THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 31, 1996 TAG: 9605300178
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY TOM HOLDEN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 166 lines
BY DAY, PLAIN OLD Bob Glass looks like most every other middle-aged father of two, save for his retro sideburns and that suspicious pompadour up top that suggests something else about his cultural leanings.
He's got a regular job as a data analyst for a defense contractor, loves his kids and drives a simple car. His wife works at the Lynnhaven Fish House waiting tables. He's knocked around Virginia Beach for most of his life.
But today, and throughout the weekend, when the resort is invaded by Elvis impersonators of every size, age and color, Glass becomes something more than a haircut throwback to the Eisenhower years.
Those sideburns match up nicely with his white, rhinestone studded jumpsuit and the belt buckle the size of a license plate. The cape's a nice touch but it's the glasses - the silver frames with the shaded lenses - that transform this ordinary data cruncher into something more kingly.
On Saturday, when the Viva Elvis II festival gets serious about The King, Glass will take the stage at 17th Street and become Elvis Presley for a while. The three-day party promises everything that one might expect at an Elvis fest and probably some things that might confuse the man himself.
Like 10-foot-tall Elvis? Or fire- eating Elvis? Or Young Elvis, young as in grade school young. What any of that had to do with the great singer is anyone's guess but it inches forward the notion that Elvis, dead for almost 19 years, is very much alive, if only culturally.
``I don't know why he persists,'' said Glass. ``I'm doing this show on Saturday. It's called ``Elvis Through the Years.'' It goes from a 5-year-old boy to someone who is about the size of Elvis when he died. Now this 5-year-old straps on a guitar and sings ``Hound Dog'' and you'd have to say he has studied the moves. He's right on target.''
Glass, mercifully, doesn't take much of this very seriously and thinks he may know why so many still love the man whose final years of painful decline to drug addiction have come to define much of Elvis' image.
``Elvis charmed everyone,'' Glass said. ``If you gave him a minute, in a movie or a song, he charmed you. He was basically a nice guy and it showed. It's that, I think, that's kept his memory alive.''
It was Elvis' ``goodness,'' Glass said, that still shines through the sad final years but it's the incredible energy of his early performances, the boundless optimism of his sometimes bad movies, that people remember.
``Once you become hip with it, you hang in there,'' he said. ``When I'm fixed up just right, people just stand and stare. A lot of them have told me that I bring back a lot of real memories because I do favor him in the mouth and nose a little. I don't know what it is. He was good, but is anyone all that good?''
Elvis Presley's grip on American culture is so thorough and pervasive that it is nearly impossible to overstate. He might be the most widely recognized American of the 20th century.
``He's the biggest American icon of all time,'' said Bill Reid, whose Cellar Door Productions helps sponsor the five-day party. ``It's the enigma of Elvis that keeps the mystery, myth and music alive.''
Reid, who oversees a staff of Generation-Xers whose knowledge of the Memphian is likely confined to ``Hound Dog'' and ``Don't be Cruel,'' saw the legendary performer a year before he died.
``I was reluctantly dragged to see him,'' he said. ``The last place I wanted to be seen was at that show, but without doubt he was the most impressive singer I ever saw. No doubt. When he sang in the auditorium, it was just magic. His talent was unparalleled. When he sang ``God Bless America,'' there was not a dry eye in the house.''
For Boomers like Reid, the Elvis festival is not only a chance to expose people to the music they may never have heard but to wax nostalgic. But before the jumpsuits, before the Las Vegas show stoppers and the slide into despair, there was another Elvis.
Largely ignored by present day culture hounds, Elvis started out unknown and dirt poor. In those early days when he would spend hours at Sun Studios cutting records for Sam Phillips, his first producer, Elvis traveled the back roads of Mississippi, East Texas and Arkansas in a beat-up Chevrolet playing county fairs, honky tonks and gin joints, perfecting the hillbilly sound that defined his early years.
