There are songs that are classics and then there are classics that connect directly into your sense of romanticism and nostalgia—the timeless songs that will affect you until the day you die, provided that something like dementia does not take a hold of you. “Take Five” by The Dave Brubeck Quartet affects me in this way. “Take Five” was recorded and released 18 years before I was born, which makes it a perfect bridge to a time that I have no personal attachment to.
Whenever I listen to this song the logical side of me hears the auditory manifestation of the word cool. Joe Dodge’s drums and cymbals at the beginning that bleed into Brubeck’s piano and Bob Bates’ bass is, by itself, an intoxicating melody that can transport one into a nirvana of mellow and smooth. Mortal men would spend three lifetimes trying to come up with something to rival the first twenty seconds of “Take Five”—and they would all fail. And then Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone enters at the twenty-first second and just like that the song has become an otherworldly kind of cool, something that transcends nirvana. My logical side marvels at all of this: the mathematical precision that allows for everything to sound so damn cool and smooth (which reminds me of the David Foster Wallace quote about bees having to move fast to stay still), as well as the way it shifts into a drum-driven song and temporarily ditches Desmond’s indelible sax and it somehow never misses a beat. It still sounds clean and superb in spite of this shift that would raise a thousand red flags on paper. Listening to “Take Five” is like looking at a classic painting in that it can become more of an experience rather than a passive connection.
As I mentioned earlier, this song also plays into an emotional side that joins up with a romanticism and nostalgia that I have no direct attachment to. I grew up in the Midwest (for those of you who are reading this in L.A. or NYC, the Midwest is the large land area that prevents you from flying to the opposite coast in under two hours) and lived here my whole life save for a few months spent living in Georgia. And just as there is a default setting that resides in many East and West Coast people that sees the Midwest as a hopelessly boring and tragic stretch of flat land filled with farmer types (and other stereotypes), I grew up with a default setting that finds the West Coast to be vapid and prone to food fads and the East Coast to be horribly biased w/r/t sports and prone to an unfounded social elitism (and other stereotypes). Please do not misunderstand me: I have no problems with stereotypes being assigned to me and the region that I live in so long as it is a two-way street and I am allowed assign stereotypes to other regions. Regional stereotypes are a given in any country. As unsexy as it is I rather like the flat land, and corn and soy fields, and farm houses that define where I live. If anything it makes me appreciate, among other things, the river and the corncob-shaped towers and art museum lions and Burnham-built buildings of Chicago all the more—all of the things that stand out in bas relief in my wonderful state.
But even with my default Midwestern attitude towards the East and West Coasts in general (and L.A and NYC in particular), I would be lying if I said that the romanticism and nostalgia of either city has never taken root in my mind. There is something about the idea of living in L.A. or NYC in the ’50′s and ’60′s that seems mesmerizing. The New York apartment with dark furniture, a scene right out of an Edward Hopper painting (minus the loneliness of the people inside, of course); an L.A. house with Old Hollywood interior design sensibilities and the airy openness of oversized windows. Within the context of a nostalgic daydream it all seems so intoxicating, not in a “we should try to bring back the America of the ’50′s and ’60′s” kind of way but strictly in a purely nostalgic way complete with all of the requisite clichés.[1]
Which leads me back to “Take Five,” a jazz song written by musicians in California that rivals most of the best jazz that ever came out of Harlem. This song evokes for me images of NYC dinner parties and book parties from the ’50′s and ’60′s; I can picture this song playing at an apartment while John Updike and Hugh Hefner are talking to a JFK adviser. I can picture this playing in the background at a producer’s house in Hollywood, while aspiring starlets (and the producers who are winking at them) try to casually mingle with everyone while their wide eyes betray the mellowness they are trying to evoke.
Great art—timeless art—is also a leveler of class. “Take Five,” even though its sound has a built-in marketing mechanism that allows it to be assimilated to words like refinement and wealth, actually has a blue collar soul. For every urbane dinner party scenario I imagine when listening to it I also picture this song being played on a turntable from Montgomery Ward in working class living rooms across America. Desmond’s alto sax is refinement par excellence; Dodge’s drum solo is blue collar personified, the motive power behind the refinement.
“Take Five” is one of the most significant and influential songs in American music history, regardless of where you grew up or what your nostalgia is tethered to.
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[1] I feel as though I have to make this distinction clear in the event that someone comes to the conclusion that my nostalgia is inherently naive, that my nostalgia is rooted in the same conservative ideals that deserve to be rightfully mocked. I was aware that the ’50′s and ’60′s weren’t good to women and minorities long before Mad Men premiered.
