Did the youth of the 70’s like Elvis?

Are you saying Elvis still loomed large because you were born in 1961

 

Neil Young was a big Elvis fan too. No accident that many of the music icons I grew up idolizing as a 70s teenager (and still do) became Elvis fans because in the mid 50s those artists were teenagers and Elvis was marketed to the American (and worldwide English speaking) public at the very time American households were buying TVs like hotcakes. Chuck Berry and Little Richard weren't marketed that way. Elvis had talent and impact, not denying that, but it was his slightly bad boy "star persona" as a rock n roll god that was largely marketed to the public and was deemed much "safer" to society (as long as TV didn't show his hips shaking) than most of the black artists of the time. Thankfully many of my heroes like the Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young etc looked deeper than just Elvis and also embraced and were influenced by Chuck Berry etc and recognized the r&b influences that made Elvis a star.

 

Elvis was deeply influenced by Rhythm And Blues artists too (there are some interesting comments by people like BB King about it, as he gave guitar lessons to the young Hillbilly Cat in the early 50's) and he kept singing that type of material until the early 70's before switching gears towards Country & Western (which is exactly when my interest for his music starts to wane.)

 

Oh yes, no disputing that Elvis' gospel and r&b roots and influences were used to market him and rocknroll to the public as the "safer" alternative,not denying that. That was my point in my previous post.

 

The answer is yes. I wasn't much of a fan myself, but it certainly seemed as if everyone else was.

I remember an occasion when someone brought a transistor radio to school (to use the lingo of the time) and had it on in the playground during the lunch break. 'Always on My Mind' (Presley's current single) came on, and everyone went quiet to listen. At some point a teacher or 'dinner lady' (can't remember which) demanded that the radio be switched off, and we were all horrified at Elvis being silenced; even to me (not a fan) this felt like it was bordering on sacrilege (we'd expect Sweet or Slade to get silenced like this). This must have been in early 1973 (it was quite cold outside and we all had our coats on).

A couple of year later, my family moved and so I had to change schools. I soon discovered there was a solid group of Elvis fans in my new class. I don't have any special anecdote from this time, other than there was always a lot of excitement if an Elvis movie was going to be on TV (I'm afraid I never watched any of them at this time).

In short, in my experience, Presley had a lot of young fans in the early to mid-'70s, at least among the pre-teens and early teens.

 

Did you grow up in Tupelo Mississippi?

 

He didn't really "switch gears" to country. He was always as much country as R&B. That's what rock and roll is, a stew of country, boogie woogie, jump blues and gospel. That first Sun single was a blues cover on one side, and a country cover on the other. A country waltz mutated into a 4/4 jump number. But a country number none the less, country boogie, like Maddox Bros and Rose. Amped up R&B and country together, that was the formula from the start (and not coincidentally, Chuck Berry's big bang single "Maybellene" was conspicuously written as a hillbilly number). The Sun sessions are a mix of R&B numbers, country numbers and pop numbers, that plus gospel was always the Elvis mix.

BTW, considering how Elvis was forced to tone down his act for TV. Denounced as lewd and for basically a kind of race mixing in his music, I don't really think it's true that he was viewed as "safe" and marketable because he was "safe" at all. He was crude, he brought a white trash teenage truck driver's mentality (and jokes and sexuality) to the middle of a the world of American popular entertainment, and his music and act were seen by many as dangerously crossing a stylistic racial line.

If you listen to Elvis being announced on those early Louisiana Hayride appearances, they don't know what to call his music -- it's folk, its R&B, its country. It's described variously but no one really knows what it is. It doesn't seem to radically out of the blue to us now, but that's the way it was received then.

I often think about the things Roy Orbison said about seeing Elvis in concert early on:

“I couldn’t overemphasize how shocking he looked and seemed to me that night,” Roy recalled. “He told jokes that weren’t funny, and his diction was real coarse like a truck driver’s. [There was] pandemonium in the audience because the girls took a shine to him and the guys were getting a little jealous.” Orbison came away realizing, “what comes out is not show. There are a lot of people who are good actors at singing to that they make you think they sound good but, with Elvis, he lives it altogether.”

His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing . . . I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it'.

Safe, or a safer alternative like Pat Boone covering Little Richard, it really wasn't. It crossed lines of class, of decorum, and, at least by implication, of race that weren't "supposed" to be crossed by entertainers that was very disruptive in the culture at the time.

