Pop stars and politicians go together like bacon and eggs but there's never been an encounter between low culture and high office more bizarre than Elvis Aaron Presley's White House rendezvous with Richard Milhous Nixon on 21 December 1970. So as August draws to a close we conclude Carnival Saloon's inaugural Elvis Month with a look at one of my favourite chapters in the Presley saga.
According to the United States National Archives the photo of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon is its most requested item, more so than the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. The National Archives website chronicles this odd meeting brilliantly and I'd encourage you take a look, pore over the photos and read the first-hand accounts and documents. But if that's too much trouble here's the condensed version.
Elvis was a man obsessed with firearms and collecting police insignia. Wherever he went he'd try to get his hands on a local law enforcement badge. As I wrote in my That's The Way It Is post there was nothing counter-cultural about Elvis by 1970. He saw himself apart from the hippies and the peace protesters who epitomised the age. The ultimate symbol of this opposition would be getting himself a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. That meant an excursion to the Nation's Capital.
Presley's uninvited trip to Washington was unusual in many ways, not least because he told no one except his Memphis Mafia pals Jerry Schilling and Sonny West. You can watch Jerry's recollection of the escapade here:
On the flight to DC Presley put pen to American Airlines paper and wrote an incredible six-pager in which he expressed admiration for the President and asked to be made a "Federal Agent at Large". As well as claiming to be familiar with "Communist brainwashing" techniques he also writes, presumably without irony, that he had done an "in-depth study of drug abuse".
The minutes of the hastily arranged meeting also make first-rate reading. "Presley immediately began showing the President his law enforcement paraphernalia including badges from police departments in California, Colorado and Tennessee." The no doubt baffled Nixon "mentioned that he thought Presley could reach young people, and that it was important for Presley to retain his credibility." The highlight of the tête-à-tête for me is Elvis' attack on The Beatles. Although he was happy to sing their songs to the Vegas faithful he told Dick that the Fab Four "had been a real force for anti-American spirit. He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme".
Did Elvis get his prized badge? Earlier in the day John Finlator, the Bureau's Deputy Director, had given The King the brush-off telling him that badges only went to "those employees directly connected with the agency". An extremely pissed-off Presley was forced to try his luck in the Oval Office.
In his definitive biog Careless Love Peter Guralnick writes that Elvis brought up the badge subject with Nixon towards the end of the meeting. He quotes Nixon adviser Bud Krogh's account.
"The President looked a little uncertain at this request. He turned to me and said, 'Bud, can we get him a badge?' I couldn't read what the President really wanted me to say. 'Well sir,' I answered him, 'if you want to give him a badge, I think we can get him one.' ... Elvis was smiling triumphantly. 'Thank you very much, sir. This means a lot to me,'... Elvis then moved up close to the President and, in a spontaneous gesture, put his left arm around him and hugged him. President hugging was not, at least in my limited experience, a common occurrence in the Oval Office. It caught the President - and me - off guard. The President recovered from his surprise and patted Elvis on the shoulder. 'Well, I appreciate your willingness to help, Mr Presley.'"
In return for this kindness Presley told Nixon that he'd brought him a chrome-plated World War II Colt .45 that he'd been forced to leave with the President's Secret Service detail. In a letter written on New Year's Eve Nixon thanked Elvis for the pistol, "You were particularly kind to remember me with this impressive gift, as well as your family photographs, and I am delighted to have them for my collection of special momentos".
On returning to Graceland for Christmas Elvis dispensed presidential presents to his family and excitedly retold the tale of Mr Presley Goes To Washington. Peter Guralnick quotes Priscilla Presley, "He was like a kid; it was like nothing had ever happened [to precipitate the trip]. He talked about how he got to meet President Nixon and told him all about how he was getting drugs off the streets."
What a story! David Frost will disagree and there are some, I'm sure, who will rate Nixon's handshake with Mao Zedong as more significant but when it comes to encounters with Tricky Dicky there's no contest as to which is my favourite.
I've thoroughly enjoyed my month with the King. I hope you have too. As ever, do leave a comment below. Thank you very much.
I've just returned from an excellent weekend at the Green Man festival in the Brecon Beacons. There will be plenty of proper reviews elsewhere I'm sure so here's a quick list of things I particularly enjoyed over the last couple of days.
Wilco (pictured above) playing Hoodoo Voodoo, not a song I've seen them perform before.
The daughter of Beth Jeans Houghton's bass player dancing on stage to their song Hot Toast.
