Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  But what if you reduce mass media in the equation? Aside from a scratchy 45 of “Heartbreak Hotel,” I don’t recall hearing Elvis in our house. I suppose I read about him in the paper, but we never had a television, and I know Elvis was dead two years before I had a radio.

  Radios were forbidden in our home, but in November of 1979, I discovered one squirreled away in a mysterious slope-roofed closet upstairs in our old farmhouse. I’ve been able to backtrack the date because when I plugged it in, turned it on, and the tubes warmed, I heard Kermit the Frog, singing his way to #25 on Kasey Kasem’s American Top 40 with “Rainbow Connection.”

  Long before I heard Kermit, back when I was tiny, my brother and I stood in front of my grandma’s fireplace, playing what would one day be called “air guitar” while mouthing along to an LP she had put on for the evening. I must have been particularly animated, because my grandma, then in her late fifties, said, “You move like Elvis Presley!” I didn’t even know who Elvis Presley was. And yet, by that time, the moves that had gotten Elvis’s pelvis banned in prime time had become de rigueur in rock. As limited as my exposure to music and television was, a little drop of Elvis had trickled down and hit me in the hips.

  The osmotic Elvis is not always obvious. You see someone owning the stage, shaking his pelvis and whatever else, and you’ll be excused for saying, oh, Elvis started all that. You’d be wrong—he didn’t start it, he popularized it—but you’d be excused. But then you see a man like Townes Van Zandt, a frail alcoholic ephemera out of Austin, Texas, dead this year at fifty-two, teetering on the edge of a stool, singing the troubled, introspective songs that made him a legend but didn’t make him happy, and you hear him tell the story of how it was Elvis on TV with his guitar and Cadillacs and girls that made Townes ask his daddy for his first guitar. Suddenly you think, if Elvis started this man—the utter anti-Elvis—what else did he start?

  Before Elvis was everywhere, he was everything. He was whatever you needed him to be. The dangerous erotic rocker, the good and loyal GI, the grandiose balladeer, the film star, the nouveau riche hick, the Cadillac philanthropist, the strung-out goofball, the prayerful gospel singer, the bloated postmodern icon. He was a national “local boy does good,” he was an archetypical cautionary tale. Here he was in 1956, according to John Shepherd, “eminently successful in flouting the propriety of middle-class sensibilities” with his nationally televised gyrations. There he was in 1971, sideburned cheek by shadowy jowl with none other than Richard Nixon, who presented the most famous addict in America with an enameled shield making him an agent of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The irony hits you like an envelope full of pills. The rebel sold out. Officially, symbolically, and to Richard Nixon no less. Little wonder that two weeks after Elvis died, Lester Bangs wrote, “I see him as being more like the Pentagon, a giant armored institution nobody knows anything about except that its power is legendary.”

  But this bizarre alignment says as much about Elvis’s ability to broaden his audience demographic as the artistic range between “Hound Dog” and “Old Shep.” How do you like me now, Elvis always seemed to be saying, and what would you like me to be next? He gave us so many ways to remember him, we couldn’t forget him. Even if we missed him the first time around.

  The future looks good for Elvis. Things will only get better; his image is bound to improve. The whole postage stamp thing was a good omen. It was a highly official way of saying, well, gosh, I think we’ve made fun of his collars long enough, let’s let him slim down and dump the jumpsuit for some vintage lamé.

  Applying the Sinatra corollary, we can assume that were Elvis alive today, he would be consigned to embarking on a Mobius strip of farewell/comeback tours, interrupted at regular intervals by celebrity tribute mawkfests. Instead, he’s still the sexy shakin’ Hillbilly Cat, legal tender backed by the full faith and power of the United States government. And by God, if there’s one thing we love in America, it’s eternal youth with a fat wallet.

  And then, in the mitigation category, we have become inured to celebrity misbehavior. Elvis and his penchant for panty-clad wrestling girls offended 1950s sensibilities, but the year he died Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols lurched into America. By October of 1978, Vicious was charged with stabbing his girlfriend to death; four months later, Vicious himself was dead. Shooting one’s television suddenly seemed positively quaint.

  But one need not pick on punk rockers to define deviancy downward. In the twenty years since Elvis pitched forward to glory, a score of his exploits have been eclipsed by any number of our most favored televangelists. In the end, the fact that Elvis lacked Mick Jagger’s metabolism and Keith Richards’s liver allowed him to mount a posthumous comeback the Jims—Bakker and Swaggart—can only pray for. And perhaps the academics—frequently loath, embarrassed, or unable to judge him as an artist—will let down their hair and let Elvis climb up the ivory tower. Some recent readings have been redemptive, and there has been a trend toward analyzing Elvis the Performer rather than Elvis the Myth, Elvis the Meretricious Primitive, Elvis the Snacker. Strange as it may seem, it may take the demise of Elvis’s original legions of fans to pave the path to complete ensconcement. In his own redemptive work, “The Academic Elvis,” Simon Frith suggests that “as arguments about performance and identity begin to inform cultural studies, so perhaps Presley will at last be taken more seriously than his fans [italics mine].” From this one can infer all that unstinting, uncritical worship made the woolly-heads nervous. I mean, it’s not like you’ve got entire conventions of Beethoven impersonators.

