Coverinfo

Songinfo

Other cover versions

• UB40
• U2 

 

 

29.06.85 Paris, France

 

Intro to the song:

"Oh, I would like to take a moment and thank everyone for coming to the show here in Paris, thank you , we appreciate it and, uh…I’d also like to thank you for your support of our band over the years when we haven’t gotten over here as much as we’d liked.I want you to know we appreciate it…this, uh …this next song…last time, it was in 1981 when we played here… and I think we, we did this song for the first time but uh…what happened was, uh, in ’75 we were on tour in the United States, on the “Born to Run”-tour and…I guess I was about 26 years old, we were in Memphis, Tennesee…we played in a small auditorium and that night I called a cab driver and I got him to take me out to Elvis’ house and, uh, it was about 3.30 in the morning, I got out there, I got out of the cab and I stood outside the gates and I could see a light on in the second story window…and I jumped up over the wall and I ran up the driveway towards the house…and I…I got to the front door – I got, I think it’s a stupid thing to do now ‘cause I hate it when people do it at my house but but but I got up to the front door and I was filled with the enthusiasm of youth and as I was about to knock, a guard came out of the woods and asked me what I wanted and I said “Is Elvis home?”…and he said “No, no, Elvis is in Lake Tahoe” and I told him that I was a guitar player too and that I had a band and I told him that, that we played in town, I told him that I had my picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek ……. I did ….. I had to pull that one out of the bag but that didn’t work, I don’t think he believed me and he took me by the arm and he put me back out onto the street where I belonged, I guess…but uh…I remember later when a friend of mine called me not too long after that and said Elvis had died, oh, it was hard to understand how somebody whose music had taken away so many people’s loneliness and who gave so many people a reason to live…could have died…seemly as lonely and as tragically as he did…anyway, I’d like to do this song for you tonight, wishing you all the longest life with the best of everything …"    

 

Whenever he could, Bruce would mention the enormous influence, Elvis had on him and on his music. Elvis is the most covered artist by Bruce (23 times) together with Chuck Berry, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan. The Influence of Elvis on Bruce, is described in a documentary compiled from previously existing footage by Dennis P. Laverty, a former Old Bridge resident who now lives in Staten Island (and who calls Springsteen and Elvis Presley "my two favorite rock stars". He used concert footage and previously released interview segments with Springsteen and various rock experts to show just how important Elvis Presley was to Springsteen.

 

 

 

Rollingstone:

 

"It's a cliché story, but watching Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show changed Bruce Springsteen's entire life. "It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic," he said in 2012, "that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self." He urged his mother to buy him a guitar after that, and in 1976 he went to Graceland after a Memphis show and even hopped the fence in a failed effort to meet the King himself. Elvis died during the recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, right as Springsteen was hoping the King would cover his new song "Fire." Springsteen channeled his sorrow into "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)," which later morphed into "Factory."

 

Keynote speech: 

 

"In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment. For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It's whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self. A certain type of transformative self, that perhaps at any other moment in American History, might have seemed difficult, if not impossible. And I always tell my kids that they were lucky to be born in the age of reproducible technology, otherwise they'd be traveling in the back of a wagon and I'd be wearing a jester's hat. It's all about timing. The advent of television and its dissemination of visual information changed the world in the fifties the way the internet has over the past twenty years. Remember, it wasn't just the way Elvis looked, it was the way he moved that made people crazy, pissed off, driven to screaming ecstasy, and profane revulsion. That was television. When they made an attempt to censor him from the waist down, it was because of what you could see happening in his pants. Elvis was the first modern Twentieth Century man, the precursor of the Sexual Revolution, of the Civil Rights Revolution, drawn from the same Memphis as Martin Luther King, creating fundamental, outsider art that would be embraced by a mainstream popular culture. Television and Elvis gave us full access to a new language, a new form of communication, a new way of being, a new way of looking, a new way of thinking; about sex, about race, about identity, about life; a new way of being an American, a human being; and a new way of hearing music. Once Elvis came across the airwaves, once he was heard and seen in action, you could not put the genie back in the bottle. After that moment, there was yesterday, and there was today, and there was a red hot, rockabilly forging of a new tomorrow, before your very eyes."

 

Bruce also wrote a song : "I’m turning into Elvis" :

 

During the Rainforest Fund concert at 1995/04/12 Bruce played the song and used this as an intro :

 

" this is the second half of the show, gonna be a tribute to Elvis and his decade. It´s been done before and a lot prettier than we’re about to do it….but that´s ok, look at it like you’re 15 years old, you don’t know a whole lot about Elvis and your uncle gets up in the livingroom trying to explain to you what it was all about. So with that in mind I’ve written a song especially for this particular occasion. You remember the coach Tom Landry, when he was trying to explain his personal relationship that he had with God ? well, this is a song that’s sort of about my personal relationship with him….´´ [Taken from the Backstreets Magazine, issue 49.]