Fever (5 page)

Lymon ascended into pop myth as an ideal of male innocence whose soaring delivery caught all the eagerness and innocence teens invested in their pop. “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” was everything good in the sexual energy between male and female, the sincere emotional tone of the most flattering come-on, from a guy who didn't yet have to imitate female sounds (falsetto) to pitch woo. (It's less often, of course, that a woman deliberately sings like a man—Tina Turner being the big exception.) His career became a cautionary tale for all who followed: he made the tabloids with drug arrests throughout the sixties and died of a heroin overdose on the eve of another record release in 1968. His many failed comebacks, drug abuse, and early death only intensified the innocence of his debut.

As Lymon opened up the possibilities for preteen stars, other Presley contemporaries darted off in various directions, toying with gender assumptions and flaunting the rebelliousness he had popularized. Little Willie John was older than Lymon, but still a five-feet-tall seventeen-year-old when he scored his first R&B hit, “All Around the World,” in 1955. The next year, his crossover hit “Fever” made explicit two new principles in the music for men: first, how vulnerable women made them feel. And second, how the expression of that vulnerability could help win women over, and strengthen a guy's own personal sense of manhood. “Fever” made John so popular that he hit the road with the young James Brown as his opening act, and Brown revered him. (The Beatles knew John's work well enough for Lennon to do “Leave My Kitten Alone” in 1965, one of the earliest unreleased collectibles and a standout track on
Anthology.
)

On the surface, “Fever” was coy bump and grind. But Little Willie John's deliveries poured scorched gravel into songs that turned his come-ons into threats. John's “Fever” had finger snaps that goaded the anxious silences and guitar twangs that cinched knots in the singer's stomach. John carried it with a sense of doom that foretold even worse than his prison death by heart attack less than ten years later. His fever was romantic, but it also surged with contempt and despair, the kind of desire that warned of how much grief many men kept in check. The record was all hook and repetition; its sense of danger thrillingly seductive.

Peggy Lee's 1958 cover of “Fever” was another example of the old guard co-opting R&B for itself, one step above Pat Boone singing “Tutti Frutti.” This was an answer record of a sort, but not the answer to anything Little Willie John had set in motion. Lee had been a big band singer for Will Osborne and Benny Goodman and was famous as the voice of Darling in Disney's
Lady and the Tramp
(1955). Luxurious in her passivity, she turned “Fever” into a steam bath, but her flirtation was all ladylike finesse; she purred where John growled, and her finger snaps had all the crackle of milquetoast. For the length of Lee's single, which included several painfully self-conscious key changes, it seemed as though Tin Pan Alley might actually tame the beast. But Lee never had another top ten hit. Paul McCartney was a fan, but Lee's image was all risqué control—her next biggest record, “Is That All There Is?” in 1969, worked as a coda to many a one-hit wonder, including herself.

Ironically, Presley covered “Fever” more as a nod to Lee than Little Willie John, but that was just the Memphis boy in him who yearned to be Dean Martin. Presley did away with the key changes (wisely) and sounded drunk on his own restraint. Like Little Willie John, an anxious quietude hovers over Presley's take. There were worlds in Presley's pauses, and the sustained tension only underlined its seething contradictions (weakness as strength). At best, this “Fever” was heartache, a yearning for something the singer feared might elude him; at its worst, it was the most damning feeling a man could carry, a measure of his capacity to feel. Elsewhere, you can measure Presley's success in his cohorts' different slants on manhood: Presley's rock 'n' roll man was a metaphor for freedom and new male identities, not a new rigid code. If anything, Presley's more provocative peers worked out the feminine side of masculinity, peacocking insecurities, vulnerabilities, and sexual eccentricity when they lacked Presley's striking good looks.

