Listening to some rockabilly last night, I dug up on YouTube one of Elvis’ performances, a rendition of “Trying to Get to You.”
There’s a feeling one has, from time to time, that might be phrased, “How come X got to be X?” How come Dickens got to be Dickens, the dominant novelist of the nineteenth century? How come Auden got to be Auden, his generation’s most visible poet? And, especially, how come Elvis got to be Elvis?
I mean, the man was a joke: So high on drug cocktails he walked like a scarcrow, his complexion plastic as he fumbled his way through this movies, his stage moves stolen from Tom Jones— Tom Jones , of all the hackneyed lounge singers—for his Las Vegas act.
And then, one stumbles across the answer. Oh, yeah, that’s why he gets to be who he was. The 1968 NBC special for Elvis was an odd event in many ways—perhaps most of all in how drugged-up nervous Elvis was: jumpy in his skin, needing the crowd to give him energy even while he hated being in front of them, uneasy with his stagey moves but incapable of not doing them. An utterly riveting, and disturbing, combination of stratospheric arrogance and titanic self-doubt.
But, still, when he did it right, he suddenly explodes as the best there ever was at those sorts of songs. His performance of “Trying to Get to You” is simply electrifying. Oh, yeah, that’s why he gets to be Elvis.
