Elvis: The once and future King

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, at 3.30 in the morning of 16 August 1977, Elvis Presley was pronounced dead at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. His girlfriend, Ginger Alden, had found his body a little more than an hour earlier, collapsed on the floor of his Graceland bathroom. He had had heart failure while seated on the toilet, reading a book entitled The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42 years old.

Within hours of the announcement of his death, vast crowds of mourners were assembling outside Graceland; when the gates were opened the following afternoon to allow them in to pay their respects, the queue stretched back more than a mile down Elvis Presley Boulevard. When Elvis's body was finally transported, in a cortège of white Cadillacs, to the city's Forest Hill cemetery, more than 100 vans were needed to transport the floral tributes from fans. It was a send-off fit for a king.

The following weeks would see a feverish burst of activity from his record company, RCA, as they struggled to accommodate the most extreme example so far of that peculiar ghoulish affection that spurs fans to rush out and purchase something, anything, by the recently deceased, as if struck by guilt for not having bought more during the dead star's lifetime. By September, there were no fewer than eight reissued singles joining the final hit released in Presley's lifetime, "Way Down", in the UK Top 50; a further 10 albums scuttled their way back into the LP charts.

The label bosses, and especially Elvis's manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, must have been delighted at their cash-cow's posthumous performance; little did they realise that, even as they were counting the profits, they were losing control of Elvis. RCA may still be making money off his corpse, but their efforts, and those of Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, to determine the manner in which Elvis would be remembered, were rudely brushed aside by the public, who asserted a kind of collective ownership of this most distinctive of American icons.

In its own way, this public reclamation of Elvis was a long-overdue snub to the way in which Parker, particularly, had mishandled Presley's career, insisting on presenting him as some kind of bland, airbrushed matinée idol, little better than the likes of the Fifties teen idol Fabian, when Elvis's real claim to fame lay in his being the one who had opened the Pandora's box of suppressed teenage desires, and brought a tremor of authentic sexuality to a ruthlessly neutered post-war entertainment industry. From the moment he died, Elvis was suddenly liberated, free to assume all manner of disguises and manifestations, from the comic to the sinister to the religious. It was as if fans, long cowed by the tragic reality of Elvis's career, were now able to assert their own notions of the star, to repossess the spirit of rock'n'roll long since purloined by corporate interests.

Within weeks of his passing, the first sightings were reported of the supposedly dead Elvis, waiting in a supermarket queue, driving a truck, or filling up at a gas station – revealingly, usually involved in the mundane, blue-collar situations routinely undertaken by most of his fans. Though in life he had become a rich recluse, a person apart from his public, in death he could now become one of them again.

The proliferation of Elvis sightings has become a collective joke since then, most now being propounded with tongue firmly in cheek. Sometimes the jokes are quite funny: only a few days ago, some punter laid a 5p bet at odds of 20 million to one that Elvis would one day ride into London on Shergar to play tennis against the fugitive toff murderer Lord Lucan in the Wimbledon finals. Always one for a laugh – like many in the 1970s, he could apparently recite various Monty Python routines by heart –

Elvis himself would probably have appreciated the gag. The Colonel, one suspects, would have been rather more appreciative, were he still around, of the marvellous new promotional opportunities afforded by TV commercials and the zombie-reanimation effect of disco remixes on tired old material, which have thrust his boy back to the top with "A Little Less Conversation", 46 years after his first hit, and 25 years after his passing. Perhaps the obsessives and weirdos are right: Elvis will never die. Or, to paraphrase the more religious of those obsessives, he died only to rise again, more powerful than ever. But then, they're nuts.

Everybody knows the story of Elvis, even if they haven't seen any of the largely lamentable biopics and pusillanimous documentaries about his life and career. The son of archetypal poor white trash, twin brother to a stillborn sibling, Jesse, Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on 8 January 1935, drove a truck, and loved his momma Gladys with a passion. Such a passion, in fact, that he decided to record a tribute to her as a birthday gift, at Sam Phillips's Memphis Recording Services, where he was spotted by Phillips's secretary, Marion Keisker. When he returned a while later with his band to record a few demos for Phillips, he changed the course of popular music by fusing R&B and rockabilly together, became a huge star, got drafted into the army, starred in some rubbish movies, made a great comeback, then declined into a bloated wreck and died. The End.

Garnished with sleazy details of one form or another – his predilection for girls' white panties, his drug habits, his demolition of TVs with guns, etc – these are effectively the facts upon which hundreds of posthumous assessments have been based, from Albert Goldman's notoriously iconoclastic biography Elvis to the eminent musicologist Peter Guralnick's more sympathetic account in Last Train To Memphis.

