This article is a preview from the Spring 2019 edition of New Humanist
What happens after the high? One afternoon in May 2011, the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas closed its doors for the final time. “Thanks for 59 years!” shouted Sam Nazarian, the chief executive of the hotel’s parent company, as his guests shuffled out of the building. The Sahara had been one of just three casinos running continuously since Sin City’s mid-20th-century heyday – a 1,750-room relic of what, three years after the global economic crash, already seemed a mythic era of untrammelled excess. The Rat Pack had stayed here, as had the Beatles, but history and glamour couldn’t make up for the banal reality of financial losses. So the gambling floors were cleared, the doors shuttered. Somewhere in those 85,000 square feet was a cautionary tale – maybe several. But what did they warn of? No matter, for within a few years, the building would reopen, rebranded to deliver “style, luxury and service” to a new generation of pleasure-seeking rich.
“We didn’t have a home,” says Angie Dickinson’s Beatrice Ocean in the 1960 film Ocean’s 11, part of which was filmed at the Sahara. “We had a floating crap game.” That’s how she describes her marriage to Danny, a war-hero-turned-casino-robber played by Frank Sinatra, yet it would equally suffice as a summation of the domestic lives of many of our biggest rock stars, who, like the most compulsive gamblers, choose instant highs over conventional happiness. Or, perhaps, it’s conventional happiness that rejects them. In 1986, a bitter Bob Dylan told the British journalist Christopher Sykes that fame was lonely. “It’s like you’re passing a little pub or an inn, and you look through the window and you see all the people eating and talking,” he explained. “But when you walk in the room, it’s over. You won’t see them being real any more.”
If we find it hard to be “real” in the company of stars, it’s because stars are unreal to us. Indeed, they’re at once more than real, and less than it: as Richard Dyer wrote in his 1980 book Stars, they are walking “representations of people”, carrying with them their public personae, mediated so comprehensively that the individual who embodies them is easily occluded. Stars are larger than life – literally, in the case of actors whose faces we see projected on cinema screens, every facial expression magnified not only in scale but in import.
With singers, of course, it’s the voice that counts – what they do with it, but also the grain of it, and whether we believe what it tells us. I thought about all this as I listened to the 1969 album From Elvis in Memphis, riding the train from London St Pancras to Rochester. Elvis was the star of the 20th century. His rise and untimely fall was the story that later pop icons re-enacted, with various customisations: the teenage dreamer, the thrill of discovery, the itinerant life of a touring musician, the imperial phase of unfailing success, selling out, the absurd wealth, the affairs, the failed marriage, the isolation, the drugs, the early death caused by prescription medication.
From Elvis in Memphis was a comeback not from obscurity but from irrelevance. After helping to bring the raw libido of rock’n’roll to the mainstream in 1955, Presley had somehow drifted into life as a less than convincing movie star, largely leaving unfulfilled the promise of his charged, stylistically diverse early records such as Elvis Is Back! (1960). There were brighter moments: films such as Viva Las Vegas (1964) weren’t awful, just painfully ephemeral, and the gospel record How Great Thou Art (1967) was a devotional masterpiece. But for a generation of fans, Presley had been what Dylan later described as an “incendiary musical firebrand loner who conquered the Western world”. In the era of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, light entertainment from a rebel god was nothing less than a betrayal.
Then came Singer Presents… Elvis, a Christmas special broadcast on NBC on 3 December 1968 – a spare, sometimes messy show in which a leather-clad Presley at last reminded his audience of his power as a performer over 50 minutes of giddy rock’n’roll. Dubbed by his fans his “Comeback Special”, it tentatively signalled that Elvis was again in the building.
From Elvis in Memphis, released in June 1969, confirmed his return as a vital force. Taped in Presley’s home town, it remains a provocation even now, every song a challenge simply to feel, and feel deeply. The death song “Long Black Limousine” is steeped in Presley’s tightly controlled melodrama, while the closing song, “In the Ghetto”, invites understanding for the kind of street kid who is despised and let down by polite society. It was a success, both artistically and commercially, reaching number one in the UK charts and 13 in the US.
