Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives

231 Pages·2012·1.02 MB·English

by  Greil Marcus

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FOR HOWARD HAMPTON
Table of Contents Title Page
Introduction
Part One - THE ELVIS ELECTION
A Moral Crisis
Contribution to LA Weekly Advice to Bill
Clinton Symposium
How the Heartaches Began
Images of the Present Day
The Roger Clinton Experience
Flashback: The Music Playing Outside Bill
Clinton’s Oxford Dorm Room
Pop Music Saves the World Again
Contribution to City Pages Artist of the Year
Issue
Bill Clinton: Hound Dog or Teddy Bear?
Part Two - TRACES OF EXTREMIST CULTURE IN A TIME OF
BROKEN POLITICS
Bob Dylan Argues with Himself at the Inauguration
The Summer of Love Generation Reaches the White House. So Do Their
Kids
More Thoughts on the White House Playlist
But Not Life
What’s New in the Cemetery
Mystery Train After Thirty-nine Years
Elvis and Hermes, Together Again at Last
Clinton Places Behind Juliette Lewis, Ahead of Prince in New Poll;
McCarthyism Tops “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
Traces of Extremist Culture in a Time of Broken Politics
Kurt Cobain 1967–1994
APRIL 12, 1994
CONTRIBUTION TO CITY PAGES ARTIST OF THE YEAR ISSUE
Nirvana After the 1994 Congressional Elections
Gladys Love Smith and Vernon Elvis Presley
Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections
Nostalgia
Mario Savio 1943—1996
Allen Ginsberg 1926—1997
Tell-Tale Heart
August 16, 1997: The Drifter
August 16, 1997: The Farmer
A Map You Can Throw Away
The Story Untold
Part Three - THE LAST LAUGH
J. T. Walsh
Heaven’s Gate
America at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Pennsylvania at the End of the Twentieth Century
The Last Laugh
Demand the Impossible
Contribution to City Pages Artist of the Year Issue
Center of the Universe
Pleasantville
A Look Back
The Man from Nowhere
Part Four - NOWHERE
A Backward Glance October 14, 2000—A Look into Bill Clinton’s Future
Version One
Version Two
Also by Greil Marcus
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Index
Notes
Copyright Page
You laughed at me walkin’, baby
But I have no place to go
Bad luck and trouble have taken me
I have no money to show —Otis Rush, “Double Trouble,” 1958

Every time I think that I have finally got it made
Some losing cards are played
Just can’t make the grade
I got
Double trouble
I got
Double trouble
I got
Double trouble
Twice as much as anybody else oh yeah —Elvis Presley, “Double Trouble,”
1967

Katie Couric: The entertainer of the century?
Bill Clinton: For me in my lifetime … the early Elvis
would be the best.
Katie Couric: Your favorite Elvis song?
Bill Clinton: “I Want You … I Need You … I Love You.”
—Today, NBC, December 20, 1999

He was an accident waiting to happen
Most accidents happen at home —Warren Zevon on Elvis Presley,
“Porcelain Monkey,” 2000

