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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 | 15culture
The 1960s may have been a wildly trans-
formative decade in the history of popu-
lar music, but for Elvis Presley it was
something of a black hole.
When he returned from his two-year
hitch in the Army in 1960, the king of
rock ’n’ roll essentially retired from live
performing, confining himself to mak-
ing movies (which were growing stead-
ily worse) and recording disposable pop
songs (that were no longer reaching the
charts). A much-praised television
comeback special on NBC in December
1968 had put him back on the radar. But
when he finally returned to the stage for
the first time in more than eight years,
for a four-week engagement at Las Veg-
as’s new International Hotel, there was
no guarantee he could still deliver on-
stage.
Elvis’s Vegas comeback show was 50
years ago, on July 31, 1969 — a milestone
being celebrated by a new Sony 11-CD
boxed set of his ’69 Vegas perform-
ances, a reunion concert in Memphis
this month and probably some snickers
from the rock classicists. Elvis’s Vegas
years are mostly recalled as a period of
commercial excess and artistic decline:
the bombastic shows, the gaudy white
jumpsuits, the ballooning weight, the er-
ratic stage behavior, the drugs. “For
many,” wrote Dylan Jones in “Elvis Has
Left the Building,” “Vegas Elvis was al-
ready Dead Elvis.”
But for that 1969 comeback, and at
least a year or two after, Elvis was at his
peak as a stage performer, and he creat-
ed a show that not only revitalized his
career but changed the face of Las Ve-
gas entertainment.
The singer and the city had a long re-
lationship. Elvis first appeared in Las
Vegas in 1956, when he was just break-
ing out — he hadn’t appeared on “The
Ed Sullivan Show” yet — and found him-
self booked into the New Frontier Hotel,
on a bill with Freddy Martin’s orchestra
and the comedian Shecky Greene. The
show was pretty much a dud; the mid-
dle-aged nightclubbers didn’t know
what to make of him. “For the teen-
agers, he’s a whiz,” wrote Variety’s
critic; “for the average Vegas spender, a
fizz.”
But Elvis loved Las Vegas, and the
city became his favorite getaway.
He came back often: retreating there
between movie shoots, seeing shows,
picking up showgirls, partying all night
with his Memphis pals. He shot his mov-
ie “Viva Las Vegas” there in 1963. He
married Priscilla at the Aladdin Hotel
there in 1967. So when his manager,
Colonel Tom Parker, finally decided it
was time for a return to the concert
stage, Vegas was not as odd a choice as
it might have seemed.
Las Vegas also needed a boost. At the
beginning of the decade, with Sinatra
and the Rat Pack riding high, the town
was the white-hot center for live enter-
tainment in America. By the end of the
’60s, however, the golden years were
fading fast. The arrival of the Beatles,
the rise of the counterculture — all of it
was making Vegas look decidedly worn.
None of the major rock artists of the era
— the Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin —
wanted anything to do with the city. The
younger generation was going to arena
concerts, not hanging out in the Sands
Hotel lounge. So it was fitting that Las
Vegas, a town blindsided by the rock
revolution, would turn to a megawatt
rock ’n’ roll star as the agent of its re-
invention two weeks before Woodstock
would take place in upstate New York.
Elvis’s return to the stage in Vegas
was a make-or-break career gamble.
Colonel Parker had envisioned a tradi-
tional Vegas show, with chorus girls and
choreography. Elvis wanted something
different: a concert to reconnect him
with his fans and showcase all the music
he loved.
“This was the deprived musician,
who had not been able to control his mu-
sic, either in the recording studio or the
movies,” said his longtime friend JerrySchilling. “And now he was going to sat-
isfy all his musical desires on that
stage.”
Elvis handpicked a new backup band
(headed by the guitar great James Bur-
ton), added two backup singing groups
(a male gospel quartet, the Imperials,
and a female soul group, the Sweet In-
spirations, whose lead singer at the time
was Cissy Houston), and filled out the
sound with a 40-plus-piece orchestra.
