Death of Elvis

August 16, 1977.

I was 11. I was watching TV or perhaps it was just on as always in my parents’ house. I was in the Red Room, which was one half of the converted 2 car garage of our rancher on Slade Drive in Knoxville, TN. The Red Room was Mediterranean style with low, wide red velvet couches and large square heavy lamps. The carpet was short red shag and the walls were paneled in white/black/grey paneling. There was a fireplace along the whole end of the room in the same white brick used for the whole house. The TV was one of those old large consoles.

The other half of this converted garage (and by converted, I don’t mean it looked like a garage, not at all, my dad was a builder, so it was completely finished) was my mother’s beauty shop. She did hair from the early 70s until the mid 70s. I remember the bouffants and the cases of lacquer hairspray. I remember the chair being coated in hairspray. She had a full counter unit with the sink and all that, the hydraulic chair (which brought my brother and me much fun when we were small) and two salon hairdryers. For those of you too young for such things, they were like this one, but lavender:

It was the afternoon, so I must’ve caught the very first reports. His death was announced at 3:30pm, so that’s when the news coverage must’ve been heaviest. Anyway, I saw the crawl across the bottom of the TV screen: “Elvis Presley dead at 42”. [I just looked that up and was slightly startled to find that he was only 42! He seemed older to me at 11, I suppose.] My mother was futzing in the shop, so I trotted in there and told her that Elvis was dead and she should come look.

She thought I didn’t know what I was talking about (natch) but came into the other room. I remember her staring at the TV in horror. She cried a little. I can’t remember anything beyond that, but I remember she was horrified.

Elvis was THE celebrity to girls in that narrow sliver between pre WWII and the Baby Boomers. These women were born between 1940 and 1945 and I’ve never met one who gives a shit about the Beatles. It was all about Elvis for them. My mother told me that she and her friends would go to the movie theatre and watch Love Me Tender over and over and cry their eyes out at the ending when Elvis’ character dies.

I think to them, Elvis’ death was probably similar to how the Kennedy assassination of the 60s was to their parents and John Lennon’s death to the Boomers. Or 9/11 is to our generation.

In an odd way, I’m glad I got to experience that with my mother. We have very few times when we connect and this was one.

And a note from me: I think Elvis was a pretty pretty boy and he could sing like nobody else. I was raised on Elvis records and remember that All Shook Up was me and my brother’s favourite 45 to play. We also loved Last Date by Floyd Cramer. :-)