 

I wasn't even a teenager when Elvis died, and I remember a lot of older kids respecting Elvis as one of the great originators, but he wasn't part of "youth" culture anymore. Nobody I knew listened to any of his contemporary material. He was already "fossilized" by the '70s, as it were...

 

I think if he had stopped when he went into the army he would probably be more respected.

 

Of course, C&W music was always a part of his own music since the early days. But he would combine all those genres he liked so much. My point is that from 1971/1972 onwards, Elvis focused much more on Country and somehow neglected his bluesier roots. Take his outputs after the 1969: there is a Blues or a R&B type of song here and there but the rest is mostly C&W. Same thing with his live act. So for one MERRY CHRISTMAS BABY, you get 10 or 15 Country tunes. Just not really my taste.

 

Mostly, yeah. I mean, he did record that great version of Promise Land, covered the Pointer Sisters. But yeah. Interestingly it was the outlaw country era (and he did cover Waylon Jennings). Might have been great to hear a full on outlaw country Elvis album with a bunch of Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Kris Kristoferson, Steve Young, et al. songs.

 

Elvis recorded 3 Gospel album and another one dedicated to C&W music but he never did a full Blues LP. I believe you need some guts for that, the type of guts he had during the taping of the 1968 TV Special. But by 1971, all that inspiration and energy were gone and so was the Blues album project.

 

I was a "youth of the 70's" and yes, I did like Elvis!
I grew up loving all his 60's stuff but I think his music really matured at the end of the 60's... in 1969 starting with "Suspicious Minds".
His 'arrangements' became more contemporary and 'classy'. Songs like "Edge Of Reality", "If I Can Dream", "Don't Cry Daddy", "I've Lost You", "The Next Step Is Love".
Of course he still had his uptempo side with "Burning Love" in '72.....
It makes you wonder (if he was still alive) how he would have fit into the 80's decade?

 

It would have been great if Elvis had gotten around to making a full blown blues album, but certainly From Elvis In Memphis and Elvis's Back In Memphis both demonstrate some great elements of soul and blues in several songs. Wearing' That Loved On Look, After Loving You, Only The Strong Survive and Power Of My Love are all great examples of what Elvis could do in the blues or soul tradition. Even his take on Eddy Arnold's I'll Hold You In My Heart is almost completely transformed into a genre bending country/soul/blues performance. I know we both love Stranger In My Own Home Town from that second album in Memphis as well.

I don't think it was a lack of guts that was responsible for Elvis not doing a full fledged blues album, but more a matter of Elvis never wanting to stick with one single genre or style of music for very long. Even when he concentrated on country music in those final years, Elvis still flirted with bluesy arrangements on several of his versions of those country songs, like on I Really Don't Want to Know, Funny How Times Slips Away or even the very last studio recording of He'll Have To Go or his cover version of Johnny Ace's Pledging My Love. Elvis, much like Charlie Rich, loved to turn genres upside down. I don't even know how to classify Elvis's soulful and bluesy takes of I've Got A Thing About You Baby or If You Talk In Your Sleep. Even Elvis country smash version of Hurt owns more to Roy Hamilton's original hit version on the R & B charts than country music.

I am sure there would probably not have been a lot of support at the label for Elvis to do a full fledged blues album by the 1970's. As Charlie Rich once said himself regarding his attempts at being a blues singer early in his career, "I love the blues and still do, but the blues made us blue, because they made us broke, and we just could not find enough work," Lol. At one time there was an A & R man with Columbia Records who had the brilliant idea to have Charlie Rich and Ray Charles make a duet album together where they could both explore their mutual affection for the blues and country music. The album title was going to be called, CR Meets RC or something to that effect. There was absolutely no support from the higher ups at the record label and that great idea for a duet album by those two music legends never got out of the starting gate.

 

I grew up in the 70's. I was 11 years old when Elvis died. I cannot say that I was a "fan" but my mom was, and she sometimes played his music in our house. I didn't mind listening to it, but I was more into Led Zeppelin, Yes, Kansas, Lynyrd Skynyrd....

 

Oh yeah, definitely… I was born in the early 60s and he was popular with a lot of kids my age.. all the way up til about 9 or 10th grade whenhe died

 

It's funny how Elvis was only 34-35 years old when the seventies began. He was the age of, say, Kendrick Lamar now, and only four years older than Ed Sheeran. But because "rock'n'roll" was still a purely youth-driven thing (opposite of the Hoffman forum, which is geriatric), Elvis was already considered kind of old and past-it.

