Present At The Creation-An Encore 

 

Elvis in all his glory and all our envy, then and in our creaky now

Sam Lowell comment:

Sure we are today on the high side of 2016  very far removed from the rockabilly side of the origins of rock and rock (now called the classic age of rock to distinguish it from undergone many permutations and transformations on its way to a niche in history). But for one moment, one brief moment as it turned out, we, those of us who came of age, came of musical age if no other in the 1950s were present at the creation. Maybe kicking and screaming if we were boys, young boys just on the cusp of knowing about girls and their charms and their sassiness after years of seeing them as just plain nuisance. Grousing, although nobody would have known to use that term and if they had they would have gotten serious harassment for daring to us a word only the teacher would know and therefore their knowledge was sucking up to said teacher, about how we didn’t compare with Elvis as much as we slicked back out hair, moved our cranky hips or forced that sneer the girls just starting their own kicking and screaming over guys, guys who were not the boys who thought that they previously were just nuisances, said they wished they could take off his face. And the way they screamed, the way they put us down for being, well, just kids really meant a lifetime of doing this or that thing they had in mind. Some things you just cannot get away from.  

But from that moment we said rock and roll will never die. Although it has gone through all those transformations and no longing is the central music which drives the young to distraction and their parents to despair. And through the good offices of YouTube it now never will. You will be eternally able to see what your parents and maybe your grandparents were going crazy over. Eternally able to see what it was like for men and women to play rock and roll for keeps. A retro-thanks Elvis even if I still can’t move those hips of mine, those sideburns have long faded to boys’ regular and I have had more occasions than I care to remember when some women tried to take a very different kind of sneer off my face.