Now the stage is nearly bare, but he’s still standing there —headline to story on
Bill Clinton’s last year in office, New York Times, January 19, 2000
Introduction
“I rooted for him during the impeachment process, of course, because fanaticism
and puritanism in any form are my enemies,” movie director Oliver Stone said in
April 1999, two months after President Bill Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate on
charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. At issue was Clinton’s testimony
regarding an affair with a White House intern, originally given during a
deposition in a later-dismissed sexual harassment case brought by one Paula
Jones, a secretary employed by the State of Arkansas during Clinton’s time as its
governor; now, after more than a year of leaked and manipulated testimony
meant to drive Clinton from office through extralegal means, Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr had lost the formal battle, and the crusade on the part of
Republicans in the House of Representatives to expel Clinton from Washington
had destroyed not their chosen enemy but two of their own leaders. Not that the
victory ennobled the victor, Stone said:”He reminds me so much of Nixon. The
pathology. The need to lie. A President who says, I smoked but I didn’t inhale. A
President who refuses to be proud of, or even to acknowledge that he didn’t go
to Vietnam for reasons of principle, and makes it sound like he’s running away
from what he did. Total pandering to the right wing. Clinton and the teenager.
Like an Elvis movie. The poor man couldn’t even get laid well.”
A month later, in an interview with journalist Jack Newfield, New York Times
columnist Frank Rich was trying to make ordinary sense of the same bizarre
series of events and found himself speaking the same language—a language in
which a metaphor that at first seems transparent is almost immediately opaque.
“Do you think the far right hates Clinton more for cultural than for political
reasons?” Newfield asked. “Do they just see him as the avatar of the 1960s with
sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?” “Yes,” Rich said, as if nothing could be simpler.
Not that he wanted anyone identifying him or his generation with Clinton
anymore than Stone did, just because they were all about the same age: “In some
ways it’s absurd because many people who still believe in the Left of the 1960s
would find Clinton a very poor example of it.” Rich recited the litany: “He
wasn’t really a serious Vietnam war protester; he was an opportunist even then.
We know he smoked marijuana, but he’s hardly an exemplar of the Ken Kesey
LSD generation. Even his taste in Sixties music, I would say, is extremely
suspect … It’s kind of preposterous. It’s like if you hated Elvis Presley, choosing
Dick Clark as the person to focus on. I’m not a Clinton fan, but he’s just not
worthy of the kind of hatred that everyone has for him.”
Why are these two interesting people drawn so helplessly to the identification
of Bill Clinton with Elvis Presley? Trying to pull a usable metaphor out of the
air, why are they drawn to that identification so imaginatively? The idea of
Clinton’s presidency as an Elvis movie (presumably the 1967 Double Trouble,
where nightclub singer Guy Lambert is pursued both by a smitten seventeen-
year-old heiress and a calculating woman his own age) is almost irresistible. The
idea of Bill Clinton as Dick Clark creates an archetype that could rewrite
Constance Rourke’s unsurpassed 1931 classic American Humor: A Study of the
National Character. But the momentum in the identification of Elvis and Clinton
isn’t about ideas—why are Stone, who as a Hollywood moviemaker can get
more women than the president, and Rich, who during the year of impeachment
came perhaps too close to crossing his newspaper’s line of tolerance of Bill
Clinton, drawn to this identification so personally? In the moment in the
conversation when Elvis arrives—like Superman or a bad conscience—to
dramatize or mystify what is otherwise a string of unexamined assumptions
meant mostly to establish that the speaker is better than Bill Clinton, one can
glimpse a piece of each speaker’s life story: his attempt, in the 1950s or 1960s,
to define himself by and against Elvis Presley, and how uncertain each is about
how the story may have turned out. They are almost saying: What if Bill Clinton
is Elvis Presley’s true inheritor?

Gallery owner to Jesse: You think you can waltz in here in your cheap shoes and
pass yourself off as an art critic?
Jesse: I want you to know that these shoes were not cheap! They cost fifty
bucks! And what about your shoes? You look like you mugged Elvis!
Diego, artist with Jesse, attempting to ingratiate himself
with gallery owner: The early, cool Elvis …
—Jesse, NBC, November 5, 1998

Like Jesse and Diego, Oliver Stone and Frank Rich are playing with the Good
Elvis and the Bad Elvis. Their Clinton is opposed to the Real, Good Elvis; he’s
the Bad Elvis, or the Fake Elvis—but somehow the equations don’t hold.
Apparently simple, the equations are in fact complex; seemingly fixed in cliche,
they are unstable. Both Elvis and Clinton are alive in the common imagination as
blessed, tawdry actors in a pretentious musical comedy cum dinner-theater
Greek tragedy about their country’s most unresolved notions of what it means to
be good, true, and beautiful—and evil, false, and ugly. Americans are caught