Elvis Presley Died for Your Sins (the Ones You Were Too Gutless to Commit)

Every time they catch a serial killer, it seems, they talk to the minister of the church where the guy taught Sunday school and he describes how good this guy was with the children and how he was a faithful deacon and came to the 9 o’clock service every Sunday and despite the 12 bodies found buried in the guy’s basement, the minister can’t quite bring himself to judge, lest he be judged himself. His neighbors describe a nice, quiet fellow who never threw loud parties, the landlady says he paid his rent like clockwork, the girl at the Starbuck’s drive-through says he always smiled and left a tip.

Indeed, I half expect to wake up myself one morning, sniff a strange aroma rising up from under the kitchen sink, and discover that I’ve got five bodies of my own buried in the crawl space. This is the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde syndrome, a Victorian neurosis that has remarkable staying power. Like Dr. Jekyll we fear what unspeakable damage our interior Mr. Hydes may have committed when he slipped last night out of our control; like Dorian Gray we feel we must keep the true picture of our diseased inner selves hidden from public view.

When my income tax refund came in the mail several years ago, I knew what it was right away, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I knew it was large, dangerously large. I had withheld more than I needed to, worried that I would fall into arrears as I had the year before. I’d adjusted the withholding in the government’s favor, and increased my payments to my therapist in case the insurance company failed to cover their share of the bills. I didn’t want my accounts to slip over the line.

But now the money had come back to me and I could spend it on anything I wanted. I had my eye on a box set put out by Rhino Records called Loud, Fast, and Out of Control. It has all the big bad hits from the ‘50s, no doo-wop, no “Peggy Sue” or “All I’ve Got to Do Is Dream” or “Love Me Tender,” but the scary, disturbing, nasty songs that had undermined decent society and everything this country stood for.

It had songs with words like “Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball” and “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, I’m just 22 and I don’t mind dying” and “You wear that dress, the sun comes shining through, I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you” and “Come into this house, woman, and stop that yakkety-yak, don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a baseball bat” and “You can talk about me, say that I'm mean, but I'll blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.”

I had an unsettling urge to listen to this stuff, a full four-CD collection of it, and only its $70 price tag had held me off this long.

Now I had the money and I bought it. It turned out the songs I hadn’t heard of were scarier than the songs I had. There were people like the Rock-A-Teens (“Woo-Hoo”), Dale Vaughn (“How Can You Be Mean to Me”), Janis Martin (“My Boy Elvis”), Billy Riley (“My gal is red hot,” he sings, “your gal ain’t doodly-squat”), Jimmy Dee and the Offbeats (“Henrietta”), Don and Dewey (“Koko Joe”), Big T Tyler (“King Kong”), and the Phantom (“Love Me,” at once one of the weirdest, most primitive, and ominous things I’ve ever heard). God know what people thought of these songs when they were released in the late ‘50s, because some of them bother me today.

What kind of people would make music like this? What is the human soul capable of? I had seen only one star of that era in person, Bo Diddley, at a street fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1984. A memorable event, if not exactly what you’d call pleasant. It wasn’t like he was playing Yankee Stadium, mind you, he was on the back of a flat bed truck, there were about 50 people standing around, it was 25 years at least since his last hit, but in spite of all that he radiated a menacing arrogance that went way beyond self-possession. As far as he was concerned he possessed himself, his band, the truck, the audience, the city of Greensboro, and all of North Carolina up to the Virginia line. It occurred to me that this was the kind of attitude it took to be who he was and do what he did, against all odds and the collected weight of proper society, in 1955.

The spectacularly vivid liner notes of the CD set (the notes say of Wanda Jackson, “while other women singers were simpering about where the boys are, Wanda always sang as if they were in her hotel room”) describe the lives these people led. Two of Jerry Lee Lewis’s wives died under questionable circumstances, perhaps by his hand. Larry Williams (“Bonie Maronie” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”) was a pimp and a drug dealer. Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash in England in 1960, Johnny Kidd (“Shakin’ All Over”) in a car crash in 1966, Little Willie John (“I’m Shakin’”) died in jail in 1968.

Vince Taylor (“Brand New Cadillac”) died of venereal disease in Switzerland in 1991. Kid Thomas (“Rockin’ This Joint Tonight”) moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he ran over a child in 1970 while working a day job mowing lawns in Beverly Hills. He was tried and freed, but when he walked out of the courthouse the dead boy’s father was waiting for him and gunned him down. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959. Elvis Presley burst his intestines straining on the toilet and died in Graceland in 1977. He was 42.

Is it any wonder that they could have had second thoughts, that Little Richard dropped his career a couple of times to enter the ministry (there’s a church I’d join), that Wanda Jackson and Conway Twitty abandoned rock ‘n’ roll altogether and retreated to country and western music? They were living the lives we still both fear and hope we might slide into ourselves.

They were our Mr. Hydes, and they put a genuine taste of danger and horror into their songs, where I, 58 years old, balding, nearsighted, worried about paying for my retirement but dancing past my bedtime with my cats, can access it any night I want.