My train reached Rochester, where I’d arranged to meet Mike Davis, the 74-year-old leader of Elvis in Essex – a fan club with the rare distinction of official acknowledgement from the Presley estate. I’d arrived an hour early, so I browsed the nearby second-hand shops. The Sue Ryder had the eponymous debut studio album by the X Factor finalists Journey South, a pirated CDR copy of Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head – but no Elvis. Likewise, no Presley at the Instone Shop a few doors along. In December 2015, a rare Elvis acetate of the song “Suspicion” sold for half its estimated value at an auction in the West Midlands – part of a trend of declining interest in Presley memorabilia. As big as Elvis was, and as much as he still figured in my mind, perhaps his time was finally passing. I wondered whether the drama I’d vicariously lived through half a century after the fact, listening to an album made 13 years before I was born, really amounted to anything in the end. Feelings, that’s all – dangerous things at the best of times, as able to bring you pain as joy. Old feelings, too, from another age entirely.
Davis met me back at the station wearing a black University of Memphis sweatshirt. A towering figure at 6ft 4in, he had started to talk Elvis before I fastened my seatbelt in his car, and we spent three hours at his “man-cave” flat overlooking the Medway, discussing the King. “That man rose from a wooden shack to the greatest star this world has ever seen,” he told me. “There ain’t nobody ever bigger than Elvis Presley was.”
We ate prawn sandwiches as we listened to the chart-topping 2015 album If I Can Dream, for which the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra had overdubbed arrangements on to some of Presley’s most iconic songs. Davis loved Elvis, and it was “love with a capital L”. The singer had given him “a family” – a network of likeminded devotees who met regularly at a pub in Essex, and occasionally made pilgrimages to Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis home. “I’ve got friends in Argentina, friends in Holland, friends in America,” he said. “If I was ever in trouble, I could ring up any of them now and say I’m really desperate . . .”
At some point in the mid-1980s, Bob Dylan visited Graceland. Confronted with the immaculately maintained building, gold records lining the walls and the gift shop filled with trinkets bearing the dead King’s image, he thought: “Elvis was going to be a religion in a lot of different ways.” I asked Davis whether he agreed. “He is a religion,” he said. “He’s like Jesus. He came from a poor background, he had disciples around him [his bodyguards and assorted hangers-on], and over 40 years after his death, he’s got a huge following. The story is there.” Davis told me that fans “go to club dos, which are our revival meetings”. When I asked whether he felt any stars today were capable of leaving such a legacy, he replied, “There is a complete uniqueness about Elvis Presley.”
Maybe for Davis, I thought, and I supposed that was fair enough. No fan has the emotional space to devote such affection, such significance, to more than one star. In that way, it really was like love. As for his belief that this quasi-religious status was unattainable for any other star, I wasn’t so sure. Try telling one of Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters” – her notoriously obsessive online fan base – that their Mother Monster is not, in fact, for ever.
I liked Davis, though, and I knew I was a little like him, too. But I was more promiscuous, maybe shallower, in my fandom. On my Mount Olympus lived not only Presley but Dylan, Willie Nelson, Elliott Smith, a few others. But Elvis, I knew, was something else: the face, the story, the excess, the voice. Despite the dissimilarity of his life to mine, when he sang a story, I believed it. He ennobled your experiences with the grandeur he brought to them. Listen to From Elvis in Memphis and he still will.
After Presley’s comeback came another fall. Not immediately: the hits kept coming, he conquered Las Vegas, he won Grammy Awards and performed startlingly powerful shows, including one in Hawaii in 1973, the first concert by a solo artist to be aired globally. But bad habits and an increasing reliance on medication inched him away once again from cultural relevance.
By the end, Elvis’s drug-addled mind was filled with fantasies of sneaking out of recording sessions to assassinate drug dealers. He worked intermittently. Waylon Jennings claimed he saw Elvis elbow his wife in the ribs for fun. Presley, despite the glory of his achievements, became a tragic figure. Maybe this is how it was meant to be. His sad, lonely death on the seat of his toilet in 1977 only bolstered the myth, after all.
It didn’t have to end this way. A bright morning in 1962: a motorhome pulled into Las Vegas after crossing the desert from Los Angeles, and eased to a halt in the parking lot of the Sahara Casino and Hotel. A group of friends staggered out, exhausted, and a young couple broke off to settle into their room. There, with the TVs at a low volume and the curtains drawn, Elvis smiled at Priscilla – the girl he’d fallen for during his two years of national service in Germany, whom he’d marry five years later, and whom he’d spirited over to America under a veil of secrecy. “Do you believe this, baby?” he said. “You’re here. Who’d ever have thought we’d pull this off?” Their future lay before them – a happy one, they surely believed. Yet how many stars manage to pull that off? What a gamble Elvis’s stardom would become, his weird self-sacrificial service to his fans. Any gambler at the casino’s crap table could have told him the house nearly always wins.
