The Velvet Elvis Revolution

“Imagining rock ‘n’ roll without Elvis is like imagining the Revolutionary War without George Washington,” wrote fan Geri Elsasser of Colorado. Lester Bangs summed up the Elvis Revolution best, writing in his essay “Where Were You When Elvis Died?”; “When Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the expression of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the ’60s.” No one yet had broadcast such a frenzy of sexual energy, and for ’50s teens, Elvis became both instigator and object of desire. Imitating him became a form of self-expression, writes Elvis scholar Erika Doss in her 1999 book, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, & Image. Through their physical and emotional participation in his act, Elvis’s fans were encouraged to become an “audience of performers.” Doss quotes one 15-year-old fan who enthused to Life magazine in 1956, “He isn’t afraid to express himself,” speaking of Elvis’s performance style. “When he does that on TV, I get down on the floor and scream.”

Elvis’s throbbing effect on his fans’ hearts and loins relied on his ability to appear to communicate with millions of kids individually. Doss quotes fan after fan (whose impressions she collected in interviews and surveys throughout the ’90s) echoing what one San Jose Elvis devotee recalled: “Even in those big sports halls and even on TV, I just knew he was looking and singing just to me.” Fan clubs encouraged this reaction by sending updates on Elvis’s activities and “personal” notes from Elvis himself — form letters that encouraged fans to push his music (“Drop your local disc jockey a card and ask him to spin one of my songs for you…. Remember that I’ll be singing it just for you!!”). In this way — in addressing a mass audience as individuals — we can speak of Elvis’s commercial success not only in the normal sense of enormous popularity, but also as literally like a commercial. He was the perfect marketing vehicle because he seemed to speak to each person alone, which amounts to what every commercial aims to do: sell a mass product as unique, flatter each viewer with the illusion that the spectacle is staged for him and him alone.

Elvis’s manager, the industrious Colonel Tom Parker, cashed in on his ubiquitous appeal by merchandizing his image in as many ways as there were types of fans. He developed fashion accessories, school supplies, toy guitars, paint-by-number sets, and pajamas. The exploitation scheme was so vast that it even included “I Hate Elvis” buttons. By the end of 1956, Elvis Presley Enterprises’ sales had reached $22 million. Today, EPE still does a brisk business, with over $41 million in revenues in 2004.

We know Elvis has been successfully sold when fans start expressing their love of for him in commercial idiom. Doss heard from Joyce Noyes of Saginaw, Michigan, who wrote in rapture, “He was the first man to totally excite me; I loved his music but I fell in love with his eyes, his beautiful hair and his creamy, blemish-free skin.” Her choice of words — the clinical blemish-free — is the language of a zit-cream ad coming through in he voice of a fan with a homely name in a homely place. Seven out of eight dermatologists were probably pissing themselves with delight.

In a 2000 essay about Elvis and consumer ideology for the journal Popular Culture, anthropologist Peter Stromberg describes the world of the advertisement as “not so much comfortable as lacking any discomfort.” Blemish-free is precisely such a state. After years of being persuaded that a sterile absence of imperfection will drive us to the wild palpitations that had kids screaming on the floor for Elvis in the ’50s, we are finally starting to repeat the idea. The teenage Joyce Noyes would’ve stopped at “creamy”, but since then she had 40 years to be inoculated with images of dewy Neutrogena models and Clearasil’s yearbook-photo crisis scenarios. In the space of one sentence, Noyes’s ardor has gone from the excitement of a coronary erection to the bland appeal of the pharmacy aisle. Her lust for Elvis, mediated through the market, dissipated into a testament to the power of beauty potions.

Alarm over this dawning age of manipulation began to permeate the American left during the King’s ascendance. In July 1957 — just six months after Elvis’s last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show — Manhattan’s Reverend Howard R. Moody wrote in the Village Voice about Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders. Moody warned of businesses’ new practice of using “head doctors” to engineer consent and keep the economy growing by “subtly and silently influenc[ing] [the public] to buy the right soap, the right cereal, the right car” and even, Moody suggests, to select the right political candidate. He cited a business bulletin that laid out the goal of this new “Motivation Research”: “We are now confronted with the problem of permitting the average American to feel moral even when he is flirting, even when he is spending…to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to his life is a moral, not an immoral one.” For businessmen, then, kids shaking their hips and squealing maniacally were okay as long as they kept emptying stores of Elvis-style jeans (black with emerald threading), socks, “Teddy Bear” perfume, and patent-leather pumps festooned with the King’s likeness.

For their understanding of how to manipulate the masses into purchasing what they didn’t need, businessmen looked to another of the 20th century’s most notorious purveyors of raunch, Sigmund Freud, as the BBC’s 2005 documentary Century of the Self explains. His American nephew, Edward Bernays, widely credited as the father of public relations, thought Uncle Siggy’s theories would dovetail nicely with that perennial enemy of democracy, the business world. Freud didn’t believe in the equality of man; he thought freedom was dangerous and must always be controlled. These ideas, retooled for the boardroom when Bernays began work in New York in 1919, enabled companies (with the approval of relieved politicians) to redirect people’s “wicked desires” onto products so that genuine social unrest would be preemptively sated by material acquisition. Shortly after taking office in 1929, President Herbert Hoover thanked a group of advertising executives for transforming the nation into “constantly moving happiness machines,” who have become “the key to economic progress.”

Fast-forward to the ’50s: while Village Voice contributors were worrying about consumerism’s potential for social control, the popular press was fond of equating mass taste with a different kind of political and social perversion. Doss cites one critic at the Los Angeles Mirror-News who saw Elvis’s concerts as the stuff of dangerous totalitarianism, writing that the atmosphere at his performances resembled “one of those screeching, uninhibited party rallies which the Nazis used to hold for Hitler.” Though the LA writer would’ve agreed with Reverend Moody’s warning that “Brainwashing, American style, becomes no more palatable simply because it is American,” he was blind to America’s already established brand of totalitarianism (available in Blue Suede and Heartbreak Pink). The analogy was spot-on, but not for the reasons he thought; for Joseph Goebbels borrowed Bernays’s propaganda techniques, and Hitler, after all, thought democracy dangerous because it encouraged self-interest without providing a way to control it.

But Hitler didn’t know about marketing. Once Elvis became our biggest commodity, he also became our greatest means for social control. Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse might as well have been talking about Elvis fans when he described, in One-Dimensional Man how “sexuality is liberated (or rather liberalized) in socially constructive forms.” For Marcuse, liberty ironically leads to domination; our sexual desires are safer when they’re sublimated. Unleashed, they provide new tools for totalitarianism.

Elvis may have liberated youthful sexuality, as Lester Bangs suggested when he described the King’s effect on him as “an erection of the heart,” but for fans like Joyce Noyes, the market transmuted those unruly feelings right back into America’s most erotic (socially sanctioned) pastime: shopping. What Elvis set free, Colonel Parker’s large-scale exploitation scheme quickly reined back in, channeling the idol’s wantonness into $1 adhesive sideburns, “Hound Dog Orange” lipstick, and any object that plastic or felt could be molded into to recall some aspect of the King’s image.