John Fogerty rocks and rolls along the Fox River in Aurora, Illinois

 By Tom Siebert

Rock legend John Fogerty vigorously ripped through his revered Credence Clearwater Revival songbook in a powerful two-hour concert before more than 6,000 fans at scenic RiverEdge Park in Aurora on Wednesday night.

The John Fogerty Celebration Tour of the U.S., Canada, and Europe made this stop along the Fox River, 40 miles west of downtown Chicago, to share the good news that the heralded songwriter recently won a decades-long legal battle to regain the rights to his iconic music catalogue.

“I got my songs back!” he announced to the Baby Boomer-dominated audience on this last evening of July. “And I’m so happy, I’m gonna play everyone one of them for you!”

Fogerty opened with “Bad Moon Rising,” one of an astonishing 14 consecutive Top Ten hits that Credence Clearwater Revival compiled between 1969 and 1972.

Many in the lawn chair-sitting audience sang happily along, as if to rejoice in the fact that the song’s apocalyptic lyrics never came to pass:

“Don’t go around tonight,” Fogerty sang in his high-pitched howl. “Well, it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

The next number was “Up Around the Bend,” with its immediately recognizable, screeching guitar riff. Then came the title track from Green River, one of three landmark albums that Credence Clearwater Revival released in 1969, surpassing The Beatles in sales.

Like many of CCR’s songs, “Green River” evokes the American South through an eclectic blend of rockabilly, Delta blues, and country music.

Fogerty is an age-defying 79 who can still hit the hard notes, play complex guitar solos, and strut across the stage with obvious joie de vivre.

And he has to stay young because his guitar-playing sons Shane, 32, and Tyler, 31, are in his band.

The brothers Fogerty did double duty on this hot sticky night. Their psychedelic garage band Hearty Har was the opening act for their famous father.

The elder Fogerty still sounds as if he were born on the bayou. But John actually hails from El Cerrito, California, a San Francisco suburb, where he learned to channel the voices and spirits of black blues greats such as Lead Belly, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson.

He, his fellow guitarist brother Tom, bassist Stu Cook, and drummer Doug Clifford began performing around the Bay Area at sock hops and banquet halls as early as 1959, taking ten years to become an “overnight success.”

John Fogerty emerged as the primary artistic force of the group, writing and singing some of the most enduring songs in rock history but leaving the other band members feeling left out and resentful.

After Credence broke up in 1972, Tom Fogerty launched a solo career that lasted until 1990, when he died at 48 from tuberculosis complicated by an AIDS-infected blood transfusion that had been performed on him during the late 1980s.

In 1995, Cook and Clifford formed Credence Clearwater Revisited, recruiting well-known musicians and performing CCR’s songs throughout the U.S. and overseas for nearly two decades.

John wrote “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” following the band’s storm-swept performance at the seminal Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969. The beautifully bittersweet ballad has come to represent the rainbow that is his life today.

Fogerty told the attentive Aurora audience how he dejectedly gave away his Rickenbacker 325 Sunburst electric guitar in 1974, only to have his wife Julie secretly hunt down and repurchase the prized instrument and place it under the couple’s Christmas tree in 2016.

So tonight’s lucky concert-goers got to hear “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” with the guitar on which it was written.

Many of them heartily joined the plaintive chorus: “I wanna know. Have you ever seen the rain? Coming down a sunny day.”

And the hits kept coming, sometimes one segueing right into another, while others were interrupted by just a brief change of guitars.

The Prairie State crowd roared at the line “just got home from Illinois” from the 1970 tune “Lookin’ Out My Backdoor,” so much so that Fogerty repeated it at the end of the rollicking toe-tapper.

He dedicated “Joy of My Life,” first heard on his 1997 Grammy-winning album Blue Moon Swamp, to Julie, who sat stage-side while her husband and sons performed. The couple has been married for 33 years and has four other adult children from their previous marriages.

John Fogerty grew up as a Cub Scout and Boy Scout, developing a relentless sense of right and wrong. So he was deeply disillusioned when Fantasy Records owner Saul Zaentz literally stole the rights to his songs and sold them for use in movies and TV commercials.

Eschewing Credence songs for years, John emerged as a solo star in 1985 with the hits “Centerfield” and “The Old Man Down the Road,” over which Zaentz sued him, claiming the song sounded too much like CCR’s 1970 single “Run Through the Jungle.”

At last night’s concert in Aurora, Fogerty busted out his bat-shaped guitar for “Centerfield,” which drew cheers from much of the RiverEdge audience.

The ode to the national pastime is played at ballparks at every level across America and is on a continuous loop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

With CCR and on his own, Fogerty has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. His 2009 induction speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was delivered by longtime fan Bruce Springsteen.

“As a songwriter, only a few did as much in three minutes as John Fogerty,” Springsteen said at the time. “He was an Old Testament, shaggy-haired prophet, a fatalist. Funny, too. He was severe, he was precise, he said what he had to say, and he got out of there.”

Fogerty is a Vietnam-era veteran who wrote perhaps the most important anti-war song of all time, “Fortunate Son,” which Ed Sullivan allowed CCR to play on his variety show in 1969, after the TV giant had tried to squash the performances of other controversial songs by Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and The Doors in prior years.

The hard-rocking “Fortunate Son” was the showstopper and “ender” Wednesday evening. The song’s searing lyrics recall English author Samuel Johnson’s quip about patriotism being the “last refuge of scoundrels.”

“Some folks are born made to wave the flag. Hoo, they're red, white and blue,” Fogerty screamed. “And when the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief’, ooh, they point the cannon at you!”

When the somehow-patriotic anthem ended, the crowd exploded in cheers, hand-clapping, and peace signs as the house lights dimmed.

About two minutes later, Fogerty reappeared, tearing into the Little Richard-inspired “Travelin’ Band” off the 1970 masterpiece album Cosmo’s Factory.

And the grand finale was––What else?––“Proud Mary,” the instant classic that propelled Credence Clearwater Revival to global renown and has been covered by more than 100 recording artists, most popularly by Ike and Tina Turner in 1971.

Seemingly everyone at RiverEdge Park knew the words and sang along:

“Left a good job in the city. Workin' for the man every night and day. And I never lost one minute of sleepin’, 'worryin' 'bout the way things might have been. Big wheel keep on turnin'. Proud Mary keep on burnin'. Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river.”

