The song Billy Joel wrote as a tribute to Elvis Presley
Billy Joel is too young to have lived through Elvis Presley when he was at the peak of his powers and the biggest star in the United States. However, Presley was ingrained into the fabric of American culture and remained an impossible presence for Joel to avoid as he discovered music’s beauty.
In Joel’s mind, Elvis was a superhero with the looks and voice of somebody who’d escaped from a laboratory tasked with creating the perfect superstar. People like Presley simply didn’t exist in the suburbs of New York, and Joel believed it was out of reach for him ever to become a successful musician if the aesthetic of Elvis was the benchmark.
When The Beatles emerged, Joel was infatuated because of their differences from Presley, but that didn’t take away from his adoration of Elvis. He told CBC: “We saw these guys on TV and said, ‘Wait a minute. They don’t look like Fabian; they don’t look like Frankie Avalon; they don’t look like Elvis. ‘They looked like regular guys like people would have hung out with, except their hair was longer. I picked up on that right away and said, ‘That’s possible. I could do that.'”
Nevertheless, Presley was responsible for his first-ever live performance, which occurred in elementary school. This childish endeavour planted a seed within his mind that would eventually lead to him writing ‘Piano Man’ and becoming one of the most cherished artists of his generation.
During an interview with David Sheff, Joel professed his love for The Rolling Stones and The Beatles before explaining how it all began for him with Presley. The singer-songwriter revealed: “Elvis was a little before me, but I do remember doing an Elvis Presley impression when I was in the fourth grade. It was the first thing I ever did in front of people.”
“I sang ‘Hound Dog’, and I was jiggling my hips like Elvis,” he continued. “I remember this because the fifth-grade girls started screaming. I really dug the fifth-grade girls. I thought, Hey, this is pretty neat. When the girls started screaming, the teacher pulled me off the stage. She said it was because I was wiggling my hips. Now, in fourth grade, you don’t have hips”.
Considering the immeasurable impact of Elvis on Joel, it was only fitting that he paid tribute to the late musician on ‘Elvis Presley Boulevard’, which he initially recorded in 1981. However, it took many decades until the song finally saw the light of day when it appeared on the 2005 off-cut compilation My Lives.
On the rarity, Joel describes taking a trip to Graceland, which he labelled a “silent mansion” selling “plastic souvenirs of Elvis on the cross”. The juxtaposition of the lifeless property, which had become a glorified merchandise store, with the larger-than-life art of Presley, who had enough stage presence to fill an entire city.
While the commercialisation of dead celebrities has become even more extreme in the years since Joel wrote ‘Elvis Presley Boulevard’, with holograms of deceased artists becoming increasingly common, it doesn’t sit right with the New Yorker, who laid his cards on the table with this song.