All-round superb quality of food. Special culinary award to the apple cupcakes.
James Marsh is having quite a year. In March his wonderful film about Twin Towers tightrope walker Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, deservedly won the Oscar for best documentary. A few months later he garnered further acclaim for directing the second part of the Red Riding trilogy, Channel 4's adaptation of David Peace's Yorkshire crime epic.
As part of my Elvis Month series I wanted to talk to James about one of his earlier works, The Burger and the King. The BBC doc was made in 1995 and is a visually imaginative and often very funny adaptation of David Adler's book The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley. Sadly it's not available on DVD and contrary to what James told me I can't find it on YouTube either. Still, it's repeated occasionally on TV and I am also going to try to get a clip on the BBC website.
I hope you enjoy reading our conversation about the film as much as I did having it.
How did the film come together? I was working at the BBC in the Arena office at the time. I had made another Arena film before The Burger and the King about the song Heartbreak Hotel so I’d been to Graceland. There are all these official souvenir gift and book shops and there were two or three Elvis cookbooks even then, that was in 1991. I remember glancing at one that one of his uncles had written. Then David Adler came up with a far more postmodern, far more curious and quite cheeky rendering of the same idea. His book came to Anthony Wall at Arena and he gave it to me and said, “You can’t make a film about this can you?” and I said, “Yes, maybe I can”.
Why did you think you could make a film from what’s essentially an annotated cookbook? I think it was a neat way of making a film about Elvis, which is a very well-known subject and exposing a different way of understanding him. What I saw in the book was a way of telling Elvis’ life story through these food choices he made throughout his life. Hopefully the insights you get are quite sharp, and quite pointed and quite interesting even though the whole manner of the film is like a black comedy essentially.
What does knowledge of Elvis’ diet add to our understanding of the man? What it gives you is access to his upbringing and this childhood in a very particular part of America. A psychologist would have a field day with this stuff. He grew up with a very underprivileged background in Tupelo, this small town in Mississippi, during the Depression. If you don’t have very much to eat then it’s a big deal when you grow up and can afford anything you want. With Elvis, he didn’t have a great imagination or a desire to collect Picasso paintings but did have a desire to eat the things he couldn’t when he was younger. He had no means of restraining himself, and no reason to either. In a sense that’s the simple story of his life and it ended up killing him to some extent. It’s like with Michael Jackson; it’s a time honoured story of indulgence and excess.
The food in the film is pretty extreme. Did you eat all the meals? Everything you see in the film we actually ate. By the end a lot of the crew had put on a lot of weight, including me, and I’m really skinny. You had to really force yourself to eat it. That day we filmed the peanut butter and banana sandwich we must have made about 25 of them. We had to eat them because it would have been incredibly rude not to. I ate squirrel very early on in the shoot. It was kind of alright. They are quite bony so there’s not much meat; you need about three squirrels to have a proper meal. It’s a tangy chicken-like flavour but kind of gristly too. I think if you stew and tenderise it it’s probably better than having it fried up in a pan like we did.
Have you cooked any of the recipes since? Certainly not. It was the one and only time I was exposed to that cooking. It’s comfort food. It’s food that’s designed to fill you up essentially. It’s true of peasant cooking all over the world in a way. It fills you up and it keeps you going. And Elvis loved it.
You mentioned your film about Heartbreak Hotel and as well as The Burger and the King you made the feature film The King with Gael Garcia Bernal which references Elvis in a different way but it's full of that Southern Gothic. What is about Presley that seems to continually interest you? That’s a good question and I don’t really ask myself those questions. I read Albert Goldman’s book which is a scurrilous and sensationalist biography of Elvis which isn’t always accurate but is a very gripping story. What you see in Elvis is an archetypal 20th-century story. You have this innocent, pure talent that’s corrupted by the world itself. His story has become a modern myth in the best sense of the word. It just so happens that I made one, then another film, The Burger and the King, about Elvis. Calling the feature The King wasn’t my idea. I resisted it. It was my co-writer’s idea to call our lead character Elvis. He was called Joe until the final draft of the script. My co-writer said we should call him Elvis. I said I can’t do that because I’d already been part of so much of that mythology. We got into an argument. Literally the following day I saw a piece in the New York Times about a Hispanic soldier who’d been killed in Iraq and he was called Elvis. Perfect! In a sense the use of that title and the name in the film was a little clumsy but it kind of works and I guess it carried on this obsession, if you want to call it that, with Elvis Presley. Our Elvis has been in the army and there are other interesting connotations with the character. Elvis is not a name that the white popluation of America has adopted but you find that Hispanic and black people are called Elvis which is really odd. And we decided to call this Mexican character in the film Elvis and it kind of stuck. And Gael loved it. He loved being called Elvis.