At song’s end, Fogerty waved at his fans and shouted: “Thank you! God bless you! I love you!”

Then, the once-troubled troubadour departed the stage for parts well- and lesser-known to make joyful sounds for many more.

The Eagles and Steely Dan shine in a Chicago concert for the ages

By Tom Siebert

Steely Dan reeled in the years and the Eagles took it to the limit one more time Saturday night before more than 23,000 concert-goers at the United Center in Chicago.

In their second Windy City show, billed as “Eagles: The Long Goodbye Final Tour with Special Guest Steely Dan,” the two supergroups that dominated pop music in the 1970s staged the ultimate battle of the bands.

First up was Donald Fagen, the 76-year-old jazz-rock genius who founded Steely Dan in 1972 with co-songwriter/guitarist Walter Becker, who died of esophageal cancer at 67 on Sept. 3, 2017.

On that somber day, Fagen issued a statement promising “to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can.”

He more than kept that vow last evening with an extraordinary nine-piece band and three angelic backup singers called The Danettes.

The opening number was Stanley Wilson’s 1959 big-band crusher “Phantom Raiders,” followed by some of the most sophisticated songs ever written and recorded.

There was the funky, hypnotic “Josie,” from Steely Dan’s 1977 multi-hit album Aja, then the breezy “Hey Nineteen” off of 1980’s Gaucho, which featured 32 musicians in the studio band’s frequent quest for sonic perfection.

“Hey, kids, how are you doing?” Fagen sang to the Baby Boomer-heavy crowd, which erupted in cheers. He added, “You’re lookin’ great!”

Next up was “Kid Charlemagne,” a magnificent song about the rise and fall of an infamous San Francisco drug dealer. Despite the conspiracy theory, The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was not about LSD. But this little ditty clearly was:

Clean this mess up else we’ll all end up in jail

Those test tubes and the scale

Just get it all out of here

Is there gas in the car?

Yes, there’s gas in the car

I think the people down the hall know who you are.

The United Center rendition of “Kid Charlemagne” featured Jon Herington’s impossible guitar solo, replete with complex bends, rapid arpeggios, and rich melody lines.

The next tune was “Dirty Work” from Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill. This song, like all on the impressive setlist, did not remain the same as the studio version.

Catherine Russell, Carolyn Leonhart, and La Tanya Hill––The Danettes––shared the lead vocals, while the original sax solo was replaced by the trumpet stylings of Michael Leonhart.

Steely Dan always had the best musicians and trombonist James Pugh is an exemplar of that high standard. He has played alongside jazz giants Woody Herman and Chick Corea. Jim is also a faculty member in the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The rest of these virtuoso musicians are drummer Keith Carlock, bassist Freddie Washington, guitarist Adam Rogers, saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, and saxophonist/clarinetist Roger Rosenberg.

But the undisputed star of the show was Donald Fagen himself. Sitting center stage behind his vintage Rhodes keyboard, wearing dark sunglasses and black clothes, he was the proverbial “cool dude in a loose mood.”

Fagen proved throughout the night that he is still a brilliant piano player, but particularly on the pleading love song “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number,” a huge hit from 1974’s Pretzel Logic.

And he stood up and out on a few numbers to show off his dazzling skills on the melodica, a portable keyboard that is blown into, most notably on the exotic eight-minute “Aja.”

The showstopper of the night––at least for me––was “My Old School,” the powerful Tex-Mex pop anthem from 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy.

It is the sordid but very funny story of a mass marijuana bust that Fagen and Becker got caught up in when they were students at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 1969.

The song’s detailed lyrics include a reference to the then-local district attorney and later Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy––dubbed “Daddy G”––as well as this memorable line:

California tumbles into the sea

That'll be the day I go back to Annandale

Notwithstanding his famous musical pledge, Fagen did go back to his old school to receive an honorary Doctorate of Arts degree in 1985.

The penultimate number of the 12-song set was “Reelin’ in the Years,” a Top Ten hit from 1973 that has not lost its infectiousness, as evidenced by much of the audience singing along emotionally and heartily applauding Carlock’s splashy drum ending.

And nothing against the great Joe Williams’ song “A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry” from 1958, a better closer may have been Steely Dan’s first hit, “Do It Again,” from 1972.

Better yet, they could have played “Everything You Did,” off 1976’s The Royal Scam, providing a neat introduction of the next act with the verse “Turn up the Eagles; the neighbors are listening.”

Instead, there was a 20-minute intermission, building up to the highest anticipation level for the most commercially successful American musical group, who were introduced by an emotional video montage of their fabled career.

Then, out of the darkness appeared rock legend Don Henley flanked by fellow guitarists Vince Gill, Deacon Frey, Joe Walsh, and Steuart Smith as well as Timothy B. Schmit, whose bass skills were not needed on the thrilling acoustic rendition of “Seven Bridges Road.”

Following the harmonic country song made famous in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, they segued straight into “Take It Easy” off 1972’s Eagles, the album from which the band first soared.

Co-written by song master Jackson Browne and sung Saturday night by the late Glenn Frey’s son Deacon, the laidback anthem seemed like sound advice for the troubles of today:

Take it easy, take it easy

Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy

Lighten up while you still can

Don’t even try to understand

Just find a place to make your stand and take it easy

Then Henley, who alternated all night between his back-of-the-stage drum kit and upfront guitar playing, sang lead on the soft rocker “One of These Nights,” title track from the album that propelled the Eagles to global stardom in 1975.

After which he alighted from his drumming perch, strolled down to the front of the stage, and became the show’s unofficial emcee.

“The Don” graciously welcomed the audience and then reminisced about past visits to Chicago, name-checking “martinis at Gibson’s steakhouse, boat rides on Lake Michigan, and sneaking out to Portillo’s in the middle of the night.”

It’s not easy to play drums and sing at the same time, but Henley has mastered both talents, as demonstrated by his next trick: singing 1972’s “Witchy Woman” while keeping the booming Native American drumbeat in perfect time and tone.

Country megastar Gill, who joined the band in 2018, nailed the lead vocals on “Take It to the Limit,” while the group’s trademark harmonies lifted much of the audience to its feet.

Gill, 66, tapped into the underlying sadness of “Lyin’ Eyes,” albeit without Glenn Frey’s signature sneer.

