History:
By 1963, Elvis Presley, the man who caused stage-rushing among teenage girls, fistfights amongst boys, and riots among both, was a family-friendly icon of the first order. Worse than that, he was a marketable brand name, as evidenced by Andy Warhol's "pop art" renderings of Elvis that year. To the minds of the artistic community, The King held about the same appeal as a Campbell's soup can. And Elvis was becoming soft -- the result of living the high life year-round, never touring, working (in the studio or before the cameras) about three months a year and spending the rest of his time in Vegas or Memphis, surrounded by a cadre of old friends who, in truth, didn't exist on the same level as Elvis and knew it.Not a formula for weathering change. And as Sam Cooke sang that December, and Bob Dylan the following February, change was inevitable. Presley may have felt, following the death of his mother, that the fat of the land was all that was left to him, but for the generation that had been raised on Elvis, the American dream, such as it was, wasn't enough.
And there was that nagging question of maturity. By now, any decent country boy would have married and had a few children; nearing thirty, Elvis was still sampling, not necessarily looking for love but feeding off of his dream. Priscilla represented his fan base -- albeit an exceptionally gorgeous version of same -- but feisty Ann-Margret, the Swedish bombshell he would meet and romance this year, was Elvis, to the point of being dubbed the "female Elvis" by certain members of the press. She was unashamed to wear her sexuality out front where everyone could see it, and while that made her easier for Elvis to understand, it also made it harder for him to control. The battle between the boy king and the man he was being pressured to turn into was a strong one -- and who made rock and roll at thirty -- yet the public was about to demonstrate just how uninteresting Elvis' rite of passage had become to them.
Next... Elvis 1963 timeline