Talking about Elvis and black people reminds me of Bubba Ho-tep. I haven’t seen it. I should see it right?
You should certainly see it. I wrote this treatment for a drama before I made The King. It was after I made The Burger and the King. It was called the Shrouds of Elvis. The idea was this. Elvis didn't die. As the conspiracy alleged he actually manufactured his own death so he could go and have a different life somewhere. I converted that into the people around him, those who stood to profit from his death, organised his abduction and he was taken off to Kalamazoo, Michigan and locked up in a mansion. At one point the BBC were going to make this drama. I think Bubba Ho-tep may have something in common with that idea.
Yes. It’s a very bizarre but amusing film. It’s not a black Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep. It’s a black JFK! That’s even weirder! I must check it out.
Do you have many memories of the people you interviewed for The Burger and the King? Quite strong ones because it was such an unusual trip we took. The two people I remember vividly are his main cook at Graceland who was this lovely black lady called Mary Jenkins. We went and saw her three or four times and every time we were given all these peanut butter and banana sandwiches. She had this really tender relationship with Elvis, like his mother almost. She was on call at Graceland every day for 12 hours waiting for his orders. It was like a restaurant he had going there. So she invited us to this house that Elvis had bought for her in gratitude for her cooking services. She was great. She did some shopping for us. In the film you see her pushing the cart around the Piggly Wiggly food store.
She was a wonderful character and very honest. She knew that he was getting big and this wasn’t the right thing to do but she wanted to make him happy. It’s the classic thing of the love between them expressed through food. He was very nice to the people around him. He wasn’t one of these awful celebrities who are rude and mean to his staff. He’s very endearing in that respect.
The other person was this guy Dan Warlick who was the medical examiner in Memphis when Elvis died. His job was basically to find out why Elvis died which involved an autopsy essentially. At one point he told me he had Elvis’ voice box in his hand. So he was holding the seed of Elvis’ genius. It was amazing; I shook that hand, warmly and calmly, grasping it in a very loving and intense way. He was the guy who got us Dr Nick. He was no longer the coroner; he had retired and was a lawyer in private practice and Dr Nick was basically one of his clients. Because he liked us and thought we were alright he brokered that meeting, which was very weird and very awkward. Dr Nick is a very controversial character in Elvis lore of course. A lot of people obviously blame him for Elvis’ death because of the amount of drugs he prescribed. I think he eventually had his medical licence removed some time after you made The Burger and the King. And rightly so. Dr Nick is an interesting figure. I think he’s dead now. I was led into this sort of antechamber to his office and Dr Nick was on the other side of the room. We had about five minutes to set our gear up and he gave us about 20 minutes of his time. But within that we got a lot out of him. He hadn’t spoken about this for a very long time. He was obviously feeling very guilty. He looks very furtive and very haunted in the interview in the film. But he was really open about the nature of Elvis’ health problems and the prescriptions he was giving him. He wasn’t the only person by the way who was prescribing drugs to Elvis, it’s the whole Michael Jackson story all over again, there were other doctors he had lined up around Memphis who were supplying him with medication but Dr Nick was obviously the main supplier. In a sense his alibi was that he knew someone was going to do it so he’d rather control it. For better or for worse that was his line and that’s what he did. And I think that at a certain point everyone can agree that what he was doing was incredibly irresponsible and presumably contributed to Elvis’ demise, if not his actual death. Clearly his health had suffered enormously.
