Here’s a short history lesson: Before man walked on the moon, before the iPhone and caller ID, before the Big Mac, even before Donald Trump decided he should rule the world … there was Elvis.
He didn’t invent rock and roll, but he did become its King.
So what do you think of today when you hear the name of Elvis Presley? Does it conjure up the memory of how outrageous he was when he swiveled his hips? Or do you see a snapshot of his styled sideburns and rebellious jet-black hair? Maybe it’s how his eyes pierced through to the hearts of teenage girls screaming at every note he belted out. Or his vocal range, which wasn’t so obvious when “Heartbreak Hotel” first hit the charts but which over time, as he added everything from ballads to gospel to Christmas songs, became second to none.
Last month, all these features flooded my mind when I emceed two fundraisers at the Lakewood Cultural Center with an “Elvis Tribute Artist” named Cody Ray Slaughter. This guy’s got the looks, he’s got the voice, he’s got the slicked-back hair, the tight leather pants — and most importantly, he’s got the moves.
Every seat for both concerts was sold out. And as I looked past the floodlights at the mostly older audience, I saw he also had the burning love, and that’s what struck me. Because it wasn’t just women — those former teenage girls — who were smiling and swinging and sometimes even screaming again, it was the men too.
Everyone was transported back to a different time, a different age, a different world. A world in which, make no mistake, our nation faced external threats, but mainly from another nation with the same determined will to live that we had. No one in that civilized world talked about chopping off their enemies’ heads, or made “Death to America” their mission statement.
Sure, we had bomb shelters and air raid drills, but at least in retrospect, those were preventive programs against a cataclysmic mistake, not a deliberate attack. The closest anyone came to issuing an angry threat was when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev heartily slammed his shoe on his desk at the U.N.
It was a world in which America by and large won its wars. We didn’t resort to “shock and awe.” We resorted to patriotic soldiers and sailors and airmen who could put a face to the enemy and really fight on the side of truth and justice and the American way. True, we had dropped a pair of atomic bombs, but not out of anger; we dropped those bombs to end a war that arguably might have killed even more people if we hadn’t.
It was far from a perfect world. Blacks didn’t have many rights yet, let alone opportunities. Neither did women. Neither did gays. Routine knee replacement, let alone a cure for any kind of cancer, was only a dream.
But there is something nostalgically appealing about an era when the Army drafts the most popular singer out there and he willingly dons his uniform and the public accepts that music’s loss is the nation’s gain. An era when politicians of opposing political parties were civil and American-made cars were the best and mass murder was a shock to our system, not a standard to be expected.
Bring back Elvis.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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