“I bet there’s rich folk eatin’ in a fancy dining car
They’re prob’ly drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ big cigars
But I know I had it comin’, I know I can’t be free
But those people keep a-movin’, and that’s what tortures me”
The total area of the United States is 3,794,101 square miles and almost every square mile of it has a history rooted in lawlessness and a freedom that would best be described as “free as in beer,” not “free as in free.” British convicts were sent here. One of the first things that white people did here was attack the Indians. Black people were enslaved. We went to war with Britain because we did not want to pay any taxes. We have always been a democracy, but we were also okay with class systems early on.
We are a country of pioneers eternally looking for something new, and when the West called us we blazed trails in droves. The settling of the American West—that wide open and lawless frontier of the 1800′s—might do a better job of describing the identity of the United States than its own Constitution or the Revolutionary or Civil War.
In my thirty two years of living on this earth I have been told that we are a country of gun-loving people. John Wayne, Sam Peckinpah, Dirty Harry, and all that jazz. Guns, our social narrative goes, are as American as baseball, apple pie, Wall Street, and a bald eagle. While I cannot refute our overall infatuation with guns, I will say that I think our admiration for them is mostly transparent. We think they’re cool, we think the idea of the Wild West is cool, but realistically no one wants to live in a society in which guns are constantly drawn and shootouts occurring on the street or in abandoned warehouses are commonplace. We like to watch Dirty Harry beat down punks, and we’d like to sound and look like him but we don’t want to be the one in charge of beatdowns and discharging lethal justice.
I mention all of this because “Folsom Prison Blues” is rooted in things that make up the American fabric (and mythology): the West, guns, class systems, justice, and repentance. The lyrics quoted above capture all of these things perfectly. The narrator “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” and now he is haunted by the fact that all of those people inside the cars of the nearby train are moving on with their lives and he never will. And to help him deal with it all he envisions them all as being rich; people who could never understand the man’s motives and how he arrived into this world.
Musically, “Folsom Prison Blues” is a tour de force. The stand-up bass provides the anchoring, the drums have a sort of train mimicry going on with its time measurements, and Johnny Cash’s simple yet powerful guitar picking during the breaks are nothing short of attention-grabbing.
Visually, Johnny Cash embodies that particular type of recklessness that America worships to some degree: a recklessness that lies at the midpoint between charming and severe. Cash always wore black—his nickname being “The Man In Black”; he embraced performing at prisons; he looked like a guy who could be a corrupt sheriff of some Texas border town; he was unbelievably blunt in interviews; he took copious amounts of drugs in his youth. He was Outlaw personified.
Now, when it comes to the Pantheon Johnny Cash automatically gets his own space. But which song best defines him? Obviously, anyone could make a case for “Ring Of Fire” or “I Walk The Line” or his cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt” as being the song that represents him the best.[1] My reasoning for selecting “Folsom Prison Blues” lies with the lyrics above. Those lyrics could have been words taken from a story by Twain, Melville, Whitman, Faulkner, or Cather. They are thoroughly American, right down to our desire to always want the villain to apologize so that he can begin his journey to tragic hero.
Johnny Cash was 23 when he recorded “Folsom Prison Blues.” It was the second single he ever released and it was his first hit. Throughout his career, this song was his signature to end his live shows. The combination of prison and train elements in the lyrics of this song would go on to define his career both musically and in terms of image.
Artists like Elvis and Bob Dylan and James Brown: those are people we wish we could be; Johnny Cash is who we are. And if you need any proof just look at the picture of him above and try to think of any other picture of a rock star that better encapsulates America.
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[1] As much as I love his version of “Hurt,” and as much as I get chills every time I watch the video for it, I couldn’t realistically select a song he did during the 2000′s when so much of his legacy and image is tied to his music produced in the ’50′s.
The history of modern music has its fair share of giants—men and women who redefined the power of music, pushed the envelope, or became the first to modify established theories of what constitutes a proper single or an album. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, John Lennon, and Bo Diddley are just a handful of examples. In my mind, one of the most overlooked giants of modern music is Carl Perkins.
Perkins grew up dirt poor in Tiptonville, Tennessee but, luckily for us, he had access to listen to the broadcasts of Roy Acuff and The Grand Ole Opry. He wound up making his own guitar as a kid and he eventually wrote and produced one of the most iconic American songs ever made, “Blue Suede Shoes.” Most people know Carl Perkins as the writer of “Blue Suede Shoes” and as one of the reasons why (Sun Records founder and producer) Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1955.[1] Elvis would eventually record his own version of “Shoes” but in my opinion Perkins’ version is head and shoulders above everyone else’s version; it thoroughly murders Presley’s cover.
