Hanif Abdurraqib on Ellen Willis’s Elvis Vegas Review
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Elvis’s 1969 Las Vegas Resurrection: A Review of Ellen Willis’s Insight
Table of Contents
an exploration of Elvis Presley’s artistic rebirth through the lens of Ellen Willis’s groundbreaking review of his 1969 las Vegas performances.
The Turning Point: From Film to the Stage
I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What I am abundantly interested in is resurrection, which means there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when well illuminated, I find myself hovering over with fascination, or a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, drew me right in.
There is no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great,but what makes her work compelling,and what most informs my own writing,is that Willis-The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic-was never afraid to be overtaken by unexpected delight,even if it came at the expense of some preëxisting skepticism. Those two traits-skepticism and the potential for pleasure-exist at the intersection of Las vegas and Elvis, especially during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweat-drenched singer laboring through the hotel residencies of the subsequent decade, sluggishly dragging himself along for the sake of a paycheck.
The elvis whom Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead but from a long stretch of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led to film roles and soundtrack recordings and away, largely, from the stage. The previous year had marked a turnaround: there was the triumph of his comeback special, which was shot in June and aired in December. But to prove that he was fully back would require conquering Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.
Ellen Willis’s Insightful Review
there’s a striking moment in her piece, a sort of mini-twist, when you can sense Willis’s mode of observation shift from bewilderment to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright enjoyment.It happens after Elvis arrives onstage, when Willis takes him in for the first time. She’s amazed by his new, slimmer physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also puzzled by his hair, dyed black and no longer slicked into the famous ducktail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to look younger, he’s not interested in performing as he did in his youth. She marvels at his playfulness, becomes fixated on his earnestness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s…
“[Quote from Willis’s review about Elvis’s performance of ‘In the G