I know you are angry at me for leering at an angel in a lingerie ad. But you don’t understand me. You mistake me for someone righteous. Some of my best songs are righteous, but I have never really been righteous. Mostly I was just pissed off. I hated injustice. I hated that so many people who didn’t deserve it were forced to suffer while so many others who caused them to suffer were allowed to live like lords. Knowing that someone who wasn’t anything but lucky could toddle whistling to work while someone else groaned in an alley alone, this scorched my guts with rage, and I howled with rage like no other songwriter before me.
I’d never had a hard life, materially speaking. But I knew that misery was real. And seeing people drift through the horrors of life in cloud of stupid unearned affluence made me want to shove their faces in the fire of what was really happening, to show them what their ignorance denied, and make them feel ashamed. My songs were acts of revenge. I made Queen Jane walk the plank, with flames of failure and humiliation lapping all around her—or at least I taunted her with terrors her arrogance was intent on forgetting, with truths she aloofly insulted with the blatant lie of her style.
But even if Queen Jane had walked the plank it wouldn’t have been good enough for me. I would have let her roast in her loneliness and sneer How does it feeeel? like I did to Mr. Jones or the intellectuals who wept for Hattie Carroll. I sided with the underdog, but mostly to make the smug ones squirm. I paraded the castoffs of Desolation Row past their faces, showed them the botched, the mangled, the wretched, the torn—the people for whom the world doesn’t work—and portrayed these misfits with enough dignity to make them glow with poetry.
I was an artist, but I also wanted to be famous and rich and get laid. By the time you’d heard about me I had already sold out. I had troops of fat suited gross men battling for proper product placement in record stores and hustling for the highest price for my performances on television. I was heralded as an avatar, a phenomenon. Artistically I was the leader. The toppermost of the poppermost admired me as a genius. Everybody covered me, but I was the best performer of my own songs. I was proclaimed the voice of my generation, and at the height of my hype I squeezed out a double album that nearly everyone hailed as a masterpiece. But it was really only exhaustion amplified into urgency by amphetamine, husks and shadows of songs crammed with some of the clumsiest rhymes of my career, like the one about the shattered little rich girl who takes/makes/aches just like a woman, who was just too pitiful to be hated like Queen Jane or the girl on Fourth Street who I positively loathed.
I wrote that song to get laid. I’ve never tried to disguise how much I needed women. I needed women so much I avenged myself against my dependence on them again and again in my songs. I had a furious envy of their elegance. It seemed in the end we could never agree on anything. Whenever I was in love I was always afraid I’d wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon my knees. And I was always in love. That’s why I chased fame so voraciously. Being admired so widely allowed me to be big enough to love on a scale impossible for someone of smaller stature. Being seen by so many allowed me to be seen by a few who could really see me. Those were the ones I loved and who loved me. The scope of my embrace was amazing. I can never adequately describe how hugely loved I felt sometimes. This filled me with a force that fueled so many songs I would never have otherwise written. It’s one thing to be talented; it’s quite another to have a river of power flowing through you as easy as breathing.
Women were my muse in the most classical sense. Even after a crackup that caused me to realize I was being eaten alive by the machinery of celebrity, I always chased the angel. Any bitterness I expressed toward women was that of a man who could never be free of them. And it is impossible not to be bitter when you know you are trapped by fame as badly as Elvis. When you see that you are not seen by a public that celebrates you for something you can no longer sustain and which was only a fraction of what you were in the first place. When you repeatedly realize that so many women you’d hoped you could love could only see you in the shadow of an idol that has nothing to do with you.
This is a loneliness with which no ordinary person can sympathize. And this alienated me even more. I still dredged up some righteousness in later songs, but now my martyrs were bigger fish: a railroaded middleweight prizefighter, a rouge millionaire, a gunned down Mafioso, Lenny Bruce. I vilified political leaders like a watcher of television news. Gradually I retired toward the periphery, where a role was conceived for me: moral murmur in the shadows of the cultural unconscious, grizzled hippie snarling in the fringes of a world gone wrong.
I’ve seen this all from a vantage where few ever stand. And now I doubt that it makes any difference in the end. I’m stranded. I even agreed to entertain at a catered corporate party during the dot com boom. And when a posh lingerie company called me one day to offer to buy one of my songs for a commercial I knew it didn’t matter. I said yes. Then they raised the stakes: would I appear in the ad? With a beautiful young model in nothing but underwear? I know what it is to be pornography—I performed in a sparkling Elvis outfit a quarter century ago and I knew what I was doing. I said yes. Hell, a free trip to Italy, a nice party, a few hours’ work, a big paycheck—maybe I’d even get laid. I went. It was easy; the producers made everything smooth. I didn’t even look at the playbacks when we were done. I didn’t get laid. When I left it was easy to forget.
But I know you won’t forget it. You’re obsessed with the evidence. But the evidence is a lie. When you see me leering at that doe-eyed nymph in the angel’s wings and blue bra, you don’t notice that I’m really glaring with bright mean eyes. You don’t know that I wasn’t even watching her when my close-up was shot. And when you look at her you don’t see what I see: an exotic animal who would crumble under my stare if we ever really looked at each other. She is an empty, lovely fawn. I don’t need her. I need the angel.
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