How Great Thou Art
A bit about America's only worthy King.
The vibes are a considerably rotten as I write on this Saturday morning. The governments of the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran are at war with one another, and ordinary people in the way. Israel is in the mix as well, and last I checked the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is rattling their saber too. (They have one right there on their flag, after all.) Nothing happening in geo-politics is good. The fact that you can say something like “Russia is too busy killing people in Ukraine to get involved” and mean it as a positive sentiment is, as James Donald says at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai, “madness.”
I am not one who believes in any sort of Hocus Pocus but last night I did awaken in the middle of the night with a feeling of unease, and had trouble getting back to bed. Later I discovered that this was about when the rockets started flying. Was I sensing something, as Spock did when the USS Intrepid was destroyed? Or when Obi-Wan Kenobi felt the “million of voices” cry out in terror when Alderaan exploded? Who knows?
The more likely answer is that it was gastric distress because Ann and I went to the movies earlier and, as befitting the film’s subject, we allowed ourselves the opportunity to gorge on snacks: buttered popcorn, peanut M&Ms, nacho-flavored Combos, and 7-Up. Once in a while it okay to do this sort of thing, but you may have to pay the price.
The film we saw was EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, Baz Luhrmann’s concert film that debuted last summer at the Cannes Film Festival. How it all came together is extraordinary — and you can read my friend Jason Bailey get into the nitty gritty of it for The New York Times. That the new movie deploys lost footage rescued from a salt mine in Bailey’s home state of Kansas is particularly flabbergasting.
I feel no need to “review” this movie, especially since my friend, one of the leading Elvis scholars of the day, Sheila O’Malley already did so for the Roger Ebert site. (She compares the Kansas salt mine to Sutton Hoo, which is kinda funny as I only learned about Sutton Hoo very recently via osmosis from Ann, who is quite obsessed with the British series Time Team.) But I did want to add to something Sheila wrote.
She praises EPiC as being “just” a concert film. Dayenu. There is no need, really, to explain or advocate for Elvis at this point. What’s more, she rightly points out that for his entire career, from before Ed Sullivan’s cameras shot him from the waist up, Elvis was an artist who was, as she puts it, litigated.
EPiC puts the best (and most high tech) spit polish on what Elvis was doing in the early 1970s and says “here it is, enjoy.” It really does feel that most every other documentary I see today is screaming at its audience: this is what I want you to believe. The blame lies with the ludicrous proliferation of documentary films and its delivery method: Netflix and the other streamers. Matt Damon’s recent interview with (and I shudder to give this guy any credit) Joe Rogan really did rip the mask off how that operation works. Damon and his chum Ben Affleck are among the more respected “creatives” in Hollywood and if even they are being expressly ordered to “reiterate the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching,” God only knows what they are telling a scrappy documentary team. (You can read the specific quotes here.)
So it’s kudos to Baz Luhrmann for just letting this footage be something of a readymade. (Though, of course, through editing, it is anything other than that, but compared to the streaming junk, it is.)
The most fun thing in the film is watching Elvis clown around with his fellow musicians. Anyone who has listened to a live Elvis performance knows he was a natural standup comedian. (Indeed, there exists a full album just of his ad libs and schtick, called Having Fun with Elvis on Stage released in 1974.) Elvis was reportedly obsessed with the movie Dr. Strangelove, forcing his Memphis mafia pals to sit through it dozens of times — one account online that may or may not be accurate says he once screened it five times in a row. (So don’t feel bad if you play “Teddy Bear” on a loop, that sort of behavior is King-approved.) He also is said to have done an impression of Peter Sellers as Strangelove. If Baz can go back to that salt mine and find footage of that I would be appreciative!
Elvis also loved Monty Python. During my first visit to Graceland, in the mid-1990s, we entered the famous T.V. room with the three sets placed side by side by side. The museum had them running shows “as they would have been” and I nearly hit the deck when I saw Terry Jones as “The Bishop.” Word is he watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail even more than Dr. Strangelove, and would use the expression “just a flesh wound” from time to time.
I bring up Elvis’s good humor because so much of it is on display in EPiC, especially when he’s bantering with his backup singers and also his drummer, Ronnie Tutt. (Once again, we turn to Sheila who writes “Ronnie Tutt’s drumming is as rabid as Animal from The Muppets.” Few would disagree.)
