Greil Marcus - Presliad - Myth of Elvis Presley
Author Focuses on Presley's Performance
In Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, an essay entitled Presliad pays tribute to Elvis Presley as a supreme figure in American culture who has no real comparisons with any of America's musical legends. Marcus identifies Elvis as being the personification of everything great in America: a great artist; a great rocker; a great sex symbol; and a great American.
Don't be Fooled
At the outset, it appears that Marcus is writing another tribute to the great King, but he quickly lets his audience know that much of what they thought and knew about Elvis was merely an illusion. For Marcus, the real Elvis is the “performance” of Elvis:
“.. Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether… action is irrelevant when one can simply delight in the presence of a man who has made history," Marcus says.
Thus, Elvis has been identified with his appearance on stage, his performance, and his presence. Marcus believes Elvis is seen as the antithesis of creativity.
“How could anyone create when all he has to do is appear?” he said.
Focus on the Performance
According to Marcus, understanding Elvis as a performer is to understand his myth-status. Marcus delves into clearly separating the “man” Elvis from the “performance” created by Elvis. What America sees, and what it wants, is the performance of the King. And for Marcus, the “myth” of Elvis was exclusively created by the American music culture to satisfy its own cravings for the power of his performance:
It is as if there is nothing Elvis could do to overshadow a performance of his myth. And so he performs from a distance, laughing at his myth, throwing it away only to see it roar back and trap him once again (Marcus, 122).
Marcus may have been successful in identifying Elvis’s fanfare with his powerful performances. He may also have accurately portrayed Elvis as being a paradigm of American culture. However, in his explanation of the myth of Elvis’s performances, Marcus concludes that Elvis’s songs are simply a façade.
The Myth of Elvis
He describes how at one performance, Elvis sang--as if suffering in his very soul--a song called “This Time You Gave Me a Mountain” (which related to Elvis’s suffering from his divorce from his “little girl”). Elvis then is described as rocking straight into a sort of burlesque rendition of “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy”--singing with a lazy grin to his audience. For Marcus, this performance typifies the façade of Elvis’s performances -- which are all based on emotion and shallowness. Thus, Elvis is relegated into a massive American road show which, according to Marcus, is the “myth” of Elvis Presley.
In the end, Marcus finally seems to recognize that Elvis’s career and his music was full of ambiguity and change. As he eloquently stated in his Finale:
"Elvis is the grandest figure in the story I have tried to tell, because he has gone to the greatest extremes: he has given us an America that is dead, and an unmatched version of an America that is full of life," he said.
Whether he was successful at the early or later stages of his career, many will forever remember Elvis as being the prodigy who escaped the blues of his own life by the power of his never-ending performance.
Greil Marcus: Mystery Train
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