He came of age in a region that had spawned nearly every major category of American popular music: country, the blues, gospel. And he was embraced by a generation who came of age during World War II and had listened to the Big Band sound but never really claimed it as its own. It was Elvis, more than any other performer, who managed to combine the various forms of regional music into a new and emerging one - rock 'n' roll - and claim it for his own. There were dozens of other rockers back then, but Presley brought an unusual skill to the task and in doing so became something else in the process - a metaphor for the American South.
``He's pretty much everywhere in popular culture now, and that's worthy of some serious reflection,'' said Vernon D. Chadwick, an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
In August, the university will host its second annual international conference on Elvis, which last year brought together dozens of sociologists, historians, musicologists and genuine fans who seriously attempt to explain the phenomenal cultural impact Elvis made.
``His impact is based partly on what I call the Historical Elvis, the Southerness of Elvis, that is not generally communicated to the world,'' said Chadwick, who is also on the staff of the Center for Southern Culture.
``He is a global icon. Around the world, he represents a part of America. But those who have pursued him more deeply are interested in his Southerness, that is, the South as the home of the blues, country and western, gospel and rock 'n' roll.
``It's very important to see that the name Elvis transcends the historical figure.''
``Why is Elvis so appealing today and why has he not, as they say, `left the building?' It's because he planted the seeds of a multi-cultural and multi-racial audience that is now discovering so much of themselves in the music he recorded and helped to create,'' Chadwick said. ``People from all cultures are discovering something about his music, about America and the American South, and that's the key to his universality.''
For many people in the New South, Chadwick said, Elvis is an embarrassment, a poor, white working class illiterate who shook his hips and acted in bad movies before his much celebrated decline.
``That's the old South that new Southerners would like to forget about,'' Chadwick said. ``But that is a bad strategy of forgetting ourselves.''
During a comeback tour in the early 1970s, Elvis began singing a campy number he called his American trilogy. It was a time when the South began to slowly emerge from its national stigma as the harbor of the white man's racial intolerance of African Americans.
``He was singing a trilogy that included `Dixie,' which acknowledged Southern history, with `All My Trials,' the great Negro spiritual, and `The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' the song of the North.
``That's what Elvis is about in my estimation,'' Chadwick said. ``He blends many voices, traditions, cultures and they all come together in his voice. He did that throughout his career.''
Sterling Riggs hasn't really taken Elvis to this level. For this Chesapeake resident, Elvis remains simply a great entertainer whose work he admires and reveres. Riggs, too, will be at the Viva Elvis II fest, dressed in the de rigueur white jumpsuit, belting out the hits from the '50s.
For this Norfolk Naval Shipyard worker, playing Elvis for the past two years is a chance to peek into the myth and gain access to a lifestyle known to but a few entertainers.
``When I was on stage last year for Elvis weekend, the crowd, the applause, the way they accept you . . . if that is only one tenth of what it must have felt like to be Elvis, to feel what he felt, then he must have been overwhelmed, '' Riggs said. ``There is no better feeling than to sing on stage for an hour and get that kind of response. It must have been a phenomenal feeling for him.''
Riggs said he gets emotional hearing the songs Elvis did.
``He didn't have negative songs,'' he said. ``They were either heartfelt or uplifting but he never sang sad or degrading songs. It's something about the way they were put together. I am a fan of the big sound he had. There has never been an entertainer before or since that put all that into it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by KEVIN D. ELLIOTT/Color cover
illustration by JOHN EARLE
Elvis Presley, a.k.a. Sterling Riggs, catches up on the latest news
and checks the schedule of his appearances for this weekend's Viva
Elvis II festival.
``Elvis charmed everyone,'' says impersonator Bob Glass. ``If you
gave him a minute, in a movie or a song, he charmed you. He was
basically a nice guy and it showed. It's that, I think, that's kept
his memory alive.''
File photos
Among the Elvis impersonators scheduled for appearances this weekend
at the Oceanfront (see schedule at right) are:
TOP: Dennis Wise, today and Saturday;
LEFT: Black Elvis, Saturday and Sunday;
RIGHT: Jerry Presley, a second cousin of Elvis, Saturday and Sunday.
[Box]
The Schedule
For complete list, see microfilm
KEYWORDS: ELVIS FESTIVAL by CNB