Long Live the King : Books: In “Dead Elvis,” cultural <i> provocateur</i> Greil Marcus tells why the Singer Who Won’t Die is immortal.

The Desert Rats have developed their own jargon as they develop their credible force posture. If a soldier is not prepared in the case of a gas attack, he is at risk of becoming Elvis: for Elvis Presley, as the saying goes, “is history.”

--Manchester Guardian, Feb. 3, 1991

Not so fast.

When U.S. troops hit the sands for Desert Storm, you probably thought Elvis was too busy being dead to attend. But far from being history, Elvis sightings were reported to be alive and well throughout the Gulf War, according to pop culture critic Greil Marcus.

That’s not to say that battle-weary soldiers imagined they were taking on the King posthumously. Indeed, it’s probably reasonable to assume that when Elvis died in 1977, he, well, died. Still, there’ve been all those people who refuse to let him go lo these many years later, who keep resurrecting him in all sorts of cultural artifacts--art, music, the vernacular and even Elvis-wear.

“One of my favorite Elvis sightings came a couple of months ago,” says Marcus, who examines Presley’s second cultural coming in his new book, “Dead Elvis.”

“It was an ad in the Village Voice for a costume store. It said, ‘This Halloween, why not go as Elvis as he was,’ and there’s a picture of Elvis looking handsome, ‘or as he is today’ “--as a skull.

“And it was shocking to see someone come out with something like that. Imagine if somebody did that with John F. Kennedy, even Marilyn Monroe. People would be offended. Here there was something so refreshing about it all, all the piety and all of the ‘Is he still alive?’ crap blown away.”

It is Elvis’ odd--and pervasive--legacy to be enjoying a second wind as perhaps the most irreverent symbol of American culture. As Marcus, 46, shows in his pastiche of essays and illustrations, Presley keeps returning for encores in everything from cartoon characters’ musings to the tabloids’ insistence on an eternally alive Elvis, from magazine covers to the personals.

In explaining such abiding cultural quirks, Marcus writes: “I understood Elvis not as a human being . . . but as a force . . . the necessity existing in every culture that leads it to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself. This . . . was what Herman Melville attempted to do with his white whale, but this is what Elvis Presley turned out to be .”

It may be hard to think of the American identity as something discrete, something that could be summed up in one handy symbol, but Elvis’ many sides made him the perfect front man for the country, in Marcus’ view.

“He was the poor country boy who loses his soul in the city. He was the white trash multimillionaire. . . . He was a male sex symbol who to many people was utterly feminine and passive and smooth and vulnerable. He was some kind of revolutionary. . . .

“And when he died he blew apart all these pieces of Elvis and hundreds more. They blew apart separately as if they were all separate atoms and then they began to recombine in new ways.”

And some of those new ways have been incongruous, even disturbing. Presley metamorphosed into an incarnation of Jesus or Der Fuhrer. In 1987, a band dubbed itself Elvis Hitler and issued an album called “Disgraceland.”

Marcus says it was Elvis’ death that breathed new life into his persona. He attributes people’s dark visions of Elvis to the singer’s own strange story. Punk bands gleefully made lyrics out of his tawdry lifestyle, and of his death at age 42 from a heart ailment after years of abusing prescription drugs. What Marcus calls “bizarre manifestations of fandom” began popping up, not the least of which was an Elvis restaurant in Israel guarded by a giant aluminum statue of the King. “Very spooky,” Marcus says.

“This figure who to so many people was so handsome and so powerful became a prisoner in his own movie factory. . . . And he went on these lifeless tours all around the country, singing the same songs, getting fatter and fatter, obviously living a life of pain and misery. And then he died a disgraceful ignominious death and that’s a strange story, and it’s got the wrong endings.”

Why does Elvis maintain his singular stranglehold on the public fancy?

In part, Marcus says, it’s because of the emotional power of his music.

In part, it’s because of the perpetual money machine he left behind--his estate, the tabloids and bootleg manufacturers, all of whom have an interest in stoking the Elvis flame. Long live products like Always Elvis wine, touted as the wine Elvis would have drunk if he drank wine.

“My favorite spinoff for that was that years later, Graceland licensed Love Me Tender Chunks dog food, which they did not advertise as the dog food Elvis would have eaten if he’d been a dog,” Marcus says.

For all the peculiarity of these Elvis “sightings,” Marcus says the more prosaic variety reported in the tabloids--the ‘I saw Elvis at the 7-Eleven’ sightings--are really not peculiar to Elvis at all. The idea of resurrection goes back in time, he notes.

Marcus dates his own fascination to Presley’s 1968 television comeback special, when, Marcus says simply, “he played some of the most exciting rock ‘n’ roll guitar I’d ever heard in my life. He was better than the Beatles. He was better than Bob Dylan. He was better than Mick Jagger.

“And that’s when I began to think, ‘My God! Who is this guy?’ That’s one of the events that turned me into a critic.”

Marcus dropped out of UC Berkeley’s graduate school, where he’d been pursuing a doctorate in political theory, to do just that. After a brief stint as an editor at Rolling Stone in the late ‘60s, he turned to writing articles and books, among them “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” (1989) and “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” (1975).

The longest chapter of “Mystery Train” and the one with the most impact was titled The Presliad, sort of a Tennessee version of The Iliad, which examined Elvis’ early recordings for Sun Records. When Presley died in 1977, Marcus wrote an obituary for Rolling Stone, assuming that was essentially the last chapter.

In fact, when he proposed a deluxe Elvis book that would have been a two-year effort, like-minded--but misguided--publishers turned him down, figuring the singer’s popularity wouldn’t outlive him. “I think we all assumed without putting it in these words that he would become just like James Dean is: He would be a poster in a nostalgia shop,” says Marcus, who lives in Berkeley with his wife, Jenny.

When it became clear that wasn’t happening, Marcus began to write magazine articles about Presley, some of which were compiled and rewritten for “Dead Elvis.”

The book has had wildly divergent reviews. The Times called Marcus “a genius” and the book “a splendid piece of critical art.” The New York Times complained that Marcus’ examination of cutting-edge culture was “peripheral” and that Presley’s true influence was felt in “the tiny towns . . . where people cried when he died.”

But look at it this way: Here it is, nearly 15 years after his death, and they’re still talking about Elvis.

“I think that if the music had lost its power, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this,” Marcus says of all these Elvisisms, as he calls them. “It comes down to that. It comes down to the way he sang, to a sense of freedom, a sense of loss, a sense of regret, a sense of excitement that you can hear in his voice when he sings.”