History Essay

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Document 36: Udo Lindenberg, An Obituary for Elvis

Back then, in 1957, I was eleven, and Elvis Presley came blaring out of the radio with “Tutti Frutti.” Upon hearing the very first beats, I immediately banished from my rookie heart my favorite songs up to that point: “Ave Maria,” “What did Hans do with Gretel?,” “The Laughing Vagabond,” and even “Marina.” I had no idea what it was about, but this hiccupy singing and electrifying music rocked right through me, and I ran into the kitchen, grabbed some pots and wooden spoons and drummed along for the final minute of “Tutti Frutti.” With that, my choice of career – which had been caught, up to then, somewhere between sailor and drummer – was decided. Elvis Presley had ignited me and I thought: This is an earthquake. Up to that point, only gushy German songs could make me dream in a weird way, but now I knew what was what. Then I also saw that film, in which Elvis, as a rather slender kid, leapt onto the stage at a club and starting singing into the face of the brawny club owner: “If you’re looking for trouble, just look right at my face.” After that, I started associating German songs and hits more and more with nightmares. That has not changed up to this day. Back then, I didn’t really understand very well what Elvis was doing with his hips. But the girls who rolled their eyes whenever they spoke of him moved up a notch in my book because their taste in music was as good as mine. Not until later did I realize what else was important about rock ‘n’ rolling besides the music. Elvis had it down pat. With built- in ball bearings in his joints and the dreamy-defiant-vulnerable look of Cupid, he made it into the underpants of even the upright Westphalian girls in my small hometown of Gronau. He gave us something of our own in contrast to our parents, who owned everything else. Until then all we heard was, “You’re still too young for that.” With Elvis in our ears we could shout back: “And you’re too old for this.” Where did this dynamite come from? Where was there more of it? Through Elvis I heard of Bill Haley, who had already been around earlier, and soon I had a record collection with “American howling” and “Negro music,” and my grandma fainted. I still remember how difficult it was to learn the “shake, rattle, and roll”-rubber legs dance, which included catapulting your dance partner. I admit that, up to this very day, I have never achieved Elvis’s bravura. Gospel-country-blues-Elvis. He was the model I used to push myself ahead. His fast numbers were like black pepper, and I could not get enough of them. The slow ones often grabbed me just as much, but not all of them. I thought some of them were too soppy. What the gospel song was for blacks, penetrating, heart-gripping, but somehow modest, was sometimes too bombastic with Elvis; as phony as a Negro in a dirndl and as overboard as a bishop’s robe in violet brocade.

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There were some things about him that remained forever foreign to me, maybe because America was so far away. After the good, clean-cut Elvis touched the hearts of adults in his country as a “good American,” and after he set an example by serving his time in the military in Germany, and once his films became sugar-coated and worse than those of James Dean, he stopped being the absolute sensation for me. Not entirely: He had a good ranking among the musicians that I thought were great, and rock ’n’ roll music itself became a sensation for me. Elvis paved the runway that many musicians, myself included, eventually used for take-off in their own jets. Source: Udo Lindenberg, “Nachruf auf Elvis” [“An Obituary for Elvis”]; reprinted in Götz Eisenberg and Hans-Jürgen Linke, eds., Fuffziger Jahre [The Fifties]. Giessen, 1980, p. 235f.