In case you haven’t heard, today is the 33rd anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, and although I haven’t seen much chatter about it out there in the blogosphere, what I have run across is the usual snark and sarcasm that a certain type of hipper-than-thou people seem to love throwing at this unfortunate man. I may not be an Elvis fan per se, but it pisses me off that he gets so little respect when this day rolls around. Yes, he died in his gaudily decorated bathroom, overweight and strung out on prescription drugs. And yes, according to some accounts, he may have been straining to take a crap when his heart gave out. But that isn’t funny, people — it’s pathetic, a genuinely sad way for any human being to leave this world, let alone one who’d occupied the heights that Elvis once did. And it pisses me off that there are so many ignoramuses out there who get off on being cruel and vulgar about how far he eventually fell. I hope you dip-weeds meet your own fates with a little more dignity.

To counter some of that nasty, grade-school-level horseshit, I’m going to repost an entry I wrote earlier this year about the surprising impact Elvis’ death had on me. You can click the link for the original post if you like, or simply pop below the fold…

I was just shy of my eighth birthday when Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. His was the first celebrity death — possibly the first death, period — that I can recall being aware of and understanding as death, i.e., the permanent state we’re all doomed to achieve sooner or later, which those we leave behind experience as loss and pain. It was, with no exaggeration, a transformative event in my life. You want to know the origins of my compulsive obituary-writing? Blame Elvis Presley. Or more precisely, blame the way our culture responded to his passing.

I actually wrote my very first dead-celebrity tribute for Elvis. I had this red leatherette agenda book, the sort of thing businesspeople scribbled their appointments in before the advent of Day Planners, PDAs, and BlackBerries, a piece of branded corporate swag. It was given to me by our neighbor’s adult daughter, who worked for an airline. I imagine she thought I’d enjoy looking at the photos of jets that were interspersed between the calendar pages. (She was correct, of course.) But even at that early age, I was trying to express myself in written words, to record the things that seemed to matter. In other words, I was dabbling at keeping my first diary in that book. And on a page dated August 16, 1977, I was inspired to write the following in the shaky, block-printed letters of a young boy who hated to practice his penmanship: GOODBYE ELVIS, WE’LL MISS YOU. (I think I probably stole that from Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcast that day, but hey, I had to learn how to say these things from someone, right?)

You may find it unlikely that a seven-year-old would be much of a fan of any musician, let alone one whose career, arguably, had peaked a decade before the kid’s birth. You’re quite right, of course; my own taste in music at that time ran more to The Muppets and The Chipmunks. I was admittedly taking my cues on how to react to Elvis’ death from my mother, who I remember was badly shaken by the news. For the record, she was not one of the goofballs who are so beloved by TV feature-story editors, the ones who erect a shrine in the living room and keep a candle burning constantly in memory of “The King.” No, Mom was just a woman who had been on the cusp of adolescence when Elvis first achieved national attention on The Steve Allen Show. He was her musical hero, her schoolgirl crush, and the only thing that hurt her worse than losing him so unexpectedly was all the nasty “tell-all” crap that started coming out afterward. These days, we’re used to the media trashing celebrities, digging up whatever dirt there is to be had and making sure everyone on the planet knows about it. But back in ’77, there was a whiff of sacrilege to the revelations about Elvis’ prescription-drug abuse, a sense that we were going to some ugly place where we didn’t really need to be and from which we weren’t ever going to return. Mom still cringes when people make jokes about his weight or how he died on the toilet. She finds such things extremely tasteless… and so do I. I tend to agree with her that people who think there was nothing more to Elvis than the fat, sweaty guy in the gaudy bell-bottomed jumpsuits are ignorant. They don’t know their history. Because the truth is, Elvis in his heyday deserved every bit of the insane adulation he received. And if his body and voice went to hell in his last couple of years on earth, that’s something that ought to be acknowledged with compassion, not scorn.

I didn’t always feel this way. Mom got a little obsessive in the years immediately following his death, and, frankly, it got to be pretty tiresome. I remember tagging along with her on many, many shopping expeditions to Grand Central and Gibson’s, discount department stores that used to be in these parts before the arrival of Wal-Mart and Target, in search of any records she didn’t yet have in the collection. First thing in the morning on most days, she’d mount a stack of six or eight LPs on her massive hi-fi console and Elvis Presley would play until nightfall. And as much as they irritated her, she couldn’t help but read the tabloids and the quickly printed paperback gossip books, and then have to vent about all the hateful, iconoclastic garbage she found in their pages. Lather, rinse and repeat, for years. And all that was fine at first. Even kind of fun. I liked looking at records and talking with my mom. It made me feel grown up, in some way I enjoyed without quite understanding. But eventually, I just got really damn tired of hearing about Elvis. And then of course I got older and found my own musical heroes, and acquired the cocky certainty shared by all teenagers that whatever came before my time was completely and utterly irrelevant to today, man. (The corollary to that is, of course, the certainty that whatever was cool in my day would remain cool ever-after. I still struggle with that one sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time. This circle of life stuff sucks.)

But you know what? I never truthfully disliked the guy’s music. Well, not all of it, anyhow. People who really know Elvis know that he dabbled in all kinds of musical genres: rockabilly, R&B, country, gospel, pop standards from the pre-rock-n-roll days, even some children’s music. I never much liked the gospel stuff, but the rest of it? Well, maybe it’s just because I heard it every day for a good part of my childhood, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t at least appreciate Elvis Presley’s music, even if I wouldn’t call myself a fan.

These days, I fall somewhere between appreciation and casual fandom. I think Elvis in his youth — as in that photo I have at the top of this post — was as compellingly sexual, as downright beautiful, as any entertainer of the past 60 years. Watching the old video clips, seeing his raw magnetism coupled with a shy, somewhat bemused personality, I can easily understand how an entire generation of girls could fall hard for that charismatic young man with the (at the time) provocative moves and the unique voice. He was a bad boy with a gentle heart, and that comes across even in the earliest TV appearances, when he really was just a boy. Even more importantly, his music generally remains as listenable, as fresh-seeming, as the day he recorded it. He has achieved what I believe he always wanted, namely the timeless, never-out-of-fashion status of someone like Frank Sinatra. I’ll never have the sort of affection for Elvis that my mom has, but to simply dismiss the man and his work because it’s old, or because it’s not someone’s particular “thing,” is unthinkable. He’s had too much of an impact on our culture, and survived in the public eye long enough to have been granted the luxury of a reappraisal.

I bring all this up because last Friday would have been Elvis’ 75th birthday. It’s hard to imagine him at that age, just as it is for anyone who dies prematurely and remains forever young(ish) in our memories. And it’s difficult to make any kind of guess about what his life and career might have been like over the past 32 years if he had survived. But, as I wrote over on Facebook a couple days ago, I like to think there’s some parallel universe somewhere in which he somehow survived that heart attack in 1977 and it scared him into getting his shit together, kicking the drugs, and getting back into shape. In this other version of history, his popularity and his relevance has probably ebbed and flowed. No doubt he’s had to stage a comeback or two, and maybe he’s even given up on rock and roll altogether and moved into other interests. (His ex-wife Priscilla apparently believes he would’ve become a preacher, or at least turned to gospel music full-time.) But whatever he may be interested in today, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’d still be singing and performing, perhaps in small, intimate venues as opposed to big arenas, and his fans would still be there, just as they always have been. Just as they were for Sinatra.

When I imagine this other world, I can’t help but think what so many people must’ve been saying on that summer day so long ago, when I first came to understand how people could be moved by the fate of someone they’d never even met but felt like they knew anyhow: What a damn shame. What a damn waste. If only…