dropped this “HBO on Hulu” thing, where there’s some content that was previously only available on HBO available on Hulu. I guess they’re trying to tempt people to subscribe to their streaming service or whatever.
One of the things I watched was a documentary called “Elvis: The Searcher” and watching it just made me SO so sad.
I’m a music lover…it just really speaks to me in a way that nothing else I’ve ever encountered ever has. And Elvis’ music especially…it’s equally sweet and torchsong crooner and raucous and spiritual and just plain fun. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine all of that wrapped up in one of the most gorgeous human packages that has ever existed. And on top of all that, he loved his mama and he loved experimenting, listening to new things, trying new things he’d never tried musically before.
It’s so much more obvious in this documentary how much control Colonel Tom Parker (who was quite possibly one of the music world’s biggest scuzzballs to ever exist) had over him, how much he feared losing control of Elvis and if Elvis had only taken control of his own life, of his music, of the movies he was in (because some of them , and Kissing Cousins comes to mind for some reason, were REAL stinkers), he might have eventually gotten clean and made music that was more beautiful, more heart rending, more soulful, closer to who he was as a person, than he’d ever made in his life.
Watching that documentary made me wish that there was a way to go back in time and save Elvis not just from that asshole “Colonel” Tom Parker but also from himself. Who knows where he might have gone, what kind of music he would’ve made, yanno?
There’s something, whenever I look at certain pictures of him, that make me want to just…IDK..mother the shit out of him. Because even though there are tons of things I am NOT good at, mothering somebody who needs it is something I AM good at. And it’s painfully obvious that after his mother died, he was just SO lost.
If you get a chance to watch it (and who am I kidding? We all have more time than we’d ever imagine having ever to watch any damn thing we want right now)…I can’t recommend it highly enough.