Ronnie Tutt, who died in 2021 at the age of 83, is someone you should know by name. You certainly know his music. In addition to playing with Elvis’s TCB Band for years and years, he recorded and toured with a diverse group of artists including The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Elvis Costello (on the King of America album, specifically), Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand (the Stony End album), Gram Parsons, the fourth Delaney & Bonnie and Friends album (with Duane Allman, King Curtis, Little Richard, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Bobby Whitlock, and more) and also Billy Joel. That’s him on the drums on “Piano Man.” You don’t really think about drums when you think about that song, but that’s why you bring in somebody good.
In EPiC you’ll see him holding it down like a madman, but he also just seems like a nice dude. He looks like the buddy on Home Improvement, actor Richard Karn, not that I’ve ever watched Home ImprovementI. Bearded, jolly, pleasant to be around. (For all I know he was a monster, but I’m just going off his aura.) The punchline is that there was another other major star her orbited while he was with Elvis: Jerry Garcia.
Indeed, Ronnie Tutt was the drummer in different iterations of the Grateful Dead front man’s side gig. You can hear him with The Legion of Mary (with keyboardist/singer Merl Saunders) and then with the Jerry Garcia Band for many years.
The close-minded individual thinks about Elvis and Jerry and says they are worlds apart. This is hogwash. This is letting marketing dictate the music. Yes, in 1972, the Vegas crowd and the post-Woodstock crowd would have sneered at one another. But Jerry Garcia was a musical omnivore, and while the Grateful Dead regularly explored “Space” with 30 minute psychedelic jams, the JGB was all about Americana and AM hits. The JGB played “Mystery Train” regularly, and few songs are more associated with Elvis than that.
Other than “Mystery Train” I can’t think of another song that they both performed. But they certainly came close. Some of the JGB’s finer numbers include “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You),” “Evangeline,” “I Second That Emotion,” “Midnight Moonlight,” and several others that would have fit in well with Elvis’s repertoire. Imagine if Elvis lived long enough to hear Bruce Cockburn’s “Waiting For a Miracle?” His version would have been different from Jerry’s (which is what perfection sounds like) but it would have been good in other ways.
In EPiC you hear a tiny snippet of Elvis rehearsing Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” (popularized by The Band), which the JGB did perform several times. (The Dead covered Dylan more than any other songwriter, but never that tune, though Bob Weir did sing in a few times after Jerry’s passing.) Jerry and Elvis were also connected by the late Donna Jean Godchaux, the Muscle Shoals singer who sang backup on Elvis songs like “In The Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds” and who was an official member of the Grateful Dead for several years. She owns the song “Playin’ In The Band,” as all Deadheads agree without contention. (Note: I just said something that many people disagree with, but they are wrong.)
The bigger point, though, is that Elvis and Jerry both had a massive hold over their audiences in ways we seldom see. You can watch women freak out in EPiC and can see (mostly) dudes do the same in any Dead video. These were men with great power but were also incredible goofballs. Jerry Garcia was no guru. He liked talking about Frankenstein movies and playing old time music on his banjo. The JGB and his other side projects, especially the ones with David Grisman,, were what kept him sane while the weight of “The Sixties” lay on his shoulders from his day job.
Tutt gave some interviews over the years and the Elvis/Jerry thing tended to come up. He told Rolling Stone “I’d always laugh because one night I’d be in Vegas playing with rhinestone two-piece outfits and the next night I’d be out with Garcia with the tie-dye and a pair of jeans. Socially speaking it was really different.”
It was. But the music wasn’t so very different.
Let’s close it out with two tracks that give Ronnie Tutt some space.
From the 1972 Madison Square Garden shows, here’s Elvis doing “Polk Salad Annie.” You’ve got the horns, you’ve got the backup singers, you’ve got the screaming fans, and you have Ronnie Tutt hammering away at the speed of sound. Add this to your morning coffee.
And from two years later, at a gig in Portland, Oregon, here’s the JGB/Legion of Mary doing a funky chicken style 12+ minute “Mystery Train.” Try keeping a smile off your face during this one.