I believe “Blue Suede Shoes” is an indescribably important and fantastic song but to me Perkins’ masterpiece is “Dixie Fried,” a song so perfect and energetic that it is by itself ample reason as to why Carl Perkins was known as “The King of Rockabilly.” And it also is one of the greatest songs to be recorded in Memphis during the ’50′s in general.
Above everything else, for art to really matter—for its audience to care at all about it—it must always be entertaining. Always. Whether you are someone who enjoys hip hop, death metal, ethereal soundscapes, classical music, or plain old pop, the songs that you love had to reach you at some basic level when you first listened to it. You have to be entertained by them. “Dixie Fried” is entertainment par excellence. It is two minutes and twenty seven seconds of rockabilly perfection.
Is this song dated? Sure. Will you like this song if you do not listen to (or like) old country or rockabilly? Probably not. But if it connects with you on any level at all, you will probably be hooked on it. Musically and lyrically, “Dixie Fried” is all about elasticity—the desire and the ability of Carl Perkins to bend and twist and expand the limits of rockabilly in under two and a half minutes.
“Dixie Fried” starts out with a guitar intro before shifting into a rhythm anchored by a da-da-da-dum piano sprinkling and a solid and steady drum beat. Perkins’ vocals range from standard fare rockabilly to local slang and accent to wild vocalizations that almost rise to the level of over the top (but it never reaches it). Just listen to the first set of lyrics—they look like:
“Well, on the outskirts of town, there’s a little night spot
Dan dropped in about five o’clock
Pulled off his coat, said ‘The night is short’
He reached in his pocket and he flashed a quart”
But Perkins sings them with a mastery that bleeds and feels like (and encompasses) ’50′s Memphis. Listen to how he strings along the “well” and coolly melts in to the rest of the lyric. Or how “quart” is sung like “KWAUGHT.” Listen to how he effortlessly breaks out rockabilly solos on his guitar with an energy that can practically project the image for you of kids dancing around a jukebox with unabashed youthfulness.
History dictates that Sam Phillips made the wrong deal. His decision to sell Elvis’s contract is the music equivalent of the Red Sox trading Babe Ruth, or the Cubs trading Lou Brock. But when you hear “Dixie Fried”[2] and you allow yourself to let it live inside of you, you can’t really blame Phillips for taking that chance.
This is one of the ten greatest songs ever made.
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[1] First and foremost, Phillips sold Elvis’s contract to alleviate some financial stress that the studio was going through. But he also used some of that money to better promote Perkins after his first singles were cut.
[2] Or the original “Blue Suede Shoes,” or “Matchbox”
To people who never grew up in the ’50′s (or even came close to it) that decade seems like it could be best summarized by: sock hops, going steady, music that will make you sing into your hairbrush, racism, the birth of Suburbia, and an unreasonable amount of obedience and domesticity being expected out of women. It was a time that was largely irony-free. As a result of this, the film, television, and music of that decade were mostly cheery and smelled and tasted like bubble gum. If you wanted to see or hear art that went against the sign of its time the ’50′s will almost always let you down in terms of mainstream art.
Enter Sonny Burgess.
To be sure, Burgess was not a huge game-changer; he was not an equivalent of Elvis, or a precursor to Dylan or Lennon or anything like that. What he did was produce some of the most raucous and energetic rockabilly and boogie woogie music of the ’50′s (i.e.–the nascent years of Rock ‘N’ Roll). Now I know what you’re thinking: “energetic rockabilly music” sounds about as cool as a sock hop, or hanging out with Betty Sue at the diner hoping that the star high school QB will come over and give you his jacket.
Many of you probably do not know who Sonny Burgess is (he’s the guy with the guitar wearing the dark suit in the picture above). Many of you probably have never heard the song “We Wanna Boogie” either. This song, to my knowledge, has never made an appearance on any noteworthy soundtrack or has ever been used in a popular ad campaign. Nonetheless, it is a song that should be properly introduced, as it is not only one of the best songs to have been produced in the Sun Records studio but it also contains one of the best guitar solos of the ’50′s (and could possibly even crack the top 50 of Most Underrated Guitar Solos of All Time list).
If you are reading this you are most likely a person who has grown up believing two things: 1) that Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, or Eric Clapton are the archetype images of what a lead guitarist should look (and sound) like, and 2) that the rock music of the ’50′s is hopelessly uncool and has aged poorly. “We Wanna Boogie” not only still holds up well (all things considered) but it also so raw and so raucous (for the time) that one can almost see why some parents were afraid of rock and the social changes it was bringing about.
“We Wanna Boogie” starts off innocently enough as a straight-up boogie woogie track with an emphasis on the piano and a horn, all while Burgess’s vocals sound like a guy trying to sing while facially imitating Groucho Marx.
And then it happens.
At the 1:25 mark, a guitar solo breaks out and for the next 25 seconds you hear a slew of screams and yells in the background to accompany it. The solo itself is surprisingly full-bodied and jagged, and not tinny and careful like many other “solos” of this era. If you were to put yourself in the mindset of someone hearing this song for the first time in 1956 this could have been as incendiary as Elvis’ appearance on the The Ed Sullivan Show that same year. Rock has always been founded on movement and rhythm and guitars and “We Wanna Boogie” never deprives the listener of these three things.
This song may sound really dated to some: the vocals might be too much of an obstacle, the horns an outdated relic, and maybe the overall song is too boring. And that’s fine. But inside that guitar solo (and even the escalating drums towards the end of the song) you will find some great rock roots amongst the heavy rockabilly and boogie influences.
By the time “We Wanna Boogie” was released in 1956 Sun Records had already seen Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis walk through its doors and cut singles and achieve huge success. And while you may have never heard of Sonny Burgess or this song, it is pretty telling that on a reissued best of rockabilly CD Sun put this song as the first track to start things off.
This is one of the best songs from when Sun Records was at the height of their Zeitgeist that most people have probably never heard.
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For the most part, before Jerry Lee Lewis arrived, the piano was something that could provide an energetic texture to a piece of music but it typically was not used as something that was so propulsive as to possibly negate the presence of a bass drum. Lewis was initially billed as “Jerry Lee Lewis And His Pumping Piano” by Sun Records, which of course sounds ridiculous and kind of perverted, even nowadays. But it does cut right to it: the way that Lewis played piano—especially within the rockabilly genre—was kind of groundbreaking and deserving of its own moniker. He did not merely play the piano, he enthusiastically and gleefully took it to its limits. Do an image search for Jerry Lee Lewis and seemingly every fifth or sixth picture shows him standing up playing his piano while his top-heavy, curly hair is disheveled at odd angles, looking like a man who could possibly do to the piano what Pete Townshend did to the guitar after a live performance.
There was something about Jerry Lee Lewis that exuded recklessness and a raw, wild-at-heart energy that separated him from almost every other popular musician of that time. Little Richard was energetic, to be sure, at the helm of his piano but his presence seemed more like a controlled animation—almost like a precursor to Prince. Lewis, on the other hand, was like an amalgamation of an old-time saloon piano player, a punk, and a hyperactive child—almost like a precursor to John Lydon (but with a religious background, and minus the asshole bravado).
It all seems so sanitized and dated now, but Lewis was kind of a groundbreaking artist in terms of chipping away at our society’s taboos. He was wildly sexual in terms of the perceptions of people living in the late ’50′s.[1] Again, it seems so benign now, but a song like Lewis’ cover of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” probably raised a lot of eyebrows when it was released. It probably raised a lot of eyebrows that a song with that title became the #1 song on the R&B and country charts. Sun Records founder Sam Philips even thought it would be too risky to release on the radio.
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” is a classic example of the conundrum involving how to separate the artist from the art. As a person, Lewis made some questionable decisions in his life and it ultimately cost him his career. As a musician who produced songs, Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the most important figures in American music. He completely changed the rules of the rockabilly genre, and he added an energy to country music that no one had really ever thought to add. But, again, as a person, what he did was pretty despicable: he had sex with a child.[2]
As for his music, you could probably flip a coin between “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls Of Fire” as to which song is more deserving of entrance in to the Pantheon. I am going with the former because I think that “Great Balls Of Fire” is a little too theatrical, a little too over-the-top. “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” on the other hand, has a great, fluid beginning and the idea to slow the song down so that it can end with a flourish is a great touch.
At the end of the day is it fair that Jerry Lee Lewis is essentially defined by a couple of songs and that he married his second cousin who was 13 years old? Probably, yes. Is the rhythm and the music and the genius of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” enough to overshadow Lewis’ personal life choices? Maybe not in the overall scheme of things. But as far as a music Pantheon goes, it is impossible to leave him out.
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[1] Actually, the part about marrying a 13 year-old second cousin is still pretty taboo.
[2] Please don’t misinterpret the previous sentence as evidence that I am trying to be a judge of all morality and character. It’s just that it needs to be pointed out, like what Roman Polanski did needs to be pointed out whenever a discussion about him arises (even though the two situations have completely different circumstances).
Ray Charles was pretty well known before he released “What’d I Say” but the ultra-cool Wurlitzer intro and the dancing cymbals on this track catapulted Charles into a Musical Genius category.[1] The beginning of “What’d I Say” is quite possibly the coolest electric piano-driven intro of all time.[2]
Everything about this song is in some way the definition of cool.
You have the Wurlitzer wizardry, which ranges from James Bond cool to a soulful, jazz-like quality—both of which have a sensuality that acts like an auditory form of foreplay. The horn section that adds to the overall movement and smoothness of the song; a chorus of warm and cool, like a room with deep colors that coexist perfectly with silver accents. Those dancing cymbals, which can make one think of a night life of any major city during the Prohibition era or Harlem during the ’40′s and ’50′s. The back-and-forth between Charles and the Raelettes—the anything-goes and looseness of it that only someone like Ray Charles could do and have it be energetic and make sense within the compositional whole. And, finally, the lyrics themselves and how they are sung: so unmistakably sexual and cool and soulful. “I’m not one to interpret my own songs, but if you can’t figure out ‘What’d I Say’, then something’s wrong,” Charles would later say about the song.
“What’d I Say” was groundbreaking for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that a blind black man produced a song that most of white America unequivocally loved. “What’d I Say” also essentially created the soul genre in mainstream music. Its fusion of gospel elements broke ground for numerous other black artists to reach the top of the charts in the following decades. The interplay between Charles and the Raelettes was the tipping point for many artists to incorporate a looseness and showmanship and energy to their live shows and studio recordings. Simply put, if you were to put together a playlist of twenty songs that define America for someone who knew nothing about American music you would have to include “What’d I Say” on that list.
This song—a hair over five minutes long—provides a glimpse of how we Americans are always in a state of trying to self-correct and reconcile our public and private differences. In 1959, our society was wary of publicly embracing black people and sex. But all that went out the window (albeit momentarily, at the time) when Ray Charles released this song. Music likes this temporarily breaks down walls that people build up in their minds. It is what the musicians of the ’60′s were trying to prove to anyone who would listen: that music could change the world.
And some of them got their inspiration from Ray Charles, whose opening riffs on an electronic piano changed quite a lot, all things considered.
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[1] Note: this post is about “What’d I Say (Parts 1 & 2).” The original version of “What’d I Say” is the normal version that everyone is accustomed to. “What’d I Say, Pt. 2″ was a B-side to the original and includes the back-and-forth between Charles and his singers and musicians. Rather than reference them separately, I am just going to say that for purposes of this post “What’d I Say” includes both songs. (Also, I think that “Pt. 2″ adds a nice dimension to the overall song and that the full five minute track should be interred into the Pantheon, not just the single, “Pt.1.”)
[2] “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s is a close second.
Originally called “Oddball”[1] during its first live performances, “Rumble” is a song that is so important within the context of rock n’ roll that it may very well be the reason for the deification of the electric guitar. Note: I am not saying that this song is more important than Les Paul. Les Paul gave the world the first real electric guitar, and he was an amazing guitar player. But Link Wray‘s “Rumble” was a phenomenon that installed into hundreds of thousands of kids the ubiquitous notion that an electric guitar was a powerful source of Cool, Sex, and Rebellion.
Imagine that you are living in America in April of 1958. Try to picture yourself living in a world with The Beaver or Donna Reed (or whoever); picture yourself living in a world with no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no Motown. Try to picture a world with essentially no experimentation of the electric guitar—no distortion, no feedback. Now, scroll down to the bottom of this post and listen to “Rumble” and then scroll back up here when you are finished.
…
The power of this song and the originality of this song is nearly impossible to convey. This track, not even two and a half minutes long, encompasses everything that is raw and sexual about an electric guitar. The sexuality of rock before “Rumble” resided mostly in image: Elvis’ look and hip-shaking movements is the gold standard of what we typically think of, but in general the look of a band or an artist (think: anyone from Little Richard to Johnny Cash) typically[2] superseded a lot of the music that was being made early on. And, yes, you could make the argument that Wray’s image helped him too (he looked like a cool kid at the time with a propensity to wear black leather) but, just as no one had ever heard a white kid perform like Elvis, no one had ever heard a guitar played like Link did on this track—so twangy and so distorted towards the end that it feels like it is being nebulously radiated from your speakers.
In the documentary It Might Get Loud Jimmy Page listens to “Rumble” in one of his rooms and makes these sweeping arm movements on his air guitar (while sporting a beaming smile, no less) in tandem with the sound of Link Wray’s real chords emanating from the very expensive speakers in the room. It is by far one of the best scenes of the documentary, it not only humanizes Page[3] but it also deifies “Rumble.” Watching Page react reverently to the song while it plays, you realize the impact that this song had on an army of kids who were suddenly seized by the idea of playing the electric guitar.
To be sure, there were songs before “Rumble” that foisted the idea of Cool onto kids and there were songs before “Rumble” that made groundbreaking use of the guitar. But Link Wray kicked everything up another notch. “Rumble” was a rockabilly guitar instrumental that became a new school inspiration for countless rock, blues, and country artists.
This song proved that, even at a slow and deliberate pace, the electric guitar is not merely an instrument but a force of nature and a living object that can force us to view the world differently.
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[1] And, thus, this is why the studio version of the song starts with someone saying, “Oddball, take two.”
[2] I stress the word typically here because in some cases (see: “Folsom Prison Blues”) the lyrics of the song are so profoundly great that they transcend any image of the artist in question.
[3] You see him as a wiry, elder statesman of rock enjoying a spontaneous moment rather than a twelve-string deity with black hair covering most of his face.
“A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis.” — Jackie Wilson
“Elvis was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.” — Little Richard
“Describe Elvis Presley? He was the greatest who ever was, is, or will ever be.” — Chuck Berry
To begin this site with someone other than Elvis Aaron Presley would be to undermine the whole concept of the idea in which a Pantheon would be created to display some of the greatest songs of all time. Rock music as we have known it for the last sixty years is tied almost exclusively to Elvis Presley.
There are Icons and then there is Elvis. He exists on his own plane.
Yes, before Elvis, you had plenty of black musicians creating and writing music that was more soulful and energetic than their white counterparts. But you also had that type of music (like the country in general at the time) being segregated into provincial quadrants. Elvis shattered those barriers. Between his look, the tonality of his singing, and the way that he made his body become an extension of his music when he performed live, Elvis Presley became a catalyst that allowed any kid in the U.S. (or England) to hear what this new dovetailing of country and blues music was all about. It allowed kids to have access to black music. It allowed kids to understand where artists like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley were coming from. Essentially, Elvis had a gigantic role in the reconstruction of post-WWII culture and society.
So, the question becomes: Which singular song best describes Elvis Presley–which song would I play for someone whose mind had become tabula rasa and would best explain the modern rock era?
There are certainly many songs to choose from, as Elvis had eighteen #1 singles. For me, though, I am very partial to “Jailhouse Rock” mostly because it is one of Presley’s most raw songs from a vocal standpoint. There is nary a whiff of the tonality in his voice that every Elvis impersonator uses too often. Instead, you are mostly treated to Elvis’s raw, unalloyed voice that is mostly yelling the lyrics.
On top of that, the music of “Jailhouse Rock” is both methodical and energetic. From the bum-bum simplicity of the drums during the intro and breaks to the fully-formed melody that kicks in in earnest with the help of a piano, this song shows Presley at his most musical and most potent. Some people–and justifiably so–may lean towards the “Don’t Be Cruel” or “Heartbreak Hotel” Elvis, and you certainly cannot go wrong with those songs (or any of the other classics performed by Mr. Presley), but for my money “Jailhouse Rock” provides such an excellent glimpse of Elvis’s charisma, power, and allure.
Whether or not you like Elvis Presley, one cannot deny the cultural significance of his life. There will never be another performer that will ever create the type of sensation that Elvis did. To try and pick one song and say “This sums up Elvis Presley” is an almost impossible task. But then again trying to pick one song that sums up The Beatles or The Rolling Stones has its inherent quandaries too but for the purposes of this site that is exactly what I will attempt to do: shine a light on those songs which either forever changed the music world, or that are simply so beautiful and so perfect that they deserve to have their own spot in the hypothetical Pantheon that I will build for you one song at a time.
You may not like “Jailhouse Rock” but, to me, it is certainly deserving of the first spot in my own Pantheon’s entrance.
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