A day of commemoration

It's 29 years today since Elvis died. Twenty-nine years! Gosh, I still remember finding out early in the morning. I wasn't an Elvis fan at the time, but my dad was -- a big one.

Elvis's death marked the beginning of my interest in him, just as it was for my brother, who remains a huge fan to this day. I diversified perhaps a little more, and within three years (1980, at the age of 10) I was into the Pistols (a little late, I know, since they'd already disbanded long before then), which was the start of a different musical journey.

Still, Elvis holds a special place in my heart, and I still play his music from time to time, but very rarely anything recorded after those first two or three years, 1954 to 1957. Occasionally the '68 Comeback Special -- a return to glory.

Elvis was the catalyst for all that came after in "popular music". And people can bang on all they like about how he simply stole black music. Maybe he did; but very few others were. That is innovation, my friend. And they can talk till they're blue in the face about how he wrote very few of his own songs and that he sold out and whatever else. All true, perhaps. But at the outset, in 1954, when he drove a truck and had long greasy hair and wore mascara, he was as subversive a motherfucker as you were likely to meet.

As Quentin Tarantino put it, in the mouth of True Romance's Clarence Worley: "In Jailhouse Rock he's everything rockabilly's about. I mean, he is rockabilly: mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie, he couldn't give a fuck about anything except rockin' and rollin', livin' fast, dyin' young, and leaving a good-looking corpse."

And after all the pretenders and would-be usurpers, when all is said and done, there's still only one king.

Rest in peace, big guy. 'Nuff said.