August 16th 2009 marks the 32nd anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Had he lived, Elvis would have been 74 this year, and I like to imagine him as the grand old man of rock and roll: creaky, raddled and unpredictable, but still in good voice and guesting on other people’s albums. Hound-doggedly cranking out his own stuff right to the end, just like his contemporary Johnny Cash.
My imagined Elvis would have collaborated with artists of different generations, just as Roy Orbison did and as Tom Jones continues to do.
I’d love to have heard Elvis work with Jarvis Cocker, a track or two with Tom Waits, or a reworking of Nick Cave’s Tupelo, a duet with Amy Winehouse perhaps, guest vocals for The New Young Pony Club maybe, and above all, a project with Michael Jackson. The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll meets the King of Pop. Together at last.
The circumstances and manner of Elvis’s death from an overdose of prescription chemicals in August 1977 and Jackson’s untimely demise in July this year contain many parallels. The timetables of their lives are soaked in as much congruence as you care to distil, and it is all a fairly easy game to play.
Their careers followed similar trajectories: early success grounded in raw and undeniable talent, supplemented by hard work and dedication, leading to world-wide fame, wealth, seclusion, retail therapy, drugs and unhappiness.
Like Elvis, Jackson was once unstoppable, outrageous, and effortlessly cool. He had the hits, the style, the talent and an ego to match. He was the King of Pop.
Elvis got fat, Jackson got thin. They both died before their time. Then the stories started.
Elvis’s story is well known. Sun Records quest for a white boy who could sing black music for a white audience. Elvis may have crossed over from white to black and caused trouble along the way, but Jackson went one better than him and he did it without any bother. With Off The Wall and then emphatically with Thriller, Jackson upped the ante, he made black artists singing black music acceptable to a white audience and delivered the whole package in a way which was impossible to ignore. It’s also worth remembering what Jackson, who at least used to be black, did for black music, black musicians and black public figures in general. Jackson single handedly broke MTVs’ unspoken ban on black acts, and it’s also partly down to Jackson that the public profile of black people in all walks of life in America has been raised. So it comes as no surprise that basketball great Magic Johnson has credited Jackson with his own rise to superstar status.
In an age of mass-communication, Jackson’s death and its treatment by the media is a mirror-image of Elvis’s death all those years ago, except that the story has been on fast forward this time around. The day after his death, ‘Jacko’ was ‘Michael Jackson’ for the first time in years, and his reputation was restored. Forty-eight hours later he was ‘Jacko’ again, although the Sun never quite had the stomach to run ‘Wacko Jacko Heart Attacko’ on their front page.
We all love our stars, but we much prefer them broken. We want our bluesmen to have ‘killed a man’ and served their time in Parchman Farm. We want our rappers to be tooled-up wounded gangstas. We want our rock stars to take drugs, paint pictures with their own blood and hurl televisions from hotel windows.
So that’s that. Elvis Presley is dead, Michael Jackson is dead. We got what we wanted. Our singers as stars and victims.
I have to declare an interest in all this stuff. For me, complaining about the media is about as disingenuous as sitting in a car and grumbling about the traffic.
I wrote a fictional book about Elvis a few years back and completed my short-story collection ‘Neverland’, about a fictional Michael Jackson and his attention-seeking best friend Uri, on 25 June at around 9 in the evening. Four hours later, the real Michael was dead and the real Uri was already on TV.
Jackson’s life and the stories which surrounded it were tough to fictionalise, since they were already a kind of fiction, a convoluted and unreliable fable. Much of this awkward glitzy myth was perpetuated by Michael himself in a misguided attempt to be ‘interesting’, as if being possessed of an exceptional and undeniable talent was not enough.
My stories about Michael Jackson are concerned with a celebrity persona that has gone horribly awry in an age of shock-news culture.
Michael’s nurses, his ‘best’ friends, his personal magicians and his ridiculous gurus will all take their turn now in the grisly ritual of historicization and it is only a matter of time until he’s spotted in a Mall or maybe riding Splash Mountain Log Flume, Disneyland.
In the meantime, Michael’s bones will be picked clean. And now, in my own small way, I will be a part of that process.