Blue Moon, Here I Come

77 E. Lorain Street
Oberlin, Ohio

The endless highway beckons... obligatory comments about Waffle House... Elvis Presley, the end of innocence, and a former teen idol twisted on scag and dead on a toilet... Phish tour, the rebirth of innocence, and a JamBands.com correspondent moderately zooted on his own fantasies...

As far as I'm concerned, tour doesn't technically begin until one is on unfamiliar territory. Right now, I'm in the last outpost of civilization on the western frontier: a small scouting station located just outside of Cleveland; my house in Oberlin, Ohio. From here, I can peek in every direction I will be going in the next four weeks: six hours north to Toronto, eight hours east to New Jersey, six hours south to Nashville, and six hours west to Wisconsin. Tomorrow morning, we set out for Memphis and Graceland; a quick 13 hour drive from here.

With the exception of a couple of quick forays to western Virginia and southern Ohio over the course of the past seven months for shows, I've never really been in the south before. Before one of the Cincinnati Phish shows in December, we crossed the Ohio River and entered Kentucky. Behind us, Cincinnati gleamed like an architect's sketch translated whole into reality. In front of us, the highway stretched on, through countless hills, past an endless stream of Waffle Houses, and into some lush mysterious place that I'd only heard about in folk, country, and bluegrass songs. The Sweet Sunny South. I had an inclination to ditch out on the last two weeks of school and continue on, but finally gave in to responsibility.

Since I realized that we could get away with leaving a few days early, Graceland has been calling to me. I'm not really sure why. I've never been a big Elvis fan. In fact, I just bought my very first Elvis album this afternoon. I guess there's a certain mystique about the place, a tourist attraction so tacky, yet so completely intrinsic to American culture. Or something. The more I read about him, and the more I think about him, the more mythically compelling Elvis himself becomes, at least as a figure in American cultural and musical history.

The record I bought, "Sunrise", is a collection of Elvis's first sides recorded for Sam Phillips' Sun label in Memphis. I figured I should take a small crash course in Elvis before heading down. The music is raw, absolutely pure. Behind it is a crackling energy that I never would've thought that Elvis Presley - the bloated, burned out Elvis of the '70s, or even the young, supposedly vital sensation of the '50s - could be possible of. Above all, there is an innocence to it, both in the music as a whole and in the timbre of Elvis's voice. If the future is embodied somewhere in the recordings, it's simply not audible. Everybody is blissfully unaware of everything that would eventually happen: where Elvis would end up, and what would happen to the music he worshipped.

Phillips' label was a homespun affair. The end of the innocence it embodied is eerily symbolized by the last song of the first disc, an incomplete take of When It Rains It Really Pours -- interrupted, according to the liner notes, "because the session was broken off due to the imminent sale of his contract to RCA" (Guralnick 2). I've never seriously listened to any of the stuff from beyond this point, the music captured on "Sunrise" doesn't sound like Elvis -- not the syrupy, vaguely rebellious, crooner that was burned into my mind's retina.

In "Five Styles Of Rock & Roll", Charlie Gillett writes of what happened to Elvis's music: "At [RCA-]Victor, under the supervision of Chet Atkins, Presley's records featured vocal groups, heavily electrified guitars, and drums, all of which were considered alien by [audiences]. Responding to these unfamiliar intrusions in his accompaniment, Presley's voice became much more theatrical and self-conscious as he sought to contrive excitement and emotion which he had seemed to achieve on his Sun records without any evident forethought" (Gillett 14).

A lot happened to Elvis in the years between 1953 and 1977 -- perhaps too much for any one person besides Elvis himself to understand. In his eulogy for Presley, "Rhapsody In Blue", Charles Shaar Murray describes Presley's death as "truly the stuff of which nightmares are made. The first great symbol of rock music as youth-culture jailbreak, dying alone of a heart attack brought on by an over-strenuous game of squash, dying as a sick, obese, tortured hulk, dying lonely, miserable, dope-riddled, dying empty, dying exhausted, dying - finally - as a man who had everything he ever wanted but found it all wanting" (Murray 654).

How Elvis got from the beginning to end is what is compelling to me. How Elvis ended up, alone with his possessions, "killing his pain with an obscene blend of cheeseburgers and scag" (Murray 656). There's something sickly American about it all: American success, American failure. And it all began and ended in Memphis. After all is said and done, though, there is still this music: a perfectly honest voice somehow jumping fresh out of the speakers with a terrific yawp.

***
Somehow, this all ties into Phish tour, I suspect: innocence, corruption, and all that good stuff. I'm still not sure the full extent of the connection, and I'm sure it'll develop. I saw my first Phish show five years ago now; June 23, 1995 at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey. I'd been listening to them for two years at that point and I lapped everything up. I never would've possibly thought at that moment that, five years later, I would be in Atlanta, Georgia seeing the band. A lot has happened in the past five years -- so much so that I can't even fathom how much possibly could've transpired during the quarter-century of Elvis's public life.

My own relationship with Phish's music has certainly changed. I've gone through phases of electric enthusiasm and sheer boredom. The music is exciting in a monumentally different way than it was when I started listening to them, simply because I've changed as a person. Different things excite me. That's what happens. What was once an absolute gut reaction to the music has evolved into something more complicated, whether I like it or not. I usually don't.

I'm listening to Elvis's first singles with fresh ears. I've never heard them before. I've never really heard Elvis's music before, period. It's a cool feeling, though thoroughly laced with a spookiness that comes with the consciousness of what would happen to him. I haven't listened to Waterloo in a while. I'll probably dust it off for the drive to Memphis tomorrow. I doubt I can ever return my ears to the state they were when I was 16. Maybe seeing Phish in a new and wonderful locales will do that. Either way, tomorrow, I'm going someplace I've never been before.

Works Cited

 Gillett, Charlie. "Five Styles of Rock & Roll." In The Penguin Book Of Rock & Roll Writing, ed. Clinton Heylin, 6-22. New York: Viking. 1992.

Guralnick, Peter. Sunrise. New York: RCA Records. 1998.

Murray, Charles Shaar. "Rhapsody In Blue." In The Penguin Book Of Rock & Roll Writing, ed. Clinton Heylin, 654-6. New York: Viking 1992.

Jesse Jarnow is primed and ready to leave his home for the wild unknown of the deep south.