The problem was this. He was taking sedatives a lot, downers, barbiturates that slowed down his metabolism and also eating an enormous amount of food. He wasn’t digesting the food properly or indeed going through the proper bodily motions you need to keep going. He died in this extraordinary way. He died on the toilet trying to have shit basically. He tried so hard he gave himself a heart attack. It’s a very symbolic end to his eating career. We also met the undertaker who had kept the pillows which he’d laid Elvis on, like relics. There are Elvis relics all over the place. The film’s look and the association with Memphis make me think of William Eggleston. There’s even an ominous ceiling fan in the final shot. Was that a conscious influence? I actually didn't know Eggleston’s work at that time. It was only doing Wisconsin Death Trip that really turned me on to American photography so I wasn’t really aware of Eggleston’s work then. I would say that Errol Morris and other documentary filmmakers who were using quite sophisticated stylistic devices to tell stories were probably more important at that time to the way I shot the film. I’d made a film before that called Trouble Man about Marvin Gaye and that has again these image type reconstructions which are a paradigm of what you see in The Burger and the King. What you’re seeing are not dramatic reconstructions per se; you’re getting imagery that comments on the story and visualises certain aspects in some way that we can’t get through archive or interviews or documentary shooting. So this style emerged from Trouble Man and a general awareness that the documentary form could support that visual style. It doesn’t have to be reverential and puritanical; you can actually have fun while making a documentary. Man on Wire is the ultimate expression of that. This idea that you can make a film that is a documentary but doesn’t have to be responsible or observe documentary type restrictions. You can break that open and deal in potent imagery that you feel the audience will respond to.
Finally, since this is primarily a music blog, what's your favourite Elvis song? That's easy. It's Blue Moon from the Sun sessions. Interestingly, I never used it in any of the films I've made that relate to Elvis - though I tried to use it at the end of The King and we couldn't afford to clear it.
I find the purity of the voice and the simplicity of the song overwhelming and very moving. At the end of the song there are these angelic moans that always make me shiver - they are the purest expression of longing that I know.
If you are a fan of James Marsh's other films you might want to read the rest of this interview in which I meander on to talk about Wisconsin Death Trip and Man on Wire a little more. I've uploaded it as a PDF.
Elvis Presley died 32 years ago today. Continuing Carnival Saloon's Elvis Month I'm marking the occasion with some truly unique tributes to the King.
Like many of my more outré recent musical discoveries it was Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour that introduced me to the song-poem phenomenon. On his Presidents Day show Bob played a remarkable track about a remarkable man called Jimmy Carter Says Yes. It's the sort of song you can't imagine anyone ever making. Which is true of most song-poems. If the concept is unfamiliar to you here's Bob's explanation from the radio show:
Have you ever seen those ads in the back of magazines that say things like "Do you have what it takes to become a songwriter?" or "Poems wanted - we'll set your poems to music". Well these are companies that are one step away from a scam. Everybody thinks they can write a poem and everybody wants to be in show business. So these companies would exploit that fact and charge between $75 to $400 to set the poems to music. Instead of being paid to make records you would pay them to make the records. A lot of people call this process song-sharking. What's interesting about it is is the songs quite often are a mixture of very sincere but unschooled lyric writing and the music is usually made by cynical studio musicians who just have it on a conveyor belt sometimes making as many as 12 songs an hour. Back in the day they'd print up just a few copies of the records (nowadays I'm guessing it would be a CD) and send it off to writer and that would be the last you'd hear from them; they'd be looking for the next group of suckers. Quite often those records end up at the Goodwill store and certain record collectors make a point of collecting these.
Phil Milstein's wonderful American Song-Poem Music Archives has more detailed background and also puts forward the case for the "unique pleasures the good ones have to offer". These include "the complex interactions at play between pro and am; cynicism and naïvete; talent stunted and craftlessness given wing".
But what's this got to do with Elvis? Well, since songs about both celebrities and the hereafter are both common song-poem topics it's not surprising that Elvis' death prompted a surge of material from America's amateur lyricists.
A few weeks ago I watched the PBS documentary Off The Charts: The Song-Poem Story. In it one of the contributors says that quite a few LPs that compiled song-poem tributes to Elvis were released right after his death. I found one of them, Gone But Not Forgotten, posted on WFMU's Beware of the Blog. You can hear the whole thing there but here's a taster.
Pure kitsch I know but no matter what you think of these songs' musical quality what's undeniable is that their lyrics have been evidently penned by hardcore fans. I think it's this heart-on-sleeve sincerity that's most enjoyable.
If you're now intrigued by song-poems WFMU has dozens more on their wondrous blog. There are also a couple of commercial compilations available (see Amazon links below). The documentary Off The Charts is really great; I bought my DVD for a few quid on Amazon, PBS have also made it available to watch for free on YouTube.
I've also created a 10-track Spotify playlist of some cracking New Lost City Ramblers tunes in tribute.
One gets the impression that Mike Seeger was the sort of man about whom no one had a bad word to say. He also opened countless pairs of ears to the wonderful sound of America's past. I'm in no doubt that he will be missed by many.
