Late summer around the Monterey Penninsula is best described as "sultry". The mornings are cool and foggy and a damp sea smell permeates everything; the air is heavy and feels thick. As the sun burns the fog away, the temperature climbs into the high seventies to low eighties. The fog melts and the air becomes thinner and easier to breathe, but still feels slightly damp. The sun is bright and not quite strong enough to sting the bare skin; but warming. As the sun starts sinking into the ocean, the heavy air and sea smell return.
It was an afternoon typical of August. Not uncomfortable but very warm, the sun was high and bright, the air still carried the sea smell and weight from morning. I was pulling into the parking lot at the main PX at Fort Ord. I was looking for a slot to slip into when the news came on. It was a Tuesday and it must have been around noon, I remember being in a hurry. The radio station broke into the song that was playing with a news bulletin...Elvis Presley was dead. I sat there for a moment trying to soak it in. I had often said that I couldn't picture a fifty-year-old Elvis trying to rock. But I didn't even realize that he had already turned 40...
I had been an Elvis fan from his beginning. I was living in San Diego in 1955 when some of the local radio stations were changing from the pop music of Patti Page, Eddie Fisher, Ernie Ford and the like to the new rock-a-billy sounds of Eddie Cochran, Bill Haley and of course, Elvis. I was eight years old and the rock sound just hit me right. I watched Elvis on TV, saw his movies, listened to him on the radio, bought his records, and in 1961, I saw him in person at the Arizona Memorial Concert in Block Arena at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He made a dozen or so movies in the early sixties and each movie produced an album with one or two hit songs on it...I had them all. Somewhen in the middle sixties, probably helped along by the British Invasion and basic training, I kinda drifted away from Elvis. His movies were bleh and so was his music. "In the Ghetto" sealed the deal for me; the man who destroyed the morals of teens in the fifties singing to raise our social consciousness in the late sixties?
I felt sad the first time I saw the films of a fat, sweaty, jump-suited Elvis forgetting the lyrics and lying on the stage to sing. I have compiled my own cassette tapes to play in my truck (pre-MP3 days) and on one side of one I labeled it "Young Rockin' Elvis" and on the other side "Young Bluesy Elvis" (If you haven't heard some of the early Elvis blues renditions, you should find some and give them a listen, he had one of the best blues voices ever)...I don't have a "Fat, busting-out-of-his-jumpsuit Elvis" tape...the Las Vegas years just ruined whatever was left of the boy.
But in spite of all that, I just never really thought of a dead Elvis. I was sad that day, and sadder. still that there was so much more that the Boy From Tupelo could have been, but wasn't.
Someone honked behind me and I found a place to park but I didn't get out of the car. The radio started playing back-to-back Elvis songs and I forgot why I was there to begin with. I just pulled out and went back to work. Seemed like everyone I talked to that afternoon felt pretty much the same; it was a blue day. For me and fifty million fans who couldn't be wrong. August 16, 1977...thirty-four years ago today