5 x 5

1. Olympic Cleansing
As Beijing is left with the clean-up and the bill, the uglies can return and the city’s protest parks can once again fill with joyous folk going about their business, I was thinking of earlier Olympic protests. That image from the 1968 Mexico Olympics of the American athletes on the dais holding up Black Power salutes has been etched in my mind for 40 years. Tommie Smith and John Carlos had just won medals in the 200 metres, and made a statement, whereas this year’s winner made an exhibition. Then I ran into a Latin-American expert, who told me about the Tlatelolco Massacre, which took place in Mexico just days before the 1968 Olympics. Protests against the oppressive government ended up in 200-300 people getting shot. If this was on the NZBC news, it was after my bedtime. “The Olympics must go on,” declared IOC dictator Avery Brundage, “This had nothing to do with the Games.” Curious fashion facts, from the days of black and white TV: Smith and Carlos wore one black glove each, from the same pair. Part of the reason was they thought they’d have to shake hands with Brundage, who had worked hard to get a segregated South African team into the Games. And in Tlatelolco, the government sent in two militia groups: the regular army, and the president’s own Battalion Olympia, disguised as civilians. So the army would be able to spot the others mingling with the unarmed protestors, each member of the Battalion wore a single white glove and white sock. As the bullets started to fly, the Battalion shot a general, so the army then blitzed everyone in sight. The Battalion dropped its cover, crying out “Don’t shoot – we’re the Battalion!” Any ruthlessness in Beijing didn’t happen in front of the cameras.

2. Life is a Hurricane
Next week it is three years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The Independent interviews the editor of local paper the Times-Picayune about its impact on the paper, and what happens when the world moves on and you’re the only ones left dealing with the mess. “Imagine how newspapers in this country would have reacted if 160,000 people – about the population of Brighton – had been homeless for three years, forced to find lodging in distant towns or to survive in trailer parks.”

3. The Godfather of Soul
Jerry Wexler’s impact has been so vast – on popular music, and my own take on it – that I’ve been reluctant to get started on it. Luckily, there have been a couple of great blogs with terrific music links, the Adios Lounge and the B-Side. The key points have been well covered everywhere – Aretha, Muscle Shoals, Dusty in Memphis – but still two pieces that moved me most I read back in 2000. Alex Halberstadt’s profile in Salon is excellent, but best of all was Austin, Texas writer Raoul Hernandez’s funny, thorough piece about Wexler’s often ignored impact on country music. Wexler produced two albums for Willie Nelson – Shotgun Willie and Phases & Stages – that sold poorly but led to his breakthrough, Red-Headed Stranger. I still think Phases & Stages is Nelson’s best: he could still be bothered to write songs, and this concept album about a breakup (from the male and female points-of-view) was simple, brilliant, and heart-breaking. And it was produced in Muscle Shoals. (Both albums also have unforgettable opening lines: “Well it’s a Bloody Mary morning, she left me without warning, sometime in the night” … and “Shotgun Willie, sits around in his underwear …”). Yes, ‘I Never Loved a Man’ is mind-blowing, and Dusty in Memphis is masterly. But Aretha’s Young Gifted and Black is her masterpiece (here’s ‘Oh Me Oh My’), and Phases & Stages is Willie’s. A few years ago Marty Duda interviewed Wexler and his former Atlantic colleague Ahmet Ertegun for a National Radio series. In separate conversations, both these ageing dynamos queried Marty’s American accent and in wistful asides said it must be great to move to New Zealand: to get away from the rat race. And now both have gone. (Here's an NPR interview with Wexler.) In his Salon piece Halberstadt describes Wexler as “a musical innovator, a brilliant producer, a shrewd businessman, a master manipulator and a shameless carpetbagger”. Wexler was so dogmatic that his autobiography The Rhythm and The Blues even quoted others who had a different perspective on events. Sam Moore, formerly of Sam & Dave – who got left high and dry by Wexler – gives an artist’s perspective, and also comments on how the Scientologists prevented him from saying goodbye to his friend who wrote ‘Soul Man,’ Isaac Hayes.

