{"id":91,"date":"2018-11-03T21:12:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T21:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tahunt.com\/ticketstubs\/?page_id=91"},"modified":"2018-12-11T17:43:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T17:43:01","slug":"elvis-presley-drugstore-malteds","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/ticketstubs\/home\/elvis-presley-drugstore-malteds\/","title":{"rendered":"Elvis Presley: “Drugstore Malteds”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Available<\/a><\/h3>\n

“Drugstore Malteds”<\/a>\u00a0 (text of the poem from\u00a0Sequestrum: Literature & Art)<\/em><\/h3>\n

\"\"July 19, 1954 Sun Records released Elvis Presley\u2019s first single: a countrified take on Big Boy Crudup\u2019s \u201cThat\u2019s All Right\u201d as the A-side, and his up tempo bluesing of Bill Monroe\u2019s \u201cBlue Moon of Kentucky\u201d as the B-side. Played on local Memphis radio stations, they lit up the request lines like a July 4 fireworks show, Sam Phillips of Sun had a hit for his label, and Elvis Presley was a star.\u00a0 In most accounts, this is THE BIG BANG that propels the rapidly expanding universe known for a time as Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll and later more simply as Rock.\u00a0\u00a0 And in most accounts, Presley’s early Sun singles with their decisive fusion of Black and White musical styles into this new idiom, figure as the core his significance: the molotov cocktail that blew the barn doors off the barn dance dance hall; the sound that swiveled a thousand hips; the beat that set a generation of Baby Booming lads and lasses to sock hopping and soda shop jukeboxing.<\/p>\n

But July 1954, Kitty Kallen\u2019s pop ballad \u201cLittle Things Mean a Lot\u201d is topping the charts, and the big stars nationally are figures like Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher.\u00a0 And if Presley was tearing up the Louisiana Hayride, he was still a regional figure viewed as a minor \u201ccountry and western\u201d act, with the circulation of his Sun singles limited mostly to the southeast.\u00a0 July 1954 Presley was a local sensation, not a national star.\u00a0 It was the slightly later recordings, after he’d left Sun Records and signed with RCA Victor in 1956, that paved the way for his appearances late that year on the Ed Sullivan show and made Elvis a national phenomenon.\u00a0 And this Elvis, the Elvis who was suddenly a national figure, didn\u2019t just rock, he also crooned, and to that the young ladies swooned.\u00a0 In the usual accounts, the synthesis of Blues and Country in the Sun recordings is given pride of place, and eventually that\u2019s what would matter most to the development of Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll, but in the first few years of his early RCA stardom, from the early 1956 singles like \u201cHeartbreak Hotel\u201d up to being drafted and inducted into the Army in 1958, what was also crucial to his impact was the way he blended the directness of Blues and Country with the lusher indirection of adult pop\u2014blending not just Blues and County but Blues, Country, and Pop.\u00a0 Step aside Ms. Kallen.<\/p>\n

When Gene Vincent, Capitol Records attempt to emulate RCA\u2019s success with Presley, sings \u201cBe-Bop-A-Lula,\u201d the lyrics make it clear that Ms. Lula is his \u201cbaby doll\u201d; Vincent\u2019s delivery of the lyrics suggest that he and his \u201cbaby doll\u201d aren\u2019t simply be-bopping to the juke box after school while their soda shop Sundaes wait back at their booth and their admiring teen friends dabble french fries into ketchup.\u00a0 Presley\u2019s Sun Records recording of \u201cBaby, Let\u2019s Play House\u201d (derived from Hard Rock Gunter\u2019s blues recording) is perhaps even more\"\" direct in its physicality,\u201d but by the time Vincent was releasing \u201cBe-Bop-A-Lula,\u201d the Elvis who had gone on to RCA was adding songs like \u201cDon\u2019t Be Cruel\u201d and \u201cLove Me Tender\u201d into his repertoire and stylistic mix\u2014songs in which the ultimate cipher term of pop music, love<\/em>, is not simply code for sexual energy, sexual desire, or even more simply sex but is also in part an emotional matter, a matter of relationships.\u00a0 That first evening on The Ed Sullivan Show (September 9, 1956), Presley\u2019s first two songs were \u201cLove Me Tender\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Be Cruel.\u201d\u00a0 In the second half of the show he rocked it up with his version of Little Richard\u2019s \u201cReady Teddy\u201d and his revisionary take on Big Mama Thornton\u2019s blues shout \u201cHound Dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

Country music and Blues and Rhythm & Blues were, in the early to mid-1950s full of songs that were rich in the figural.\u00a0 In \u201cBaby Let\u2019s Play House,\u201d suggests one aspect of coupling up that occurs primarily in one room of this figural house. \u00a0In this song or a country classic like \u201cIt Wasn\u2019t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,\u201d the figural expresses the actual (or the desire for the actual or the cost of actual).\u00a0 When Elvis begins blending the fantasy of Pop into his fusion of Blues and Country, he may, as various commentators have suggested, started down the path to Elvis the Las Vegas act, but there\u2019s another dynamic to this, at least in the first years of his RCA stardom.\u00a0 In the adult pop of Kitty Kallen (and Doris Day and Dean Martin and Perry Como and\u2026) the fantasy in the song offers a way to move beyond reality.\u00a0 It tends toward escapism, a three-minute respite from the real.\u00a0 In Presley\u2019s initial RCA work, fantasy evokes reality\u2014its dynamics, its limitations\u2014yet celebrates a possibility of breaking out of that reality.\u00a0 And in the tension between the two what\u2019s evoked is more than the fantasy, even if the terms of reality aren\u2019t admitted or engaged and can\u2019t, ultimately, be evaded.\u00a0 That, I\u2019d suggest, is the genius of \u201cJailhouse Rock,\u201d especially as it\u2019s staged within the movie Jailhouse Rock<\/em>, where it functions as a celebration of the sense of freedom that energy can offer, yet frames that as a dance scene within a jail.\u00a0 Great Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll?\u00a0 Yes, and part of its greatness is the implicit tension within it between the realism, the energy, of Rock and the fantasy of Pop.<\/p>\n