Writer on Elvis Presley

“Of course, the main harbinger of the homer era was probably Ruth himself. After “Heartbreak Hotel,” no one wanted to be Perry Como. They wanted to be Elvis Presley. After 1920, no one wanted to be Ty Cobb. They wanted to be Babe Ruth. The old game had been about precision, strategy, incremental progress. The new game was about power, the single blast that busts open the piñata.”

“On the sunny side, there was that moment, during Pres. Trump's 2019 State of the Union address, when the place erupted with a gusty/lusty HAPPY BIRTHDAY. This was to honor a man in the audience Trump saluted for valor in surviving first the Holocaust and then the Pittsburgh “Tree of Life” massacre – and now his 81st birthday. There was nearly breakdancing and moonwalking in the balconies of Congress. Decorum be damned. We are Americans. Freedom is our bequest. Frivolity is our nature. I saw the same gusto at the Navy base in Haifa; also for an impromptu birthday. They are Israelis. Their love of life and country runs so deep they can't sit still and prefer to party, as it was that day in America. For where else but in America and Israel would a solemn occasion turn spontaneously to rock and roll? Try that in the parliaments of other countries while the leader speaks, and see who comes out alive. Instead, we insist on joy. We celebrate our freedoms through acts of whimsy. Long ago we traded in their Richard Wagner for our Elvis Presley.”

“Mississippi is also about people helping people. We lead the nation in charitable donations per-capita. When disaster strikes, our people respond with immediate relief for their neighbors, as they did after the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and following devastating hurricanes like Camille and Katrina of recent times and dozens of tornadoes and fires. Elvis Presley helped to rebuild McComb after a January 1975 tornado nearly leveled the place by giving a concert to aid storm victims. Today, Presley's birthplace in Tupelo is among the state's leading travel destinations, rivaling the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River-area casinos that annually pour millions of badly-needed dollars into the state treasure. There are more musicians, singers and other artisans of note per square foot here than anywhere else in America. Presley and Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner presided over our creative class, but they have been surrounded by a skyful of bright lights in the artistic constellation.”

“I remember having a conversation with some of the older artists at STAX about when Elvis was breaking in the mid 1950's like the Reverend Bishop Dwight Arnold “Gatemouth” Moore, a disc jockey who had been a huge blues singer in the 1920´s and 1930's and became a gospel singer thereafter. In fact, it was he who said, 'Elvis gave us a second career'. That's what some people thought, but it's like you hear, some thought he was doing great things for African-Americans, bringing a respect to that music. I've read the newspaper articles of the time and the sense of fear and anger that Elvis instilled and the way he was despised was a real jolt, and it remains an amazing representation of America at the time. At the same time, the fact it was a white guy doing it made it different and I think a lot of people did get a new life.”

“I was making for the door when he opened his eyes, blinked, as if he wasn't sure for a moment what I was doing there. He twitched a shoulder toward the phone and said ‘Would you mind calling room service and ordering me a fried-egg sandwich?. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet...”

“The Writers Institute's intimate dinner gatherings – typically 10 or 12 seated at a round table with a modest buffet from our University at Albany campus food service – are a reminder that wonderful things happen when we turn off our mobile devices, make eye contact and actually engage in the give-and-take of dialogue. At a recent dinner, the conversation swung around a couple of otherworldly experiences. One story revolved around a "possessed" Elvis Presley clock, actually a detour into paranormal activity. The Lady who spoke and her husband, explained that they were both fans of Elvis so they made a pilgrimage years ago to Graceland, where they purchased a kitschy clock that featured Elvis swiveling his hips in sync to the movement of the clock's tick-tock. The batteries had long died, but they left the clock on the wall for sentimental reasons. A decade later, the Lady described that while she watched a recent documentary on Priscilla Presley, the clock surged back to life and Elvis began swiveling his hips once more after years of stoppage. I was the dubious journalist again, arguing that so-called dead batteries retain a small amount of voltage even though they stop powering a device. Sometimes, they mysteriously recharge, but she refused to yield to the notion that the clock's unsettling movement could be explained by natural laws...”

“I believe the three most important events of the 1950's were the Brown vs Board of Education decision, the building of Levitttown and the emergence of Elvis Presley.”

“There are some things — football, particle physics, heavy metal, and constitutional law among them — that I love, but don't love nearly as much as I love the way people love them. Give me a choice between watching the Super Bowl and watching people talk about the Super Bowl for two hours, and I'll always pick the latter: Listen to someone explain their passion, and eventually, they'll show you their soul. But at the very top of this list of loves, there can only be one man, Elvis Presley. I love him, I think to myself as I leave Graceland, as much as I can love a human being I have never truly known. But, maybe more than anything else about him, I love him for the fact that both his presence and his absence created a space for people to come together and try to comprehend the capacity for destruction and redemption, the sheer power, of their love. I love the potential for intimacy and revelation such a space allows. I love that it has lingered long enough for me to find it....”