My own take on Elvis is that his life was a classic three-act opera, the first act depicting the blazing comet of youthful success, the final act dealing with his triumphant 1968 comeback and subsequent tragic decline, and the middle act being one long betrayal, as the emasculation begun by the army was completed by Hollywood. It makes, I feel, as much sense as any short summary of his life, and at least lends it a tragic dimension that is, perhaps, the least this towering figure of 20th-century culture merits.

For some, the tragedy of Elvis was simply one of physique, as if his decline was just a by-product of his taste for burgers. When the US Postal Service, a few years back, announced it was to bring out an Elvis stamp, a huge public debate ensued, with fans voting on whether it should be the young, svelte Elvis or the old, obese Elvis depicted on the stamp. The young Elvis won hands down, of course, most fans preferring to be reminded, every time they opened a letter, of his – and, by extension, their own – youthful promise, rather than the inevitable betrayal of that promise by the depredations of age and appetite.

A few more thoughtful types took the opposite view, seeing in Presley's defiant later performances a courage and nobility denied to his younger self, but they were in the minority. In any case, Elvis himself appeared disgusted by his surplus pounds, undertaking the most drastic weight-loss programme ever devised when scheduled for a season in Las Vegas. Unable to bear the pangs of hunger associated with dieting, Elvis would be given a knock-out shot on arrival, in his private jet, at Las Vegas airport, and would be taken to a hotel suite whose windows had been blacked out, where he would remain, unconscious, for three weeks, sustained only by a drip-feed of vital nutrients. After three weeks, he would awake, several stone lighter – and, one imagines, ready for dinner.

In truth, Elvis was always in denial – not just about his physical condition, but about his addictions and, more tragically, his art. This is a man, remember, who once visited Richard Nixon at the White House to try to persuade the President that he, one of the most high-profile, recognisable people in the world, should be made an undercover narcotics agent because he could speak to the young in their own language and counter the damaging influence of the likes of the Beatles and Jane Fonda (Nixon, no fool, kitted him out with a badge and eagerly assented to the photo-opportunity) – yet whose own corpse was found, on examination by Bio-Sciences Laboratories of Van Nuys, to contain an extraordinary cocktail of 14 different drugs, including codeine, morphine, Valium, Valmid, Amytal, Nembutal, Carbrital, Demerol, Elavil, Aventyl, Sinutab and a "close to toxic level" of Quaalude, and likewise of Placidyl. It is entirely appropriate that Elvis should have died in a bathroom – he was, by then, in effect a walking bathroom cabinet full of drugs.

His art, too, was largely a matter of denial. Legend has it that it was RCA, or the army, or Colonel Tom, that emasculated the naturally rockin' Elvis and set him to recording the slew of sickly ballads – "It's Now or Never", "Wooden Heart", "Can't Help Falling in Love", "Are You Lonesome Tonight" etc – with which he continued his career on his release from the army. But the scissor-wielder was actually none other than Elvis himself; he wanted nothing more than to sound like Dean Martin; to that end, the epochal 1954 sessions that first teamed Presley with the guitarist Scotty Moore and the bassist Bill Black began with limp attempts at ballads such as "I Love You Because" and "Harbor Lights".

It was only during a coffee-break that Elvis started horsing around with "That's All Right, Mama", and only when the astute Sam Phillips took an interest that Presley started to rock'n'roll seriously. Now that most of the outtakes from that session have been made available, it is possible to compare the huge gulf of form and meaning between the earlier, country-style run-through of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and the final, rock'n'roll version. The same happens, albeit in pantomime fashion, with "Milkcow Blues Boogie", which features a false start in polite country style before Elvis says, "Hold it, fellas – that don't move me; let's get 'real, real gone' for a change!", after which the trio rock it up a treat. It's so corny-hip, it could be the would-be film star Elvis rewriting his own history to fit a more satisfying dramatic shape.

Likewise, it was Elvis the gospel fan that requested the Jordanaires as back-up singers for the sessions that resulted in "Don't Be Cruel". They would serve, for the rest of his career, as the background sense of order, maturity and paternal security against which he promised such youthful potency and sexual abandon; they would also ruin some of his best work with their staid, conservative sound. It was Elvis, too, who hankered after getting into the movies, visualising himself as a serious actor like James Dean; but when his minders acceded to his demands for a non-singing role (as the half-Native American Pacer in Flaming Star, surely a metaphor for his own interracial musical stature), the results proved less popular with the public than the same year's GI Blues, and Elvis was condemned to a decade of bland musicals that would in effect destroy his reputation.

It is convenient to place all the blame for an artist's decline at the door of his business associates, but Elvis, like Dylan and Michael Jackson after him, was essentially a self-made man (albeit not quite as literally as Jackson). Even as a youngster in Memphis, he had definite ideas about the way he wanted to appear to the world: long before stage duties demanded such flamboyance, the teenage Elvis would have clothes run up by Memphis's top tailor to his own outlandish designs, and had already discovered how to accentuate his saturnine good looks with eye-shadow. His hairstyle, too, was the result of diligent experimentation with various pomades (an interest satirised in the running joke about Dapper Dan Pomade in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?). In the end, Elvis settled on a combination of three different types of hair dressing – "butch wax" for the front, to get the most effective "flop", and separate oils for the back and top. Even by the narcissistic standards of today's product-conscious youth, that seems a tad obsessive, to say the least.