  But of course the impersonators won’t go away soon, and the sightings won’t stop, and some summer, years from now, you’ll be stuck in traffic in a strip-mall chunk of town, and the sun will be unforgiving, and right outside your passenger-door window will be some guy set up on half a service station parking lot, selling velvet in a frame, and five or six of those beauties will feature the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.

  Whether the academics decide to elevate him or not, low culture will keep Elvis alive. Everything “Elvis” is a tribute. Even the embarrassments: the tick-tock clocks that dance, the Elvis shampoo. If I am wrong, and academe turns on him, all the better. The more vitriolic or condescending the observations, the more they stand tribute to an insatiable need to establish the proper position of the icon, to the power of the icon to evoke.

  Do you doubt that Elvis can still evoke? I share my first name with two of the most recognized men in the world: Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. No one ever makes the association. But if your name is Elvis, you cannot escape the association. I have no acquaintances named Elvis, although I can think of a few well-known Elvii: Elvis Grbac, the NFL quarterback; Elvis Costello, the musician; and Elvis Stojko, the champion figure skater. But here’s the thing: The first time I heard these names, and the last time I heard them, I thought immediately of Elvis Presley. What other name triggers that instant connection? Adolf, maybe. Jesus, certainly. There was a time, I suppose, when people named their boy Elvis because they liked the name, or they had an uncle Elvis who was dear to the family and got kicked in the head by a mule. But somewhere along the line the boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, stole that name forever, and no one else can ever truly have it for their own. You take that name, you live with a legend. Make no mistake. The legend lives, but the man is gone. I have it on good authority from Nashville reporter and Graceland wake attendee Bill Hance that Elvis is indeed dead (“I done seen him”), and posthumous rehab can only do so much. Julie Baumgold drove that point home with just one backhanded line in a gentle, looping dance of an essay written for Esquire in 1995. Describing an all-star musical tribute to Elvis, she wrote, “Tributes can be dangerous things, because sometimes all they prove is that it takes forty performers to not quite recall one Elvis.”

  But then, who needs Elvis back? Elvis was big, but the trickle-down Elvis is culturally colossal. The feeding frenzy took place decades ago, but the postprandial Elvis is very much in
demand.

  And forever available.

  1997

  Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

  Friday, September 14, 2001. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, twenty thousand people are shoulder to shoulder on the Library Mall, honoring victims of the attacks in New York and Washington. The air is cool, but the sun is high and bright, intensifying all the red, white and blue. A man wielding a tall flag takes bellicose swipes at the sky, and the cops bounce a handful of vociferous protesters, but mostly, solemnity prevails.

  A block away, at the base of the student union terrace, the waves on Lake Mendota roll to the breakwater with an easy chug and surge. Sparrows work the terrace for crumbs, their beaks ticking at the concrete, pausing only to flutter from the path of the professional class, which is out jogging over lunch break. The joggers pass in talkative packs, leaving sentence fragments in the air. Today, the fragments are all from the same conversation:

  “…relatives on the plane…”

  “…which will help with coalition building…”

  “…but the people we’ll kill won’t be the ones…”

  Up on State Street, the poster kiosks are running heavy to peace rally announcements and reactionary screeds. Somewhere under the new stuff is a poster that says Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown will be playing on University Avenue tonight, at a club called Luther’s Blues. It’s not going to happen. Gate saw the towers come down in New York City, and he’s not getting on any airplanes. Right now he’s in Louisiana. On his porch. Keeping peaceful company with a gator.

  Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was seventeen years old in 1941, and on the road, playing music. He was standing on a street corner in Norfolk, Virginia, when someone told him Pearl Harbor was burning. His mother, certain he would be drafted, sent him a letter and told him to come home. They drafted Clarence, but not until ’46, when the war was over. He didn’t care much for the army. “There was so damn much prejudice…segregated barracks and mess halls…I couldn’t understand how in the hell people could live like that when they were tryin’ to save each other. They wouldn’t let our boys fly no airplanes…it’s hard to describe how the black man was treated. Nobody seemed to give a damn.”

  Gatemouth is seventy-seven years old now, and he has seen his nation attacked a second time. He notices the flags are out again. He’s not sure how deep the patriotism runs. “Don’t get me wrong now—I feel sorry for what happened to those people. But it’s the funniest thing—when things is smooth, nobody likes one another, they hate one another’s guts. But when a crisis happens, everybody hugs one another with all this bullshit sympathy. I mean, why can’t you have respect and concern for each other before? It’s just like Christmas—from January to December, everybody is just on your own. But when that one day comes up…”

  Born in Vinton, Louisiana, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown grew up in Orange, Texas, near the Gulf Coast. His father fiddled for friends on the weekends, and at the age of five, Clarence began backing him on guitar. They played a little bit of everything—regional tunes, French traditionals and German polkas. When Gate was ten, his father started him on the fiddle. During World War II, he got work as a drummer.

