What’s in a Song?

“One Night” by Elvis Presley

I’m inspired to write about songs by The Philosophy of Modern Song, by Bob Dylan, but also by three books written by the great Al Young, Bodies & Soul, Kinds of Blue, and Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.  Young in particular is an inspiration.  He would write about anything, the first place he heard the song, the singer, the feeling that title calls up to him.  It’s a way of writing memoir by noticing small moments from the past.  Such things keep coming up for me.

For two years of my youth, my best friend was a guy named Bill Moorhead.  I started at Shady Side Academy in fourth grade and had to make a whole new set of friends (Doug Reid and Bill Latimer came with me that year from Sterrett School).  Many of the guys I met at age nine would be friends for years, Stan Hahn, Andy Rogal, Gordon and Gerry Hughes, Bart Griffith, but the guy who stood out was Bill Moorhead.  I no longer remember how it all started, but we were soon fast friends.

He came from a prominent Pittsburgh family and lived in a house above Forbes Avenue, across from what is now Carnegie Mellon.  It was a huge place, kind of a mansion; I’d never seen anything like it.  It had, among other things, a long winding stairway to the second floor, and I vividly remember seeing Bill’s beautiful mother descend that stairway one morning for breakfast in a nightgown and robe (I used that image in my novel, The Autobiography of My Body, and in fact borrowed the house, and some of the family, as background for that book.  I didn’t talk about people in detail, because I didn’t remember them.  All I really remembered was the elegant beauty of his mother).

I got to know the place because Bill frequently had me over to spend the night.  That wasn’t much trouble for the parents, because they had a cook and housekeeper who supervised the children; we had our meals in the kitchen with her, while the parents dined in the dining room.  We were largely on our own, even at age nine and ten, when our friendship happened.  Bill’s mother wasn’t much in evidence, but his father used to show up; I remember, for instance, that he came in when we were going to bed, and said to me, “Don’t get up early in the morning, like this stinker,” referring to his son.  Bill was definitely an early riser, and always got me up when he was awake.  We roamed the house at will.

His father could do an amazing imitation of Stan Laurel, somehow contorting his face into an exact replica.  He was a prominent Pittsburgh attorney, and unbeknownst to me was planning to run for Congress; he would win that seat, as a Democrat, so my friendship with Bill was short-lived.

Bill was the first guy I knew who was into popular music.  Transistor radios were all the rage in those days, and he carried one everywhere, playing the local pop station, KQV.  Being obsessed with radio was also new to me at age nine, though pretty soon we would all be that way.  I remember in particular one balmy starry evening (I don’t understand how it was balmy, because it must have been toward the end of the year) when we were lying on our backs on the large lawn, actually more like a field,  which was below his house and above Forbes Avenue.  KQV was counting down the top forty records of the year, and we were anticipating number one.  When it was announced, we both went into paroxysms of rage, horror, and disbelief.

“One Night” by Elvis Presley.

All my friends from that private school hated Elvis.  Our parents also hated him, because, in contrast to wholesome singers like Pat Boone or the Four Freshman, Elvis seemed like a Southern hick, one remove from the truck driver he had apparently once been, with that slick wavy hair (you could almost smell the hair oil), the sideburns,  strange clothes, the sultry expression on his face.  He exuded something—I believe it’s called sex—that our parents wanted to keep us away from.  Elvis no, Pat Boone yes (in his white sport coat and pink carnation).

I will admit that, when Elvis first came on the scene, I hadn’t understood his appeal.  I’d been listening to How Much Is That Doggie in the Window, and along he came with (You ain’t nothin’ but a) Hound Dog (I was seven years old).  Ditto for Don’t be Cruel, I Got Stung, and any number of other tunes.  They sounded so strange, weirdly affected.  One Night in particular, with the labored way Elvis sang, and the short phrase that included no fewer than three grammatical errors (“I ain’t never did no wrong”).  What the hell.

It was also true that, at that age, we all pretended not to like girls.  Bill had a lovely younger sister, and we paid no attention to her, or any of the other girls we would soon go to dancing school with (I think that didn’t happen until we were eleven).  We pretended to hate girls, would run from them when they came in the room.  That was the way the guys around me acted, and I fell in line.  I had to adapt.

Actually, I loved girls.  At Sterrett School, I’d always had a girlfriend—for a couple of years it was the beautiful Ellen Rosenberg—and as far back as first grade I’d spent a lot of time kissing Margie Kaplan, a neighborhood girl whose brother Lanny was my best friend (I seemed to have a thing for Jewish women).  I actually liked dancing school when I started, loved getting my hands on the girls.  I was precocious in that way, or somehow skipped the latent period when boys don’t like girls and just hang around together.  I was fine with doing that, but also liked girls.

And one thing you had to say about Elvis, he got the girls.  They screamed when he sang, in a way that they never did for Pat Boone, and in all of his movies, he wound up kissing lots of girls, beautiful girls.  He did exude sex, in “One Night” in particular; that weird way he delivered the song, almost groaning, suggested overwhelming frustration.  He seemed to really want, as Stan Hahn would have said, to put it to her.  (As we discovered much later, from the excellent biographies written about Elvis, he wasn’t much into the act of intercourse.  All those groupies who’d been screaming for him must have been mildly puzzled at his request.  “I prefer that you leave your underpants on.”  One of the biographers mentioned that the height of ecstasy for Elvis was a time when a girl jerked him off, then rubbed the come all over herself, an act which I’ve seen in porn movies but have never particularly understood.  People find that attractive?  Sexy?  Really?  Elvis?)

I snuck off to Elvis movies, going by myself (I was quite the loner in those days.  I often went to movies solo, usually in East Liberty, which was a short streetcar ride away).  The girls went apeshit over Jailhouse Rock, which I saw in the theater; they screamed in agony when Elvis was hung up and whipped in prison (though the whole thing was obviously phony).  I also saw GI Blues, Take Me to the World’s Fair, any number of forgettable movies (though all Elvis fans need to watch Fun in Alcapulco, I think it is, in which Elvis sings Bossa Nova Baby, somewhat confusing his Latin American countries, and creating a dance, called the Bossa Nova, that didn’t actually exist).

I would now say (as the Beatles once said) that Elvis’ great years came before he went into the army (when someone told the Beatles that Elvis had just died, one of them said, “Elvis died when he went in the army.”)  Colonel Tom Parker took that original talent and seemed to be trying to make him into someone with universal appeal, Perry Como with greasy hair.  But Elvis’ real appeal was always to those young girls who wanted to be with him, underpants or not.  One Night was one of his greatest songs.  It truly was number one.  Our tastes just weren’t sophisticated enough to take it in.  We should have roared in appreciation.

But his greatest song of all time was an overlooked number called Reconsider Baby.  It let us know what might have been.