The International’s 2,000-seat show-
room was twice as large as any other in
Vegas, and the sold-out venue was
packed on opening night with celebri-
ties and Vegas VIPs, along with dozens
of rock journalists and critics, many
flown in from New York on the hotel ti-
tan Kirk Kerkorian’s private jet. Behind
the scenes, Elvis was so nervous he al-
most had to be pushed out onstage. “I
saw in his face the look of terror,” said
the comedian Sammy Shore, his open-
ing act. But when Elvis walked out, to a
throbbing rhythm intro, grabbed the mi-
crophone with a trembling hand, and
launched into “Blue Suede Shoes,” the
audience went wild.It was the old Elvis, rocking as hard as
ever, on a song he hadn’t done in a dec-
ade. He followed with more vintage hits
— “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,”
“Hound Dog.” He did them faster than in
the old days, almost as if he wanted to
get through them as quickly as possible,
to get to the more mature and varied
material he was starting to record. He
sang “In the Ghetto,” the social-protest
song that had been released in the
spring and became a hit. He did covers
of songs identified with other artists —
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Ray
Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the
Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
The high point of the show was a gal-
vanic, seven-minute version of a song al-
most no one in the crowd had heard be-
fore: “Suspicious Minds,” which would
be released during his Vegas run and
give him his first No. 1 hit in seven years.
The show lasted an hour and 15 min-
utes, and Elvis was on fire throughout —
prowling the stage like a panther, doing
karate kicks, sweating and downing wa-
ter and Gatorade. He was huffing and
puffing after just a few minutes, but the
voice never faltered: richer, more ex-
pressive, more powerful than ever. “I
never saw anything like it in my life,”
said Mac Davis, the singer-songwriter
who had written “In the Ghetto” for him
and was in the audience that night. “You
couldn’t take your eyes off the guy. It
was just crazy. Women rushing the
stage, people clamoring over each other.
I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face the
entire time.”
Presley talked to the audience, too —
nervously, with a few corny jokes and a
lot of self-deprecating asides (much in
evidence on the full-show recordings in
the new boxed set). But that was part of
the appeal: This was no slick Vegas per-
former with polished jokes and pro-
grammed patter. Elvis seemed just as
awed by the occasion as everyone in the
audience.
He played for four solid weeks, seven
nights a week, two shows a night — not a
single evening off — and every gig was
sold out. The critics raved; David Dalton
in Rolling Stone called Elvis “supernatu-
ral, his own resurrection.” Richard Gold-
stein, writing in The New York Times,
said watching him “felt like getting hit in
the face with a bucket of melted ice. He
looked so timeless up there, so con-
stant.” The hotel instantly signed him up
for five more years.
Elvis brought something new to Las
Vegas: not an intimate, Rat Pack-style
nightclub show, but a big rock-concert
extravaganza. He showed that rock ’n’
roll (and country and R&B too) could
work on the big Vegas stage. And he
brought in a new kind of audience, not
the Vegas regulars and high rollers, but
a broader, more middle-American
crowd: female fans who had screamed
for Elvis as teenagers, families who
made Elvis the centerpiece of their sum-
mer vacation. It was the same audience
that Vegas would discover, over the next
couple of decades, as it embarked on its
own reinvention — a foretaste of the Ve-
gas we know today, the Vegas of Cirque
du Soleil, theme-park hotels and (more
recently) a new generation of pop-star
residencies, from Elton John to Lady
Gaga.
Elvis soon grew bored with Vegas,
and the shows began to deteriorate. But
it’s easy to forget what an engaged, dy-
namic, even inspiring performer he was
in 1969. Elvis in the ’50s had been the
great divider: the musical artist who
split the culture in two — between the
adults, who listened to the pop stand-
ards and Hit Parade tunes, and the kids,
who were listening to a newfangled mu-
sic called rock ’n’ roll.
By the end of the 1960s (a decade in
which that divide grew even starker),
Elvis was the great uniter: gathering all
the music he loved, from rockabilly to
operatic ballads, in one great democrat-
ic embrace. He didn’t need to be the
coolest thing in rock. He wanted to sing
to everybody.
He did. And in the process he helped
transform a city.When it really was viva Las Vegas
Richard Zoglin is the author of “Elvis in
Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las
Vegas Show,” published by Simon &
Schuster.In 1969, Elvis Presley
and the gambling mecca
both got a needed rebootBY RICHARD ZOGLINPHOTOGRAPHS BY FOTOS INTERNATIONAL/GETTY IMAGESElvis Presley’s 1969 show at the International Hotel helped rebrand Las Vegas as a new kind of entertainment hub.“You couldn’t take your eyes off
the guy. It was just crazy.”A curious form of mystery builds in
“The Vexations,” the debut novel by
Caitlin Horrocks. This suspense has
little to do with the narrative’s central
character, an aspiring French com-
poser named Eric, who eventually
becomes Erik Satie: the famous author
of the melancholic, graceful
“Gymnopédies,” as well as the proto-
conceptual-art composition that gives
the book its title.
