Elvis has wrecked the building

"I haven't seen anything like it since Eleanor Roosevelt died." Bemused, Don Rubincam, entetainment editor of The Courier-News, snuffed out another cigarette, and with a very little help from me, set about the task of piecing together the small-town daily's package on the death of rock and roll icon Elvis Presley. The newsroom was in quite a furor, although many of the reporters were my age, leaned toward the Eagles and just didn't get Elvis. I was what they call a "news clerk," trying to write my way out of obituary, weather and police-report duties and into full-time work on the entertainment desk. Just a few months before, Rubincam had read some reviews and previews I'd written and asked our managing editor if he could use me part time. I was supposed to help Rubincam with clerical duties, filing and the like, but Don had me writing more than he had me filing. I wasn't about to argue. I was by no means savvy about the entertainment business or how to find out information. I spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out where Elvis Presley would be playing. Not nostalgia for the old folks It wasn't nostalgia that was driving me exactly. Sure, I had strummed my air guitar in the back yard at age four and shouted the lines: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog!" I did it for what seems like hours (but was probably just a few minutes in adult time). I still remember the white Elvis t-shirt with the king caught in mid-swivel before a big black record. However, I wasn't pining for these things. I'd been getting deeper into the roots of the music that interested me, and from reading some other writers' reflections on the early days of rock and roll, and some things John Lennon had said about Elvis, I wanted to see if Presley held up. It hadn't been that long since National Lampoon had spoofed him with a cover that portrayed the one-time rocking Adonis as a big, button-popping, washed-up lounge lizard. So I had picked up The Sun Sessions in the early summer of '77. What a thunderclap of raw energy! The Sun Sessions was everything that the emerging punk-rock scene wanted to be but wasn't. From top to bottom That's when I hit on the idea of doing a feature for Rubincam that compared Presley's first album with what was then his most recent one, Moody Blue -- his first and last album. (Hey! I was young!) I was in the middle of writing that up when Presley died, and Moody Blue truly became his last album. What a dung heap of misplaced energy! Moody Blue with its insincere, by-the-numbers parodies of rock and roll and its heavy emphasis on overly histrionic ballads, was everything the punks never wanted to be -- but were in their own way. (There were some good numbers here, but the stench of death was about the project from the beginning.) Rubincam didn't outlive Elvis by much, and when he died I got my first promotion. (If it wasn't such an understatement, I'd say that life is very weird sometimes.) Anyway, the Presley piece was the first high-profile article I wrote in my pro career. People seemed to like it, and I felt like I'd arrived. Who would have thought that 20 years later the news media would be full of pro forma coverage of the anniversary of the guy's death? Forgotten in the coverage of the disciples who think that Elvis is God or, at least, the Silver Surfer, is that it all started with records and a guy trying to sing something a little different from what anybody else was singing. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo