Prelude

El is one of the most important American gods and the personification of living music.
He is a god that from the sweat of the impotent youth is incarnate and self empowered.
According to another myth he is the son of the pearl goddess Gladis and Vernos the god of darkness.
Southerners believe that El fires up his Stutz each night and cruises through the veins of the black rhythm bringing anguish.
Herewith he is accompanied by the botox goddess Prisis and her daughter Lisis and each day the monster Driesos attempts to hinder his progress.
In the evening El is swallowed by his mother Nickoupopolas and in the morning reborn.
El is also King as god and since the second dynasty noted artists have called themselves ‘sons of El’.
In Memphis both Sun and Graceland, home of the oracles, are worshiped as manifestations of the music god.
In this city the slaves to music build temples for El.
From these temples little remains.
The underworld resounded with the clattering of gold, Drowned in greed and the worship of false gods.

Birth

The birds flew in syrupy optimism toward the shadow.
The grey and balding citizens from the cursed outer neighborhoods sat in fear chasing away the heat with youthful memories.
The youth, to escape the suffocating heat, fell en mass to the old river running just outside the imaginary city walls.
The vegetation sipped thankfully at the humidity, but still wilted slowly under the shimmering yellow globe behind the clear blue blanket of the sky.
But none of this affected the city. In fact, as usual there was a melodious cheerfulness.
Even the chronic love-sickness and the sorrow of their origin couldn’t take away the happiness in the faces of the black city dwellers.
‘Whites Only’ was written on a sign at the service station, together with the price of fuel.
In the near distance a canvased backed lorry bounced modestly on.
The canvas siding of the truck was adorned with the logo of a purveyor of all things electrical.
A cloud of grey consumed the sign in a moment of dusty mist.
A pimpled young man in a striking pink shirt and a provocative dark brown quiff played somewhat nervously with the knobs on the radio in the dashboard of the truck.
Through the crackle racially bound tones built to a roar.
From wooden white gospel to black sung blues wrapped in three meager chords.
At this point our young driver pulled his hand away.
Next to him lay a crumpled over-shirt, the breast pocket embroidered with the same logo as on the canvas siding.
Under the shirt lay a guitar proudly boasting the scars of a long and loving past.
The truck ceases it’s toeing & frowning.
The androgynous mettled surface gave way to that sign of a city in the making: asphalt.
The truck then comes to a standstill just past an intersection, parking half on the road half on the pavement.
The driver steps out carrying the guitar nonchalantly by the neck.
He crosses the street without looking for the traffic, which strangely enough appears to vanish as he walks.

An attractive mature woman with high hair, big green eyes and vague laughter lines sat at a desk, diagonally opposite the door facing the street decorated with a half open venetian blind.
She makes brief notes whilst speaking in a friendly singing tone into the telephone.
Opposite the desk stood some folding wooden chairs.
The back wall of the reception area as is the norm with record labels was bedecked with obligatory photos of serious black musicians taken in the recording booth.
The door swung open.
The venetian danced against the glass in the door.
The young man with the pink shirt, quiff, and well loved guitar walks directly to the lady behind the desk.
She completes her telephone conversation cordially.
‘Good afternoon young man, how can I help?’, she asks in a charming tone.
‘I want to record a song’, the young man quickly answered without actually listening to the question.
‘Fortunately we can do that sort of thing here otherwise your request would have appeared misplaced.’, said the woman teasingly.
The young man shook nervously and turned his face observing uninterestedly the photos of the musicians behind the desk.
The receptionist in the meantime arose and tapped the young man on his shoulder.
He follows her to the glass door of a small booth, fitted out as the sober quarters of a monk, but then with a microphone in place of a crucifix.
The young woman went to open the door, but hesitated placing a melodramatic hand before her mouth.
‘How rude of me, I haven’t introduced myself’, she said extending her hand.
Our young truck driver blushed lightly. He shook the warm hand unconvincingly.
‘El- Elvis Presly ma’m, p pleased to m- m- make your acquaintance.’
The mature lady looked on Presley as if he were a some ginger stray with large eyes that she had just freed from the asylum and was stroking in the palm of her hand until it began to purr gratefully.
‘Marion Keisker, the pleasure is mine Mr Presley’ she replied teasingly but without condescension.
‘What kind of a singer are you actually?’ she inquired genuinely.
‘I sing everything’, Elvis replied with unexpected confidence, as if he were applying for another job on the bosses time.
‘With whom would I compare you then?’
‘…’
Elvis looked to the photos behind the desk and said: ‘I’m unlike anyone’.
Elvis conjured a smile, but it was soon replaced with a concerned look as he saw his truck parked outside.
He recognized the fact that he was actually still on the clock and had no time to waste. (No lunch hour, flat tire, flash of angina would fly with the boss were he caught.)
Elvis checked Marion, opened the glass door himself, went inside, sitting himself on the solitary stool, lifting the guitar onto his right thigh, held higher than his passive left thigh.
Marion turned the necessary knobs in order to activate the microphone.
‘You can start with singing when the red light above the door comes on’, Marion said routinely as she indicated toward the lamp, ‘But don’t sing too long now ya hear’.
‘They’re only small records.’
Marion gave a fleeting wink and closed the door.
There he sat, unsure of the future, aware of a lonely past.
Never was his world so literally represented than by those insulated walls, the silence in them and the threat of an early death as the father to popular music.
The ultimate manifestation is a carbon preparation, suspended in a frame,... the microphone.
Just like an obedient idiot savant whom dutifully stops dead in the middle of an intersection because the pedestrian signal has suddenly switched to red, Presley waited on the all important lamp.
His fingers are held in the position of the first chord.
Swallowing is out of the question, as he blinks away the stinging drops of salty sweat that slide between his eyelashes.
The recording lamp had seen many people who, for the price of eight dollars, could fill both sides of a greasy black disk with renditions of their own favorite songs.
If the lamp had consciousness it would surely have ended it all depressed at the constant barrage of pitiful self advertisement.
Everyone came to vent their long suppressed artistic aspirations under the guise of recording something for their mother.
Died of lung cancer, but back then nobody was aware of the danger connected with chain smoking, so the blame was laid at the feet of alcohol poisoning, or an overdose of painkillers.
The embarrassment of having the ambition of a professional singing career sat deep in the conscience of all sons, with or without slave ancestors.

Red light!

The Mortal

Evening shadows feed my heartache
As another empty day passed
Oh you should know how much I long for you,
My happiness

Every day I return
And I begin dreaming of your tender kiss
Always shall I think on the void
My happiness

It seems a million years ago
That we shared our dreams
But I shall hold you once again
Grief will cease to exist

Should the sky turn grey or blue
Every place on earth is good
As long as you are with me
My happiness.’

