may 4th extract-link davis

Link Davis-Trucker from Tennessee-Starday single   

I know nothing about Link Davis except for this rockabilly single issued on the Starday label in 1956. I do know that this song is all about Elvis when he worked as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company and therefore gets me a route into writing about an artist who I haven’t got on the iPod but really should.

I may have tangentially touched upon Elvis somewhere along the line a bit earlier but I can’t honestly write for a year about popular music without having a bit of Elvis in here. There’s some great artists and some hugely influential artists and astoundingly innovative artists but how many are true giants, towering over the past half century and more? He touched so many lives, both ordinary individuals   and fellow artists and even now, his shadow hangs over popular culture in so many ways.

I’ve had a bit of a chequered history regarding Elvis and it’s only been in the past 15 years or so that I’ve gradually come to realise not only how important he was, and is, but really how good he was. Being so much into music for so long it was if Elvis was always there but I was sort of dismissive-there seemed to be no relevance to me. I would have no sooner bought an Elvis record in the 70’s and 80’s, when I was heavily into punk and post-punk than I would have voted for the Tories or taken up hangliding. It just didn’t seem to be anywhere on the radar. The well known songs were so well-known that it was as if they’d always been there. I didn’t not like them, it was just ambivalence. They were as (un)important to me as, say, a James Last box set advertised in the back pages of a Sunday paper. So what, it’s just Elvis. On top of that the only other exposure to Elvis was re-runs of his cheesy films from the 60’s that would be shown on daytime TV-I guess simply to use up a bit of time. I recall watching his 1968 effort, “Speedway”, about NASCAR and co-starring Bill Bixby one Wednesday afternoon when I had time on my hands. Bill Bixby and NASCAR. Nothing more needs to be said. I also had a perception-now totally wrong-of an inherent naffness of the “Fat Elvis” Vegas years.

There were, thankfully, a number of gradual turning points which have brought me to the point where I am today in understanding the greatness of the man. I think that they all happened at roughly the same time and although there may have been other influences coming to bear on me these are the main three. 

Firstly, as a birthday present for me when she was about 4 years old, Amy, my daughter, saved up her pocket money and bought me an Elvis compilation. “The 50 Greatest Hits”.  Now, by any standards, this is a brilliant collection which starts with “That’s All Right “ and “Mystery Train”  and has 48 other fantastic songs.  However, because it was a present and because the way it was bought I would have loved it anyway (unless she’d got me a Sisters of Mercy album-that would have been inexcusable). About two weeks after she got it for me, she accidently broke the jewel case and unbeknown to me, sat and made her own cover to rectify it, thinking that a new sleeve would make it better. This is my favourite piece of art ever-it beats anything done by DaVinci, Warhol, Picasso, you name it. I decided at the start of writing this year not to have any pictures or photos in this but I’ll make an exception…

(Elvis by Amy)

The second factor was a random sort of purchase of the second volume of the classic biography of Elvis by Peter Guralnick, “Careless Love”. I’d read his 1971 book about the blues and knew he was a brilliant writer. I read excellent reviews of the first volume anyway and thought that if he’d spent so much effort writing about Elvis then there must be something there. Not only that, but it was a hardcover edition in a remaindered bookshop for only a fiver-a bargain.

The final significant piece in the jigsaw was an increasing obsession on my part with the music and life of Bob Dylan. In every book I read about Dylan there seemed to be a reference to Elvis along the way-maybe not to a massive extent but he was still there, somewhere always in the background.

With these three things falling together then I came to understand something that had eluded me for so long. There’s not much point in explaining it anymore; the how’s and why’s-it can simply be put into four words.

Elvis is The King.       .