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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Watching Presley's "'68 Comeback Special" is a total religious experience, proving once and for all that the King was no false idol.
Jul 15, 2004 | "In my Father's house are many guitar men."
-- John 14:2
He stands endlessly multiplied, figures with guitars lining the scaffolding behind him as far as can be seen. And yet they do not dwarf him, do not eclipse him. There are no false idols to worship when he is present.
The opening of "Elvis: '68 Comeback Special" ("Singer Presents Elvis," as it was called at the time, and just released in its entirety, outtakes and all, as part of a new three-DVD set) remains a marvel of awesome, arrogant confidence. It opens with Elvis Presley's face filling the screen, a mean, dirty blues riff behind him. "If you're lookin' for trouble, you came to the right place," he says, and they are not welcoming words. They throw down the gauntlet to the audience, signal that Elvis is once again willing to act as a divider, willing to resurrect the rifts that his music caused 12 years earlier, willing to cleave parent from child, friend from friend.
The divide between people who felt liberated by Elvis and those who felt threatened by him is not the divide he caused in the '60s. That division was between the people who were still willing to watch Elvis and get what the great critic Lester Bangs, seeing Elvis, called "an erection of the heart" and those who considered him a clown, irrelevant in the face of Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones, hell, even in the face of the lagging, dragging Doors. And yet the performance that opens the show, "Trouble" segueing into the hard rocker "Guitar Man," is so big you can't imagine any divide it will not swallow whole.
The final shot of the opening sequence finds Elvis standing with his guitar, singing the final verse, the camera slightly beneath him so that he is looming over us. As he sings, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing in the center of an enormous neon sign spelling out "E L V I S" in red lightbulbs, pulls back until he is just a small figure on the screen. This is the challenge the director, Steve Binder, has laid down to his star: Will Elvis stand up to "E L V I S" or will he be dwarfed by it, crushed by his own outsize image? There's no contest. From the midst of that huge sign, Elvis is surveying his kingdom. He's present in every particle of what we see even when he's barely visible. "I like a lot of the new music," he will say later in the show, "the Beatles 'n the Beards 'n whoever," dismissing the music that he forged, saying none of them can equal him. And for the hour that follows, he's right.
"For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them."
-- Matthew 13:15
To say that Elvis surpassed expectations in this show is an insult. After the Army, after years of hiding from the public in movies like "Tickle Me" and years of hiding from his own best musical instincts in songs like "No Room to Rhumba in a Sportscar," expectations weren't much. But even if the music in this special had followed the Sun Sessions and the initial records at RCA, it would still be titanic.