Showing no emotion for the sensitive lyrics Elvis prepared himself for the next number.
There is no time to lose.
Outside the recording booth, Marion listening to a country number on the radio situated on her desk, looks up to see if everything is ok.
The young singer concentrates his gaze toward the microphone.
Now and then closing his eyes as his left (right) upper lip curled.
‘I’m ready’, Elvis said as if he were expecting the next instruction from his boss.
Marion Keisker sitting filling in a form was startled.
She had not heard the boy come in.
She put her pen down and stood up.
‘If you have just a moment, Mr Priestly.’
‘Presley’, thought Elvis, but he did not bother to correct her.
She dissapeared behind a door.
Impatiently Elvis looked again toward the photos on the wall and turned his head toward the exit.
Now he became nervous.
His truck stamped the ground urgently wanting to chug on through that songful southern land.
Were his boss to find out that he had spent his work time singing love songs into a glorified tin can, and moreso spent an entire weeks salary on the event, he would not have fired him but instead laughed in his face and withheld his next two weeks salary.
The concern over his work was suddenly distracted by the arrival of four black prisoners, complete with chaperons and chains around their wrists and ankles.
The guards carried two guitars.
But they held them like dirty diapers.
They were obviously the property of the incarcerated.
The prisoners sat down, and one of them, a two meter tall negro with grey tightly curled hair, began to sing in a deep heavy voice.
‘Sometimes I feel as a motherless child’
Now the other three prisoners joined in: ‘A long way from home.’
All four repeated the last line in perfect harmony.
Elvis was not so much surprised by the beautiful harmony of the four detainees, but more by the guards apparent deafness or at least complete lack of emotion for the music.
Marion Keisker was back at her place behind her desk and saw the interest Presley showed in the quartet.
‘They are the pride of Sam’, said Marion as she wrote out a receipt for $8.25 for the making of the acetate, ‘Their last single is selling well in Memphis’.
They were struck by a lightening bolt from a fire breathing seraph....angelic voices, angelic voices.
Th- th- they record real records here in the studio?’ asked Elvis without removing his gaze from the four black men.
‘Certainly’, said Marion as she signed the receipt.
‘I was wondering if they would all fit in the booth together’, Elvis whispered.
‘Please, young man!’
Elvis took his own record and laid some notes and coins on the desk.
It is precise to the penny.
Marion sees that straight away and gives a friendly wink.
Elvis remained standing foolishly.
‘Can I help you further young Mr Presely?’
Marion looked to the four guarded men indicating that she had other work to get on with.
Elvis plucked up all his courage and, leaving his insecurity behind, took a piece of paper from his pocket and lifted a pen from behind the bureau.
With a few movements of his fingers he scribbled his name and address and gave it to Marion.
‘Presley. And should you....’ Elvis shocked by his own assertiveness finished his sentence: Should you need another singer.
The muse in his throat would have said enough.
‘Thanks’, he said softly and as a hurried businessman, left the premises.
A bone fide place of business, to be sure.
Marion gestured to one of the guards who was half listening.
He ordered the four prisoners to stand.
Marion played with the Elvis’s scribbled note as the prisoners approached the desk.
Ah why not, thought Marion and she added on the other side of the note: ‘Good ballad singer, a ‘keeper’.

The start of eternity

Sam Phillips scratches at his thick red beard.
There is strangely enough no grey hair to be found on the body of the 80 year old guru of colorless rhythm and blues.
He tries to bring his rocking chair into action, but his legs are no longer in a condition to achieve this.
Sam sits irreversibly alone on his veranda and he looks out over the peaceful green of his domain.
The heavy dampness of the air does no good for his heart.
There is nothing that does good for his heart.
He ponders more than ever about the beginning he began so long ago and asks himself if he will ever make the finishing line.
His musical birth place, the Sunstudio on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, is already for years paraded as a curiosity for tourists. Sam is too old to bother about the fact that people believe that the father of sun studios is already dead.
More so, Sam himself forgets that he is still alive.
He has never subscribed to his own legend.
The Presley saga.
Come on, as if the father of Albert Einstein envisaged an infinitely curving universe.
Sam is becoming more spiritual with the passing of relative time.
He has to, sobriety knows no time and especially not at 706 Union Avenue.
The old man becomes restless. He wishes no longer to stay on his veranda, he wishes no longer to look out on his own sorrowful dull green blades of grass.
Sam Phillips tries to remember something. His weak heart begins to pump faster, at least relatively seen.
He begins to panic.
‘Do I believe in god or not?’, Sam asked the heavens.
‘I must know quickly’, he said huffing but calm.
‘Poor boy, in a short while he will be all by himself.’
‘Without me he loses his rhythm. Without me he loses his spiritual guide, without me...’
Sam wants to stand, but collapses back into his comfortable rocking chair.
He is such a charming boy and he sang so willingly those sickly sweet ballads.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to make him stop singing....God, what’s the name of the song again.’
Suddenly Sam realizes that there is nobody there listening.
A salt less tear creeps slowly downward toward the corner of his mouth.
‘What’s his name again, of the young man?’