Cristina Harris started the Elvis Presley crooner “Today, Tomorrow, and Forever” without warning. She just sat at the keyboard and began working through the changes. It was more than enough. All the conversation in the room quieted. The Buddy Holly that the bar was playing over the sound system faded.
By the time she started singing, there was no other sound in the room but the music. She turned the lush arrangement from the movie Viva Las Vegas into a stark, fragile thing that held the audience rapt, even reverential, until the very end.
Reverential might be the best word to describe this year’s evening of tribute to Elvis at Cafe Nine. Thrown Thursday night on the eve of his birthday — he’d be 81 this year — the musicians on stage, who almost never even introduced themselves, eschewed hip-shaking for just singing and playing their best, paying their respects to an idol whose star seems to have faded very little, nearly 40 years after his death.
Throwing a tribute night to Elvis would make for a successful evening in just about any bar in America. Like Mojo Nixon said back in 1987, “Elvis is everywhere / Elvis is everything / Elvis is everybody / Elvis is still the king.” Even the surface of Presley’s persona dazzles. There’s the gold lamé suit and the long-running Vegas residency. There are all those movies. There’s the secret 1970 Oval Office meeting between Presley and then-president Richard Nixon, during which Elvis asked for, and got, a badge from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The photograph of the president and the king shaking hands is apparently the most-requested image from the National Archives. A lot of people even know what Elvis’s favorite sandwich was.
People don’t cry when they visit Graceland because of any of that, though. Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a shotgun house in 1935 in Tupelo, Ms. to parents who had to move out of it a few years later due to lack of payment. He had a twin brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn. It haunted Presley for his entire life. He had to hang around Sun Studios in Memphis, Tn. for a year before producer Sam Phillips heard in him anything other than a talented but (at the time) uninteresting ballad singer. The story goes that Presley pulled out “That’s All Right,” the song that started him on the path to superstardom, as a last-ditch effort when he realized he was blowing it with Phillips at the recording session Phillips finally granted him in 1954. Superstardom also wasn’t easy. There was the strange, vampiric relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who managed probably way too many aspects of the star’s life and wore a Hawaiian shirt to Presley’s funeral in 1977. Presley’s career had lows to go with the highs, before his substance abuse problems killed him.
But as Sam Phillips said, “regardless of what happened to Elvis in his latter years, he had one of the strongest souls and spirits about him of any person I’ve ever seen.”
And man, could he sing.
Which is why covering one of his songs as a tribute to him is a liberating experience. You can’t touch the vocal performance on any of his songs. So why even try?
I signed up early with Margaret Milano, the tribute’s organizer, in hopes of snagging “Love Me Tender.” My angle: as a banjo player who’s played a lot more stuff from the 1920s and 1930s than from the 1950s, I knew that Elvis’s hit lifted its melody from the popular 1861 tune “Aura Lea.” The song had never quite fallen into obscurity and was in the public domain by the time music director Ken Darby rewrote the lyrics to be the theme song for a movie originally called The Reno Brothers; the title of the movie was changed to Love Me Tender when Elvis (who also appeared in the movie) had a hit with the song just before the movie’s release. Meanwhile “Aura Lee” continued its existence as a folk song, often beautifully recorded. I thought it might be fun to play “Love Me Tender” as if it were still “Aura Lee” — and by doing so, pay some respects to where Elvis was from, and the crazy road he’d taken.
I had worried that maybe I was taking my duties to cover Elvis a little too seriously. That turned out to be unfounded. Just as Harris had found the edge in a number from Viva Las Vegas, so D.W. Ditty reminded us just how close Elvis had been to the blues after all, even on songs like “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.”
Gary Mezzi, a.k.a Buzz Gordo, ripped through a set of Elvis songs that he picked on the fly, from “Little Sister” and “Girl Happy” to the whoever-heard-this-before? “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce” (also from Girl Happy) and “Kentucky Rain,” which turned into a sing-along. “Thank you very much,” he said as he finished. “Am I the first person to say that tonight?”
Christoph Whitbeck scored major points with the audience for vocal stylings that got closest to Presley’s, on “Blue Christmas” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
“One more!” a woman behind me shouted at the end of his set. “Elvis says one more!”
By the time I got to my set the audience was still eager for more. The chatter stopped three notes into my sparse rendition of “Love Me Tender.” About 15 minutes before my set, I realized this would be a great time to pull out not a song by Elvis, but a song about Elvis, written by a friend of mine named Drew Bunting. I texted him for the lyrics. He obliged, and I got up on stage and sang his song, the aptly titled “Song for Elvis,” reaching over with one hand to scroll through the words on my phone as I played.
Filled with tragedy and humor, but above all, a real grief at both his early death and the price he paid for fame, it ends with the mantra “build a new Graceland wherever you are.”
The song went over well. “That was great,” said the same woman who had shouted to Whitbeck for more. “Elvis is happy.”
Paul Panamarenko closed the night with a wistful “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a fitting end to a night filled as much with remembrance, and even with a little sadness, as with celebration.
I said before that a tribute to Elvis would probably go over big in any bar in America, and perhaps beyond. But somehow it also seems particularly suited to the Elm City. Musically, it fits with New Haven’s ongoing fetish for 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, which shows up in ways large and small — from the kinds of guitar sounds that local bands prefer, regardless of what kind of music they’re playing, to the kinds of acts that manage to make a successful night of passing through town once or twice a year. But in a deeper way, New Haven and Elvis understand each other. If the audience was any indication, its musicians did OK by the King. Though with songs that good, and all our hearts in the right place, it makes sense that it should come out all right, any way we do.