Related Posts State Songs #4: Arkansas - includes the New Lost City Rambler's track Arkansas Sheik
Elvis Week, Memphis' annual celebration of its favourite son, begins today. I thought I'd also dedicate August to the King so welcome to Carnival Saloon's inaugural Elvis Month.
To anyone who only associates Elvis Presley in the 70s with a hopped-up bloater bursting out of his sequinned jumpsuit I always recommend the superb concert film That's The Way It Is. For pure entertainment I challenge anyone not to enjoy it. It captures Elvis in one of his earliest Las Vegas residencies at a time when he still had a 32" waist.
The performance is fresh and energetic and Presley's voice sounds great. He's hilarious on stage too - joking with the band, messing about with his early hits and treating many of the beehived women in the audience to some very public displays of affection. The film's behind-the-scenes sequences are also a treat, my favourite being the sight of Elvis on a tandem bike.
After dozens of lousy films that made Elvis an even bigger star the Vegas years cemented his reputation not as a rock'n'roller but as America's greatest mainstream entertainer. The audience are an interesting part of That's The Way It Is. The men look like accountants, many of their wives resemble air-hostesses. This is not a crowd you can imagine at Fillmore West.
In the 50s Elvis' gyrating hips genuinely shocked middle America. There's an argument that Colonel Tom Parker orchestrated Elvis' stint in the army to guarantee middle America's acceptance of his star. He hoped 15 months military service would erase the memory of pelvic thrusts and fainting teenage girls.
That's The Way It Is was released again in 2001 as a re-edited 'special edition'. Whereas the 1970 original is inter-cut with peculiar interviews and what now looks like outmoded period detail the new version wisely keeps its focus on the concert.
Colonel Parker will be smiling from the grave. Before the film's release he sent a three-page memo to MGM head Jim Aubrey advising all interviews be "thoroughly checked [so that] it doesn't become monotonous and take away from the performance". The Colonel was equally unhappy about the depiction of Vegas as a Gomorrah of excess: "There is no reason to show an abundance of steaks in a truck... when perhaps in Dalton, Georgia, where the picture may be showing, a family saved up money to see the picture and relinquished their hamburger for that night so that they could see Elvis." (Quotes from Peter Guralnick's brilliant book Careless Love).
The DVD I have includes both versions and I'd suggest watching the 'new' one before the original. There's also a wonderful three-CD set that includes previously unreleased concert and rehearsal tracks. Here are two tracks.
For East Londoners the A13 is the great escape route. It runs out of the city through Essex towards the seaside towns of Southend and Shoeburyness.
I'm currently reading London Orbital, Iain Sinclair's account of his walk around the M25. Early in the book he writes that "the A13 shuffle through East London is like the credits sequence of the Mafia soap, The Sopranos; side-of-the-eye perspective, bridges, illegitimate business about to be overwhelmed by the big combos". The prose on the previous page is even better:
The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; fly-overs like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for the transporters. The A13 drains East London's wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, a pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated.
Carnival Saloon regulars won't be surprised that when I read that passage my thoughts turned to Billy Bragg's Essex-man take on Route 66.
The song's great appeal to me lies in its thrall to Americana (why are there no good British road songs?) combined with its absolute Englishness. Billy's put it better. Bragg's evocative essay about his revered highway, written some years before Sinclair's book, concludes, "the A13 is still there, rolling through a Springsteenesque landscape in which riverine Essex takes the place of the New Jersey shore, a tarmacadam trail to the Promised Land".
Whenever my 'American cousin' John Barner visits he arrives with a demented to-do list of things he wants to see. No Tower of London or British Museum for this tourist. Last time we took a vaguely Sinclairian jaunt out to Barking to admire the cul-de-sac named in honour of Billy Bragg. Next time I won't be shocked if we end up taking "the A road, the okay road that's the best" and "go motorin' on the A13." Related Posts Doing Woody's Work - MP3s of the Mermaid Avenue demos Billy Bragg & KT Tunstall - odd gig at HMV Oxford Street last year
MP3s are posted for a limited time with the aim of encouraging visitors to discover music they've never heard. If you like what you hear please buy more from the artist and go to their gigs. I always post links to purchase next to an MP3 link. If you represent an artist or a label and would prefer that I remove a link to an MP3, please email me at carnivalsaloon @ gmail.com and I will immediately delete the file.
The minutes of the hastily arranged meeting also make first-rate reading. "Presley immediately began showing the President his law enforcement paraphernalia including badges from police departments in California, Colorado
- Buy Bud Krogh's book at Amazon