He also sang the soothing folk rocker “Tequila Sunrise,” from 1973’s Desperado, and “New Kid in Town,” a melancholy south-of-the-border song off Hotel California, the Eagles’ 1976 magnum opus that sold 32 million copies.

During the 20-song set, the hits kept coming. And so did the guitar techs, handing out fresh instruments before each number.

Bassist Timothy B. Schmit, 76, beautifully sang the soulful “I Can’t Tell You Why,” sounding as good as he did when the song became an oft-played single from the 1979 album The Long Run.

The iconic, eclectic band has been touring off and on for more than 50 years, selling more than 200 million records worldwide. Six of the Eagles’ seven studio albums rose to number one, while six of their singles topped the charts.

They have earned six Grammy awards, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and received Kennedy Center Honors in 2016.

Up until 1976, the Eagles were best known for their unique blend of folk, country, bluegrass, and rhythm and blues music. Then founding member Bernie Leadon––who played guitar, banjo, and mandolin––left the quintet and was replaced by gritty lead guitarist Joe Walsh, turning them into a harder rock band.

Walsh struggled with alcohol and other drugs throughout his early career with the James Gang, as a soloist, and with the Eagles. But he was able to get himself together enough to co-write the band’s hit “Life in the Fast Line,” which he played to great fanfare Saturday night.

Walsh, who has been in recovery since 1993, also performed 1970’s “Funk #49” from his James Gang days, Hotel California’s “In the City,” and his 1978 masterwork “Life’s Been Good”––a comic song of rock star excess and serious guitar licks.

Of all the gifted musicians on stage, Joe gained the loudest and longest applauses––and laughs––after making funny faces, recalling his party days in Chicago, and giving a shout-out to legendary local DJ Steve Dahl.

And even though Henley promised early on that the concert would be all about the music––“no fireworks, no inflatables, no wind machines, no butt-waggin’ choreography”––the visuals were a stunner. The stage lighting was colorfully compelling, while the thematic backdrops for each song were poignantly picturesque.

Deacon Frey, who joined the band in 2017, sang lead on “Already Gone,” a revved-up rave from 1974’s On the Border, in addition to the debut album’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” after which a photo of his famed father was shown on the towering video screen. And just like his dad in the 1970s, Deacon, 30, wears his shades atop his shoulder-length hair.

Glenn Frey, co-leader of the Eagles who helped write and sang lead on many of their songs, died at 67 from complications of rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia in 2016.

His aching loss was followed by the death of another original band member, Randy Meisner, last September. Meisner had suffered from obstructive pulmonary disease and was 77.

After the Eagles broke up for the first time in 1980 amid drug use and personnel turmoil, Glenn Frey had a successful solo career.

So has Henley. He dedicated his smash hit “The Boys of Summer,” from the 1984 album of the same name, to “our good friend” Jimmy Buffet, the tropical troubadour who died of skin cancer at 76 last September.

I would have loved to have heard Henley’s “The End of the Innocence,” an ode to forgiveness and the title track from his 1989 solo album.

And writing of forgiveness, with Frey and Meisner now gone, it would have been a healing gesture to welcome back Don Felder, the Eagles’ longtime lead guitarist who is alive and well and still performing.

Felder, who was replaced by virtuoso guitarist and backup vocalist Smith in 2001, infamously fought with Henley and Frey, took them to court over song royalties and concert profits, and published a tell-all book in 2007 titled Heaven and Hell: My Life with the Eagles.

However, the day after Frey died, Felder told the Associated Press that he felt an "unbelievable sorrow,” adding, "I had always hoped somewhere along the line, he and I would have dinner together, talking about old times and letting it go with a handshake and a hug."

Felder wrote the music for the epic song “Hotel California,” Saturday night’s first encore, with its dramatic acoustic intro followed by Henley’s genius lyrics:

On a dark desert highway

Cool wind in my hair

Warm smell of colitas

Rising up through the air

Up ahead in the distance

I saw a shimmering light

My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim

I had to stop for the night

Smith and Walsh meticulously performed the dueling lead-guitar outro that drove the United Center audience into rock and roll heaven.

Every Eagle contributed to the grand performance, in addition to first-rate touring members Will Hollis on keyboards, Michael Thompson on trombone, and Scott Crago on auxiliary drums.

Walsh took the tempo down with the talk-box blues-shuffle “Rocky Mountain Way,” which he first recorded with his then-band Barnstorm on the album The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get in 1973.

Then back came the still-golden-throated Henley with a moving performance of “Desperado,” a song that was popularized by Linda Ronstadt, whose early 1970s backup band included future Eagles Frey, Henley, Meisner, and Leadon.

And the finale of this astonishing concert was the Eagles’ last No. 1 single, 1980’s “Heartache Tonight,” as the video-screen camera captured fans around the cavernous sports arena smiling, clapping, and singing along.

The Eagles/Steely Dan tour began last September in New York City and is scheduled to continue through mid-June with dates in Canada, Great Britain, California, and Charlotte, N.C.

The two classic rock groups may be saying goodbye to touring. But their timeless music, which transcends genre and generation, is here for the long run.

Bruce Springsteen and hIs E Street Band roll over Wrigley Field in Chicago rock fest

By Tom Siebert

Rock giant Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band tirelessly tore through twenty-six songs in an astonishing three-hour concert before more than 40,000 fans, ranging from Zoomers to Boomers, at historic Wrigley Field on Friday night.

In the second Chicago show of his mammoth ten-month tour of North America and Europe, The Boss, an age-defying 73, blasted off with “Nights” from 1975’s Born to Run, the album that landed his picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, while Rolling Stone prophetically proclaimed him the “future of rock and roll.”   

The sold-out ballpark crowd variously stood, sang, clapped, danced, and flashed fists, index fingers, peace signs, and cell phones. 

The next number, “No Surrender,” from 1984’s multi-hit Born in the U.S.A., boasted one of the greatest lines ever written: “We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.”

Yes, we did. And another verse rang relevant to America’s current state of division: “There’s a war outside still raging/You say it ain’t ours anymore to win.”

Then Bruce and the band fast-forwarded to 2020’s Letter to You album with “Ghosts,” a rollicking ode to deceased E Streeters Danny Federici and Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, who passed away in 2008 and 2011, respectively.

Like late-inning shadows during a twilight baseball game, the theme of mortality eclipsed this emotional event, which Billboard has heralded as the “greatest show on earth.”

