Elvis Has Left the Building

The Death of the King and the Rise of Punk Rock

Dylan Jones

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781468311013
• eBook ISBN: 9781468310429
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

"An interesting look at how 1977 marked the explosion of punk alongside this heartbreaking (though not altogether surprising) loss of a legend" ( USA Today ). In the late 1970s, punk music was setting out to destroy everything Elvis Presley had come to represent. But punk couldn't destroy The King himself—he had already done that, succumbing to his excesses at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Ever since, Elvis has permeated the world in ways that are bizarre and inexplicable: a pop icon while alive, he has become almost a religious icon in death, a modern-day martyr crucified on the wheel of drugs, celebrity culture, junk food, and sex. In Elvis Has Left the Building, Dylan Jones takes us back to those heady days around the time of his death and the simultaneous rise of punk. Evoking the hysteria and devotion of The King's numerous disciples and imitators, Jones offers a uniquely insightful commentary on Elvis's life, times, and outrageous demise. Recounting how the artist single-handedly changed the course of popular music and culture, he also delves deep into the cult of The King and reveals what Elvis's death meant—and still means to us today. "I'm not sure punk would have existed without [Elvis]. In fact I'm not sure a lot of things would have existed without him. Dylan Jones is the right man to ponder such questions." —Bono "A gripping tale of impossible success and terrible waste and lost beauty that veers from Memphis to Las Vegas and all the way to the broken backstreets of London." —Tony Parsons, author of The Hanging Club

1

God Save the Queen

“No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977 …”

– Joe Strummer

Until the death of Elvis Presley, the summer of 1977 had belonged to George Lucas, and Star Wars. Released on May 25th, the film had instantly become a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. Produced with a budget of just $11 million, it earned $460 million in the United States and $314 million overseas, easily outstripping the previous year’s blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, as the highest-grossing film of all time.

Lucas, a precociously talented director (and businessman) had made his mark with his own take on teenage subculture American Graffiti in 1973 before writing, directing and completing Star Wars over the next four. The Washington Post called it “A Spectacular Intergalactic Joyride,” suggesting that Lucas had supplied 20th Century Fox with a new lease of life. “George Lucas’ delightful science-fiction adventure fantasy is a new classic in a rousing movie tradition: a space swashbuckler” while Roger Ebert’s review hailed it as “an out-of-body experience,” comparing its special effects to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Star Wars started breaking records the moment it was released – even though it was originally only shown on 32 screens. It made $2.8 million in its opening week, but didn’t receive a wider nationwide release for another two months, and then only after huge public demand. So idiosyncratic was Star Wars thought to be that 20th Century Fox didn’t know how to market it; in the end it didn’t matter, as the public marketed it for them. For months there were lines around the block wherever the movie was shown; people just couldn’t get enough of it.

Groundbreaking. Pioneering. Paradigm-shifting. Star Wars was 24-carat popcorn, a blockbuster of such power and influence that it changed the nature of cinema completely, ushering in a new era of cinematic behemoths. It was so successful, so quickly, that critics didn’t really understand what had happened.

Star Wars drew a line under auteur-driven cinema, and waved goodbye to the likes of Easy Rider and Taxi Driver, as Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo jetted off into a galaxy far, far away.

People loved Star Wars in a way no film had been loved since Gone With The Wind.

In San Francisco, the manager of the Coronet on Geary Boulevard reported that “I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re getting all kinds. Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players. People with paints and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before. People loaded on grass and LSD. At least one’s been here every day.”

Novelist Jonathan Lethem saw the film 21 times that summer, and only stopped at 21 because the number seemed “safely ridiculous and extreme …”

Whether George Lucas was rekindling mythology in the Homeric tradition, or whether his inspiration lay in the pages of lower-brow Asimovian pulp sci-fi, the pseudo-mythical underpinning of Star Wars paved the way for The Matrix and Lord Of The Rings trilogies, where heroes struggle against the forces of evil. Lucas was no doubt influenced by Tolkien’s labyrinthine mythography in the first place, but pre-1977, moviemakers did not truly think in epic terms. He pioneered a new kind of epic, one that relied on rather old-fashioned ideas of what going to the movies should be like. It was designed as a family-friendly flick, with morally just heroes in whom everyone could believe. Tellingly, when the unfinished film was shown to Fox executives, World War II dogfights were shown where battles between TIE fighters and the Millennium Falcon would be.

Ridley Scott had just released his first film, a stately adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel, The Duellists, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. However the premiere was completely overshadowed by the release of Lucas’s film, which Scott queued to see at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. “The actual air was agog, the air was excited. I’d never seen so many crowds outside a theatre. To me this was what cinema at its best should be. A mass medium, a mainstream audience, and everybody standing outside, having queued for days. We got some pretty good seats, about thirty feet from the front, so I got the best sound and this picture was in my face, and frankly I couldn’t believe it. I’d done my little film, which I was happy about, but this film was massive. It actually changed my mind about what I would do next. I’d been developing one thing, and then decided, really, how can I go down that route? I must go in another direction and so instead I made Alien.”

