'...I mean don't tell me about Lenny Bruce, man--Lenny Bruce said dirty
words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which
Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing,
whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who
worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis
altered America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had
been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as
repressed as ours and how much you could get away with it, but Elvis kicked
"How Much Is That Doggie In The Window' out the window and replaced it with,
"Let's fuck." The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos
still reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and
harmony. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to
ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls
in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally,
every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter,
tens of tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger,
not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria
among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of
making a point of not trying.
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe,
then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more
contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. I thought it
was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to
speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains
and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because
solipsism holds all the cards at present: it is a king whose domain engulfs
even Elvis'. But I guarantee you one thing: WE WILL NEVER AGAIN AGREE ON
ANYTHING AS WE AGREED ON ELVIS. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his
corpse. I will say good-bye to you.'
Lester Bangs: Where Were You When Elvis Died?" - The Village Voice