All Shook Up

It was among the more indelible images of the 1992 presidential campaign: then-46-year-old Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee--struggling in the polls against his better-funded opponents, incumbent Republican President George Bush and billionaire Reform Party founder Ross H. Perot--took a chance on his baby-boomer appeal and sauntered onto the “Arsenio Hall Show” wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers and blowing the Elvis Presley hit “Heartbreak Hotel” on his saxophone. Clinton, of course, was raised in Hot Springs, Ark., within 150 miles of Graceland, and knew exactly what he was doing in wooing the so-called Elvis Vote: proving, as critic Greil Marcus writes in “Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives,” that he could “cut himself down to size” and “at the same time try to take off and fly.” A disarmed Bush immediately jabbed back, in an attempt at pop-culture politicking of his own, that Clinton’s “Elvis Economics” would turn the White House into America’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” Clinton won the election.

“Double Trouble” takes up where Marcus’ 1991 “Dead Elvis” leaves off, updating through the Clinton years the author’s study of the continuous influence “the King” has had on American society since his death in 1977. From 1992 to 2000, Marcus compiled comparisons of the two charismatic Southerners and contributed articles of his own on the notion to periodicals including Artforum, Interview, the San Francisco Examiner, SF Weekly and the New York Times. The result is “Double Trouble,” a collection of 40 short essays brimming with savvy commentary, pithy anecdotes, trenchant observations and rollicking satire. Although “Double Trouble” doesn’t measure up to Marcus’ best books--1975’s “Mystery Train” and 1999’s “Invisible Republic”--it does offer irresistibly offbeat glimpses into the zeitgeist of the last decade of the 20th century.

The title “Double Trouble” derives from the Doc Pomus-Mort Shuman song performed by Presley in his 1967 movie of the same name. What’s more, as Marcus points out in one essay written during Clinton’s impeachment hearings, the Elvis movie “Double Trouble” is, of all things, about a magnetic Southern nightclub singer being pursued by a smitten 17-year-old heiress and used by a calculating woman his own age--characters not unlike the president, intern Monica Lewinsky and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Yet in a sparkling essay titled “The Last Laugh”--originally delivered as the keynote address on Aug. 14, 1998, at a University of Memphis conference--Marcus garners analytical inspiration for his new book from pop artist Andy Warhol’s giant silk-screen “Double Elvis,” a duplicated still image from the 1960 Elvis B-movie “Flaming Star” of the rocker in cowboy garb, with his legs spread like a gunslinger’s and his pistol thrust forward. Warhol proudly presented “Double Elvis” as a gift to Bob Dylan, who was so unimpressed he traded it to his manager, Albert Grossman, for a used sofa. Today “Double Elvis” hangs in Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum and is worth millions, while dozens of other artists have paid homage to the painting with their own double, triple and even quadruple Elvises.

“The whole complex of who Elvis is, where he came from, where he went, is in this picture,” Marcus writes of the pop art icon. “I can’t begin to make it hold still, to make it talk. The Elvises in this picture can’t talk, and they don’t even try. Shoot first, ask questions later.”

Marcus tries to answer some of the many questions Presley unwittingly raises about America’s celebrity-obsessed popular culture. “The seemingly mindless identification of the dead Elvis Presley with a host of demons and fiends in the 1990s was a testament to his exile in his own culture,” Marcus writes. “[I]t was also a replay of the assault this son of the Great Awakening had faced in 1956, when a preacher, speaking for millions, famously declared him morally insane.”

Peter Guralnick, author of “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love,” may be the leading biographical authority on the real Elvis, but Marcus stakes a claim here to authority on what Elvis represents: the essential contradictions that define American society. Marcus explains that Presley, like the United States itself, is in the eye of the beholder: insolent yet polite, vain yet humble, juvenile delinquent yet a pious churchgoer, a multimillionaire with trailer-park tastes.

In “Double Trouble,” Marcus draws direct parallels between Presley and Clinton, painting them both as instinctive outsiders: white male Southerners raised in poverty who created complicated personas to escape the image of the white trash hillbilly and failed. “Both Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton reaped all the rewards available in American society except one: moral citizenship,” Marcus contends. “Both remain figures by which that quality can be defined, which is to say that it is defined by, among other things, the degree to which one can believe he or she is better than either or both. Our attraction to both is inseparable from our need to prove to ourselves that we are different from them--to prove that if we will never rise so high, we would never sink so low.” Together, Marcus argues, these two charmers embody the fractured psychological tug of war over puritanical righteousness versus Hollywood-style debauchery.

