Rock 'n' Roll: Return of the Big Beat

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ROCK 'N' ROLL

A long-gone folk hero often leaves behind the legend that someday he will return to his people. Barbarossa still sleeps, and the horn of Roland has not sounded again, but Elvis Presley is appearing in the flesh before an audience for the first time in nine years.

He stepped onstage in front of a gold lamé curtain at Las Vegas' new International Hotel, coordinated his pelvic girdle and his phallic guitar, closed his eyes, tossed his head and sent a solar wind of nostalgia over the 2,000 middle-aged record executives, hotel guests and show folk assembled for the opening night. It was like being back in the innocent '50s with Blue Suede Shoes, Love Me Tender, Jailhouse Rock, Don't Be Cruel, Heartbreak Hotel, All Shook Up—and of course, the mangy Hound Dog ("cryin' all the time"). But things weren't quite the same. The audience was too grown up to scream and squeal. They clapped instead and called "Bravo!" and "More, more!" And Elvis—with longer sideburns and the grease out of his hair—was gently kidding the old songs and himself. After an especially rabid Hound Dog that ended with a split-kick jump, he was so winded that he reached for a glass of water, telling the audience: "You just look at me a couple of minutes while I get my breath back."

Comeback Bid. Presley's backup sound is much fuller now than it used to be, and more electronic; he has a soulful quartet called the Sweet Inspirations, a 35-piece orchestra loud with drums and guitars and a couple of Beatles songs (Yesterday and Hey Jude) plus Ray Charles' What'd I Say. But the newest thing about the new Elvis is social consciousness. Recently released as a single, his version of In the Ghetto, a mawkish ditty about big-city slum life, came close to the top of the pop music charts.

The return of Elvis at 34 is a characteristically careful piece of timing by the canny "Colonel" Tom Parker, his manager since the days when Presley was nothing but a sexy-looking young truck driver with a guitar. For the last 13 years Parker has kept his charge virtually invisible to live audiences—limiting him to records, movies, one TV special and no interviews. Now is the time, the Colonel senses, for the comeback bid. Teen-agers seem to be tiring of bloodless electronic experimentation and intellectualism, and may be ready to discover for themselves the simplistic, hard-driving Big Beat—as the '50s generation discovered it after the cool complexities of bop and progressive jazz.

The Colonel could be right. Radio stations around the country are trying "rockumentary" programs of "oldie but goodie" rock 'n' roll sounds of the '50s. These draw a surprising response from teen-agers as well as the late-twenties and over-thirties at whom they were originally angled.