Tue 12/10 @ 1PM
When I started listening to rock and roll, I didn’t get the fuss around Elvis Presley. I was listening to Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin. He was a cornball Vegas act in a gaudy white jumpsuit.
It wasn’t until a friend showed me old clips of some of his earliest TV appearances in the mid ’50s that it clicked. That was a different Elvis — a fresh-faced, ambitious, sensual singer with an edge to that voice that was ripe even at then when he was barely out of his teens.
You’ll find some of that groundbreaking, game-changing Elvis in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s newly opened Elvis exhibit.
And it’s appropriate that the Rock Hall’s weekly Tuesday gallery talk the week after it opens is devoted to the man some called The King. Titled “Elvis, Memphis & the ’50s,” it will focus on Elvis before he went into the army and then went to Hollywood, back when he came up to Memphis from Tupelo and changed the face of music by helping invent rock and roll.
Take some time to watch the short film about Elvis’ career, created especially for the exhibit, and read the correspondence relating to his spectacularly successful 1968 comeback television special.
The gallery talk is included in museum admission: $22 adults, $18 greater Cleveland residents, $17 seniors and military, $13 kids 9-12, free under 12.