Springsteen and his 17-strong ensemble lived up to that out-of-this-world billing, seemingly channeling the “let’s play two” eternal optimism of Cubs great Ernie Banks and turning the concert into a celebration of life.

The first of several arena rock anthems performed was “Prove It All Night” from 1978’s masterpiece Darkness on the Edge of Town. 

The Wrigley rendition featured Bruce’s gritty guitar solo, the Wall of Sound five-piece horn section, and a thrilling call and response chorus by Springsteen and soulmate Steven Van Zandt.

The core members of the E Street Band are celebrities in their own right. 

There is the eternal rocker Van Zandt, 72, with his piratic bandana, psychedelic scarves, and scintillating guitar. “Little Stevie” or “Miami Steve” took a hiatus from the band to fight apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, and from 1999 until 2007, played mob consigliere Silvio Dante on HBO’s The Sopranos.

Drummer Max Weinberg, also 72, has performed in studio and on stage with Springsteen since 1974, moonlighting as band leader on Conan O’Brien’s three talk shows from 1993 until 2021. His own band, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, shook Chicago’s Park West the previous night.

Multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, 72 too, replaced Van Zandt in 1984, stayed on when Stevie  returned in 1998, and is the longstanding guitarist for another legendary rock group, Neil Young’s Crazy Horse.

And bassist Gary W. Tallent has been at Bruce’s side ever since his amazing debut album Greetings from Asbury Park in 1973.

The rest of these virtuoso musicians are saxophonist Jake Clemons, nephew of the late Clarence;  vocalist, violinist, and acoustic guitarist Soozie Tyrell; Roy Bittan and Charles Giordano, who each play both keyboard and accordion; saxophonist Eddie Manion; trumpeters Curt Ramm and Barry Danielian; trombonist Ozzie Melendez; and singers/percussionists Anthony Almonte, Lisa Lowell, Michelle Moore, Ada Dyer, and Curtis King.

On this hot August night in the not-so-Windy City, Springsteen touched all the bases of his five-decade career encompassing 21 studio, 23 live, and 8 compilation albums.

Each number ran breathlessly into the next––one, two, three, bam!  

Every one of the band members and backup performers got a chance to shine during the 15-minute jazz jam “Kitty’s Back” from 1974’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.

“Wrecking Ball,” title track from the 2012 album, told the story of a struggling New Jersey steelworker representative of the blue-collar workers who survived the Great Recession brought on by greedy Wall Street investors.

Like many of The Boss’ songs, it measures the aching gap between the American dream and its elusive reality, all the while holding onto optimism and patriotism. 

If American philosopher Henry David Thoreau was right, and most of us live lives of quiet desperation, American rock poet Bruce Springsteen turns up the volume of our despair.

And he did it with a vengeance during “The Promised Land,” with eyes wide shut, right fist thrusting into the balmy late-summer air, and howling the frantic lyrics:  

“I’ve done my best to live the right way/I get up every morning and go to work each day/But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold/Sometimes I feel so weak I just wanna explode/Explode and tear this old town apart/Take a knife and cut this pain from heart/Find somebody itching for something to start.”

And as is often the case in his song-stories of distressed protagonists, the hope for a better day comes in the chorus: “Well, the dogs on Main Street howl ‘cause they understand/That I could take one moment into my hands/Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land.”

In songs, interviews, and his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen has opened up about his years-long struggles with clinical depression, stating that music has been the best help and healer.

Perhaps that collective recognition of human sadness is the strongest connection that he has with his loyal fans. How else to explain hundreds of thousands of everyday people––from Denver to Dusseldorf––cheerfully singing along to what are mostly life-sucks songs, albeit brilliantly written and performed?

Soul music is also writ large in the Springsteen songbook. On Friday night, Chi-town became Motown as Bruce paid homage to his Black influences, performing The Commodores’ “Night Shift,” from his 2022 covers album Only the Strong Survive, and reggae artist Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped.”

At one point during the marathon concert, Springsteen shouted out: “IS THERE ANYONE ALIVE IN CHICAGO TONIGHT?!” The roaring crowd indicated that, yes, there is.

The new Boss is not the same as the old Boss. He doesn’t stand up on piano racks, dive across the stage on his knees, or tell personal stories between songs like he did when I saw him perform at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1985.

But his fingers still fly up and down the frets of his guitar, his serrated singing voice remains vibrant, and his rapport with the audience is as tight as ever.

Throughout this enchanted evening, the bellows of “Bruuuuuce” drifted across the hallowed ballpark, which was built in 1914 and underwent a five-year $740 million makeover between 2015 and 2020.

“Maybe everything that dies someday comes back,” Springsteen crooned wistfully in 1982’s “Atlantic City,” one of many great tunes that did not make this night’s still-impressive setlist.

The COVID-19 virus, which has claimed nearly 7 million lives according to the World Health Organization, has darkly shadowed the 90-date tour that began in Tampa on Feb. 1 and is scheduled to conclude in San Francisco on Dec. 12.

The tour itself was postponed for two years and a few shows earlier this year were either postponed or put on without either Clemons, Lofgren, Van Zandt, or Tyrell––all of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The tenuousness of touring––and the fragility of rock life itself––was movingly personified Friday night by Bruce’s eulogy for George Theiss, who died in 2018, the fifth and final departed bandmate from Springsteen’s teenage group The Castiles.

“Death gives you the clarity to think about the purpose and possibilities of living right now,” Springsteen mused. “So be good to yourself, be good to the ones you love, and be good to the world around you.”

Then he stood alone on the titanic stage and sang the acoustic guitar-accompanied “Last Man Standing” from Letter to You.

The big-sounding band was back for “Because the Night,” a 1975 breakout hit for the Patti Smith Group. Bruce’s version showcased the brilliant electric guitar skills of Lofgren, who twirled and whirled while shredding his instrument.

The velvet-voiced E Street Choir was featured in 2002’s “The Rising,” Springsteen’s tribute to the 2,996 people who perished in the four terrorist attacks on U.S. targets on Sept. 11, 2001.

The mother of all showstoppers was “Badlands,” with its immediately recognizable drum-piano-guitar gallop that echoed the themes from the Western TV shows and movies that Springsteen grew up watching. The opening lines of the soaring song are typically in-your-face:

“Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland/Got a head-on collision smashin’ in my guts, man/I’m caught in a crossfire that I don’t understand.”

