The Presley Phenomenon

...In my kind of music," he said, "you just get out there and go crazy...

...Perforce, most of Elvis is given over to detailing the excesses of exhaustion, and what Clemenceau said of the United States aptly describes Presley's own path: He went from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through civilization...

...At 19, for example, Presley managed to cut a professional record on Memphis' Sun label, with "That's All Right Mama" on one side and "Blue Moon Over Kentucky" on the other...

...Yet by the middle of 1956, about six months after the release of his first national hit, "Heartbreak Hotel," Presley had peaked...

...Elvis (McGraw-Hill, 598 pp., $14.95), his scolding, derisive biography of the singer, drips vitriol from every page (an "attempt at cultural genocide," the Village Voice-reviewer hysterically called it), yet the adoring have not been deterred...

...Once he has grabbed hold of a fact, nothing will induce him to let go until he has seen it in print...

...To a degree extreme even for rock music, his work was all feeling, no thought, all heart, no head...

...Four years after his death, the same could more accurately be said about Elvis Presley...

...Just this month an old car that transported him to one of his concerts sold for a ridiculous sum...

...His art was based on ignorant passion...

...The second requirement was simple ignorance...

...His collapse cannot be separated from his broader significance, his position in American life...

...Indeed, by the end, he didn't even like rock 'n' roll...

...In particular, he fingers the singer's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, for sucking his property dry and then making additional millions from the useless hulk...

...Goldman assiduously explodes the myths that have grown up around these early years, but what is amazing is how much of the mythology remains after he is done detonating-the irresistible performer, the unconscious magnetism, the clamorous crowds, the eviden turn of history's wheel...

...The company's owner took the disc to a local DJ, and the night it was aired "the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree...

...Goldman had to deal with an odd problem right from the start...

...Most disconcerting of all is his extravagance...

...Significantly, unlike every other major rock star, Presley never wrote his own material...

...Nor was Presley alone...

...No one who reads Elvis will be able to perceive Presley in quite the same way again...

...Everything that Presley was to achieve he accomplished in the first two years of his professional existence...

...If Presley had received any formal musical training, he would have been sidetracked into an established genteel tradition: the church, the parlor, or at best the concert stage...

...Between the lurid revelations and analytical insights, an Elvis Presley emerges, monstrous and pathetic, who is not easily forgotten...

...Goldman demonstrates that Presley was wholly a child of the modern mass media...

...Presley provides a biographer with almost nothing to narrate, practically no battles in reaching the top, no obstacles overcome or competitors bested, no trials and errors in building a career, no progression, no drama...

...If he had learned to play and sing at his father's knee, absorbing an ancient oral tradition, he would have been too submerged in the old to commit himself so fully to the new...

...From the grave, he has earned over $20 million...

...Lacking both knowledge and roots, he steered solely by his personal tastes...

...His fate was emblematic...

...What Presley did contribute was an image of total commitment, for no white person before him had thrown himself so completely into rock 'n' roll, given himself so wholeheartedly to this new, wild musical amalgam...

...The boys in his audience responded to the symbol of defiance and independence he presented, the girls to the erotic power of unleashed abandon...

...Goldman, never one to let kindness interfere with accuracy, observes: "He became a stock figure until, step by step, he was reduced to one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen...

...Dewey would play 'Blue Moon Over Kentucky,' then turn it over and play 'That's All Right Mama.' It was just those two sides for the rest of the evening...

...The book has quickly climbed the best-seller list, snapped up by an apparently insatiable public...

...Nonetheless, if it is possible to write a good book that is 300 pages too long, then Goldman has written a good book...

...The personal decline was no less ugly...

...It would be a mistake to include the Elvis Presley of those years in the history of American music...

...Presley's carefully preserved personal effects continue to inspire among the worshipful a kind of religious awe, like so many Shrouds of Turin...

...The rest was bankruptcy (artistic and personal, that is, not financial...

...Despite the debunking, there is the stuff of legend here...

...John Lennon was wrong: If anyone is bigger than Jesus, it is Elvis Presley...