Little Richard was the most flamboyant of these performers. His bouffant hairdo anticipated the Afro, and he tossed his head back with the illicit thrill of a gay man passing as a mere eccentric in a straight man's club. Suburban Eisenhower culture in the 1950s was so sexually occluded that it accepted Richard as a kind of oddity, just another weird twist in the new teen craze. But Richard's persona drew on lyrics transparently trimmed of explicit come-ons even before they suggested homosexuality (“Well, long tall Sally's built pretty sweet/She's got everything that Uncle John needs…”), and his singing was so good he managed to distract attention from his beehive and Vegas showgirl makeup. In retrospect, it's nothing less than astounding that Little Richard broke through, essentially as a novelty, in January of 1956 (just before Presley had his first national hit), with “Tutti Frutti.” He threw in manic falsetto “Whoo!” at every turn, and “Long Tall Sally” was heard as “Wop-Bop-A-Lu” gibberish when it was really code for God Knows What.

Buddy Holly presented another kind of man: one who got up his nerve with women
only
through song. Holly turned John Wayne's dismissive tag line from
The Searchers
(“That'll be the day”) into a triumphant rock catchphrase, a world of revenge hurled at a suspicious lover, and John Lennon's favorite song. Consider the conceit: Holly, the wire-framed nerd, found something in Wayne's bigoted Ethan Edwards to call his own—something that reduced that oversized character's blind hatred into a retort that boomeranged with affection. Holly hiccuped coyly, as if barely containing all the terror of changing from a boy into a man. Physically, he was a geek with glasses, but as a writer he held his own with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lieber and Ed Stoller (“Hound Dog”), Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus (“His Latest Flame”), and Willie Dixon (“Wang Dang Doodle”). A song like “Peggy Sue” drew a simple yet fetching line from inarticulateness to sentimentality. “Rave On” and “Not Fade Away” testified that even dweebs wanted to get loaded and go nuts.

Holly's is an even more radical gender persona than Presley's: a guy whose hormones have not yet finished with him, who hangs onto his boyish qualities obsessively, yet through cunning, skill, and sweetness rebuffs any notion that he is “less of a man” because of his square glasses, stiff posture, or skinny frame. Indeed, with songs like “Learning the Game,” Holly only played the boyish innocent: here was a writer familiar with love's more fathomless contours. His Science Boy glasses and Texan curls flew in the face of Presley's cinematic profile. Along with Roy Orbison, Holly was the awkward kid who was easily underestimated, the misfit who refused to let his looks prevent him from being cool.

Like Presley, all these newfangled rockers were unashamed of their feminine side, whether for reasons of sexual preference (Little Richard) or self-conscious opposition to the tough-guy standard (Holly and Orbison). Both Holly and Richard flaunted versions of the feminine qualities that Presley intimated, the same vulnerabilities that would have mortified any man subscribing to Wayne's code. Presley's freedom wasn't limited to proving that strength with women came from admitting your weaknesses.

Other figures cherry-picked Wayne's persona and exaggerated its elements into parody. Jerry Lee Lewis's insolent growl sponged off Wayne's haughty superiority, as though Lewis were a ten-gallon figure stuck in a two-bit town, determined to prove his manhood by getting drunker and wilder than anybody else (“Whole Lotta Shakin'”). Lewis was the type of man who made hookers roll their eyes, and everybody else steered clear of. He was full of bluster, but you couldn't deny his loony magnetism, or why some girls might just fall for it. Wayne would have tossed Lewis out of his saloon more than once—and Lewis would have mooned him on his way out the door.

And then there's Chuck Berry, the middle-aged hairdresser who gazed down on teenage experience with benign hilarity. Before Dick Clark came along, Berry was America's oldest teenager. Gender was not his Big Subject, but it remained a pervasive, looming subtext; his songs gave off a comfort level around manhood that had a resounding embrace: in “Almost Grown,” gender is almost as much of a joke as age. Berry had been there, done that, and assuaged a lot of teen terror surrounding adulthood simply by shrugging it off. “Too Pooped to Pop,” for one, extols the comedy of impotence. The guy who popularized “My Ding-A-Ling” was not all twisted up about his manhood, or anyone else's.

*   *   *

Of course, the larger arc of Elvis Presley's career overshadowed much of his early greatness. The signposts are well-known: after an unprecedented explosion onto the world's stage between 1955 and 1957, he was drafted into the peacetime army, and his old-fashioned sense of duty, and fear of the scandal that might surround any special treatment, prompted military service in Germany. This self-imposed sabbatical interrupted his early momentum and caused more than a few early followers to doubt the essence of his sincerity: would this New Man count for anything if he could simply be shipped off to serve (during
peacetime!
) instead of holding out for something better? Muhammad Ali blasted through this barrier ten years later. Presley's induction cast shadows on Ali's draft refusal even though Ali's protest was racial.

