Unboundedness: Elvis Presley: "Suspicious Minds"

"The panther's tread is on the stairs
Coming up and up the stairs."

"Pursuit" Sylvia Plath



…the advent of vinyl meant you could listen to a song whenever you wanted; you could of course listen for it on the radio, but with vinyl you could just listen to it over and over. The needle would be placed on the opening groove and the spiral nature of the groove would do the rest; the needle would lift at the end of the groove, ready to go back to its stand or be placed right back at the start…eventually a record was cut so that the needle would never leave, though, and that was called a locked groove; Sgt. Pepper ends with one, for instance. Theoretically, a locked groove could play forever, or as long as the listener could stand to hear the same thing over and over again…


…and over and over again, but there was something else the Beatles did too; fade a song out and then fade it in again* - “Helter Skelter” deals with a spiral descent, a relationship of hide and seek, indecision, and if it had been released as it was done in the studio, would have gone on for half an hour…


Music tries to reach infinity however it can. One piece is being played over several centuries**; but pop music was stretching out around this time too, from Jimmy Webb to The Beatles to Isaac Hayes. The go-go 60s where songs had to be around three minutes were still around, but to truly get into a song, to really be carried by it, more time was needed. This stretching of time implies many things; more time to explain, to have orchestral passages, to suggest that what is being said is big and important...which suits the end of a decade and what some may have sensed as the end of an era...

But yes, infinity. That which means "unboundedness" and loops around itself, swinging and returning, not so much a spiral as a length and a curve, a length and a curve...pop singles may be long but they are not infinite; the needle always dutifully leaves the end groove, and it is up to the listener as to whether they want to hear the song again. There is probably a limit to the number of times anyone could hear a song, even one they love, in a row***; but then there are songs that seem to keep revolving of their own accord, that could be listened to repeatedly, looping away, but even that will not work. They will just keep going, like a heartbeat, long after the record player is turned off...if the listener is trying to get a song into or out of his/her system, well, this one will just stay.

There is no beginning, as such; the situation is laid out pure and simple, as if you are walking into something that has already been going for some time - here is infinity, and now you are conscious that you are part of it, that you are (however obscurely) part of the "we."

It is dark; the very middle of the night; when time is not really the point. He's singing about himself, about her, sure, but he is singing so urgently that you can't help but become involved, and as it's an ever-looping situation then you can bet you're taken in, you are part of it whether you like it or not. You become her in a way, are that suspicious and disbelieving mind that will not rest and thus will not let him rest. Throw the clock away: you are like this all the time.

In the infinite world, so much of ordinary life becomes transitory, meaningless. Or almost impossibly stable; it was this way, it is this way, and it will always be this way. One constant - love - meets another one - jealousy - and neither can ever budge. There is no escape, there are only tears, tears that you cannot see, because men aren't supposed to cry in pop songs...can his love conquer her disbelief in the end? Our own dubiousness? How can either of them prove the other is wrong? It loops and loops, slowing down, he begs for their love to survive, praying to her, praying to the infinite itself to slow down, praying for something to break through...

...and then fades out...



...but it is still the night, still the middle, the endless stretching out until it cannot be seen or heard anymore, inaudible but there. The narrator in "Ruby" knew he was going to die and the question was how to take her with him. Death is not an option here; and there is no end to the song. Sure, the needle will leave to go home eventually, but hearing the song again will not prolong anything, because it's already there. Not even fading it out will work, not even the song technically 'ending' will do. The infinite has opened up and makes a mockery of things like 'endings' and for that matter, 'beginnings' - and you are part of it now, witness, if not actual participant, in the whole relationship here, with its looks and accusations and tears and pleas and insomnia...

...and of course this comes from the same writer (Mark James) as "Always On My Mind" - there he is in another kind of infinity, one next door to this one - the Other is not suspicious there as lonely and ready to break up, to go. But here there is no going, he can't go even if she does, and the only sign of any resolution is in her suspicion...at least she cares, even if her caring is making him a nervous wreck.

Elvis is caught in a trap; how poignant that sounds, coming from a man who has just proved to the world once again that he is indeed the King; how poignant that he recorded this in a studio that no longer exists (not at home in Graceland, which would have been just too much). The song was recorded to approximate how he did the song in Las Vegas, the fade-out/fade-in in particular; it is a song that could in theory be sung forever...everyone is on it here, playing and singing as if they are just as desperate as Elvis is...he may well be caught in a trap - a trap of his own making, hapless...but he's going to make art out of it, one way or another...and he laughs at the end, happy, having escaped the song, if not the situation...

...it is a cliche, I feel, to say that music keeps going long after the musicians who created it; a lot of music gets forgotten, lost, after all. Musicians themselves forget lyrics, songs, whole albums (i.e. Robin Gibb and his Sing Slowly Sisters). Here Elvis presents us with a song that is right in the middle of everything, a song that once again everyone can understand (the old "Elvis is everyone/Everyone is Elvis" idea), that too many people have been caught in...and he rollicks through this live, like a figure in a great painting that knows it's in a great painting...happy to be in the infinite.

And here in the infinite is where I leave Elvis: but really, do I leave him here? He returns again and again in the charts and in music so much as to be part of the infinite himself, always indisputably there if only in theory, a monarch perhaps for twenty years but much longer than that in the imagination. (There are future #2s for Elvis, but they are all previous #1s and so I won't be writing about them.) It is only fitting to end here, end with him having reclaimed his right to rock, to sweat it out onstage and live out the music, to sing a song that never really ends (which he plainly understands)...a song that continues even after it ends, an ur-song, if you will. A song that everyone, including poets, understands:


"And you will never know what a battle/I fought to keep the meaning of my words/Solid with the world we were making./I was afraid, if I lost that fight/Something might abandon us."

"Fidelity" Ted Hughes



*Jimi Hendrix did this as well, on “Manic Depression.”

**Though not composed as such until 1987, Cage's work was, I'm sure, being thought of before then; the longest symphony in the regular orchestral repertoire is Mahler's No. 3, which can take up to one hundred minutes to play. Cage's work can be played much faster, of course, but even at its fastest takes nearly fifteen hours.

***How many times have you listened to a song the whole way through? Not because you had to, but because you wanted to...