Whether one knows these works
intimately or not, a reader can’t help
being aware that Satie is not going to
be confined to the margins of Mont-
martre’s bohemia forever. (And youprobably doknow the first of those
“Gymnopédies,” a beautiful, pensive
piece that turns up in movies as differ-
ent as the mellow, existentialist com-
edy “My Dinner With Andre” and the
explicitly erotic “Love.”) Deprived of
the element of surprise, Horrocks
instead wrings drama from her method
of narration.
In alternating chapters, “The Vexa-
tions” shifts among several vantage
points, including that of Satie; his
brother, Conrad; the painter and art-
ist’s model Suzanne Valadon, with
whom Satie is infatuated; as well as a
poet and sometime collaborator of
Satie’s named Philippe — a figure
invented by Horrocks but loosely
based on his friend the Spanish poet
Patrice Contamine de Latour.
These characters offer insights into
Satie’s childhood and his years of quasi
penury and anonymity in fin de siècle
Paris. But as literary vehicles, they
cannot match the voice of Satie’s often-
estranged sister, Louise, the longest-lived member of his family, which
scattered shortly after the death of the
siblings’ mother when they were still
very young.
Crucially, Louise tells her story in
the first person, and Horrocks’s novel
is at its most vivid when inhabiting her
voice. Louise yearns for a closer rela-
tionship with her brothers, and la-
ments a patriarchal society that pre-
vents her from competing with them
for distinction in the world. “Somebody
has to be extraordinary. Why not you?”
Louise thinks at one point, considering
Erik’s musical promise as she nurses
him through a health crisis. “Then:
Why not me?”
Later on, when an elderly relative
cites Louise’s lack of financial experi-
ence as a legal pretext for deeming her
unfit as a mother, Louise confides:
“Deep inside I laughed — a man who
hadn’t even wanted me to have a
purse? He would have taught a boy, I
thought bitterly. He would have taught
a boy all these things.”Little else in the novel is as en-
thralling as Louise’s intelligence. The
other characters spend time in the
Chat Noir cabaret and the rest of
Paris’s bohemian attractions while
Louise is stuck in the provinces. But
their observations have a stock quality,expressing the petty jealousies and
insecurities familiar to any cadre of
creative strivers.
So why take leave of Louise’s con-
sciousness at all? As her passages
become the book’s most arresting, this
choice becomes a pressing question.
Horrocks’s explanation arrives in the
final chapter, where she hints at a
grand pattern underlying the novel as
a whole, to which Louise holds the
clues.
Whether or not a reader cottons to
this stratagem, it levies some costs
along the way. The chapters devoted to
Erik are the least psychologically
involving; and much of the balance of
the novel is concerned with characters
who profess ignorance of music in
general, and of Erik’s in particular. His
brother, Conrad, says that he likes
Erik’s music — but he also lacks the
language to say much about why he
does.
That’s not a problem shared by
Horrocks, as passages in Louise’schapters make clear. Late in the novel,
Louise sagaciously describes Satie’s
“Pièces Froides” as “slim ladies in
gloves and scarves and interesting
hats, not snowmen with stone eyes.”
Such moments of musical insight are
far too few. Eager to challenge conven-
tional notions of genius in a society in
which men’s talents were nurtured at
the expense of women’s, Horrocks is
attuned to the possibility that Louise
might have made equal or greater
contributions to culture if only she’d
been given more opportunities and
encouragement. But in “The Vexa-
tions,” Louise is effectively sidelined
for long stretches, and clever as it is,
Horrocks’s belated revelation about
why she has structured her novel this
way cannot make up for the many
pages in which readers have been
deprived of its most musical voice.Bohemian rhapsody
BOOK REVIEWThe Vexations
By Caitlin Horrocks. 451 pp. Little, Brown
& Company. $28.BY SETH COLTER WALLSSeth Colter Walls is a contributing
music critic for The Times and the
author of the novel “Gaza, Wyoming.”Caitlin Horrocks.TYLER STEIMLEРЕ
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