Finding the King at Chuck E. Cheese’s
I remember the first time I heard an Elvis song. The year was 1984, and I was about four years old. It was at a Chuck E. Cheese in a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio.
My mother loves to tell the story of how her youngest daughter would spend less time playing the games that the other kids enjoyed and more time sitting on a round stool in the corner of the dining room. I was drawn to that corner because of an enormous teddy bear that sang songs like “Return to Sender” and “Teddy Bear.” After each song, I would place another token in a small box off to the side, sit with my hands under my chin, and eagerly await the next tune. I simply couldn’t resist watching the side-burned bear move and sing.
The next natural step taken by my mother was to buy a few cassettes of the King’s albums. And it was–for my young ears–auditory heaven.
Elvis During My Early Years
By the time I turned eight and had visited Graceland on a roadtrip to Texas with my family, I was far-gone in my love for all-things Elvis Presley. My mother began to buy me video tapes of Elvis’s movies. I can still remember my first two movies: G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii. By the time I was eleven, I had visited Graceland three or four times. I was simply in love with the person who I thought was the king of my heart.
Of course, trouble sometimes arose when I would tout the King’s attributes to my classmates at school. When I was in third grade, I remember other kids’ saying that Elvis was a bum who died of a drug overdose. In one incident, a boy kept repeating Elvis’s penchant for drugs, and I all but slugged him. My young mind had always thought the King died of a heart attack, brought on by a broken, lonely heart.
Elvis in my Adulthood
Today, I am thirty years old. And over the years, my love for Elvis has weakened. It has evolved from a period of infatuation with all things Elvis into an appreciation for his contribution to music and popular culture. I now know that the King was not perfect; in fact, I do know that drugs proved to be his downfall. But I also understand that my young mind wasn’t too far off the mark in believing that he was lonely in his later years. And that loneliness caused by his inability to mingle in the “real world,” coupled with other issues in his life, likely influenced his drug-taking. Of course, that is just my theory.
For many people, Elvis devolved from a trim, rebellious icon of music into an overweight, aloof individua–one who became incredibly removed from the outlet that made him famous: true rock and roll. But I still don’t buy that perspective. It simply denies the fact that some of Elvis’s best songs came during his later career.
The Best of Elvis’s Music
No matter what one’s opinion is of Elvis the man, one simply cannot deny that several songs influenced popular culture during his time. He is not called the King of Rock and Roll for nothing. The man’s music influenced a generation of singers and bands, and his tunes are still played on the radio, on television, on the stage, and on the big screen. We cannot deny the continued presence of his music.
Any individual, including non-Elvis fans, can appreciate at least one song from the singer’s collection of tunes. The following is a list of the ten best songs released or made popular by the King. They cover the entire spectrum of Elvis Presley’s career.
10. “Can’t Help Falling in Love”
This song first appeared in Blue Hawaii, which was released in 1961. Its place on the list is testament to the fact that songs from Elvis’s movies still had a place on musical charts during his acting years. It is a popular song to play at weddings.
9. “Always on My Mind”
Elvis released this version of a country song in 1972. Ironically, he released the song around the same time as his divorce from his wife. Many believe this song is dedicated to her, as Elvis sings about not treating her well enough, even if she was “always on his mind.”
As with many Elvis songs, this one comes from one of his movies (that of the same title). The song was released in 1957 and illustrates the rebellious rock and roll that made the King famous.
7. “In the Ghetto”
Released in 1969, this was part of Elvis’s later career. It was one of the King’s only political songs as he sung about a young baby, born in a Chicago ghetto, who grows up to be killed at a young age. The tune is one of the most depressing in Elvis’s entire collection.
6. “All Shook Up”
This song reveals the voice behind the hip-swinging, side-burned Elvis of 1957. Listen to the lyrics, which are pretty racy for the time period, if one reads between the lines of verses like “my hands are shaky and my knees are weak.” The sexual undertones are undenial. No wonder he shocked the conservative public of the 1950s.
5. “Memories”
Elvis sang this song as a close to the live segment of his ’68 Comeback Special. It is one of his most poignant tunes and is a great song to listen to on a road trip. The tune is also the perfect song to listen to while looking at old pictures in a photo album.