4. Rainbow’s End
Harold Arlen’s classic ‘Stormy Weather’ is never far from my mind, especially this winter: songwriting perfection. Ted Barron at Boogie-Woogie Flu agrees; for a week or so he has just posted some wildly varying versions, including Arlen himself, Lena Horne, plus Memphis group the Reigning Sound’s garage-punk version from 2002. After that you’ll be looking for some more Arlen, but over the rainbow. So did Billy T James, and with the punchline of this clip he nails my nagging problem with Arlen’s other octave-leaping classic. (Includes cameo appearance by Max Cryer.)

5. Get Your Kicks
I recently had to give a talk on geography and music, a rich area. Distracting me from writing it was this addictive musical geographer’s toy from The Word. And afterwards I came across this 50 Songs for 50 States project by the Boston Phoenix. Many of the classics are better than you’d predict, and there’s a very high hit rate for recent visitations. By comparison, the Guardian’s Laura Barton takes a road to nowhere.

One-upmanship

Copying iconic images is old news for photographers covering the Olympics. So it was inevitable that someone would emulate the famous 1972 shot of Mark Spitz displaying his – count ’em – seven bits of bling against his hairless chest. (Out of shot are the stars-and-stripes budgie smugglers.)

Michael Phelps, of course, has earned his right to this pose. It’s just a shame that Beijing’s imposing medal ribbons have made it look like he is wearing a fetching halter-necked top borrowed from
J Lo. (Out of shot is the taffeta cocktail frock.)

Going to Graceland

Staying with Memphis in the meantime, where it's Death Week in more ways than one. On August 17, 1977 I was on a bus going through Wellington when I noticed the Evening Post's billboard:

THE KING IS DEAD - Elvis Presley 1935-1977

The circumstances of his death meant that Elvis became a punchline for those with limited imagination, or fodder for semioticians who can't dance. Growing up in Wellington, the closest I got to an Elvis film were the trailers at the local fleapit. Just old enough to remember 'In the Ghetto' as a hit, in the early 1970s when NZBC-TV had a run of daytime movies - Loving You, King Creole and Jailhouse Rock - I suddenly got it. Later, even the post-army years.

In 1988, I made a 24-hour visit to Memphis, my first, driving up from New Orleans with Mike Howie at the wheel of a car that died in Elvis's carpark. After the article below was published, a woman from Taranaki wrote to say that she thought I was mocking Elvis, which wasn't the intention. To the visitor, Graceland is presented as an irony-free zone, and is a fascinating insight into the man. Surreal and sad at the same time.

A House On Lonely Street

In the early 1970s the city of Memphis finally found something adequate to name after their most famous son: a highway. So the six‑lane Highway 51 South became Elvis Presley Boulevard, and at 3764 stands Graceland, the palace/mausoleum that ranks with the White House and Taj Mahal as an icon. The enigma that is Elvis comes clear when one visits his home.

The first surprise is how close Graceland is to the highway – only about 50 metres. The famous wrought-iron gates, showing Elvis as a young rocker surrounded by musical notes, still stand at the roadside. They’ve been open since daughter Lisa Marie made Graceland a tourist attraction in 1982, to cover the costs of maintenance, she said: the Presley estate remains in trust till she turns 25 in 1993.

The gates were one of the first things Elvis installed after he bought the mansion in 1957. Aspirant Elvises struggled to pass through. Early in his career, Bruce Springsteen could only rattle them, crying to the guards in his frustration, “But I was on the cover of Time!” Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter snuck through, like a glam rocker in Colditz, making it as far as the kitchen. Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t wait for an invitation: he just turned up in a limo late one night, drunkenly waving a derringer. Raised from his slumber, the King told his guards to ignore him.

