When you find yourself in opposition to the current youth, remind yourself that you have simply grown old. A perfect paradigm for this patently evident rule is that Elvis Presley was a hated radical shaking up the stilted state of affairs, and then suddenly, he found himself taking up that same view against his successors. The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll transformed America with his hip-snaking ways, but unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a fan of what he had begotten.
The irony of his hatred of the revolutionaries that followed in his wake is profound. As one letter from a former Army Intelligence Service officer to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover stated in 1956: “[Elvis is] a definite danger to the security of the United States”. Continuing: “[His] actions and motions were such as to arouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. One eye-witness described his actions as ‘sexual self-gratification on stage,’ – another as ‘a strip-tease with clothes on’.”
Before troublingly concluding: “It is known by psychologists, psychiatrists, and priests that teenaged girls from the age of eleven,” which doesn’t even make them teenagers, evidencing his twisting of facts, “and boys in their adolescence are easily aroused to sexual indulgence and perversion by certain types of motions and hysteria, – the type that was exhibited at the Presley show. There is also gossip of the Presley Fan Clubs that degenerate into sex orgies. From eye-witness reports about Presley, I would judge that he may possibly be a drug addict and a sexual pervert.”
While that might make for very problematic reading, the fact that Elvis was toured around the FBI headquarters ten days after meeting Nixon in 1970 as an ally figure shows just how fast the sexual liberation of pop culture unfurled beyond his own liking. When Elvis was there, he shared his belief that “the Smothers Brothers, Jane Fonda, and other persons in the entertainment industry of their ilk had poisoned young minds by disparaging the United States in their public statements and unsavoury activities.”
However, it was The Beatles that he thought had sullied the fine nation of the United States of America the most. “It was a period of – what else can you call it? – pandemonium. We four guys from Liverpool couldn’t possibly realise then the implications of what we were doing,” reflects in 1964: Eyes of the Storm.
Philosophically, he muses: “Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening. Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the ’60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation.”
Elvis was part of a previous generation, and the freedoms the new kids were trying to strong-arm into existence upset his increasingly conservative disposition. In fact, it is rumoured that he offered to spy on John Lennon to help Richard Nixon drum up charges that would have the peace and love singer deported from the Land of the Free.
Lodged in the FBI vault is a 663-page report on “Presley, Elvis A”. Within that, we learn that “he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit.” Furthermore, he was also “of the opinion that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music.”
That is the measured discourse he conveyed to the authorities, but according to his publicist, if you mentioned John Lennon around him in private, the Kung Fu fighting burger king would “fly into a rage”. However, you can equally feel his hatred from the logged notes of his meeting with President Nixon. “He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme,“ they read, marking perhaps the most infamous case of never meeting your heroes in history.