Thousands across the storied stadium sang along: “Talk about a dream, try to make it real/You wake up with a fear so real/You spend your life waitin’ for a moment that just don’t come/Well, don’t waste your time waiting. 

“Badlands, you gotta live it every day/Let the broken hearts stand as the price you’ve gotta pay/We’ll keep pushin’ till it’s understood/And these badlands start treating us good.

“Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, badlands,” the Wrigley Field fan club chimed in unison.

Practically every song was a sing-a-long of sorts. But The Boss let the audience serenade him for the first two verses of “Thunder Road.”

“The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways/Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays/Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, hey, that’s me and I want you only/Don’t turn me home again, I just can’t face myself alone again.

“Don’t run back inside, darling, you know what I’m here for/So you’re scared, and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore/Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night/You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re all right/Oh, and that’s all right with me.”

“Thunder Road” was the would-be closer of the concert, but after a brief interlude of darkness, the houselights came on for “Born to Run,” one of six stunning encores.

The sprawling song ended with a bang, several actually, as Weinberg performed an explosive drum solo while Springsteen waved him on like a third-base coach sending a runner home.

The crowd-pleasing follow-up was the 1974 salsa-tinged rave-up “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” as fan favorite Jake Clemons led the powerful horn section.

Then came the Number One hit “Dancing in the Dark,” with Bruce doing a dad-dance parody of his famous video duet with actress Courtney Cox in 1984.

Springsteen and Van Zandt mugged for the cameras during the seriocomic “Glory Days,” their hammy faces projected on the three towering video screens, as the audience was bathed in red, green, and blue lights.

“Stevie, it’s time to go home,” Bruce shouted to Van Zandt, who may have retired from politics but showed his support for war-ravaged Ukraine by brandishing a guitar bearing the blue and yellow colors of that country’s flag.

“I don’t wanna go home,” cried Stevie, as the rock legends seemed to be having as much fun as they did playing sock hops and VFW halls in their native New Jersey during the late 1960s.

Near the end of this dizzying, dazzling concert, the crowd was singing “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” so loudly that anyone in the vicinity of Clark and Addison streets got a free show, not a bad deal when tickets for the mega-event ranged from $90 to $5,000.

Those who paid the highest legally scalped prices were treated to Springsteen walking down stage stairs and ramps into the front rows, shaking hands, posing for selfies, signing autographs, and tossing out guitar picks and even his harmonica to one lucky fan. 

Bruce has lots of guitars, picks, and harmonicas––and as Seinfeld’s George Costanza might say, “He can afford them!”

In his incandescent career, Springsteen has sold more than 140 albums worldwide and been awarded 20 Grammys, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award for Best Song (1994’s “Philadelphia”), a Tony for his Broadway show, a Kennedy Center Honor, and MusicCares Person of the Year honors. He is a member of both the Songwriters and Rock and Roll halls of fame.

And unlike the recent tours of music immortals Paul Simon and Elton John, these are not farewell shows. Both Bruce and Stevie have said they would tour nonstop, a la songwriting king Bob Dylan, except for family commitments and the availability of venues, road crews, and band members.

Following Bruce’s full-throated introduction of the E Street Band and backup performers, he took the stage alone with an acoustic guitar and sang the final encore, a tear-inducing “I’ll See You in My Dreams” from Letter to You.

In “Badlands,” Springsteen asserts, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”  

And it wouldn’t be wrong to hope that his Chicago sign-off was not goodbye but au revoir. Until we meet again.

Judson University celebrates life and legacy of 'Chariots of Fire' figure Eric Liddell

By Tom Siebert

Judson University honored the heroism of Chariots of Fire protagonist Eric Liddell last night, launching a series of global events leading up to next year’s 100th anniversary of the Scottish sprinter’s record-breaking win in the 400-meter dash at the 1924 Olympic Games.

Kilt-clad bagpipers serenaded about 350 guests as they entered Herrick Chapel at the Elgin campus of the Christian college, which was hosting its internationally known World Leaders Forum.

“Eric Liddell was a great servant and brave humanitarian,” Sir James MacMillan told the audience of students, staff, Liddell family, elected officials, and members of the Chicagoland community.

“Long may his legacy continue into the future,” added the fellow Scotsman, a world-renowned composer who conducted a chorus and orchestra performing his hymn “Who Shall Separate Us?” at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London last September.

Liddell, whose story was told in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire, famously declined to participate in the 1924 Olympics’ 100-yard dash because the race was run on a Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.

The gold medalist went on to work in the North China mission fields from 1925 until 1943, when he was captured by invading Japanese forces during World War II and detained in an internment camp. There Liddell assisted the elderly and taught science and Bible classes to the younger detainees.

He died of exhaustion, malnourishment, and a brain tumor on February 21,1945, six months before the camp was liberated by the U.S. Army.

Also speaking in praise of Liddell was Lord Robert Smith, a native of Glasgow and prominent Scottish businessman. Lord Smith, former governor of the British Broadcasting Corporation, implored the college students to follow Liddell’s lead and choose service over celebrity.

“Find opportunities to volunteer and contribute to society,” he advised. “It will enrich your life.”

Co-hosts of this year’s event were ABC7 Chicago sports anchor Dionne Miller and Chicago Scots president Gus Noble, who inspired the audience with quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Scottish poet Robert Burns, and Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan.

Near the end of the two-hour presentation, the World Leaders Forum announced its donation of $20,000 to the Eric Liddell Community, an Edinburgh care, charity, and community hub that helps the elderly who are struggling with depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The forum also funds entrepreneurship, diversity programs, and RISE scholarships for developmentally challenged students at Judson.

Since its founding in 2011, Judson’s World Leaders Forum has featured former President George W. Bush; ex-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev; ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair; former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan; former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; ex-Vermont Governor Howard Dean; and author, attorney, and diplomat Caroline Kennedy.

The forum also hosts an inspirational series whose past keynote speakers have been evangelist Nick Vujicic, Olympic gymnast champion Mary Lou Retton, magician Jim Munroe, Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban, actor/entrepreneur Terrence Howard, and actor/activist Edward James Olmos.

Located in northwest suburban Elgin since 1963, the university has about 1,300 students and offers a Christian liberal arts and sciences education through its Bachelor of Arts degrees for more than 60 majors.