It’s easier these days. Leave your car in Elvis’s parking lot across the road (US$1.00) and buy a ticket for the mansion tour ($7.50). Stroll around his two private planes, the Lisa Marie 707, and small jet Hound Dog II (these “airborne luxury apartments” can be inspected for $3.95), and within two‑and‑a­-half minutes a shuttle bus arrives to take a group of 16 pilgrims across the road and through the hallowed gates.

The driveway winds past mature trees – cypresses and elms – to deposit the party beneath the portico of the Southern mansion. But despite the imposing columns, the antebellum architecture, the trimmed hedges, the Romanesque statues and vases, the effect is not so much Gone With the Wind as built­-without‑a‑permit.

While hardly humble, Graceland would be overshadowed by many homes in the more exclusive areas of Remuera or Fendleton, though the plans would never get past the residents’ protection group.

The front door is carved oak, its size as unremarkable as the attached metal fly screen. Before anyone enters, however, the “Graceland Guest Rules” are explained: no touching, no smoking, no exploring, no noisy children, no pets. Most important, no cameras with flashes: “Your respect of this rule will help preserve Graceland mansion and artefacts from the deteriorating effects of flash photography.’’

Is the decor as delicate as treasures from King Tut’s tomb? No. Even Presley’s interior decorator was aghast at his taste: “I would see it, and swallow hard,” he said. “There was really no way I could say, ‘Oh Elvis, you have made an abortion!’“ Or as one of Presley’s hangers-on said, “That house is filled with everything you’d walk into a furniture stare and not buy.’’

The crass splendour that is Graceland explains all about its owner. Elvis simply had no idea – of how to handle his fame or his money, let alone his talent. The feeling evoked is one of loneliness. It’s a house but not a home; the image is not one of roaring parties, or Lisa Marie toddling about in naps, but of Elvis, padding about alone, looking for his next banana split.

There are no books, no pictures other than motel room art – and nothing old. Elvis hated antiques. They reminded him of being poor. No, everything inside Graceland is new. I was prepared for tackiness – indeed that word quickly becomes inadequate – but what is surprising about the interior is that it’s all cheap tack.

The internal tour is limited to the ground floor. To visit the bedroom would be bad manners, to visit the upstairs bathroom where Elvis died (reading a book on the Shroud of Turin), bad taste. The visitors, mainly couples in their late 30s, are subdued and serious, as are the guides. With the vacant enthusiasm of doorstep evangelists, the guides shunt the visitors through the rooms with a rapid-fire patter. Their clean-cut demeanour barely hides their boredom, though they’re still buzzing that the heavy metal band Poison has just been through. “They all come here to pay homage,” said one guide.

The guides keep the myth intact. Presley’s divorce from Priscilla is conveniently forgotten; the TV cameras in every room were installed because “Elvis liked to look after his guests, to see what they were up to and what they needed.”

To the left of the foyer, carpeted in white shag-pile, is the dining room. A large smoked mirror glass table is surrounded by gold leaf baroque chairs, with velour upholstery. The drapes are turquoise, the walls white with gold scalloped trim. Glass cabinets are crammed with cheap knick‑knacks, statuettes, porcelain, vases.

On the right are two living rooms, smaller than one would expect, with low ceilings. Dividing them is an archway, flanked by peacocks in stained glass windows. One room is for a grand piano, dipped in gold.

Down a steep, narrow staircase, with walls and ceiling covered in mirrors. To one side is the TV room, with mirrored ceiling and bright-yellow vinyl furniture. Opposite is the pool room, so over-upholstered it’s like a womb. Heavy brown drapes cover all the walls and the ceiling, the fabric fanning out from the chandelier in widening pleats. The pool table is electric blue.

