Music: Last Stop on the Mystery Train

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Those early Sun sides, typified by the wonderfully spooky, smoky Mystery Train, were arguably the best music Elvis ever made. The more familiar songs, like Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog and Don't Be Cruel are great tunes, joyful and sassy. They have become cultural artifacts, but no amount of historical respectability can fully dim their raucous vitality. They also represent a high point. Only four or five years after they came out, Presley's music had virtually become a patented mixture of heavy breathing and hokum.

After his Army hitch, and under the guidance of Colonel Parker, Elvis' new music was confined largely to sanctimonious spirituals and sound-track ditties off the string of brain-rotting movies he turned out, sometimes at the rate of three a year. At first, the movies—like Jailhouse Rock—tried for a little of the defiance and vitality Elvis got in his music, but such ambitions were quickly forsaken for formula. Elvis beefed about the scripts, which he once contemptuously dismissed as "travelogues," but Parker could point to the fact that each of the movies turned a profit—often a handsome one—and that the sound track from one of these travelogues, Blue Hawaii, was Presley's bestselling album ever. The Colonel was constantly nudging Presley away from rock, stuffing him into an entertainment package that offered a little something for everyone. Audiences stayed loyal, and Presley earned millions each year. No matter that with the coming of the Beatles a lot of rockers deserted him. Elvis had already set their style.

It was style as much as the songs he sang that made Elvis Presley such an immediate, and ultimately irreplaceable, phenomenon. Initially, it was all a matter of attitude, the low lids, the lip that curled up like a whitecap before breaking on the beach, the musky voice that seemed to take its honey coating from a lot of scruffy worldliness and its distinct throb from straight below the waist. His first appearances were small Pop cataclysms. The sensuous movements that headline writers called "gyrations" and that earned Presley nicknames he did not like—Swivel Hips, the Pelvis—had their roots in roistering responses of some fundamentalist congregations.

Offstage his deferential manner toward adults, his shy country-boy come-on to women, made him seem, whatever heights of fame he achieved, strictly and forever down home. He defined himself, as Critic Greil Marcus points out in an excellent Presley essay, "by presenting his authentic multiplicity. I am, he announced, a house rocker, a boy steeped in mother-love, a true son of the church, a matinee idol who's only kidding, a man with too many rough edges for anyone ever to smooth away. Something in me yearns for a settling of affairs, he said with his pale music and his tired movies; on the other hand, he answered with his rock 'n' roll and occasional blues, I may break away at any time."