When Presley returned, in 1960, his manager Colonel Tom Parker's movie agenda crowded out his musicmaking, and up until 1968 he didn't even travel much to Memphis or Nashville to record, remaining in Hollywood where the money was. Yet despite the sheer preponderance of schlock dialogue and wooden staging he ambled through, he carried himself with a nagging self-consciousness that became a kind of inverse charm. Elvis knew he couldn't act his way through this corn, that there was something dreadful in the treadmill they had put him on, but damned if he knew how to get off. With a father who'd done jail time for floating checks to make ends meet, this was not a guy who was going to risk another career bump like the army. Here was a reverse lesson about strength: Presley, who could be imperious, tough, and forbidding in song, was somehow stripped of authority in front of the camera. It seemed to bewilder him as much as anybody. Imagine John Wayne lumbering and faking his way through a singing career.

There's been a lot written about how Presley's 1968 comeback TV special rekindled his flair for performing. But there was something else going on in that important appearance before a live audience, his first in over a decade: Presley took his young fervor and channeled it through a now-grown man's sensibility. On one level, reconnecting with his audience in that intimate setting (the “One Night with You” sequence) was about recapturing the charisma that had been squandered since the army.

But in another very important sense, this thirty-three-year-old star was out to prove not just that his early success was no fluke, but that a sense of adolescent fun and daring counted as grace in adulthood. It's ironic, then, that for his remaining years, Presley became more and more of a self-parody, striking karate poses in sequined suits in Las Vegas showrooms. There were still great moments, even greatness in the largesse of talent he sweated off like so much perspiration (some argue for the salacious “Burning Love,” others for the schmaltz of “Kentucky Rain” or “In the Ghetto”). Presley could seem like a geyser of bad taste, but he always had talent to burn, and his charisma somehow broke through many poorly chosen songs, inane dialogue, and flaming sideburns. In many ways, this was spectacle enough.

In front of the TV cameras in 1968, clutching a microphone in black leather and uttering the words “If you're looking for trouble/You've come to the right place,” Presley glimpsed the longer journey that Bruce Springsteen would take—an extended cycle through styles, worldviews, and levels of popularity that until 1968 had seemed out of reach. Most hippies ignored this Presley, the over-thirty careerist, as passé and beyond the pale, even as they acknowledged his importance. But there were many in his audience who found this idea of adult rock appealing, fundamental to the basic notions of rock itself, less specifically about youth and more about an enduring state of mind. In this way, Presley was again drawing on his black musical role models like Joe Turner, Smiley Lewis, Arthur Gunter, Little Junior Parker, and Ray Charles, who placed far fewer exaggerated ideals upon youth and sauntered through middle age with confidence and sass.

In 1968, though, Presley's outrageous new pose disrupted what everybody had long assumed about manhood, romance, and showbiz careers in general. If he wasn't completely alone in his quest for a new kind of manliness, his appearance as an overwhelmingly popular rock star made him tower over his Hollywood peers, and gave him an aura of inevitability, a sense that men—and the women who adored them—would never be the same.

*   *   *

When critics talk about the Elvis comeback, they most often refer to this 1968 TV special. But to Elvis, coming back to his career at age twenty-five after serving in Germany was the far bigger challenge. During this period, his mother died, and he worried that most fans had forgotten him, even though they kept giving him hits (“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” “Doncha' Think It's Time,” “Hard Headed Woman,” “Don't Ask Me Why,” “One Night,” “I Got Stung,” “(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such As I,” “I Need Your Love Tonight,” “A Big Hunk o' Love,” “My Wish Came True”—all but two of these top ten). Parker held out faith, though, consoling young Presley's fears, and carefully laid the groundwork for a future Presley was insecure about. Few singers before him had been as big (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra), and serving his country during peacetime was an unprecedented professional gamble. Would he still command the same charisma he once had? Would people still go see his movies, buy his records, give him the same freedoms with his music he had enjoyed up until 1958? Could he even presume to ask?