So Long on Lonely Street

By JAY COCKS

This is a season of anniversaries. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated its second decade in June, being very proper and punctual about the schedule set down in its own song: "It was twenty years ago today/ that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play." Paul McCartney cut a cake in London and spoke about peace. Two other Beatles failed to show up for the party. One, of course, couldn't.

Next month, on Aug. 16 to be exact, Elvis Presley will have been dead for ten years, an anniversary that will be memorialized on a less moderate scale. This is the sort of occasion that is best honored simply, with fond memories and the playing of some choice sides. But when a record company has product to sell and an estate has merchandise to move, the date suddenly gets writ large. RCA has just released four compilations of Presley material with scrupulous "audio restoration": The Top Ten Hits, The Number One Hits and, most crucially, The Complete Sun Sessions, recorded at the start of his career, and The Memphis Record, recorded in 1969, when all the anger and antic experimentation of rock seemed to have left Elvis in the lurch. The 23 songs on The Memphis Record (never released all together until now) were originally conceived as a reassertion of Presley's primacy. In 1987 they sound like a premature last testament. The Memphis Record, as it turns out, is one of the great legacies of American music.

For some fans, however, not even the music is enough. Elvis' Memphis home, Graceland, already a prime tourist attraction, will gear up for everything from candlelight vigils to a 5-km run. Lucy de Barbin, who claims that her daughter Desiree was fathered by Elvis, is pushing the recently published Are You Lonesome Tonight?, which purports to dish out the hot sticky behind the entire episode. Meanwhile, the King's official ex-wife, Actress Priscilla Presley, is offering a one-hour video tour of Elvis Presley's Graceland. It isn't hard to figure what Elvis would have made of all this fuss: he was used to it. Besides, Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, could always work it out so that he and his boy got a good cut of the action.

( There was one thing that was not manageable, though, not even with all Parker's Snopesian smarts. Elvis' reckoning with history was beyond anyone's reach, including, at the last, his very own. He died bloated with his own excess and everyone else's expectations. He did not invent rock 'n' roll, but he forged it and focused it, and he was the first great rock superstar. He haunted his contemporaries, like Jerry Lee Lewis, who once showed up outside Graceland waving a pistol and demanding an audience. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty -- all dreamed of him and were daunted not only by his gift but by his destiny. He was the rocker they yearned to be and feared becoming.

Elvis sold his soul many times over -- nightly, in Vegas dates; routinely, in all those musicals filmed in Hollywood as if they were popped out of a microwave -- but he never sold out. He probably sang My Way in his later years as often as he sang Heartbreak Hotel, but it was never clear that Elvis himself thought all the trash amounted to short change. Even during his earliest recording dates at Sun Records, he did a Billy Eckstine favorite as well as an Arthur ("Big Boy") Crudup blues, and he was always a big Dean Martin fan. He could puff and perspire all over a stage on the Vegas strip and show up back home to sing some heavenly gospel. Whatever he did and however he sang, it always seemed as if he were paying the vig on some spiritual debt that kept mounting until, with the aid of a few prescription drugs, it finally crushed him.

It is impossible to know the exact nature of that debt, of course, but its depth can be felt in all his best music. The joy, the brazen melodrama, the low tragedy and the raunch all range free on the two greatest hits packages. The Sun Sessions, first released in 1976, is a seminal record. This new version offers alternate takes and outtakes, including an unlikely version of Harbor Lights, and makes a fascinating history of one scuffling producer (Sun Founder and Rock Pioneer Sam Phillips) and three good ole boys (Elvis, Lead Guitarist Scotty Moore, Bass Player Bill Black) groping toward greatness. "That's fine," says Sam Phillips after one take on Blue Moon of Kentucky. "Hell, that's different. That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout." All the difference, and all the history, hovered around that "nearly." It took a while, but that new territory was finally called rock 'n' roll, and after a time, it looked like it might shut Elvis out.

The material on The Memphis Record was meant to catch him up with history, and he hit pay dirt. In the Ghetto gave him his first Top Ten hit in four years; the second single from those sessions, Suspicious Minds, was his first No. 1 single since 1962. Gregg Geller, the archivist who supervised these four releases, has gathered the songs from those twelve days of studio work into a double album that is a bedrock classic. Elvis never again sang this consistently or this passionately. There are blues and country here, gospel and rock and pop, all sung as if Presley's life depended on each tune. It did, in a sense, and reclaiming himself, just this once, seemed enough. It gave him the strength to get on for another eight years. But listen to Long Black Limousine, and it's clear that Elvis knew what was waiting around the corner.

The Memphis Record is full of triumph and dread. It is saturated with Presley's power and baptized with his loneliness. "He tried not to show it," Phillips recalled, "but he felt so inferior. Presley probably innately was the most introverted person that ((ever)) came into that studio. He didn't play with bands. He didn't go to this little club and pick and grin. All he did was set with his guitar on the side of his bed at home. I don't think he even played on the front porch." He sang out and reached out, but, after all, maybe it's just as simple as that. Elvis Presley always sang to himself.