What a good thread Kay started in her comment to the previous post:
BTW -- where were you when Elvis died? Thirty years ago today. I was only a few days away from my 17th birthday. I was with Laurie (who I was at my house just today, life, huh?) -- at the Concert Company in New Orleans. I think we had been running around in "Veemer," the no-AC-hand-me-down-Toyota, putting up posters for Laurie's super-cool concert-promoter sister Cyndi. The announcemnet came on the radio (WRNO? WTIX?) and the DJ said, "you'll always remember where you were when you heard that Elivs died."Somehow it escaped me that yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Elvis' passing. I never cared much for his music -- by the time I was paying attention he already was bloated, druggy, Vegas Elvis; he seemed like a parody. Yet I too remember where I was when I heard he'd died.
Somehow I have.
Mid-August in Roseburg, Ore., is hotter than hell, and we were getting ready to do our standard hot-summer-day thing: float down the North Umpqua River. Like everyone at our high school, my friends and I and sometimes my little sisters floated the river. You sat in big, overinflated truck inner tubes, starting from Hestnes Landing by our house, navigating the rapids and avoiding the rocks and getting totally sunburned and tube-rashed until you reached Twin Rivers Park, about three or four miles and several hours downstream.
(Today's pussies use rafts.)It was Mom's job to haul us and our tubes down to the landing and then later to pick us up at the park. On this particular day I think one of our tubes had gone missing or damaged, and so we were driving around to tire places looking for a replacement. (Mom was much more patient with this kind of thing than I think I'd be now with my own kids.) It was just as we were pulling into the Montgomery Ward parking lot, listening to KRSB in the old Ford station wagon, that they announced the Elvis news. I remember thinking, who cares, and also being annoyed in advance that they'd play nonstop Elvis songs for at least a week, which they did. But the moment did stick with me.
I can't remember what was playing on the radio when they broke in with the news. I'd like to think it was something as cool as Frampton, or "Love and Happiness," or "I'll Take You There." But the No. 1 song on the Billboard chart that week was not quite so soulful: Andy Gibb's "I Just Want to Be Your Everything."
Where were you?
2 comments:
I'll have to check my old diary later. I was 13 30 years ago and don't remember hearing that Elvis was dead. I was still living in Fort Worth, TX then on Wonder Drive. School hadn't started yet, so I was probably playing Red Light Green Light with the kids across the street.
I think of it more as....What was Elvis doing the day I was driving around in 100 degree weather, rear-vision obstructed with huge inner tubes, once again enabling my blessed children in the treacherous river-floating excursion, which always left me tense, fearful and half-crazy until their safe arrival at the River Forks pick-up place.
I was sorry about the fate of Elvis that day.
Rita Matassa
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