Judson president Gene Crume told the Tuesday night audience that he is often asked how a tiny school in the rustic Fox Valley of Illinois is able to attract such notable names to its World Leaders Forum.

“It’s because our mission is to shape lives that shape the world,” Dr. Crume asserted. “And there is no greater example of someone who did that than Eric Liddell.”

The event concluded as Crume presented honorary degrees to MacMillan and Smith, in addition to vintage Elgin watches, paying homage to the city’s one-time status as “watchmaker to the world.”

'Till' is a mandatory movie for our times

 By Tom Siebert

I went to school for sixteen years and was never taught about Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black youth whose brutal murder by white supremacists in 1955 added angst and urgency to the Civil Rights Movement.

So thank you, Chinonye Chukwu, for making Till, an agonizing but exceedingly sensitive film that is going to be seen by millions and win many awards, all the while memorializing this American tragedy.

In the upbeat opening sequences of the movie, Emmett (portrayed by charismatic newcomer Jalyn Hall) is a high-spirited, likeable lad who lives with his mother Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler in a tour de force performance) on the second floor of a two-flat apartment on the South Side of Chicago.

He and his doting mom joke, banter, exchange smiles, and sing doo-wop and bee-bop tunes in imperfect harmony. Writer/director Chukwu films the fun in vibrant colors, from the bright dresses that Mamie wears to the wallpaper in Emmett’s bedroom, illustrated with tiny boats, planes, and trains.

Exuberant Emmett, whose nickname is “Bobo,” is excited about the rail trip that he will soon be taking to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi. But Mamie is overcome with dread over his looming journey into the segregated Deep South.

“I don’t want him seeing himself the way people see him down there,” she tells her mother––Emmett’s grandmother––Alma (Whoopi Goldberg, who co-produced the film). “They have a different set of rules for Negroes.”

And to her big-personality son, Mamie Till directly warns: “Be small down there!”

At the train station, mother and child engage in a long tight embrace, a scene made painfully poignant by the audience’s knowledge that the lingering hug will be their last one.

During the 700-mile ride from Illinois to Mississippi, Emmett looks optimistically through a train window, his future as seemingly wide open as the sweeping scenery.

In the small town of Money, he stays in a shotgun shack owned by his great-uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper, and reconnects with his cousins.

Then, on August 24, after a long day of picking cotton with his relatives, comes Emmett’s much-disputed interaction with shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant while purchasing bubble gum.

“You look like a movie star,” Emmett tells Carolyn, 21. And as he leaves Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, he turns around and whistles at her. She goes to get a gun and points it at the car that Emmett and his extended family are departing in.

Four days later, Carolyn's husband Roy and her half-brother J.W. Milam abduct Emmett at gunpoint from Moses’s home. Then, in an awful scene heard––but mercifully not shown––they beat the youth, shoot him in the head, and tie a 75-pound cotton gin belt around his neck with barbed wire.

Emmett’s bloated and mutilated body was discovered two days later in the Tallahatchee River. And when Mamie is notified via phone call that her beloved son is dead, she collapses in trauma.

The grief-stricken mother somehow gains enough strength to travel to Mississippi, identify her grotesquely disfigured son, and pay $3,400 to have his swollen, badly bruised body shipped back to Chicago.

Then Mamie decides to turn her pain into purpose. She chooses to hold a public funeral with an open casket and allows Jet magazine to photograph Emmett's face. The disturbing cover photo shocked the conscience of Americans and people around the world.

But apparently not the jury of twelve white men in the trial of Bryant, 24, and Milam, 35. Both men were found not guilty in Tallahatchee County Court on September 23, 1955, despite Mamie’s courageous testimony describing her son's corpse.

However, in a Look magazine article published on January 24, 1956, the acquitted duo brazenly admitted in ghastly detail how they killed Emmett Till. Protected by the double jeopardy clause in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Bryant and Milam could not be retried.

Meanwhile, civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Dr. T.R.M. Howard reached out to Mamie and she became a social justice proponent. National sympathy over the gruesome killing contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

On June 12, 1963, Evers, who led the effort to permit blacks to vote in Mississippi, was gunned down outside his Jackson home by Byron De La Beckwith, a Ku Klux Klan member. Medgar’s wife Myrlie and their three young children watched the murder take place.

Emmett’s mother remarried, becoming known as Mamie Till-Mobley, earned a master’s degree in education from Loyola University, and served as an elementary school teacher.

On January 6, 2003, she died of heart failure at the age of 81 and was later buried near her son at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, a suburb southwest of Chicago. Mamie’s monument reads, "Her pain united a nation."

In August 2017, a Mississippi grand jury opted not to charge Carolyn Bryant Donham, then 82, with perjury for allegedly exaggerating her testimony in the infamous trial of her husband and half-brother.

And earlier this year, on March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, making it a federal hate crime when two or more people conspire to kill or harm someone because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other prejudices.

Still, white supremacy remains the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, famously said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Till is a must-see movie that will hopefully bend our country’s moral arc closer to a more just society.

 

New book about Yoko Ono reveals her genius, gravitas, and greatness

By Tom Siebert

When Yoko Ono was reluctantly thrust onto the global stage in the late 1960s, she was called “ugly,” a “screamer,” and the “dragon lady” who broke up The Beatles.

More than five decades later, winsome writer Madeline Bocaro sets the record forever straight in the epic, vividly detailed book, In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono, revealing John Lennon’s otherworldly half as a beautiful woman who could sing pretty songs, and on the contrary, wanted the Fab Four to stay together.

I was ready to read a 558-page book about Yoko after recently re-listening to 1980’s Double Fantasy and realizing that her seven songs on the Grammy-winning album were better than John’s seven, as she brilliantly reached into rock, new wave, American folk, Eddie Cantor, and Marlene Dietrich music.

I learned from Ms. Bocaro’s book that Ms. Ono’s musical skills were developed growing up in an aristocratic Japanese family, learning piano at the age of four, and later studying at prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

Moreover, Mr. Lennon was not the first Beatle whom Yoko met. In the fall of 1966, she approached Paul McCartney on behalf of John Cage, asking if the avant-garde composer could use some of the song-writing duo’s lyrics for a book of music manuscripts.