...Steady degradation, humiliation and self-loathing transformed Presley, by the time of his death in 1977 at age 42, into an infantile grotesque...

...Beyond the immediately biographical, two things were necessary for Presley, or anyone like him, to emerge on the national scene...

...It flicked on and, just as immediately, flicked off-instant success followed at once by instant decline...

...In the '60s Presley drifted into middle-of-the-road schlock, capturing a wider audience at the same time that he lost every trace of vitality and setting the stage for the '70s, when he titillated old ladies in Las Vegas with Tom Jones imitations...

...By the end of his life, Presley had come to embody all that was most foul in the American mainstream...

...they were the nihilistic masses who read Penthouse magazine, collected guns, flocked to Las Vegas and Atlantic City envied and admired big bucks no matter how acquired, and believed Western philosophy had reached its pinnacle in the credo of looking out for number one...

...The movies Presley made started out mediocre and went downhill from there...

...Albert Goldman has obviously benefited from this mystique...

...More discerning readers, curious about a national icon, will recognize Elvis' shortcomings...

...Haley was always something of a novelty act...

...His rise was so rapid that, reading about it, one cannot help feeling something special was going on, something almost magical...

...The young performer's eccentric look was copied from a Tony Curtis movie, his musical education acquired not, as has commonly been assumed, from church singing but from turning the radio dial...

...Now, as in life, he remains a national phenomenon-an American original as well as an incredible money-making machine...

...Goldman blames greed, commercialization, exploitation, divorce, and Presley's stint in the Army for the fall...

...Born in 1935 into a Mississippi family with pure Southern redneck roots, Presley did not begin singing in public until 1953, when he was a senior in high school...

...The ignorance, however, undid Presley, allowing him to be bilked by a scheming manager, turning him into a self-indulgent, drug-drenched, shattered wreck once he had fulfilled all the dreams an impoverished and unsophisticated country boy could possess with his mansion, his Cadillacs and his swimming pool...

...His ascent operated more on the principle of a light switch than an escalator...

...These, it should be pointed out, were not the '60s flower children and counterculturists, who faded away in the early '70s...

...Presley was neither the first of the '50s white rockers nor the best...

...The first of these was the medium of radio, which allowed previously separated musical strains to be blended into startlingly new combinations...

...But ultimately, it seems, what went wrong in Presley's life is intimately connected to what went right...

...and Goldman's acidulous tone occasionally swallows up his subject...

...That image was irresistible to Presley's fans...

...She created a shy and reclusive mama's boy who found comfort apart from other children in the isolated satisfactions of listening to music...

...Although radio stations still carefully segregate the type of music they play, since before the 1940s listeners have had an unprecedented range of sounds to choose from...

...After 1957, he ceased being of any musical importance and took his place within that part of our national pantheon which offers celebrity to such as Jimmy Hoffa and Spiro Agnew...

...As it turned out, Presley was born into a South that was abandoning its folk past without having yet acquired the North's high-art heritage...

...Many of his early fans and still more of his later ones also lost direction during the '60s and '70s...

...Equally uprooted and unlettered, similarly if rather less grandly nouveau riche, they followed their idol into hedonism, narcissism, irresponsibility, and anti-intellectualism (though rarely, of course, to the same degree...

...Although Goldman brings to Presley's much hashed-over life a valuable combination of qualities-the investigative reporter's doggedness, the gossip columnist's fascination with the sleazy and the sensational, the intellectual's critical apparatus-these features do not always coexist comfortably...

...The passion captivated millions who had never seen anything like it before...

...With Goldman's help, we know now that the source of that unique dedication, on a personal level, was the peculiarity of Presley's childhood, especially the role played by his pathologically protective mother...

...The songs became repetitious, formulatic...

...Bill Haley was working the territory at least two years before Elvis claimed it for his own, and Buddy Holly's musical superiority was almost as evident then as it surely is today...

...Repeatedly during this period of his life, Presley duplicated that kind of remarkable success...