Hound Dog Elitist

ll right, in this of all weeks, we all remember what common-as-dirt Tennessean had the trees on his front lawn planted in the shape of a guitar. Don't we?

No, we don't. The exotic landscaper was Andrew Jackson, not Elvis Presley, and the down-home spread in question was not Grace-land, in Whitehaven, but The Hermitage, outside Nashville, where Al and Tipper Gore got down on Sunday and entertained several thousand of what the vice president called "the closest friends we have in this world" at a barbecue.

Jackson, the 7th president of the United States, owns a few more distinctions that should remind us of the first King of Rock-and-Roll, however. He was the sworn enemy of the Establishment of his time, and he forced it, by example as much as by executive fiat, to reform itself and make more room for the disenfranchised classes. His very last name -- which means, basically, son of the common man -- denotes his mission.

Before Jackson, the presidency was all wigs and perfumery and would-be New World aristocracy. After him, the roustabouts would have their shot. Regular folks, ranging from Abraham Lincoln, arguably the greatest American of them all, to -- well, yes, to Richard Nixon.

Another event that took place on Sunday was a TV movie, on Showtime, about that day in 1970, infamous in the annals of both Elvis and America, when the King made a pilgrimage to Nixon's Oval Office to offer his services as what amounted to an undercover narc.

A shabby moment, to be sure -- indicative, as the program indicated, of Elvis' tendency to be isolated both from reality and from his own role in the social liberations of our time. (The portrait was overdone, of course; he did know what ameliorist songs like "In the Ghetto" and "If I Can Dream" were meant to suggest, and he is on record as having professed, both in public and in private, a guarded admiration for The Beatles.)

But, lookit, last week was the Flyer's Elvis issue -- which included a balanced appraisal of the Showtime movie -- and we can take our leave of the program's dramatic content, other than to note a priceless (if totally invented) scene in which the Elvis and Nixon characters do a duet on "My Way," with the Watergate president crooning, "Mistakes, I've made a few/ But then again, too few to mention."

What the movie also included, unfortunately, was the sorriest possible collection of used-up weasels as narrative commentators on Elvis -- Tony Curtis, Wayne Newton, Dick Cavett, Edwin Newman, Alexander Butterfield -- and their remarks constituted more unintentional self-parody than anything else.

Two are worth special mention. There was a snitty reference from Cavett to a line by "the Earl of Oxford writing under the pen name William Shakespeare,"and there was Newton's sayonara in a Showtime postscript: "I miss Elvis. I wish he was still playing Vegas. Does that mean I'd have to give him back his act?"

The Age of Jackson and its sequelae (including Elvis) notwithstanding, upstart elitists like Cavett continue trying to make the low-born Bard of Avon into an aristocrat -- on the theory, you see, that the common people are incapable of producing a genius.

Newton's fatuous remark -- with its double presumption that he is Elvis' peer and that spontaneous popular expression constitutes an "act" -- is an attack on the democratic idea from the other, vulgarian extreme.

If it weren't for the fact that Elvis fans are generally too dignified and polite, what a wonderful add-on it might be to this year's candlelight vigil at Graceland if -- at about 4 a.m. Memphis time (and 2 a.m. Vegas time, when geeks like Wayne Newton get going good) -- they should all turn toward that debased desert Mecca out West and give Mr. Newton the one-fingered salute of unsolidarity he deserves. Right, take that act, Wayne!

And that goes for the Earl of Oxford, too. (Jackson Baker is senior editor of The Memphis Flyer.)