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Beyond even that, Presley inspired his audience. “It was like he whispered his dream in all our ears and then we dreamed it,” said Springsteen at the time of Presley’s death. You did not have to want to be a rock and roll star or even a musician to want to be like Elvis—which meant, ultimately, to be free and uninhibited and yet still a part of the everyday. Literally millions of people—an entire generation or two—defined their sense of personal style and ambition in terms that Elvis first personified.

As a result, he was anything but universally adored. Those who did not worship him found him despicable (no one found him ignorable). Preachers and pundits declared him an anathema, his Pentecostally derived hip-swinging stage style and breathy vocal asides obscene. Racists denounced him for mingling Black music with white (and Presley was always scrupulous in crediting his Black sources, one of the things that made him different from the Tin Pan Alley writers and singers who had for decades lifted Black styles without credit). He was pronounced responsible for all teenage hooliganism and juvenile delinquincy. Yet, in every appearance on television, he appeared affable , polite, and soft-spoken, almost shy. It was only with a band at his back and a beat in his ear that he became “Elvis the Pelvis.”

In 1960 Presley returned from the army, where he had served as a soldier in Germany rather than joining the Special Services entertainment division. Those who regarded him as commercial hype without talent expected him to fade away. Instead, he continued to have hits from recordings stockpiled just before he entered the army. Upon his return to the States, he picked up pretty much where he had left off, churning out a series of more than 30 movies (from Blue Hawaii [1961] to Change of Habit [1969]) over the next eight years, almost none of which fit any genre other than “Elvis movie,” which meant a light comedic romance with musical interludes. Most had accompanying soundtrack albums, and together the movies and the records made him a rich man, although they nearly ruined him as any kind of artist. Presley did his best work in the 1960s on singles either unconnected to the films or only marginally stuck into them, recordings such as “It’s Now or Never (‘O Sole Mio’)" (1960), “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” “Little Sister” (both 1961), “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Return to sender” (both 1962), and “Viva Las Vegas” (1964). Presley was no longer a controversial figure; he had become one more predictable mass entertainer, a personage of virtually no interest to the rock audience that had expanded so much with the advent of the new sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Dylan.

By 1968 the changes in the music world had overtaken Presley—both movie grosses and record sales had fallen. In December his one-man Christmas TV special aired; a of rock and tour de force roll and rhythm and blues, it restored much of his dissipated credibility. In 1969 he released a single having nothing to do with a film, “Suspicious Minds”; it went to number one. He also began doing concerts again and quickly won back a sizable following, although it was not nearly as universal as his audience in the 1950s—in the main, it was Southern and Midwestern, working-class and unsophisticated, and overwhelmingly female. For much of the next decade, he was again one of the top live attractions in the United States. (For a variety of reasons, he never performed outside North America.) Presley was now a mainstream American entertainer, an icon but not so much an idol. He had married in 1967 without much furor, became a parent with the birth of his daughter, Lisa Marie, in 1968, and got divorced in 1973. He made no more movies, although there was a good concert film, Elvis on Tour. His recordings were of uneven quality, but on each album he included a song or two that had focus and energy. Hits were harder to come by—“Suspicious Minds” was his last number one and “Burning Love” (1972) his final Top Ten entry. But, thanks to the concerts, spectaculars best described by critic Jon Landau as an apotheosis of American musical comedy, he remained a big money earner. He now lacked the ambition and power of his early work, but that may have been a good thing—he never seemed a dated relic of the 1950s trying to catch up to trends but was just a performer, unrelentingly himself.

However, Presley had also developed a lethal lifestyle. Spending almost all his time when not on the road in , Graceland his Memphis estate (actually just a big Southern colonial house decorated somewhere between banal modernity and garish faux-Vegas opulence), he lived nocturnally, surrounded by sychophants and stuffed with greasy foods and a variety of prescription drugs. His shows deteriorated in the final two years of his life, and his recording career came to a virtual standstill. Presley never seemed confident in his status, never entirely certain that he would not collapse back into sharecropper poverty, and, as a result, he seems to have become immobilized; the man who had risked everything, including potential ridicule, to make himself a success now lived in the lockstep regimin of an addict and recluse. Finally, in the summer of 1977, the night before he was to begin yet another concert tour, he died of a heart attack brought on largely by drug abuse. He was 42 years old.

Almost immediately upon hearing of his death, mourners from around the world gathered at Graceland to say farewell to the poor boy who had lived out the American dream. In a way, that mourning has never ceased: Graceland remains one of the country’s top tourist attractions, and Presley’s albums and other artifacts continue to sell briskly. Each August crowds flock to Graceland to honour him on the anniversary not of his birth but of his death. From time to time rumours cropped up that he did not really die, that his death was a fake designed to free him from fame. Elvis impersonators are legion. His biggest fans—working-class white women, almost exclusively—passed their fanaticism on to their children, or at least to a surprising number of daughters. “Elvis has left the building,” but those who are still inside have decided to carry on regardless. Once more, Elvis Presley is triumphant, although this triumph is shadowed by something far less than happiness.

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