Paul referred her to John, who a few weeks later, on Nov. 7, coincidentally walked into a London art gallery where Yoko was preparing an exhibit of her conceptual works. One of those art pieces was a ladder, which Mr. Lennon climbed atop and gazed into a magnifying glass pointed at the ceiling, where a small white canvas had the word “YES” written on it.

He was impressed with the positive message as well as the messenger, and within less than three years, on March 20, 1969, they were married, instantly becoming the most famous couple on the planet.

The multimedia crush was, well, crushing, and inspired them to hold a honeymoon “bed-in” at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel to protest the then-raging Vietnam War.

“Their lives were not their own,” Ms. Bocaro writes. “John and Yoko were messengers, using fame as a tool to promote peace and to give us hope.”

The horror and haunt of war had shaped each other’s world vision. John grew up playing in the Liverpudlian rubble of World War II, while Yoko’s family sheltered in a bunker during the apocalyptic firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

The once-wealthy family faced starvation and was forced to beg for food, a circumstance that first fired her artistic imagination.

“The painting method derives from as far back as the time of the Second World War when we had no food to eat, and my brother and I exchanged menus in the air,” Yoko stated in an art catalogue from that fateful 1966 exhibit in London.

In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono also includes meticulously dated and described entries about her books, poetry, films, concerts, songs, albums, and recording sessions, in addition to pulled quotes from media articles and excerpts from the author’s own interviews.

Ms. Bocaro was smart in using real-time quotes in her book, rather than new interviews in which memories are faded, resentments are reconciled, and facts are reimagined.

The screaming, for instance, was not imagined. It stemmed from Ms. Ono’s childhood, when she became aware of the power of a woman’s voice and curious about her mother’s warning not to ever go near the family’s servants’ rooms.

But young Yoko went anyway, only to hear a conversation between two teenage girls, one of whose aunt had given birth the previous day, and she was describing the sounds women make when having a baby.

“There was a totally sanitized image about a woman, you know, they were supposed to be just pretty and make pretty noises,” Ms. Ono told The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, in 2016. “So I was scared, and I sneaked back to my room, but that really stayed with me. And years later, I started to create all sorts of sounds.”

Those sounds, while disturbing to some, reflected her feelings as a “disrespected woman,” Ms. Bocaro comments below that passage in her book, adding that Yoko then “began to carry the torch for the plight of all women.”

Popular music fans, who had grown accustomed to Mr. Lennon’s serrated singing voice, were introduced to the screaming stylings of Ms. Ono on “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),” a song about her daughter, who was absconded by second husband Tony Cox, on the Live Peace in Toronto 1969 album.

Klaus Voorman, a longtime friend of John’s who played bass guitar at that concert as a member of the Plastic Ono Band, provides the book’s most trenchant quote about the fabled couple’s relationship.

“Up to the time Yoko came into the picture, John, even with all his success and money, was a frustrated, helpless creature,” said Mr. Voorman, who created the iconic cover of The Beatles’ Revolver album in 1966. “When Yoko appeared, he bloomed. It was an amazing thing to see. For him, that was the revolution.”

Indeed, Ms. Ono inspired Mr. Lennon to become a more visionary songwriter, pioneering male feminist, and fervent proponent of peace.

Critics of her music may be surprised to learn that she has had thirteen number one singles on the U.S. Billboard charts, influencing such artists as Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, the B-52’s, Sonic Youth, and Meredith Monk.

On Dec. 9, 1980, John Lennon was shot to death by a deranged fan, as the couple were walking toward the entrance of their apartment home in the storied Dakota building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Since Mr. Lennon’s still-shocking death, Yoko, along with her son Sean and his stepbrother Julian, have preserved John’s music, messages, and legacy. She also has quietly given away millions of dollars to charities, hospitals, art museums, peace groups, environmental causes, and just friends in need.

The artwork of Ms. Ono, now 89, is still exhibited throughout the world. Her music still fills the global airwaves. And her Twitter feed is a proverbial daily devotional, from which Ms. Bocaro quotes generously in her magnificent book:

“Your fear is protecting you…There are no brick walls…Start with feeling love for the problem. You will then know what step you wish to take…Waves always return…No cloud can cloud us forever…Water is more valuable than gold…The child in you will save you…The light that shines on everything shines on you, too… Silence is the highest form of expression.”

John Lennon was anything but silent about his wife’s creative talent, saying she was as gifted as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan “rolled into one.”

Ms. Ono remains an inspiration to anyone who has experienced foolish prejudice, unfair criticism, or unspeakable tragedy.

As Madeline Bocaro eloquently concludes: "Yoko is like a polished gemstone––radiating after years of abrasion."

 

Actor Edward James Olmos stands and delivers at Judson University in Elgin, Illinois

 

By Tom Siebert

Pioneering actor Edward James Olmos shared his intriguing takes on God and country, in addition to giving a well-received shout-out to Chicago’s baseball teams at the Inspirational Series of the World Leaders Forum at Judson University in Elgin on Monday night.

“Everyone knows God is a woman,” Olmos told the Christian college audience of about 400, many of whom smiled, laughed, and even clapped. “And Jesus is not white. He is from the Mediterranean.”

The Miami Vice and Stand and Deliver star did not shy away from another taboo topic, politics, saying that the United States is deeply divided over the false claim that President Joe Biden was not duly elected in November 2020.

“When the civil war comes, it will pass, so just go inside like you did during the pandemic­­––get some food and watch Battlestar Gallactica,” he joked, referring to the rebooted television series in which he played Commander William Adama from 2003 to 2009.

The charismatic actor talked about the heavy subjects with a light touch. But most of his hour-long storytelling traced his life from boyhood baseball player to teenage rock singer to actor, director, and producer who shattered stereotypes of Mexican Americans in plays, movies, and TV shows.

Olmos became famous portraying El Pachuco, narrator of the musical play and later movie Zoot Suit in 1981. From 1984 to 1989, he was the somber Lieutenant Marty Castillo in the mega-hit Miami Vice, winning both an Emmy and Golden Globe for the complex role.

Also in 1989, Olmos became the first and only American-born Latino to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, after starring in Stand and Deliver as Jaime Escalante, an East Los Angeles high school teacher who successfully taught advanced calculus to at-risk Hispanic students.

“There’s no one more important than a teacher,” Olmos told the diverse crowd of staff, students, elected officials, and community members at Judson’s Herrick Chapel.