The best essays in “Double Trouble” deal with the cultural connection between Presley and Clinton that novelist Salman Rushdie has also made. Although at first this thesis may seem overblown, Marcus makes a convincing case early in the thoughtful introduction to his book that Presley really is the perfect lens through which to view Clinton--plus it’s fun. As Marcus documents, it is astounding how many smart columnists and high-profile pundits have drawn the comparison over the years: in 1992, for example, the Washington Post dubbed Clinton “Elvis with a calculator on his belt,” while earlier this year New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, upon hearing that the president was mulling a run for the U.S. Senate in Arkansas in 2002, joked, “Elvis will never leave the building.” As Marcus puts it in his post-impeachment analysis, “For both Elvis and Clinton, one dead, one back from the dead, behind all the hysterical and gaudy obloquy is the suspicion that each could have been everything he ever promised he would be--and, in the common imagination, still can be.” Just as Elvis could convince his fans seated far away in a theater balcony that he was singing directly to them, Clinton can effortlessly con whomever he is chatting up that they’re the most important people in the room.

Only about half of the essays in “Double Trouble” deal with the Presley-Clinton symbiosis; unfortunately, the book is padded with quirky obituaries of radical cultural figures such as Kurt Cobain, Allen Ginsberg and Mario Savio, apparently included mostly to boost the page count. Two of these pieces--a self-indulgent reflection on the Velvet Underground and a curmudgeonly review of Donovan’s CD boxed set “Troubadour: The Definitive Collection 1964-1976”--are clearly filler. But this is definitely not the case with Marcus’ three strong essays on Dylan, including the elegant tribute “Tell-Tale Heart,” written a few years back, when the legendary poet-musician was hospitalized with a rare cardiac ailment. Marcus’ review of Dylan’s 1997 Grammy Award-winning album “Time Out of Mind” marks another high point in “Double Trouble,” as when he writes, “This is as bleak and blasted as any work a major artist in any field--and by major artist I mean an artist with something, a reputation, an audience, to lose--has offered in ages.” Marcus continues: “At first the music is shocking in its bitterness, in its refusal of comfort or kindness. Then it settles into something, like a conventional set of songs, and then a curve in one of them--the finality of a life left behind in the way Dylan gets rid of the seemingly traditional lines ‘I been to Sugartown I shook the sugar down’ in ‘Tryin’ To Get to Heaven,’ perhaps, or the long quiet drift of ‘Highlands,’ a number so unassumingly mysterious you feel it could unwind its ball of string over the entire length of the record without exhausting itself--up-ends any casual listening and throws every bit of wordplay or quiet testimony into harsh relief, revealing a tale that is finished and whole.”

Whether he is reviewing David Adler’s “The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley” or praising P.J. Harvey’s voice or dissecting Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or analyzing Harry Smith’s 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” the erudite Marcus always probes for the deeper sociological meaning of whatever is at hand, assigning historical significance to the seemingly commonplace, poignancy to the bizarre and purpose to the banal. Few critics of American popular culture share Marcus’ facility for analyzing movies, music, journalism and avant-garde literature. He is a scholar in a field populated mostly by enthusiasts and hacks.

Yet Marcus is most impressive when he is the least high-toned, as in “Double Trouble’s” moving essay “The Roger Clinton Experience,” despite the arch allusion to electric guitar legend Jimi Hendrix atop his account of a benefit concert at the I-Beam, a post-punk nightclub in Haight-Ashbury where he went in October 1992 to hear Bill Clinton’s little brother Roger’s stylings of stale R&B; standards. Much of the piece is what you’d expect: harsh one-liners, nasty put-downs and other hilariously vicious mockery. “The material was as bland as could be with edges coming only from the band,” Marcus wrote. “Roger Clinton looked like Mickey Dolenz, mugged like Francis the Talking Mule, and oozed smarm.” But then Marcus drops his stiletto and fesses up: It seemed that everybody there that night was having a great time, laughing and bopping happily to well-chosen selections like Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright” and Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog.” However easy, self-satisfying and entertainingly callous an opportunity Roger Clinton’s performance might have afforded a New York Times music columnist, Marcus instead chose to report the truth: There was also something somehow stirring in the younger Clinton’s spectacle. “Maybe,” Marcus wrote, “it was the human scale of the event; maybe it was that the person representing Bill Clinton, who may soon be forgotten but who this night seemed very big, was someone as small as you or I.” That kind of blunt honesty is rare among critics, particularly when such a cheap and easy shot is there for the taking. To his credit, for all his erudition, Marcus can, as poet Rudyard Kipling put it, “walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch,” which is what makes for smart analyses of Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton and other commoners-turned-kings.