All Hail His Pinguescent Majesty

Many thanks to Robyn, our inestimable keeper of arcane knowledge, for pointing out that The King is 77 today!

This wouldn't be a proper "Dive" post if I didn't make some sarky crack about Fat Elvis and the obesity epidemic, so here goes:

You kids won't remember, but way back in the seventies, the Elvis diet briefly vied for supremacy with the Karen Carpenter diet for the soul of America; but while a few young girls still kill themselves the Karen Carpenter way, an increasing majority of modern America has whole-heartedly embraced the Elvis diet, making it the most successful ever.

As a role model, The King has shaped the America we see today; a nation groaning under a hideous, heaving horde of wobbling, half-ton lardosaurs gorging themselves to death on junk food.
Elvis is succeeding where al-Qaeda failed; slaughtering whole generations of innocent Americans in a bloated, oleaginous, adipose apocalypse.

But what a fucking great singer he was (for which we can forgive his becoming a fucking great lard-arse).

Inevitably, this brings to mind an Elvis story from my past.
Back in the tragic year of his alleged death (I'm a firm believer in his immortality, though possibly not of his being a space alien), I played probably the easiest season of my life; rattling off Scotty Moore licks behind an Elvis impersonator.
Actually a rather good one, not like the dross you get these days.

It happened like this:
In the heady days of 1977, I was making no money whatsoever playing lead guitar in a band doing Yes, Focus and Mahavishnu covers, whilst listening to Punk and managing a spectacularly unsuccessful Punk band (what a monstrous master of the sell-out I was).
Being but a schoolboy I needed cash desperately to spend on riotous living … and more guitars.
So when a couple of old guys heard me playing Zappa stuff as they walked past the house and came knocking on the door to say "Will you join our band, please?", the only question in my mind was "Do you have paying gigs?"

They did … and so I became Scotty Moore for a season, playing stuff I could do with both arms cut off.
It was all rather splendid fun, made lucrative by the King leaving the building that very summer.

"Elvis" himself took a bit of a shine to young Dive, inviting me to his house for meals and introducing me to his lovely daughter (you can cringe now, Theresa; you know what's coming).

Being a lusty eighteen-year-old version of Dive, one thing swiftly led to another, and a few days later I found myself in their kitchen "helping" Theresa bake stuff.
To my utter horror, in walks "Elvis" to be confronted by his smiling daughter in a bright red sweatshirt with floury white hand prints all over her boobs.

Ahem …

To my (again "utter") delight, he simply grinned and told us to clean up and "go upstairs where it's more private and play some records or something".
Smiling like a couple of idiots, up we went, as it were … "up" being the operative word.

It was only later, at dinner, when they invited me to tea for Theresa's upcoming birthday.
"Great! What is it, your seventeenth or eighteenth?"
"I'll be fourteen." she said.
Fuck!
Fuck my fucky, fucking luck!

It turned out that they thought they had found "a real catch" and were already planning our wedding! Sheesh!
To be brutally honest, these folk were - like the real Elvis - people of a somewhat … er … "rural" outlook, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

As a result of which I dropped poor Theresa like a hot … well, like a hot underage girl, dammit!

Poor thing. On the rebound, she got herself an alarmingly porcine boyfriend within a couple of months but he promptly eloped with her mother!
That was just too "Deliverance" for me … Theresa's mum possessed none of her daughter's charms, resembling nothing so much as the grisly offspring of an unnatural liaison betwixt a dugong and a potato.
The upshot of which was that poor "Elvis" gave up singing and I ran away to college, getting the Hell outta Dodge.

This is what life is like in rural England.
I deal with it as best I can …

Happy Birthday Elvis!
You still rock, dude.