Star Wars not only changed what kind of films people watched, but how they watched them. The film made such a fortune for cinema owners that it enabled them to build multiplexes. 20th Century Fox, which had been on the brink of bankruptcy, became a major studio, its stock prices tripling in 1977.

And as you drove to the movie theatre, you were probably listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

Released in February, Rumours topped the Billboard charts for over thirty weeks, and all three major US trade publications – Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World – eventually named it as their album of the year. By March, it had already sold more than ten million copies worldwide, including over eight million in the US alone. If you drove down any main street, in any town, in any city, the songs you would hear pouring out of the stores and the malls were all from Rumours: “Go Your Own Way,” “Don’t Stop,” “Dreams,” and “You Make Loving Fun.” It was almost as if the harmony-driven sound of Fleetwood Mac had taken over the whole country.

During the late Seventies, Fleetwood Mac’s only rivals in bottling the musical essence of Los Angeles and southern California were the Eagles, who had spent the best part of the decade working up to it; with Fleetwood Mac it sort of happened by accident. Before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined, Fleetwood Mac was a middle-ranking British blues band that had recorded a handful of already classic songs – “Black Magic Woman,” “Albatross,” “Man Of The World,” “Oh Well” – all written by the now-departed guitarist Peter Green.

Fleetwood Mac 2.0 were a different proposition altogether, able to fuse the singer-songwriter pretensions of the early Seventies with a slick pop sensibility (and a great drum sound) that sounded just fine on FM radio. Especially in your first car, with the top down, and four or five friends in the back, passing beers and smokes between them. Visually, the group played it safe too, their image synonymous with the leather and lace of singer Stevie Nicks – a look that originally consisted of a chiffon dress, a leotard, a small jacket, a pair of suede platforms and a top hat. All black.

Rumours cost over a million dollars to produce, was recorded in seven different studios, and took over a year to finish. Yet it turned out to be a bona fide classic, not so much a concept album as a soap opera, chronicling the convoluted romances of the band’s five members. The artists’ real lives became virtually indistinguishable from the songs they were singing, and in some respects the album was the apotheosis of confessional pop writing. The making of Rumours was tortuous as Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ relationship broke down during its recording, as did the relationship between John and Christine McVie. Then there were the drugs, which fuelled the band’s work ethic. “It was the craziest period of our lives,” according to Mick Fleetwood. “We went for four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I’m talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point, I thought I was really going insane.”

As one critic put it, Rumours articulated the conflicting morass of love, possessiveness, freedom and reflection that the end of a relationship brings. It had some great harmonies too, harmonies that suggested the Californian coast, even if you were actually just driving along the M40 after an evening spent at the Hope and Anchor.

In Britain, bands like Fleetwood Mac were meant to be on the way out in 1977, banished to the margins by the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, but though the zeitgeist might definitely be elsewhere, Rumours was as perfect a pop record as anyone could hope to hear.

Bossa nova also had an unexpected renaissance in 1977, in the form of Joao Gilberto’s extraordinary Amoroso album. The Brazilian “new trend” had been at its most fashionable in the early Sixties, yet Gilberto’s LP used lush orchestration to move the genre a little further towards the mass market. And in 1977 it was nothing less than a revelation. In particular his version of the Antonio Carlos Jobim classic “Wave” could be heard on beaches from Miami to Rio, from Puerto Banus to St. Tropez.

Woody Allen also owned 1977, propelled by Annie Hall into the mainstream as a writer, actor and, most importantly, a director. The movie turned his nerd alter-ego into a sex symbol, a man who was finally saying goodbye to the Sixties. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall may have kick-started a fashion for big hats, baggy trousers and waistcoats, but Allen’s lovable loser became the archetype with whom most people identified. The film won four Academy Awards, was adored by critics, and managed to convince its audience that New York was the most sophisticated city in the world. It was pretty funny, too.

Elsewhere, in Michigan to be precise, Led Zeppelin set a new world record attendance for an indoor solo show at the Pontiac Silverdome when 76,229 people attended a concert there on April 30th. On March 10th, five days before Luciano Pavarotti made his first appearance on American television, the rings of Uranus were discovered. This was the year when music went truly universal: when NASA launched their Voyager unmanned probes, each spacecraft carried a golden record containing sounds and images representing life and culture on Earth, including the first movements of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” American Bandstand celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special hosted by Dick Clark, including an all-star curate’s-egg of a band, made up of the Pointer Sisters, Booker T and the MGs and Gregg Allman among others, performing another Chuck Berry song, “Roll Over Beethoven.” Elvis wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but then he never was, unless he was performing alone.

1977 was also the year in which Spain held its first democratic elections for over forty years, General Franco having died in 1975; the US Supreme Court ruled that states were not legally required to spend Medicaid funds on elective abortions; and South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in police custody, aged just thirty.

The United States was still recovering from Watergate, keen to see their new president, Jimmy Carter, wash away the paranoia and indignity of Richard Nixon’s reign. Carter offered a new dawn, a new hope. And then just as the country appeared to be forgetting its troubles, and indulging in some good old-fashioned American science fiction, one of its most revered, most treasured folk heroes went and died.

Elvis had left the building.

