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play. Listen to the wordplay intro to “Baby, Let’s Play House,” which was really another way of saying, “What are we waiting for?” Or the way he steers “I’ll Never Let You Go” into a lascivious rockabilly coda (like “I Got a Woman” in reverse).
    By contrast, Wayne labored at his soft moods and avoided soapboxes of desire. Even though his acting was shallow, Presley would have uttered that line (“You sure are cute when you’re angry,”) with comparative panache, with the self-possession that told you how corny it was—and let the lady share in the sheer effrontery of it. And there are simply no Wayne analogs to the unbridled vocal freedom in Presley numbers like “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine” or “Just Because,” or hard rockers like “Good Rockin’ Tonight” or “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” Perhaps to many, Wayne rocked hard on the inside, but Presley made sure all that presence was front and center: in the song, onstage, in his body.
    It was in blues numbers that Presley began refining how (white) men could reimagine the idea of manhood: outbursts like “Trying to Get to You,” “His Latest Flame,” or “One Night.” This last number, the Smiley Lewis song about an orgy (available with the original lyrics on Reconsider Baby ), got edited from “One night of sin” to “One night with you” to assuage the RCA censors. But this edit doesn’t suggest that Presley was “cleaning up” his image as much as it reveals how he buffed up the surface to let the ulterior motives shine through. The song’s emotional hangover reflects the two singers’ differing racial attitudes toward sex: Presley brings a touch of guilt to what Lewis recalls with pure glee. But even without the dirty lyrics, nobody has much question what he’s singing about. In “Ain’t That Loving You Baby,” Presley lets loose with a beguiling sexual energy, the kind that tells you he would beat Wayne in any contest for any woman.
    Presley turned seduction themes into metaphors for the way he inveigled his audience and for the fame and money that trailed his every move. Part of Wayne’s (and his ilk’s) resentment against Presley’s fame was surely about how easy the young King made it all seem. Wayne’s ethic was about earning your pride, winning your standing among men by proving yourself through valor, heroism, and good deeds; sex was an invisible footnote. Presley’s response was all about instant satisfaction, the pleasure of now, and a lack of anxiety about what’s “proper.” In other words, Presley’s sound is the saloon party Wayne left early to go on Indian lookout.
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    Hollywood tried to hitch its fortune to rock ’n’ roll’s locomotive, but the train was already barreling out of town, leaving screenwriters and actors in catch-up mode for at least a decade. Beginning with Elvis Presley gyrating his hips unlike any man before or since, and Jerry Lee Lewis shaking his ducktail loose as he roared out “A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” rock songs poured from jukeboxes with new gender poses. From hairstyles to lifestyles, extremes were the rule: a whole generation of performers who came of age after 1955 either confronted the bland Norman Rockwell male-female stereotypes with bold poses of eccentricity or twisted the norms beyond recognition. Audiences weren’t far behind.
    Almost immediately, it seemed, the fault lines were everywhere. David Halberstam makes a crucial point about how TV father Ozzie Nelson tried to turn his son Ricky’s music into something that profited the Ozzie and Harriet show in 1957. Ricky Nelson loved rock ’n’ roll for its independent spirit and powers of self-definition, and he was reluctant at first—at sixteen, he just didn’t feel