1968: If I Can Dream - Elvis Presley

There must be peace and understanding sometime

I started this Substack as a place to write about music from the last thirty years, and an excuse to write about artists other than Bob Dylan. I didn’t really expect to stick with it and make it all the way through to the end, and I especially didn’t expect to carry on with more music writing once I had done.

That last series started with the song that was Number 1 the day that I was born, which made sense to me as a starting point, and ended in 2024 with a song by Sabrina Carpenter. At first, it felt difficult to decide where to take these posts next. Without being confined to a particular year, running chronologically towards the present, there was so much - too much - music to choose from. But then I thought, the last series started at the beginning so this one needs to go back even earlier than that.

I can quite vividly remember encountering every musician who has been important, influential or inspiring to me; can vividly remember the first time that I heard Bob Dylan, Courtney Barnett and Frank Sinatra or Tom Waits. I can recall the first time I really felt, understood or got Leonard Cohen or Fiona Apple or Paul McCartney.

But I don’t remember the first time I heard Elvis. Elvis was always there, before anyone else. He was always constant. He was always the first and the best and the last and the only.

When I was little, really little, my Nan made a mix-tape cassette of Elvis’ best songs for me and we would sing and dance along in her kitchen, listening. Later, we branched out to the Elv1s: 30 #1 Hits CD and I learned that he had even more treasures in his catalogue. When I was a little older, approaching teenage, I encountered my first Elvis impersonator on holiday with my mum and later still would spend hours watching Elvis: That's the Way It Is with my uncle. Most recently I visited Graceland, Sun Records and the Overton Park Shell with my girlfriend. We even serendipitously caught a speech by Priscilla Presley on Beale Street.

Even though I have lived with his music for longer than I can remember, hearing it still gives me the highest thrill. It’s still the most electrifying music I can imagine. The jolt of the ages that course through the opening acoustic guitar strumming of That’s Alright Mama or the swaggering brass riff that kicks off Trouble still send shivers of delight down my spine every time.

Elvis Presley was not just The King, but he was The King of Kings. He’s the one that inspired all the greats that came after him and opened the door for everything that has come since. The closest thing that we have come in popular culture to a modern day deity. There is a stratospheric and celestial power in the earthiness of his voice, and a spirituality and soul that reverberates through the ages.

It is fitting that the greatest singer of all has had the greatest biography written about him, or biographies, in Peter Guralnik’s Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. The writing and the story in the books are as great and as epic and tragic as the writing and stories in Tolstoy or as heroic and fantastical as in Homer.

Bob Dylan said of the books that “Elvis steps from the pages”, and he does. “You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others” and it does. The books, like Elvis’ music, bring him back to life with every page.

His spirit is tangible and alive in the air in Memphis, as well. Such is the power of his voice and his music, that when I stood in the room earlier on this year at Sun Records where he cut his first recordings, and heard those opening notes of That’s Alright Mama come calling out of the speakers, I felt frozen to the spot. I felt energised in a way that I haven’t felt before, and was moved to tears by the traces of the magic that are left in the place.

As great as his early rock and roll records are, my two favourites of his albums come from the middle period of his career, and a time when he was not considered to be at any kind of creative peak. 1967’s How Great Thou Art and 1969’s From Elvis in Memphis.

The former is a gospel album which is so moving and nourishing that even as a lifelong atheist, it’s enough to make me believe to my bones that he is singing The Truth, and the latter, to me, is just about the greatest album that anybody has ever made.

In between these records he recorded his ‘Comeback Special’, which needs no introduction or explanation except to say that it is simply incredible. Perhaps the most incredible, the most breath-taking and audacious moment of the whole show comes right at the end, in If I Can Dream.

Written with Elvis in mind by Billy Goldenberg and Walter Earl Brown and inspired by the message of Martin Luther King - and in the wake of his assassination as well as that of Bobby Kennedy - the song replaced I’ll Be Home for Christmas as the finale to the television special and is one of the most triumphant, emphatic and enduringly powerful performances that has ever been captured on film and tape.

Elvis transcends the role of a singer on this song, and becomes one with it. He is not merely singing a song, but imparting a wisdom in his plea; a message in his prayer. This is what every one of his songs was saying, in essence; this is the tragedy of Elvis, and all mankind, set to music. And that music? This is the sound of the better world that Elvis is singing about, the brass and the reeds and the backing vocals and the drums are the sounds that we will be met with when we finally make our way into the world that he dreamt of.

But if we can dream of a better world, where everybody is greeted as an equal, and can walk hand in hand together under a clear sky, then why can’t we create it? Why does it feel that we are no closer to doing so than we were when the Comeback Special first aired?

It’s been 56 years since Elvis sang this song, and we are still dreaming, still waiting and still hoping for that better land to appear.