Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Five, part three. Elvis the Pelvis. Part Three

   Elvis the Pelvis. Part Three.




    In 1958 Elvis Presley joined the U.S. Army. In those days of the Cold War the U.S. draft was in full swing. Millions of young American males joined the armed forces without a protest. Only some male members of a few religious groups were exempt from the draft. All others had to go.
    Presley willingly joined the army. He served two years mostly in West Germany where he was promoted to sergeant. He came home in 1960 and a huge t.v. pageant was put on to welcome him back. Yet the decade of the 1960's proved to be very different from that of the previous decade. Soon the U.S. was embroiled in an unwinnable war in Indochina. African Americans took to the streets to win equal rights. New groups from Great Britain like the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones poured out new music. Then Bob Dylan sang songs that were very challenging to conventional tastes. The new music was way different than Elvis's.
    As musical tastes changed, so did Elvis. His mother died and that hurt him. He appeared in very forgettable films like 'Blue Hawaii' and sang songs that were saccharine sweet. Presley now lived in a huge home in Memphis called Graceland. Here, Presley partied, did legal and maybe illegal drugs and probably had many women. His fame was still legendary yet he had changed. The Beatles found him somewhat strange when they visited him in the mid-1960's.
    In May 1967 he married Priscilla Ann Wagner whom he'd met in Germany. Yet Presley married or single wasn't well. The couple were divorced in 1973. They had a daughter named Lisa Marie who later married another famous and disturbed rock star namely Michael Jackson. In the late 1960's, a cultural revolution was in full swing across the western world. Presley loathed the cultural revolutionaries and the Black Power advocates who praised armed struggle. "Kill your parents," Yippie leader Jerry Rubin told the young people of America. Nor did Elvis have any time for those who burned their draft cards.
    "Hell no" young people chanted outside draft office and while taking part in anti-Vietnam war marches. "We won't go (to Vietnam)." Tens of thousands of young men fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Others went to prison. All  of this appalled Elvis. "Elvis Presley gave money to George Wallace," yippie journalist Paul Krasner said in effect in 1968. Still, Krasner couldn't prove this. Wallace was a pro-segregationist anti-protestor governor of Alabama. He ran third in the 1968 U.S. presidential election with 16 per cent of the vote.
     Republican candidate Richard Nixon won the election just squeaking past Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Presley may not only have supported George Wallace. In the early 1970's he visited president Nixon in the White House carrying to Nixon  an anti-drug message. Nixon welcomed the king of rock'n roll for he was under attack from the left. Nixon praised Presley who by this time may have been addicted to a number of drugs. In any case, the support of Presley didn't hurt Nixon's political fortunes.