But the piece de resistance is at the back of the house: the Jungle Room. Elvis furnished his favourite room himself after seeing an ad on television for a local furniture store. He went straight down there, and in 30 minutes had what he wanted: a den with a Hawaiian theme. The intention may be Hollywood voodoo out of Blue Hawaii, but the result is more like a Dr­ Caligari nightmare. Bright green shagpile carpet, chairs with leopard-skin covers and dark wooden arms, roughly carved into gargoyles. A coffee table hewn from a tree trunk, voluminous curtains in M*A*S*H camouflage fabric, porcelain figurines of tigers, tikis and watermelons. Elvis liked it so much he recorded his last two albums right here, say the guides.

Out the back door, and viewed from behind, Graceland’s grandeur seems as superficial as a Hollywood film set, propping up the plantation-mansion facade. Across a lawn is a squash court, rapidly jerry-built in 1975 when Elvis wanted a game. He only used it twice, though the lounge room’s brown vinyl couches and upright piano are worn, one imagines from singalongs.

Into the trophy room, a concrete‑block museum that holds countless gold records and much more besides. Costumes from the Vegas period, with monumental belt buckles and high collars and smothered in rhinestones. On a mannequin, they seem small: Elvis, a quarter-inch over six feet, wore lifted heels. In frames are dozens of certificates proclaiming Elvis a sheriff in countless small towns, plus a blue police badge with accompanying letter from Richard Nixon appointing the King an undercover detective for the Bureau of Narcotics. Glass cases display Elvis’s guns: magnums, .38s, rifles, revolvers, derringers. “Elvis liked guns,” says the guide.

Outside is a kidney-shaped swimming pool (“Please Do Not Throw Coins in the Pool”) and beside it is the “Meditation Garden”. Less than 20 paces from the house, Elvis lies buried beneath a full-length bronze plaque alongside his mother, father and aunt. A small plaque remembers Jesse Garon Presley, Elvis’s twin brother who died at birth. An eternal flame has an inscription listing Elvis’s friends, including Dr Nichopolous, who prescribed the pills that Presley consumed in his final years.

Overlooking the scene is a full-sized statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, and two kneeling angels. Dotted about are wreaths and mementos from fans (“Always On Our Minds – Elvis followers of Malta”). Elvis’s epitaph is written by his father: “He had a God‑given talent that he shared with the world ... God saw that he needed some rest and called him home to be with Him.”

One is given a few moments of contemplation before the shuttle bus arrives to whisk the tour party back across the road. Another museum houses Elvis’s cars and motorbikes, including a Harley Davidson Electra Glide and a pink jeep, battered from Elvis playing dodgems. Pride of place is given to the fabled 1955 pink Cadillac that Elvis bought with his first flush of success, the ostentatious symbol that said he’d arrived.

Behind glass cases is more Elvis memorabilia: his first pay cheque ($54), some books (Kahil Gibran, Esoteric Psychology, The Legend of Bruce Lee, The Omen), LPs (Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas, Ray Charles The Man and His Soul) and videos (The Pink Panther, Monty Python episodes). In a mock drive‑in cinema plays a compilation of clips from Elvis films, called Follow That Dream. Six gift shops offer take-home memories of Elvis. The souvenirs – teddy bears, miniature juke boxes, ashtrays, snowies – follow the Graceland theme, tawdry workmanship at premium prices. In the heart of the South’s cotton growing district, the T‑shirts – Elvis in pink glitter – are made of polyester.

© Chris Bourke 1988

Black Moses

Who’s the black politician who’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

Obama!

Damn right.

Whether the estate of Isaac Hayes will let his biggest hit be rewritten as a campaign song remains to be seen, but having a black contender would be unthinkable without the breakthroughs of Mr Black Moses himself, Isaac Hayes. 

The high-hat triplets; the wah-wah guitar; the long, brown leather coat; the ’fro; the mo. John Shaft – a bad mother – is the mythical father of Obama’s success thus far. However the fictional villains in ‘Stagolee,’ Shaft and all the other blaxploitation films – and recurring role models such as the just resigned mayor of Detroit – could be the reason that the White House won’t get its makeover just yet.

