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.

Runaway, Del Shannon, 1961

What's with all these questions? The old songs are full of them: Why do fools fall in love? Why must I be a teenager in love? Will you still love me tomorrow?

Sometimes there's adolescent male bravado behind the questions. "Do you love me?" screams the Contours' lead Billy Gordon, "I can really move, do you love me, I'm in the groove." Dumped earlier by the girl, now Gordon is back, he tells her, "to let you know, I can really shake 'em down." That'll show her.

Bo Diddley in "Who Do You Love?" takes the psychotic approach—he wears a cobra snake for a necktie, his chimney is made out of human skulls, and when he growls, "Take it easy, Arlene, don't give me no lip and tell me, 'Who do you love?'" what's she to answer but "You, Bo, forever."

This is the brutally male side of teenage innocence, the I-don't-care-if-you-don't-want-me-I'm-yours-right-now approach to romance.

On the female side the questions are more pathetically poignant, but just as detached from reality. "Is it in his eyes?" Betty Everett asks in "The Shoop Shoop Song," "Is it in his sighs? Oh no, if you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss, that's where it is."

Sure it is. It makes you shiver to think that a generation this out to lunch had the atom bomb. The people in these songs lived in a different nation, the land of the clueless, and Del Shannon's "Runaway" was their national anthem.

Like much of the best rock 'n' roll, "Runaway" is nightmare music, rising out of dumb animal pain. I'm talking about suffering unrelieved even by an awareness of the cause of the suffering. It's bad enough to be crushed by life, but even worse to comprehend the agents of your destruction no better than road kill under the wheel understands the workings of the internal combustion engine.

Rock 'n' roll builds its myths out of this kind of suffering. The music best defines itself in moments that are mythic in their stupid, clueless, purely emotional response to life's least comprehensible, and therefore cruelest, blows.

So what's so mythic about dumb suffering? Where's the grandeur, the heroic vision, the bigger-than-life spectacle in the fate of a run-over possum?

It's in his kiss, that's where it is. If you've been run down, screwed over, cheated on, turned inside out, and hung out to dry by seven ratty guys in a row, how do you find the stomach to take a chance on number eight? You make up a myth.

You tell yourself you've got the magic love detector this time, that you can feel true love in the way his lips meet yours, that you can't possibly be fooled again because you've got the Book of Love in your hip pocket and passion in your heart.

At least that's what the poor sucker in "Runaway" told himself. And where did it get him? Well, his love affair didn't turn out that well, but that really doesn't explain exactly where he is.

He's out "a'walkin' in the rain" somewhere, and there's a tinkly cantina piano playing and this movie cowboy music swelling up like the theme from The Magnificent Seven, and when he tells his story it's like the Ancient Mariner spilling his guts to yet another complete stranger, not telling the story to anyone so much as reciting it again to himself in the darkness, like maybe if he goes over it one more time it will begin to make sense:

As I walk along I wonder

What went wrong with our love

A love that was so strong

And as I still walk on I think of

The things we done together

While our hearts were young

The story, the suffering, are transformed in the retelling into something less distinct, less particular—a hazier, dreamlike narrative—less specific in its details but more universal in its meaning. More like a myth, in other words.

This is not a hardboiled detective novel, where a relentless torrent of facts—it was a cold day in West Hollywood, the rain drifted down in a fine mist, I stopped under a drugstore awning at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea and lit a Chesterfield—drive the story down a blocked alley to an inescapable conclusion. In detective fiction the clues are all there and the cold, hard facts add up to cold, hard reality. The mystery dissolves in the wash of facts. If there are larger philosophical conclusions, they are cold, hard, tough conclusions delivered like a punch to the kidney.

"Runaway" lets the mystery be. "Runaway" lives in the moment of mystery, before anything is clarified. The storyteller in "Runaway" is up against questions of misery, loneliness, loss. He can and does tell you how that feels, but he never tells you why it must be, because he hasn't got those answers.

The song, rather than giving us an answer, itself becomes the answer. It elevates style and mood and beat into meaning, as all good rock 'n' roll does. "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," Johnny Rotten snarls, and in the rock 'n' roll world that's all you need to know.

So Del Shannon's voice cries out in the darkness:

I'm a'walkin' in the rain

Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain

Wishin' you were here with me

To end this misery

It becomes too much and the voice cracks in stuttering, falsetto agony;

And I wonder

I WA-WA-WA-WA WA-UN-DER

Why

WHY-WY-WY-WY-WY

She ran away

And I wonder

Where she will stay-ay-ay

My little runaway, run-run-run-run-runaway

Then the whole song is gathered up and carried away in the instrumental break, it just soars off, transported by this silly-assed, high-pitched, whining carnival calliope (actually an electric keyboard called the Musitron played by Shannon's co-writer on the song, Max Crook). It's a weird noise, like you would hear at a county fair on an unbearably hot, sticky August night in Mississippi, maybe, a sound so tacky and inspired it defies the forces of gravity and reason.

The singer comes back again, still stuttering and wailing the final chorus, but now he's riding on top of that whining keyboard line, irresistible, triumphant, and mythic in his suffering. And so he rides off into the fade-out.

I was six years old in 1956. As the great songs of that time were released they came to me unawares, over radios playing through open windows on a summer day, in snatches heard briefly as my parents turned the dial. They floated into my consciousness as if by magic, like unwritten truth absorbed through my skin. I didn't know from Lieber and Stoller; these songs could've been written by Homer, for all I knew.

Certainly now, looking back, "Runaway" strikes me as a talisman handed down from a time when myth and mystery were real and walked among us. But so the song always was, even on that day, almost a half century ago, when I first heard it and asked myself, "What was that?"