Muhammad Ali & Elvis

Jan. 8 - Another birthday for Elvis Presley - he would have been 67 on Tuesday - and his songs are all over the radio. I heard them on my way to see the new movie about Muhammad Ali, who, coincidentally, will turn 60 later this month. The confluence of icons seemed rigged to make me feel ancient, for I remember them both when they were young and dangerous. But this is the power of Ali and Elvis, this is why they've never really left our collective consciousness: They still make me want to rip it up, shake it up, holler for a new world order.

'I told him he should go out and see people. He said he couldn't because everywhere he went they mobbed him. ... All they wanted was to be friendly and tell him how much they loved him.' - MUHAMMAD ALI

AND WHO AMONG US thinks we couldn't use even a fraction of their magic today? They were unlike any celebrities before or since, rising from the precincts of the dispossessed to bestow us with the gifts of their audacious genius. They carried us to places we'd never been and needed to go.

Elvis took the race-tinged opposites of country music and rhythm and blues and hammered them into the life force we call rock and roll. Ali took boxing, civilized man's most primitive sport, and made it new and fresh and, in his own way, an instrument of goodness that touched war, religion and the enduring conundrum of race.

Takers who gave, dreamers bound to reality, they became bigger than Fame herself, and Fame is a jealous bitch. She'd rather kiss someone for 15 minutes and move on, leaving behind a trail of faded sitcom stars and athletes marooned in games gone by. But Ali and Elvis resisted a hasty exist, and look what it got them: Ali trapped in the slow motion world of Parkinson's disease, Elvis all stove up on a fatal diet of drugs and fried-peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

There is no escaping the images that attend their fates, and yet the power of Elvis and Ali is such that a mere song or film clip takes me straight back to their glory days. And I know I'm not alone, or Michael Mann never would have made the movie called "Ali" and Gillian Welch never would have written a song called "Elvis Presley Blues."

Overlooked Treasure

You've heard of "Ali," of course, thanks to the Great American Hype Machine, but Welch's song, which appears on her Grammy-nominated CD, "Time (The Revelator)," seems fated to become an overlooked treasure. That's a pity, because in a little less than five minutes, "Elvis Presley Blues" gets to the heart of its subject in a way that "Ali" never does in two and a half hours.

In a voice that sounds like it's straight out of Appalachia though it belongs to a daughter of Los Angeles privilege, Welch makes us see the courage that was Elvis. Once again he is on stage, all sideburns and youthful passion, creating something with somebody else's songs, turning the vision he nurtured in his bedroom and his church and his truck into a way of life.

. . . he took it all out of black and white
Grabbing one in the other hand
And he held on tight
And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it like to make it break
He shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake
With his soul at stake, soul at stake

When he could no longer run that gauntlet, when fame and human frailty combined to overwhelm him, Elvis retreated. It was then, in the early '70s, that Ali sought him out, the heavyweight champion who called himself "The Greatest" paying homage to the rock-and-roller whom the public had crowned "The King."

When Ali Met Elvis

I wonder what they talked about, and if they recognized ineach other a genius at borrowing the best of others and molding it into something distinctly their own. But all I know of their two meetings - in Las Vegas, naturally - is that Elvis repaid Ali's kind words with a fight-night robe, a flowing sartorial confection with 'People's Choice' written in rhinestones on the back. Ali wore it twice, then stopped after he got his jaw broken. Just the same, Elvis still had a place in Ali's heart.

"I felt sorry for Elvis because he didn't enjoy life the way he should," Ali says in Thomas Hauser's oral biography, "Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times." "He stayed indoors all the time. I told him he should go out and see people. He said he couldn't because everywhere he went they mobbed him. He didn't understand. No one wanted to hurt him. All they wanted was to be friendly and tell him how much they loved him."

No Secrets Out There

Ali has spent a lifetime being as public as Elvis was reclusive. In my days as a newspaper sports columnist, I considered Ali's raised-window-shade existence a blessing, but I'll bet Michael Mann cursed it when he was making his movie. There were no secrets for him to unearth, no facets that hadn't already been explored. So it is that in "Ali," there are no surprises.

The movie skims the surface of the turbulent years from 1964 to 1974, from Sonny Liston to George Foreman, from Malcolm X and the Black Muslims to the war in Vietnam, and never once does it tell us something we haven't heard or read before. Even Ali's wife-cheating ways were well documented, unless, as happened at the Chicago Daily News, they were edited out of stories for fear they would corrupt public morals.

Compounding the dilemma of information overload is Mann's refusal to let his star, Will Smith, find the joy in Ali. Not, of course, when the courts put Ali in exile for refusing induction into the Army, but later, after he has come out the other side and gone to Zaire for the Foreman fight. To see "When We Were Kings," Leon Gast's splendid documentary on that rumble in the jungle, is to witness Ali discovering his connection to Africa and lavishing its people with the love they returned in kind. In Mann and Smith's interpretation, alas, you get an Ali who is somber and remote, an emotional glacier who never existed.

But maybe any actor playing Ali, no matter how scrupulous, is going to come off as a fraud. It's the same thing, really, that we've found with actors playing Elvis. Even in death - and he will have been gone 25 years come August - Elvis remains too much with us for a pretender to inhabit his spirit and get away with it. There was only one of him, just as there is only one Ali.

We were lucky to have that many.

Source : John Schulian (MSNBC)

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