  He broke from the back of the riser to the front one night in 1947 when T-Bone Walker took sick during a show at the Golden Peacock in Houston and stopped playing, mid-song. Clarence jumped onstage, picked up T-Bone’s guitar, and ripped into his own “Gatemouth Boogie.” In fifteen minutes, as the story goes, the crowd tipped him six hundred dollars.

  Club owner Don Robey hired Brown, became his manager, and put him on tour with a twenty-three-piece orchestra. Soon he was signed to Hollywood label Aladdin Records. Dissatisfied with Aladdin’s promotional efforts, Robey launched his own Peacock Records label. Brown had several hits with Peacock, including his signature “Okie Dokie Stomp.”

  Drawn to Nashville in the 1960s to take part in a local R&B television show, Brown recorded a number of country singles. He spent much of the ’70s in Europe, where he recorded nine albums. He also toured the world on behalf of the U.S. State Department, taking his American music to locations ranging from Botswana and Madagascar to the Soviet Union.

  In the late ’70s, Brown moved to New Orleans and teamed up for an MCA album with Roy Clark (1979’s Makin’ Music). The Clark project led to joint appearances on Hee Haw and Austin City Limits. In 1982, his album Alright Again! (Rounder) won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Recording, and Gate himself received the W. C. Handy Blues Award for Instrumentalist of the Year. Eventually, there would be seven Grammy nominations, nine Handy awards and a Pioneer Award from the R&B Foundation. Brown continued to tour through the ’90s and into the new millennium, with stops in New Zealand, Australia and Central America, again on behalf of the U.S. government.

  For seventy-two of his seventy-seven years, Brown’s career has unfolded over a shifting geography of place and sound, yielding a body of work nearly impossible to categorize. Read the bios and press clippings and you’ll find references to blues, roots, jazz, cajun, calypso, zydeco, bluegrass, country, funk and swing. Ask Gatemouth, and he’ll call it bayou swamp rock. Or border-type country. Or American and world music. Or American music, Texas-style. He plays, and leaves the sorting to others. Someone once said his country licks didn’t sound country. “What country you talkin’ about?” asked Gate.

  On the heels of two albums driven by big-band Texas swing—1997’s Gate Swings (Verve) and 1999’s American Music, Texas Style (Blue Thumb)—Brown’s new release, Back to Bogalusa (Blue Thumb), rides a more laid-back bayou groove. “I wanted to back down,” he says. He brought in a few extra horns, Mike Loudermilk pitched in on electric and acoustic guitar, and Sonny Landreth and Cajun accordionist Zachary Richard sat in on several numbers. Otherwise the tracks were cut with his regular band: Harold Floyd on bass, Joe Krown on keyboards, David Peters on drums and Eric Demmer on saxophone.

  They didn’t dally in the studio. “I don’t take no six months to do no album!” announces Gatemouth. “What you gonna do on it for six months?!? I know guys stayin’ in the studio two and three months, workin’ on four tunes! That’s ridiculous! For what?!?” He pauses to chuckle. “Took about a week. Workin’ at my own pace.”

  He concedes he’s had to adjust that pace of late. Age, he says, and he’s all right with that. “Mm-hmm…that’s the way it is,” he muses. Suddenly, a thought strikes, from left field. “These people my age, gettin’ all these face-lifts! What for?”

  You wouldn’t know where to start, eh, Gate? “Hell no! If that rubber band broke on top of my head, the skin’d fall down and trip ya!” Now he’s really laughing.

  He will speak out. On the trouble with America: “Look at our jails now. They’ve got forty percent more blacks in jail than whites, and they’re all doin’ the same damn thing—messin’ up. Society feels like the black is into dope, well that’s wrong, because the white’s into the dope, too.”

  On the trouble with other countries: “We help every country we can get out of a bog hole, yet, they don’t like us. A lot of ’em are very phony about it. And [now] we’ll see what’s gonna happen when we need help. Once we help them, it’s kiss my butt after that. And that’s wrong.”

  On kids these days: “I try to tell the young people, try and not hurt each other, because if you hurt somebody, it’s the same as hurtin’ yourself. It’s hard to talk to the young people because they’re into another thing of their own. That goes for whites and blacks and whatever else out there, because they’re rebellin’ against society.”

  On body art: “Look today how they’re piercin’ their faces all up with holes and puttin’ earrings in their tongues and nostrils…I mean it’s haaarrible-lookin’, man! I have some friends, their daughter’s got more holes in her than a sieve. With rings hangin’ in every one. And on the other side of the coin, the blacks, especially ‘round New Orleans, puttin’ all this cheap gold in their mouth, and keeping their mouth open so you can see it. It’s very distasteful to me. I
just try to tell them, I think you’re ruinin’ yourself at the same time. They don’t seem to care.”

  On automotive sound systems: “They get right upside of you and turn them things up, and I got a big heavy 1976 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, and it vibrates that car with all the boomin’. Now how in the hell can they stand it sittin’ in their cars?”

  On infomercial psychics: “That woman on the television…if she’s so smart, why can’t she go and tell us who killed that baby in Colorado?”

  On certain white rock singers: “Howlin’ like a cat caught in a hot oven.”

  On blues singers: “Cryin’ about who owes them…nobody owes you anything!”