elvis presley

Notable events from our shared experience

Notable events from our shared experience

One of the great what-if stories in Hollywood history has Elvis Presley turning down the starring role opposite Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born.

Why did Elvis Presley die sitting on the toilet?  Whose flatulence is worse, men's or women's? How many pints of saliva do we produce every day? What causes morning breath? What three foods are most likely to kill someone? Do prisoners really smuggle stuff in their rectums?

In the mid-to-late 1950s, there were two young men in their early 20s - one born in Mississippi, the other in Louisiana - who not only climbed meteorically to the top of the musical world but caused a sensation with their flamboyant hairstyles and matinee-idol looks.

Fans of Elvis Presley - and we're thinking of the young, dashing Elvis of the mid-1950s - couldn't help but notice how utterly cool his clothes were. For a young working-class hero from the South, the King was impeccably tailored, and rakishly so, in pink and black shirts, pegged pants and iridescent sharkskin jackets, and two-tone shoes. That's because Presley got his threads from a hepcat who really knew 1950s male fashion: Bernard Lansky, the proprietor of Lansky Bros. on Beale Street in Memphis.

If you grew up in the early to mid-1970s, you may remember tuning your AM radio to a local Top 40 station and grooving to music that, for want of a better word, we'll call the Memphis Sound. It was a hybrid of country's twangy guitar  and plaintive vocals with the driving beat and existential, socially conscious lyrics of  the West Coast's psychedelic rockers, with a little soul music mixed in, to produce a catchy sound that was a little hippie and a little homespun. Songs such as "Walk a Mile in My Shoes" made you want to shake your hips and get funky, but when you listened to the words, you couldn't help but think, too.

As usual, my sister Lynda had to go and ruin everything.