LATE NIGHTS LISTENING TO THE SUN SESSIONS

There’s a point to be made about Elvis Presley’s early life that touches on our music in a unique way. Forget the bloated, drug-addled, gun-toting, ludicrously dressed Elvis of his later years, the horror figure that haunted Las Vegas singing to middle-aged women and passing out his sweat-drenched cheap scarves. I’m talking about the shiny young man who walked into the Sun Records studio in the morning of his life full of hope and confusion, with charisma and talent bursting transcendently out of him.

Elvis came of age in the very middle of the 20th century, in the decade following two world wars and a soul-searing economic depression. And it was for the post-war American 1950s to delve chaotically into the issues of race, working class anxiety, mass culture, corporate consumerism and sexual permissiveness in a time of unparalleled prosperity. When it came to the New Music of youth, rock ’n’ roll, it was clear to everyone from