Hanif Abdurraqib on Ellen Willis’s Review of Elvis in Las Vegas
I have very little interest in the music of Elvis Presley, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a dominant figure in American music. What I am resurrection interests me immensely, which means that there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when properly lit, I find myself skimming over with fascination, or with a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, immediately appealed to me.
There’s no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great, but what makes her work compelling, and what most informs my own writing, is that Willis…The New Yorker first pop music critic, was never afraid to let himself be overcome by an unexpected pleasure, even if it came at the expense of a certain pre-existing skepticism. These two traits – skepticism and the potential for fun – exist at the intersection of Las Vegas and Elvis, particularly during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweaty singer who worked the apartment hotels of the following decade, slowly trudging to earn a paycheck.
The Elvis Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead, but from a long period of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led him to film roles and soundtrack recordings and, largely, away from the stage. The previous year had marked a turning point: there had been the triumph of his comeback special, filmed in June and broadcast in December. But to prove that he was fully To return, one would have to conquer Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.
There is a striking moment in his piece, a sort of mini-twist, where one can feel Willis’s mode of observation shift from perplexity to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright pleasure. This happens after Elvis arrives on stage, when Willis first greets him. She is amazed by his new, more slender physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also intrigued by his hair, dyed black and no longer styled in the famous duck tail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to appear younger, he is not interested in performing like he did in his youth. She marvels at his playful side, becomes obsessed with his seriousness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time I saw him as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied.” Although Willis herself was only twenty-seven—the magazine had hired her the year before—she appreciated her maturity. “He knew not to try to be nineteen again,” she notes. “He had more than enough to offer at thirty-three.”
Willis’ Elvis Chronicle embodies one of his central gifts: his ability to guide you through an unknown tunnel and lead you out the other side, into a life-giving light, no matter how surprised you are that the destination looks like it does. The fact that this piece isn’t particularly long makes the aforementioned twist land with even more force. This is a writer who says, “We don’t have much time, and I’m not trying to change your mind, but I’m allowing you to witness how I was moved from one place to another.” »
Reading Willis’ review of Elvis as he comes back to life reminded me that my interest in the singer goes beyond resurrection. Elvis was among the first of what I consider virgin pop stars, a lineage of artists, encompassing more recent figures such as Taylor Swift, who are so imbued with meaning, for many, that they become a stand-in for big emotions and big concepts, whether they believe in them or not. What fueled Elvis’s fame was that he could contain all projections at once, and even cultivate them. It takes a sharp critical eye to capture an artist like this, to write not about what he means but about what he does. This work is not about removing the romanticism from an artist’s appeal. On the contrary, I find it deeply romantic. Willis indulged in the spectacle of an Elvis who had not yet finished, an artist still as alive as he had ever been. ♦
First concert of the King at the Hôtel International.