Wearing a matching black shirt and suit, he pulled up his pant legs, only to reveal socks bearing the blue and white logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in whose farm system he once played. “I know that here I should be saying Chicago Cubs! White Sox!”

Olmos, 75, has long been a peace and social justice advocate. In 1988, he joined United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez to protest the poisonous effects of pesticides on California grape pickers and their families.

And in the aftermath of Rodney King’s brutal beating by Los Angeles police officers in 1992, Olmos took a broom to help clean up riot-ravaged neighborhoods in the South Central section of the city.

At Judson, the actor/activist lamented the lack of jobs for Latinos in Hollywood and the overall increase of prejudice toward Mexicans in America.

“The last five years have been very difficult for us,” Olmos told the hushed audience, which was well-represented by those of Hispanic heritage. “We have to do better.”

Later joining host Jacqueline Ruiz and Olmos on the stage was Rick Najera, an award-winning sketch comedian and playwright.

Najera, a protégé of Olmos who was recovering from his third brain surgery, was presented with the 2022 Communion Champion award for “igniting the flame of inspiration.”

The event marked the resumption of the Inspirational Series part of Judson’s globally known World Leaders Forum after a five-year break.

Previous speakers in the series have been magician Jim Munroe in 2017; Olympic gymnast champion Mary Lou Retton in 2016; and in 2015, evangelist Nick Vujicic, who was born without limbs.

From 2010 to 2021, Judson’s World Leaders Forum has featured former President George W. Bush; ex-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev; ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair; former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan; Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban; author, attorney, and diplomat Caroline Kennedy; former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; ex-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; and actor Terrence Howard.

Located in northwest suburban Elgin since 1963, Judson University offers a Christian, liberal arts and sciences education through its Bachelor of Arts degrees for more than 60 majors, minors, graduate, and online programs, as well as certification and accelerated adult degrees. For more information, visit www.JudsonU.edu.

The World Leaders Forum funds entrepreneurship, diversity programs, and RISE scholarships for developmentally challenged students at Judson.

Following Monday night’s event, P.G. Nkalang'ango, a Judson senior from Tanzania and majoring in computer science, said he was most impressed with Olmos’s emphasis on simple disciplines, such as making one’s bed in the morning, as integral to success.

“I realized that I need more discipline in both the small things and the big things in my life,” said Nkalang'ango.

Abigail Belsan, a junior from southwest suburban Lemont who majors in architecture, enjoyed Olmos’s “lighthearted discussion.”

Asked whether she was okay with the actor’s vision of God as female, Belsan replied, "Everyone has their own beliefs."

All shook up after seeing brilliant, new, 'Elvis' musical biopic

 

By Tom Siebert

“Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis,” John Lennon once said. And Bob Dylan described hearing Presley’s voice for the first time as “like busting out of jail.”

 

I grew up in a subsequent era, however, when the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” was widely viewed as an aging Vegas crooner who had long left the building of musical significance.

 

But as I watched director Baz Luhrmann’s epic Elvis, I was caught in a trap for 159 mesmerizing minutes, making me astonishingly aware that Presley’s life was much more triumph than tragedy.

 

In a tour de force performance, newcomer Austin Butler completely inhabits the hip-swiveling, barrier-breaking international supernova of music, movies, television, and time present.

 

Seen in dizzying flashback through the dying eyes of Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by a puffy, prostheticized Tom Hanks, Elvis is more of a fast-moving montage than a movie.

 

The sweeping, frenetic film slows down just enough to depict in riveting detail Presley’s poverty-stricken beginnings in Mississippi, early rockabilly recordings, audiences of screaming girls and seething boys, mediocre-but-money-making films, dutiful Army service, stunning television comeback shows, and final glide path to drugs, womanizing, gun-wielding paranoia, and world-mourning death.

 

The movie has been praised for its overall accuracy by Elvis’s ex-wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie. But screenwriters Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner did take some dramatic license.

 

While it is true, for instance, that Presley’s sexually suggestive stage mannerisms garnered the attention of law enforcement, there is no documented evidence that Colonel Parker made a deal with the U.S. government that sent Elvis into the service in exchange for no criminal charges being filed against him.

 

What’s more, or less, no one in Elvis’s living circle can recall him hanging out with B.B. King and receiving career advice from the blues guitar great, as was imagined in the movie.

 

Besides, it would have been much more fun to fabricate Presley cavorting with Chuck Berry, who may not have invented rock ’n’ roll but certainly wrote its early narrative of teenagers, jukeboxes, malt shops, and sock hops.

 

A reincarnated Little Richard does appear in the film, portrayed eerily accurate by Alton Mason, who sings “Tutti Frutti” with all wail and glory.

 

However, it is easy to believe that Elvis was indeed profoundly affected by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

 

This would explain his dramatic shift from the good-rocking “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” to message songs such as “In the Ghetto” and “If I Can Dream,” the brilliant close to Presley’s NBC-TV special in December 1968 after the scrapping of a cheesy holiday medley.

 

But by far the most controversial aspect of the movie is the world’s top actor, Hanks, playing Parker as a gambling-addicted demon who exploited Elvis commercially, personally, and fatally.

 

“I made Elvis,” the colonel says near the end of the emotionally exhausting film. “But I didn’t kill him.”

 

No, he did not. And according to Parker’s biographer, Alanna Nash, there is no truth to the high-anxiety scene during which Presley fires his manipulative manager during a concert at the International Hotel in Las Vegas.

 

There is no question, however, that Parker’s 50 percent cut of Elvis’s earnings, coupled with the rigorous performing schedule that the manager demanded, played an integral part in Presley’s rise and fall.

 

But the singer’s electrifying voice––as well as his ingenious blending of blues, gospel, and country music––would have eventually changed the course of culture, even without the help of a conniving carnival barker.

 

When the 42-year-old entertainer died of heart failure at his Graceland mansion in Memphis on August 16, 1977, Elvis’s net worth was $5 million. His estate has since risen to an estimated $500 million, making him the most commercially successful solo act of all time. 

 

This movie, moreover, has already made more than $220 million, the second highest-grossing musical biopic behind 2020’s Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Queen front man Freddie Mercury.

 

I went to see Elvis in suburban Chicago with members of my Christian singles group, a redemptive twist, considering that many churches, particularly in the South, once condemned Presley’s songs as “devil music.”

 

To paraphrase Dylan, the times they have a-changed. And Elvis is perhaps the biggest reason.