When I grew up in the ’70s Elvis was a “fat joke” to the kids, we didn’t realize his importance, just America’s infatuation with him. I remember seeing his “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite” in 1973 when I was seven years old, and I remember when he died–I was in the Southglenn Mall in the suburbs of Denver and remember seeing a display of Elvis on this sad occasion, next to the Bowie Low album cover, which had also been just released, which intrigued me much more … But finally, back in the ’90s, I kept thinking about icons that truly changed culture, and how Warhol was so good at flattening the icon into a stamp like persona, much in the way in capitalism and current technocratic culture agency—who we are as spirits, souls, and individuals, is reified, like flour folded into pizza dough, the capitalist machine…

I was thinking about Elvis, and of course we all love the Sun Sessions early songs, but I watched, for the first time, the famous 1968 “comeback” special—and it bowled me over. We forget in our contemporary times what it must have been like to see single individuals, with tremendous talent and the urge and motivation to change the world, perform as artists, with a whole country watching (in an age when there were only three or four networks), and having that individual make a HUGE impact. Singer Presents …Elvis—the show more known as the famous ‘68 Comeback Special was like this, he was only thirty-three years old, but his big hits had been back starting in 1956, he went into the army, and came back tamed, doing stupid movies with Colonel Tom Parker, that made money, and he sang to a pre-recorded soundtrack, but was on autopilot, and lost his true rock and roll fans. The producer of the Comeback Special, who loved him, took him on a walk down Sunset Boulevard, and Elvis realized he lost it as people didn’t recognize him, or if they did, they didn’t care.

Instead of the Christmas special the Colonel had planned, the producers wanted Elvis to go back to his roots, and he was able to get his two old front men, Scotty Moore and drummer D. J. Fontana, to the studio, where they had acoustic, sit-down sessions that were edited down to some of the most fantastic live TV ever recorded—imitated by MTV and so many others, with the engine of Elvis’s genius driving it all. The stand-up full band numbers were also great—Elvis since the army had only performed for movie cameras, and having a live audience was super invigorating for him. The dance numbers have a bunch of ’70s cheese melted in, and a tribute to the equally cheesy film output by Elvis, but he is somehow able to rise above it all. The song that is the title of this work, “If I Can Dream,” was a heartfelt tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, that Elvis lip syncs to (he sung the original recording in a room by himself, curled in a fetal position on the floor), that is moving and great.

Elvis recorded songs other people had written—Bob Dylan and the Beatles ushered in the whole singer-songwriter movement, that made much of Elvis passé—but as an artist who works with appropriation, I love him. He can sing way better than Dylan or Lennon/McCartney, not with irony, but with complete sincerity and deep resonance. He liked to sing every people song, country ballads, and gospel—sometimes the more normalized and banal, the better. He can synthesize his moods and feelings so well to the lyrics—that, like Hallmark Cards, are sometimes so sentimental or bathetic that anyone in the world can identify with them—but with such a wealth of emotion and beautiful singing it’s transportive. I hope in my painting I can bring emotion and feeling into my painterly brush…. If Warhol “flattened” out his icons, perhaps if you could paint figures that changed culture more like Rembrandt or an old master, bringing warmth and feeling back to them, you could have something new, like how Elvis breathes life and beauty into everyday songs (particularly as they are every-day emotions and feelings we all think about)…

The inset TV guide image was from his ’56 days, I think on The Ed Sullivan Show, where again he had most of the viewing night on television audience, again changing culture—amazing from then to the comeback how much had changed—and in the nine short years after the special, all that would come before his sad demise. Elvis really changed the world through music and was an amazing individual who was kind and Christ-like, also evoked here. Like the audience in a bullfighting painting by Goya, the crowd here looks ravenous and unhealthy, they are like animals feeding off their heroic icon, who gives everything for them. To me, this is like the life of the artist, and Elvis was one of the greats, who I still think about (and whose music, which expands generations and genres of storytelling) and is relevant as much to me today as when I first “rediscovered”” his genius.