RAMBLE ON: "Trouble" by Elvis Presley

The first time I heard Elvis sing “Trouble” it knocked my fucking teeth out. I don’t remember where or when it was – I was a kid, I know that, and I remember it was on TV. Probably one of my parents watching an Elvis retrospective on PBS or something. I’m gonna guess it was from the ’68 Comeback Special, which I’ve never actually watched; I’m watching it now and Elvis only sings it for 45 seconds as the intro of the show. “Trouble” was never a single, it only shows up on the most expansive of Elvis compilations, and its streams on Spotify are surprisingly meager (his 1970 single “I Just Can’t Help Believing,” which I’ve never heard of, puts up better numbers).  But as the opening salvo of the greatest comeback in pop history, “Trouble” is indelibly etched into the Elvis legend. And as a little kid, decades after it was released, it blew my mind, largely because of one word: Evil. Evil. Because I’m e-ee-e-vil, my middle name is misery.  I’d definitely heard cool characters brag about being “bad” by that point and understood how bad could sometimes mean good. But “evil”? Evil?? My eight-year-old brain was not prepared.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I read within the last couple years the King wasn’t trouble anymore; he was in trouble.  Being the King of Rock & Roll meant nothing now that rock music had plummeted in relevance, and the Presley estate was working to move Elvis’s legacy to the more current sounds of pop and rap. Thus, this year’s megahyped biopic added hip-hop beats to his r&b-inflected early work, and mashed up “Viva Las Vegas” with Britney Spears’s “Toxic” (Britney herself performed “Trouble” during her own attempted comeback at the 2007 VMAs; that one didn’t go as well.) Director Baz Luhrmann loves his anachronisms, of course, but you can also see the heavy hand of brand management in it, too. Elvis’s equally deep connections to country music are completely ignored, and rock & roll, the music he helped birth, is all but forgotten.

But there is one scene where Elvis actually is the King of Rock and/or Roll, for my money the best scene in the movie and perhaps my favorite piece of media all year. Tired of the forces trying to water down his sound – the angry voices of segregation; his gun-shy and tasteless manager – Elvis violently and angrily shakes off his shackles at his 1956 concert in Russwood Park. All the cliches of the New Rock & Roll – the revolutionary rebellion of youth, the riotous mobs of screaming girls inspired by this new sound – are given new life through Baz’s shameless energy.  The song that Elvis sings during this? Naturally, “Trouble.” Because he’s evil. Eeeeeeeevil.

This is not how the actual version of “Trouble” by the actual Elvis went. It wasn’t recorded and released until a couple years after his Russwood Park concert, by which point Elvis had already been drafted by the army. I’m no Elvis-ologist, but I think there’s a good chance that Elvis ’68 was literally the only time Presley performed it live. Before then, its only noteworthy appearance was its debut in the 1958 movie King Creole; a craggy gangster (played by an already-crotchety-and-old Walter Matthau) orders busboy Elvis, as an intimidation tactic, to get on stage and sing a song, and Elvis tears the place down with “Trouble” while Matthau glowers, upstaged.

In a lot of ways, the scenes from the two movies – “King Creole” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” – use the song the same way, Elvis embarrassing his antagonists with his sheer charisma. But the attitude is entirely different. The original “Trouble” is loose and funny, with a Dixieland jazz band swinging behind Elvis who puts on a goofy face and does a silly dance during the second-half breakdown. The version in the biopic is blues-ier, angrier, and Austin Butler as Elvis takes it in a much different direction. One writer called “Trouble” a proto-punk song, a take that I have real trouble (ho-ho) accepting. Elvis was so much of a threat because he didn’t seem to care who he pissed off; he was cocksure, swaggering, and too busy feeling himself to worry what any uptight squares thought of him. The man certainly inspired the punks, but he was no punk; he was a golden god.

That is not true in the movie, where Austin Butler performs the song with as much menace and venom as he can. Sure, the song is sex; Butler extends his mic stand suggestively and then drives the girlies crazy with his swinging hips. But towards the end, his thrusting somehow becomes less about sex and more about offense. Screeching feedback overwhelms the track. Butler grips the mic and screams, looking for all the world like Johnny Rotten rather than Elvis Presley. This is the rock & roll not of Elvis’s day but of the decades after; furious, violent, almost pleasure-less but cathartic in its rage.

It's exhilarating. But I struggle to square it with the actual man; of all the movie’s fictions, this is by far the least accurate to the spirit of Elvis. Elvis was never an angry performer; from his dynamic beginnings to his bloated tragic end, he was always a man enjoying himself on stage. “Trouble” is basically a song about how Elvis is a bad motherfucker you don’t mess with, but Elvis was always enjoying himself way too much to be threatening, or at least not threatening in that way. He’s evil, evil, evil as can be – the song is written to mean evil in the sense of violence and destruction, but that’s not how he sings it. He’s evil, meaning sinful; he won’t kill you, but he will corrupt your soul, and you’ll love it.

The way I reconcile it is by thinking about how David Milch had intended Deadwood to use only period-accurate language, but had to rewrite it into the legendarily profane show it was because the cursing of the 1870s no longer held any power to a modern audience, consarn it. “My daddy was a green-eyed mountain jack”; what the hell does that mean? There's a reason that Elvis led off the Comeback Special by announcing that he was trouble, evil, not one to mess around with; he had to put that killer's snarl back into his image after years as a simpering Hollywood phony. Perhaps Elvis had to become a snarling punk rocker for the audience to understand how dangerous he was. I heard one critic says that Elvis is a bad movie that some critics only liked because it gave them a chance to talk at length about Elvis.  Maybe so. (The counter-takes about Tom Hanks’s performance being Good Actually is a road I can’t follow.) But the fact that the movie was such a big hit, and revitalized the Elvis legend so successfully, surely indicates something about what the movie does right. Arguably the song itself – both versions of it – devolves into ridiculousness, the band just going nuts while Elvis shouting the word “evil” over and over again while doing a touchdown dance over his haters. Who better to capture that chaotic energy than Baz Luhrmann?