Uh, what’s happening CC?
They still call it the White House
But that’s a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, CC
‘Chocolate City,’ Parliament

George Clinton was referring to the black majority in inner-city Washington DC as a positive response to white flight   to the suburbs, and thanking the city’s fans for their support, but Isaac Hayes made his political statements on the Billboard charts. 

Shaft wasn’t the first blaxploitation film, but it was the most successful, crossing over into the mainstream market. I’ll never forget seeing Hayes receive his “best song” Oscar on NZBC-TV. He confronted middle-America in their living rooms with a hard-funk rendition of the song, resplendent in gold chains, shades and shaved head – and not much else. A fashion statement for the cultural theorists in the audience. Sammy Davis Jr handed him his Oscar with the wisecrack that he’d been dressed by a local hardware store. How many Oscar moments from 2008 will we remember in 36 years? 

In 1968, when Martin Luther King was murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Hayes was one of the leading songwriters at Stax Studios a couple of miles away. At that moment, Hayes was on driving to the motel to pick up a musician: in the fading days of segregation, the Lorraine was where the black folk stayed.

At Stax, Hayes and his lyricist partner Dave Porter wrote for everyone on the label. It was Sam and Dave who turned their gospel testifying into pop hits. Their trademark song ‘Soul Man’ was a statement of black consciousness as powerful as any by Muhammad Ali or Nina Simone, with a better backbeat. On the piano, leading the band, was Isaac Hayes. 

Hayes was driven more by the pop charts than politics; in 1968 he was yet to become a black icon, but he was hip to the catchphrases coming out of the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King declared “I have a dream” he wasn’t talking about romance, but Hayes and Porter were: 

I had a dream last night, love is worryin’ me
I claim the only woman that I’ve ever loved
Don’t you know she turned her back on me ...
‘I Had a Dream,’ sung by Johnnie Taylor

Taylor’s dreamer works the graveyard shift five nights a week, comes home sick one time to find his “baby ain’t there”: 

I shouldn’t let this worry me, it all happened in my sleep ... but I got to stop from eleven to seven next week.

A hit record was political statement enough for Hayes, who was still printing money with Sam & Dave. On a follow-up single with them, ‘I Thank You,’ he played clavinette and asked the drummer to imitate a trotting horse. 

Perhaps Isaac Hayes knew his dream run with Memphis soul was coming to an end. Otis Redding was dead, followed four months later by Martin Luther King; the civil rights movement began to splinter. But Hayes had enough power to take artistic control of his music, with him out front. He had an accidental hit with his own album Hot Buttered Soul. It was a very odd record: here was a great songwriter singing other people’s songs. He would meander for 20 minutes with ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ or ‘Walk On By’ – and the audience just said, take your time. 

Hot Buttered Soul led to Shaft, and Hayes was the biggest thing in showbiz. He drove a gold-plated Cadillac, wore suits of gold chain mail and purred in his deepest voice about the power of love.

Shaft and Isaac Hayes’s outrageous experiments paved the way for Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye – and now Barack Osama (even if the 1960s civil rights leaders have been hesitant with their endorsements). 

Sir Isaac Hayes applies for an English passport.

Hayes was the 70s Duke Ellington, the sophisticate who got his inspiration from the street. His bank balance suffered from extravagance, and he disappeared into Scientology. Then the TV show South Park wanted his deep voice for the animated character of Chef, which worked well, until the South Park scriptwriters satirised Scientology. 

When rap music arrived it was tailor-made for an Ike Hayes revival. Here were African-American males strutting their stuff. Hayes himself chose Public Enemy’s Chuck D to revisit a song off the classic album Hot Buttered Soul. Its name: ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’. 

Can you dig it?

Links: a great profile of Hayes from Memphis magazine; thorough obit at the Independent; watch him perform ‘Shaft’ live in the studio; Shaft meets Shane here; and below, the dynamic duo Sam & Dave perform two of his songs live: it’s a slow starter, but a big finisher.