To a (white) teenage audience primed for rock'n'roll outrage by Little Richard's pompadour and the antics of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Elvis was the liberator, the one who opened up a whole new set of possibilities about the way you could live, the bold new way you could do something as basic as walk down the street with a certain swagger. And in his unashamedly black-inflected vocals was an equivalent liberation from the white-bread MOR schlock that dominated post-war American pop. As Bob Dylan would later admit, "Hearing Elvis for the first time was like a jailbreak – and I didn't even know I was in jail".

Or, as the cultural theorist Camille Paglia put it, when comparing Elvis to that earlier media super-star Lord Byron, "Energy and beauty together are burning, godlike, destructive". Within months of his arrival on the national stage, the godlike Elvis had destroyed the old showbiz order, rewritten the rules on young desire and initiated the era of the teenager. Before Elvis, there were no teenagers – older children were just adults in training, apprentices to the past; after Elvis, there was youth culture, the most powerful commercial force in the history of the world. He gave an entire generation an idea of itself as a generation, rather than an afterthought of history. "It was like he came along and whispered a dream in everybody's ear," said Bruce Springsteen, "and then we dreamt it."

Strangely, though, the dream did not end in 1977, but became weirder and more surreal with the passing years. The rash of apocryphal sightings of Elvis was ironically proven true, as a proliferation of Elvis impressionists brought his presence to second-hand life around the world. In this, as in his music, the star proved a liberalising force, offering equal opportunity to all: tiny pre-teen tots would ape the young Elvis's shaky legs; older, tubbier types would belt out the melodramatic "American Trilogy" with due kitsch gravitas.

Meanwhile, ciphers of Elvis started appearing in films such as Mystery Train, TV series such as Twin Peaks, and cartoons such as Johnny Bravo. Before long, Elvis had become an iconic American presence, as integral to the national character as Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy, Twain, Thoreau and Melville – though, unlike them, one accorded no intellectual gifts. Instead, like John Wayne, he is acclaimed as a force of nature, something pure and instinctual, a man of action rather than reflection, more endowed with pioneer spirit than the smarts to comprehend his own position. Andy Warhol, no less, affirmed Elvis's ascension to the pantheon of global icons by featuring him in one of his multi-image screenprints, alongside the likes of fellow mononyms Mao, Marilyn and Che.

Other artists, too, were liberated by Presley's death, free to portray him in a range of imaginative, unofficially sanctioned situations and personae, from Elvis Zombie to Elvis Hitler. (Interested parties should consult Greil Marcus's fascinating study of Presley's posthumous presence, Dead Elvis). The extent of the underground Elvis artefact industry, meanwhile, was demonstrated a few years ago, when the Royal Festival Hall hosted American installation artist Joni Mabe's Traveling Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis, a mind-boggling accumulation of Elvis ephemera, from lamps in the shape of an Elvis bust, and bottles of "Love Me Tender" Moisturising Milk Bath, to such grisly artefacts as putative Elvis toenails, and what she claimed was Elvis's wart.

"I honestly believe it is Elvis's wart, yes," she affirmed, when I asked her whether she was serious. "I thought it was a joke at first, but then I looked at pictures and realised that, yes, he really did have a wart on his hand before 1958, and in pictures after 1958, it's gone. Everything adds up!" Faced with such overwhelming evidence, one could only gaze in wonder at the rejected scrap of flesh in its perspex reliquary, just begging for some mad scientist to come along and clone a new Elvis from his wart.

By far the most popular appropriation of the late star's image, and one taken seriously by some adherents, is that of Elvis Christ, a notion that draws much of its potency from the way in which Elvis has demonstrably "risen from the dead" like none before him, to assume an almost sanctified status in fans' hearts. Just as some Irish families still display pictures of John F Kennedy like some martyr, so, too, can quasi-religious icons of Elvis be found on the walls of trailer-homes across America – albeit icons painted on velvet.

In Portland, Oregon, there is an actual Church of Elvis, offering true believers the opportunity to be blessed by Elvis or even married by him. The church's shop window contains a prayer-wheel with alternating images of Jesus and Elvis; as the wheel spins, the images mingle together eerily. Blasphemous to some, maybe – although, as the former Eagle Don Henley noted in his song "If Dirt Were Dollars": "I was flying back from Lubbock/ I saw Jesus on the plane/ Or maybe it was Elvis/ You know, they kinda look the same... "

A special supplement on Elvis Presley will be published with 'The Independent' on Saturday 10 August