Tonight, Elvis plays Chicago, towards the end of a tour that started last week at Madison Square Garden. Close on 100,000 people saw Presley sing for the first time in his career in New York.
It's hard to pretend to be at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, sitting in the midst of a stadium where the voices of the audience break like surf, and hemmed in by soda salesmen and souvenir poster hawkers. Yet that's what thousands of people attempted. Women dressed in leased wigs; yellow crêpe pant-suits cut to reveal cleavage; synthetic semi-see-through lace stretch blouses: fat hips, court shoes, thick paint. Men wore plastic combat jackets, sideburns, blue cheeks, black pompadours, blue patterned short-sleeved shirts, prominent wrist-watch, and in one case I saw a reflex camera mounted on a tripod, like a machine-gun.
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