Aug 26
What Am I Watching?
For the past forty-five minutes or so, I’ve been watching a documentary on Elvis Presley on TV Land.
The cable network has essentially gone nuts when it comes to the King of Rock and Roll, which isn’t surprising considering that Presley died thirty years ago this month.
But I’m not a big Elvis fan. I like some of his songs well enough, but he died when I was 7, and while my mom adored him, I never paid that much attention to him.
What does surprise me is that I was so easily pulled into this show. It’s not one of those pathetic made-for-TV movie biopics; this is a behind-the-scenes look at Elvis in concert with interviews from Elvis himself. So it is interesting to hear what he had to say about his own fame.
It turns out that he never got over extreme stage fright before a performance, which is ironic, because he could have gotten huge cheers by just walking onto the stage. It’s also interesting just how much Gospel music he sang backstage and in between performances. It is clear that despite his problems with drugs, his personal faith was important to him to the end.
It’s a sign of a well-done documentary when you’ve watched almost all of it without even realizing that you were really that interested.
