Hound Dog
(Leiber,
Jerry / Stoller, Mike) Performed by Elvis Presley
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine
Well
they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Yeah
they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine
Well
they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Yeah
they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine
Well
they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Ya
know they said you was high-classed
Well,
that was just a lie
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
You
ain't nothin' but a hound dog
Cryin'
all the time
Well,
you ain't never caught no rabbit you ain't no friend of mine
I don't remember when it happened that I developed a crush on Elvis -- he was slightly before my parents' time and he wasn't a particular favourite of either of theirs -- so Elvis was definitely my very own first favourite singer. I liked all the early cutesy songs -- like Hound Dog and Teddy Bear and Good Luck Charm -- and even though I was a huge fan of his while he was still alive, I wasn't very interested in Elvis' later stuff.
We moved from New Brunswick to Ontario at the very beginning of 1977 and our new next door neighbour, Ron, was an even bigger Elvis fan than I was: his basement was nearly completely wallpapered in Elvis record covers (with the sporadic Doodle Art done by his wife Joyce), and the first time we went down there, one of my brothers looked at the walls and said, "Krista is going to marry Elvis when she grows up because she's in looooove with him". I was nine, so totally humiliated, but Ron understood Elvis-love and didn't tease me about it.
When Elvis died later that year, Ron was one of the many grief-stricken Elvis fans who made a pilgrimage to Graceland, and over the next few years, he would go on an annual solo Elvis tour, apparently retracing the King's footsteps. One year, not long after their third little girl was born, Ron came back from his annual vacation with a strange woman at his side. As my mother later told me, he rang the doorbell to his own house, and when Joyce answered it, Ron said, "This is my girlfriend and I was wondering if she could stay here while we figure things out". Needless to say, Joyce slammed the door on him. What a hound dog.
Ron and Joyce were one of those couples that looked like they had it all: Ron owned a small chain of independent record stores with his twin brother, Don, and even though they were probably the same age as my parents, they seemed more youthful (maybe just because their kids were younger). In addition to Ron taking these annual vacations, they were able to build a really nice addition onto the back of their home -- a huge family room with a rooftop patio that let off the master bedroom -- which had formerly been the modest twin to our own house. Their furniture was nicer, their car was nicer, and Joyce was my Mum's best friend. When Ron left, my mother said, "Maybe now Joyce can grow out her hair. Did you know that it was Ron who made her bleach it and get all those awful perms?" I didn't know, but I would eventually figure something like that out.
After Joyce became a single mother, my Mum would make me babysit for her for free every now and then, just to give Joyce a break (which I really didn't mind doing -- I liked her girls and I had nothing but sympathy for Joyce's situation). One evening, I was babysitting and talking to my friend Cora on the phone in Joyce's bedroom and I began to snoop around in her drawers and found a couple of framed collages of naked pictures of Joyce, her hair various shades of brown and blonde, her pubic hair consistently nearly black (which was the most shocking part of the pictures as I remember them). I couldn't even tell Cora what I was looking at (I think I was 12 or 13 at the time), and feeling shameful, I hastily put the pictures away, wondering at how 1) Joyce had the nerve to pose for these pictures, some of which were taken out in a country field somewhere, 2) Where did Ron go to get them developed, and 3) Why did Joyce keep them after Ron was gone? With the notion that Ron "made" Joyce get the "awful perms", I thought of these pictures as something Ron "made" Joyce participate in and I left that night thinking that she was definitely better off without him.
The next day at school, there was a knock on the portable door, and after the teacher answered it, he told me there was someone there to see me. I went outside, and there was my Mum and Joyce, looking furious. Mum explained that when Joyce went to get the grocery money that she keeps in her dresser, she found it was gone. When she asked her girls about it, they said that they could hear me opening and closing drawers in Joyce's bedroom, but that's all they knew about it. Since that was all the money Joyce had to feed her family with, they had come to the school to get it back from me. I didn't even see any money when I was snooping and I couldn't tell them what I had found and I made some lame excuse about having been on the phone with Cora at the time and was hoping to find a pen to write something down with. I don't think they believed that I hadn't taken the money -- and I am still annoyed that my mother would have ever believed that I did -- but I was never asked to go babysit for her again. Eventually, Joyce and the girls moved away and that was that.
When I think about Elvis now, all of this sordidness is wrapped up in my erstwhile love for the King. I've heard since then how it was Elvis who "made" Priscilla dye her hair and wear the big fake eyelashes, treating her like his living doll. His affairs and drug-induced impotence and even his huge age-difference with Priscilla make me think now that Elvis is no proper sex symbol. But, an early love is a love with tentacles, and when I first met Dave and he used his own love of Elvis to court me...well, that's another story.
