re: Your Greatest Song of All Time

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American trilogy - Elvis Presley

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Excellent choice.

Without mentioning names to protect the guilty-when Mrs M was pursuing her PhD, achieving high honors and voted by her peers to honcho various associations and various cross University conferences, I, as her faithful consort, shared various and sundry social occasions with her and her peers and minions.

On one such occasion, a colleague of the divine Mrs M from the Emerald Isle, took umbrage that I was not as an enthusiastic fan of The King as he demanded I be.

This demand came to a head in a pub off Chimes where an official conference steering committee “meeting”, as one might justifiably call it, was taking place having finally “lit” sparrow like after migrating from all the previous pubs where such august and intellectually rigorous business had been discussed and decided.(I should qualify and disclaim here that Mrs M does not and has not ever drank adult beverages)

“What the fook, you don’t like Elvis! You’re a fooking-a FOOKING American!”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like…”

“A FOOKING AMERICAN!! The FOOKING King!”

“Well, since you put it that way, but I hold Van Morrison in just as high regard as I do Elvis.”

“FOOKING A you do! Into The Mystic…you play it on the Wurlitzer (? ) all the FOOKING time-it’s that and that alone which made me aware you might be a man of good will and sufficiently sophisticated musically to perceive my thoughts on the incontrovertible greatness of Elvis.
I’ll say no more on this matter having come to some slight meeting of the minds on, on, on the matter.”

“Okay, good deal, I…”

“FOOKING American Trilogy !!! Need we say more?!?! American FookingTrilogy! I’ll say no more. Period! You agree! And I will gladly hoist myself and am putting it on the Wurlitzer!
Give me coins and dollars and go get the table more pitchers. I’ll prepare us for the grand event with other lesser songs leading up to The King’s opus…!

And I did and he did. I came back with pitchers to a table full of individuals who had sat mostly silent throughout our “conversation”. He returned, filled his plastic cup, lit a cigarette, placidly enjoyed the two songs preempting Elvis’s opus magnum. Proud Mary , Ike and Tina Turner’s version, and CCR’s Born On The Bayou .

Finally 2001:A Space Odyssey, visions like sugarplums of a sweating obese jumpsuited King,
Tupelo’s own… “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton.
Ole times there are not forgotten…”

“That’s the fooking KING!!! Listen to that! Fooking American to his heart and balls-grand, glorious-listen to that!”
Standing up, simultaneously stumbling-my friend has unleashed his vintage Zippo on a handful of napkins he’s waving in a Statue Of Liberty pose-that are lit, burning like the sun, and raining down incendiary debris everywhere. It is threatening Dresden on all below

Over come the bouncer to me. “Get him under control or I’m gonna throw all of y’all out. You got him wound up, you calm him down or I will!”

Good times. Forever etched in my mind and heart.
The King- American Trilogy