There were two enormous television events in 1977. In January, the twelve-hour, eight-episode TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots was screened on consecutive nights. Among the most emotive series ever made, it traced the capture and enslavement of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka born in Gambia in 1750, and the emancipation of his descendants after the Civil War. It was an enormous hit, breaking US audience-rating records and winning nine Emmys and a Golden Globe.

Later, in an extraordinary journalistic coup, David Frost broadcast four ninety-minute interviews with disgraced former President Richard Nixon in May.

In March, KLM flight 4805 crashed into taxiing Pan Am flight 1736 as the KLM jumbo jet attempted to take off from Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, killing 583 people. The airport was crowded with diverted planes following the detonation of a terrorist bomb at Las Palmas’ main airport for the Canary Islands. Fog had made the runways unmanageable, and not only could the aircraft pilots not see each other, neither could the air traffic controllers. At the time it was the world’s worst air disaster, and remains so to this day.

In the fashion world, the TV show Charlie’s Angels was all enveloping. The principal star was Farrah Fawcett, whose long feather-cut and big flicked hair, as well as her well developed body, made her a pin-up for both men and women. Other big hairstyles of the day included the pageboy and Vidal Sassoon’s wedge.

On June 5th, Apple launched its first personal computer, the Apple II.

Britain, meanwhile, had by 1977 appeared to lose not only its pride but even its ability to manage itself, after over half a decade of unwieldy inflation, strikes, flip-flopping governments and even a three-day week. After all but running out of money in 1976, and having to negotiate a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the country was perceived to be the sick man of Europe, a term once reserved for the Ottoman Empire. What it needed was a massive celebration, a year-long street party – and it got one, in the form of the Silver Jubilee.

A couple of months before Elvis’s death, the week of festivities celebrating the Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s accession to the throne began when she lit a bonfire in Windsor Great Park. That was the first of a hundred beacons that lit up the sky all over the country. There were street parties everywhere, even in places that didn’t strictly have streets. On June 7th, more than one million people lined the streets of London to watch the Royal Family make their way to St. Paul’s at the start of the official celebrations. The Queen, dressed in pink and accompanied by Prince Philip, led the procession in the golden state coach. At St. Paul’s, 2,700 selected guests joined in the ceremony. It started with Vaughan Williams’ arrangement of the hymn “All People That On Earth Do Dwell,” which had been played at the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

For a while, people in the UK discovered a new sense of belonging, and while the economy was still in disarray, and the unions still playing up, the anniversary was a much-needed fillip.

However, in the UK, above all else, 1977 was the year of punk, the anti-Jubilee cult. Punk was an oratorio of aggression, with everything calibrated to annoy. Although opinions differ as to the precise provenance of punk, the Economist got things pretty much right in its obituary of Johnny Ramone: “The counterblast began on August 16th 1974, in front of a tiny crowd in a seedy New York bar called CBGB. Four young men – Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone – walked on stage. The concert they gave was shambolic; they spent as much time shouting at each other as playing. But they improved rapidly, and it soon became clear they had hit on something.”

Punk, basically.

Predecessors had included the Velvet Underground (1966), the Stooges (1968), the MC5 (1969), Jonathan Richman, and Richard Hell (whose “Blank Generation” was written in 1974), while Patti Smith soon followed with Horses (1975), but it was the Ramones who first made punk flesh, who ushered in a sense of the Zeitgeist. The Ramones’ first album was released in 1976, and a fusillade of British records swiftly arrived in its wake, namely the Damned’s “New Rose” in November 1976, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK” the same month, and the Buzzcocks’ “Spiral Scratch” in January 1977.

While it was rooted in garage rock – these new bands were happy to use the familiar tools of rock – punk’s determination to eschew the musical and lifestyle excesses of the previous generation resulted in a “Year Zero” mentality. Punk bands made accelerated, hard-edged music, with aggressive lyrics and stripped-down three-chord instrumentation. There was a DIY ethic, with most bands turning their backs on the multi-layered, overdubbed pop symphonies favoured by the likes of Fleetwood Mac. Punk served as an apocalyptic catalyst to so many Seventies teenagers; it shook them around, threw them up in the air, and – when they bounced back down again – forced them to confront their preconceptions about life, the universe and everything in it. Well, at least the records they bought and the clothes they wore.

Though the music may have originated in the US, it was the UK where the youth cult started. By early 1977 the centre of each and every British city, town and village was full of young people dressed as the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) or Johnny Ramone – complete with a floppy pudding-bowl haircut, drainpipe jeans, plimsoles, a matelot top and a (plastic) leather jacket. Overnight thousands of young men turned from being neurotic boy outsiders in oversized overcoats and hooded brows (clutching their Genesis, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell albums under their arms), into the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Dylan Jones
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Exit Stage Left
• 1. God Save the Queen
• 2. The Day Elvis Died
• 3. Real Real Gone
• 4. Punks vs. Teds
• 5. Elvis Is In The House
• 6. What Happens In Vegas …
• 7. Are You Lonesome Tonight?
• 8. Don’t Be Cruel
• 9. God Save the King
• 10. A King’s Ransom
• Chronological Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• About Elvis Has Left the Building