Love Me Tender

When Elvis died in 1977 Michael Bracewell laughed. Twenty-five years later he is moved to tears by the sound of Presley's great - and misunderstood - voice. This is the story of his conversion...

The King chose an awkward moment to finally leave the building. When Elvis Presley died in the summer of 1977, his credibility had curdled into caricature, but the tragedy of his downfall was yet to be acknowledged. We, the self-styled punks of suburban Croydon, for example, safety-pinned and full of ourselves in a carefully tailored assemblaged of ripped t-shirt, black PVC and old school uniform, had the nerve to snigger at the untimely passing of one of the world's greatest singers. On a table in a dank little venue called The Greyhound, some heretic had carved the legend, "Elvis Is Cool". And barely had we heard that the King was dead before the words were changed to "Elvis is cold".

Heroic in our sense of modernity, we looked upon Elvis as an athersclerotic, corporeal symbol of all that was old and irrelevant. He was down there with cheese cloth and The Old Grey Whistle Test, a received idea of the air-brushed Americana of the 1950s: the kind of stuff you found on the illuminated casing of juke boxes and slot machines. When his death was reported, we imagined the morbidity of kitsch on an imperial scale, and would have fallen in line with Albert Goldman's cruelly lurid description of a drug-sodden Elvis, bloated and incontinent, his backside swaddled in giant diapers as he crawled across the fist-thick carpet of his presidential-style suite.

This was a feeling which lasted, in my own case, until the early 1990s. To some extent, Morrissey's rehabilitation of a certain kind of Americana had had the effect of laundering my idea of Elvis (the King was coverstar, bow-tied, quiffed and liquid-eyed, on the sleeve of The Smiths' 1987 single "Shoplifters of The World Unite"). But this was largely cosmetic; my real conversion occurred when a friend passed on the complete set of "Elvis Masters" recordings, which were about to released as three sumptuous boxed sets. Beginning with the plangent simplicity of "Happiness" and "Blue Moon", so scratched and submerged that they could have been retrieved from another planet, and ending with the monolithic, soul-rending humanity of "Suspicious Mind" and "In The Ghetto", my total immersion in the works of Elvis Presley – this must have been some time around 1991 – was rather like one of those mid-stream baptisms where the whole body goes backwards and under. It's how I imagine some people must feel when they discover Beethoven or Mahler.

So all that summer I listened to Elvis, bound up in a love affair with a voice and an image which millions of other people had also come to love. And I began to realise, having felt a rehearsal of this love over the years – for The Beatles, Johnny Ray, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Siouxsie and The Banshees – that Elvis was nothing less than the single, original and irreplaceable template for pop's glamour. And there was more: the King's music, heard in the 1990s, remained complex, radical and utterly modern. "Heartbreak Hotel", with its spooky dead-drops into silence and pared down vigour revealed itself as a hugely sophisticated project – small wonder John Cale chose to perform it during the concert put together by Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers in 1974.

For here in Elvis was a totality of effect: the voice, the image and the performance in holistic harmony; here was the star as the embodiment of his vocal genius. You could understand John Lennon's line, "Before Elvis there was nothing"; and having spent many a moment moved to the luxury of tears by the singing of Elvis Presley, and hearing him as a white expression of a black American experience, it didn't take long for me to start thinking of his music in terms of articulating the reality of the human soul.

Looking around, newly awakened to the magic of Elvis, it swiftly became apparent that I was a late-comer to a drama which had just turned weird. Elvis, since his death, had become the subject of a secular transubstantiation. A brilliant work by Greil Marcus, called Dead Elvis, put forth a bravura theory about what the singer had become in terms of ghost and necrophilia. For Marcus had identified the development of a whole new hybrid of Elvis-derived folk art, stretching from elaborately illuminated fan mail – part sexual fantasy, part breviary – to a punk Gothic fetishising of Elvis as a zombie anti-hero, feeding off the body of corporate culture.

Such high minded theorising was matched by the complete Warholisation of Elvis into a piece of Pop art. Elvis, in this respect, had become atomised into tens of thousands of pieces of kitsch memorabilia. He had been translated, as source material, into what Tom Wolfe described in The Painted Word as the "dopey campy" appeal of popular culture for contemporary aesthetes. His sincerity and seriousness, his genius and originality, were temporarily obscured by a Jeff Koons-style delight in the aesthetics of bad taste.

With the 25th anniversary of his death, the status and legacy of Elvis seems to stand at a cross roads. On the one hand, the "dopey campy" legend of Elvis has become embedded in the public imagination, with the King becoming the multi-purpose signifier for an ironic, cartoon notion of Pop. On the other, this very delight in irony prompts a further observation from the writings of Tom Wolfe in which he attempts to reclaim the substance of popular culture. In an essay entitled Roy Lichtenstein versus Chester Himes, Wolfe describes his belief that that the artists and designers from whom Pop artists sourced their iconic signage – be that a frame from Dick Tracey or a film still of Elvis – are in fact more interesting, more potent in their aesthetics and more sophisticated in their craft, than the elevated works of the Pop artists themselves.

With this in mind you can see how Elvis became due for some revisionist appraisal. Elvis the musician, singer and performer should be valued over Elvis the cartoon zombie. Listening to Elvis singing "Take My Hand Precious Lord Lead Me Home" or "It is no secret what God can do", you hear a voice and an interpretation which is as vital to the totality of Presley's genius as his dandified phrasing on "Fever", the sheer eroticism of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", or his instinctive presence as a performer on the legendary '68 Special. Jeremy Reed's new and extraordinary epic sequence of poems about Elvis, Heartbreak Hotel (Orion), is one of the few anniversary events which liberates the star from a mausoleum of camp Americana. Much of the rest will be seasons of cheesy films and lists of quirky "Elvis Facts".

Perhaps such trivia is in keeping with the origins of fan culture which Presley himself inspired. Today, when I watch footage of his final performances, I am reminded of those sequences in Martin Scorsese's film Raging Bull, where the great boxer has become penned in by the very celebrity which had made him a legend. For Elvis had been like some kind of laboratory animal, shot into space by his fame when our understanding of the long term effects of celebrity was still in its infancy.

If you look at the few grabbed press shots of Presley when he was about 25 and had just left the army, they show a young man who appears to be dissolving through a protective membrane which will separate him forever from the world that the rest of us share. It's a membrane made up of hotel service corridors, drugs and the broad besuited backs of body guards – "my presence like a robe pontifical," as Shakespeare wrote of kings, "ne'er seen but wondered at". Presley's only means of survival behind that membrane were his music and his self-medication; his fame had destroyed his life, but his music is always reborn.

TV programmes to mark the anniversary of Elvis's death include 'There's Only One Elvis', BBC1, Sunday and 'The Elvis Mob', BBC1, Wednesday