I wonder how many people, smitten in the blast of Elvis's vein-splitting rock, actually experienced the lyric as a ballad. It seems that most receive the song as an "unspeakable mix", as one commentator put it - we need words to this music, but we only hear them in fragments and we really don't care, not in that white-hot intensity.
The lyric has a setting, characters and a punch-line - it's intriguing, funny and absurd. Its irony comes from the Blues tradition and the song is largely in the 12-bar form.
That a warder, who is usually a control freak, should throw a wild party in a prison cell block, is unlikely. The gallery of characters is rich - Spider Murphy, Little Joe, the drummer boy from Illinois, Number Forty-Seven, Number Three, Shifty Henry, Bugsy and the hip warder himself who cajoles the sad sack into grabbing a wooden chair if he can't find a dancing partner.
The ultimate absurdity - rock music like this has a greater freedom, Bugsy seems to imply, than making a prison break!
The song, perhaps more from its elemental force than the crafting of the lyric, embodies one of rock's greatest concerns, what one writer called "keeping a free head".
It is really so enjoyable to -at last- READ the words ...
ReplyDeleteas for the music ... it is such a breath of our Youth ...
... and few people will take the time to analyze all this ..as deeply as you ...