THUS SPAKE ELVIS
Thus spake 'Zarathusra moved in musical concordance with the man just outside the rim of sparkling blue twilight casting pyramids of hot light down onto an audience of shuffling silence and audible gasps of awe. The chords droned in a syllable of weeping for each passing moment of expectation, approaching that inevitable star-crossed instant in the rumbling quake of drums, where with a ringing twang the emergence of a jungle echo usurps the renaissance elegance of Zarathusra in one mighty sweep, and charges a deep presence of southern majesty to fill the air. Like the final parting of an eclipse two forces of different origin and emotion have carried a stronger force, alive and vital, onto a sun-swept stage of strobe effect.
If one could inject a partial hold on time it would be here, at this point, that it should momentarily stand. An entrance onto a stage for Elvis Presley is the instant he truly begins to live, no matter the scores of times he has crossed this mark nor the sleepless hours he has prepared for it. All else becomes a blur but the pounding beat, crying out in his own heart, and the constant sound of urging from the crowd behind the blinding lights. It was not a single moment somewhere in a vague yesterday that brought him to this place in time. What would Richard Strauss have felt had he witnessed the fusing of classics and rock? Perhaps he would have been melancholy on the changing times. I tend to think he would sense a continuance in the style he created and that of Elvis' music, a bridge of emotion that transcends time.
Trace back the music within the man, Elvis Aaron Presley. Follow the turning, dipping tremble of his voice, past the closed eyes and sweated brow. Deep inside lies the whole fiber of his sound, his purpose. The bluesy rhythm funnels through him, reaching down into Mississippi land, where there was no need of orchestra for mood. The music bubbled from the earth in the lazy streams and tired, worn feet padding the dirt of the cotton fields. Urgency is born of desolation, a need to break free, the same urgency that is coming through the lips of a man, who has known desolation, in the choking phrases of “C. C. Rider". Coming closer to the surface in Elvis is a solid chunk of Tennessee, the good earth, a testament of his manhood, a retreat from his public self. Pervading is his mother's strong guiding hands, still a vivid presence, and his own self respect. This is the anchor, the bond that will never be broken, for it holds him to a rational world in the midst of a glorious insanity, a mystical rapture. Could the twenty-one year old Elvis have dared to anticipate that his driving, strained pitch, touched with uncertainty and unconscious reverence, positioned with a basic combo upon a wooden stage, would turn like Cinderella's pumpkin into the rich personification of excellence that the Elvis of thirty-eight years maintains within his every control? Silhouetted on a backdrop of purples, reds and blues, poised in an armor of jewels, the design a similarity to an age in which Strauss waltzed, his collar high, to his own rhythms, Elvis exerts a mingling of ages and cultures into one with such ease that no division may be seen. In Shakespearean eloquence, drama at its finest hewn, he interacts with a karate-ballet and plunges into a musical realism that is basic and raw in perspective. During the interchanging never does he become tangled in his audience. His force is a wave that retreats, leaving no trace of the spilling forth. It passes like a tremor in the earth.
Now we see the final layer of Elvis Presley, a central inertia of calm, evidenced by the regal glint of his eye and the lifted chin, an affirmation that the moment has past but others will follow. He is steady, taking each feeling as it finds him. Looking into the whole image of this man, it is as if Elvis is the product of Strauss. elegance and the urgency of rock. The light and dark of an eclipse joining into one force with neither envious of the other, both striving for one purpose.
As for Elvis himself, as we unshackle time from our grasp, he knows only the clearness of his music through the lighted sound with no reproach of the past, no vision of the future, only the knowledge of that one instant to which he is committed. All else falls away, Tupelo, hard times, family, all must abide by the laws of gravity when confronted with such immediate profusion. The man in the galactic suit is mesmerized by his own presence, like a dazzling reflection of starlight. Is he enchanted, or are we?
I AM GLAD IT INSPIRES YOU AS WELL!