4. “Hound Dog”
“Big Mama” Thornton originally sang this song in 1952, and Elvis later recorded his version of the tune in 1956. This is one of the reasons why people refered to Elvis as the white singer of black music. He was the first white singer to sing black artists’ music as they were orginally supposed to sound. A young Elvis Presley sang this tune as his hips swiveled and shook on his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 (the same show where producers recorded Elvis from the waste up so as not to shock the general public). If anyone has doubts about Elvis’s role as a cultural icon for youth in the 1950s, one only needs to watch the segment of his Ed Sullivan performance. The screams of the audience’s young girls reveal just how much of a sex symbol the man had become by 1956.
3. “If I Can Dream”
While “In the Ghetto” was Elvis’s only blatant call for social change for black Americans, “If I Can Dream” is his memorialization of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was assassinated outside of his Memphis hotel room just months before Elvis sang this song during his ’68 Comeback Special. This song is, far and away, Elvis’s most inspirational tune. To close his comeback special, the King–dressed in all white–belted this tune out to the American public, imploring them to see a world where all of his “brothers walk hand-in-hand.” The song is testament to Elvis’s hope for racial equality in a year of political upheaval. After listening to the tune, one will appreciate the King not simply for his music, but also for his forward-thinking in race relations.
In 1964, Elvis starred alongside a sexy redhead named Ann-Margaret. The film illustrates the young woman’s sultry qualities, while also depicting the intensity of the stars’ onscreen chemistry. Viva Las Vegas” was Elvis’s best film from the 1960s (it simply has nothing on “Jailhouse Rock, which was released in the 1950s), so the title song belongs near the top of this list. The song truly reveals the King’s love affair with Vegas–a place where he later married his long-term girlfriend Priscilla and later became a mainstay of entertainment during the seventies. Anyone looking for a song to play on a trip to Vegas should look no further than this tune. Some of the instrumentals are a little dated, of course, but the city’s grandiosity is best conveyed in this very important song. And what is a trip to Vegas without seeing or hearing some influence of the King, anyway?
1. “Suspicious Minds”
Elvis released this song in 1969, and it is the best that the King had to offer during his entire career. The reason for its placement as number one on this list is simple: it was the song that ushered in a new era in Elvis’s career as a stage performer and musical talent. After years of churning out mediocre movies with simple plots set around musical numbers in the 1960s, Elvis had pretty much retreated from his role as live entertainer. By 1968, teens were less interested in the rock and roll sounds of the previous decade. And yet somehow–after his ’68 Comeback Special–Elvis Presley came back to the world of stage performance. He released new music and created a new persona. Gone were his days of hip-shaking. But in their place was a mature, sequined showman who performed for the same fans who had screamed at his hip-swiveling a decade before that. Like him, these fans had also matured–and they loved his latest single, “Suspicious Minds.” Today, the song is considered one of Elvis’s best ever, and its popularity shows that the King’s career was far from over by the early 1970s. Put simply, this song might have saved Elvis’s title as the King, for without later releases like this one, Elvis might have simply faded into the background as an old teen idol.
Long Live the King
Theories and rumors surround the King’s private life and cloud his importance as a musical icon. In many cases, people have taken sides as to what kind of person the true Elvis Presley was. Was he a male chauvinist who treated his young wife poorly? Was a creep for falling in love with a fourteen-year-old girl as a twenty-something stationed in Germany? How many drugs did he really take? Was he really a womanizer? Why was he still so far removed from the general public in the late 1960s when so few young people actually cared about his music? Why did he surround himself with an army of “yes-men” who doubled as bodyguards–was he really that egotistical?
To be honest, as an Elvis fan, I don’t want to know the answers to those questions. What I do like to discuss, however, is the importance of the one aspect that mattered: the music. Elvis was a musical icon by the time he was a young man in his early twenties. He had influenced later singers and bands who quickly overshadowed him during the middle period of his career–a time when his dream of becoming an actor was realized, if only half-heartedly.
And yet, his music still allowed him to establish a market for his name in 1969 with the release of songs like “Suspicious Minds.” During that same year, American youth had flocked to a music festival outside of a small town in New York–a place that proved to be the high point of the 1960s countercultural revolution.
With the success of Woodstock, the counterculture’s notions of free love and peace–along with its music–seemed to reign supreme. Just over a year later, however, a murder at the Altamont Race Park during the performance of the Rolling Stones and a shooting on a university campus in the town of Kent, Ohio, (which left four dead at the hands of National Guardsmen) proved to be the dying gasps of the same cultural movement that had pushed Elvis aside by 1967. Elvis’s music and his rebirth as a Las Vegas entertainer, however, allowed his career to outlast those of his younger contemporaries.
The man’s music clearly had staying power. It still does.