Then, as we all know, from 1971 onward, he accelerated quickly downward into a pool of sedatives, yogurt, teen girlfriends, hospital stays, and colon blocks.

When Elvis turned 40 in 1975, the papers were full of "Fat and Forty"-type of headlines, which is rather sad.

 

Anecdotal:

I was 2 when the calendar shifted to 1970 - and obviously 12 when the decade ended.

I heard "Jailhouse Rock" as part of a TV commercial that advertised some "best of Elvis" compilation and liked it.

"Jailhouse Rock" ended up being the 1st 45 I ever bought for myself. I actually wanted "Philadelphia Freedom" but Giant Music was out of stock.

I wanted to buy something, saw a reissue of "Jailhouse Rock" on the shelf, thought "hey, that sounded cool in that commercial" and got it instead.

I'd love to claim this turned me into an 8-year-old Elvis fan, but it didn't. That was the beginning and end of my youthful interest in Elvis.

I was 10 when Elvis died - it shocked me because he was so famous, but he held no relevance for kids in my age bracket back then.

I have no idea what - if any - discussion would've occurred at school since it was summer vacation, but I can't imagine we would've had much to say.

At least where I lived in suburban DC, Elvis wasn't vaguely on the radar for adolescents in the mid-to-late 70s!

 

I really like this post. It's hard to describe the pre-internet dynamic to those that have always had 24/7 instant access to media. I also grew up in a rural area and we only knew what was on TV, radio, magazines or newspapers. I was always up for hearing anyone's record collection. This was especially true if they had music that was great but not chart toppers of the day. Word of mouth recommendations seemed like such a cool way to discover new music, although it was so inefficient.

I keep hearing about how many were booing and making jokes about Elvis well before he died. In our home, there was no indication of how bad Elvis' health was in 1977. His movies played regularly on the weekend movie shows on TV. I had an Elvis poster on my wall in 1976 that was of Elvis from around 1972 (I figured that he still looked about the same).

My mom was always an Elvis fan (dad never was) and she grew up watching the movies, the 1968 special, That's The Way It Is, Aloha From Hawaii, etc.. I recall just how shocked my mom was when the news of Elvis' death was reported on TV. I remember how she actually gasped in horror when Elvis In Concert was shown and Elvis came out. She had no idea of how his appearance had changed from just 4 years earlier when he performed the Aloha concert. My mom was never emotional over something on TV but that night, I can recall her getting upset and asking loudly why did they let Elvis perform instead of taking him immediately to the hospital? I could tell that this had really upset her because she went in the kitchen and did things for the rest of the broadcast and wouldn't watch it because she felt so bad for him. I know that there were tabloids and such back then but people like my mom never had time for that stuff and she never delighted in someone's calamity. I didn't really hear the mean stuff about Elvis until after Elvis In Concert was broadcast. It seemed to take on a life of its own going into the 1980s.

 

Well said, Dave112. It was so much am era of finding things word of mouth, exploring a friend's (or their parent's) collection, and what just happen to pop up when the tv or radio was on. That's touching to hear about your mom. I had no sense of his health or later career, though I was surprised when he died. It was only once I really started exploring his whole life in the last 10 years or so that I became more aware of how he struggled. Your mom was right, it' s sad he wasn't taken off the relentless tour wheel to receive the help he needed.

 

I was a youth of the 1970s, more or less. Elvis was heard on the AM radio (mostly his current stuff) and seen on TV, but was not really part of the tribal conversation for longhaired musical youth. I think a lot of young people respected him like they did Sinatra or Dean Martin, as sort of cool older guys. People liked "Burning Love" and "Kentucky Rain" (early '70s). A few rock bands covered him, not many.

I don't think there was a great appreciation for early Elvis amongst that young adult audience until the CD era, although everybody knew "Hound Dog" and a few others played now and then on Top 40 as golden oldies.

Elvis was my earliest musical memory (my mom's 45s), but I didn't dig in until the Sun stuff came out on CD and was widely praised. No doubt some young people were better educated about him in the '70s, but I never knew one.

 

The first time I saw Elvis was in one of his movies, I’d never seen anyone who looked like him, he looked almost unreal. I found my mums records and played them to death. No male musician will ever come close to what young Elvis looked like for me.

 

Sadly as a member of that demographic no, I didn’t. A decade later I started to understand his appeal based on his immense talent. Past two decades I readily admit he is indeed The King. Happy at some point I saw the light and I love Elvis.

G-d bless his soul.