It is been said by past writers of urban intellect that Garon had willed Aron his 'lifeforce' for Aron to use in this life (for Garon would not need it in his next life).

Let us go further and in a different direction - where secret things guard a dark wood where intuition lives. Where East Tupelo becomes not just any town, nor any stable, not just anywhere.

In their beginning Aron and Garon were One. At a certain embryonic moment they split in TU. I spell 'TU' because this happened in Tupelo. Aron and Garon are the 'TU' in Tupelo.

Garon was proclaimed Firstborn Dead - then Aron (Firstborn Alive) becoming the TUPELONER.

Garon is the TUPELOSER. But in losing he gains alpha-martyrdom. He is there at the beginning of something that has fueled our lives in a way that the older religions have not. He heralds the beginning of something new to believe in. American spirituality that is tied in with the way we live today.

Something that I call the GOSPELVIS.

It is based on the boyhood that Elvis lived in East Tupelo. A boyhood bound up in facts which have a mythic ring to them. A religion based not so much in belief as in POSSIBILITIES. The possibility of how a dual nature conscious in a man even before he was born can influence a life, a career, and art. The possibility that " the system" does work for poor people who try to do good. The possibility that there is a consciousness that provides a silent order to all things. And in the end there is only the hope to return to that imperfect consciousness.

I see an embryonic lifestyle for TU brothers within their feminine host that is as real to us as that epiphany was to Elvis when he first saw '2001, A Space Odyssey' and heard "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" which he would use to open his superhero power plays (seen as mere rock shows by the literal minded). (Despite who turned Elvis onto the theme, there was that first listen that he masterfully assimilated.)

Iggy and Ziggy were not the only 70's rockstars influenced by Kubrick. Before there was Iggy and Ziggy there was ARON & GARON. Before Ziggy was influenced by "Clockwork Orange", the Tupelo Twins were Kubrick fans of a sort thanks to Peter Sellers who starred in "Doctor Strangelove". Elvis repeatedly rented "Dr. Strangelove" back in the days of the Memphian Theatre. If the 'Z' in 'Ziggy' descends from 'Zimmerman', does the 'G' in Garon descend from 'God'? No, the 'G' descends from their mother 'Gladys'. And the single morality image borne from the climax of 2,001 is a fetal loner.

Note Iggy's Clockwork Orange eyelash. foto by MICK ROCK

And suddenly there was only one singer of love songs.

Aron sang out to Garon. No answer.

Aron would continue to sing out to his soulmate until the day he believed he would return to him: August 16, 1977.

If Garon had lived and grown up with Aron neither would have amounted to much. Aron would have still driven a truck in Tupelo ... and I might have even fallen in love with his simpler daughter. A daughter that would have stripped for me in my cult movies. A starlet from Tupelo. "TUPELORNA". This of course, is a dream. I, too am from East Tupelo. I am the second greatest thang to come from East Tupelo and thereby deem myself SUPER TUPELO, JR. And though I was raised some 17 miles from there out in the country (see my bio-pic "TEENAGE TUPELO"), I frequented East Tupelo all my young years. But fame stripped Lisa Marie (ironically) of her Father's birthright and adoption landed me in a dissimilar alien terrain. So much for 'alternate realty'.

Aron would not have died at 42, nor would his Mother. As it is, with the sheer enigma of that dual-death age of Gladys and Aron, I believe the divine perpetrator is Garon. It was Garon who decreed 42 as the death-year for both brother and mother.

How could this happen? A recent study showed that mothers who have boys shorten their own lifespan. Consider toting a dead baby and it's toxins. Toxins consumed like milk by mother and twin brother. Suddenly the early and same age deaths of both do not seem so hard to fathom. But of the dual-death ages? I do not know. For that we must enter into the spectrum of pure enigmatism.

The number 42 has something to do with the death of unborn Garon. PURE SPECULATION: Perhaps Garon died when he was 42 days old. Gladys was not aware of this predestination though she provided the materials, but it is tempting to say Elvis struggled for awareness with his acute obsession with what I call 'numerological mortality syndrome'. To know when you are going to die is the mythic key to the gates of a private kingdom.

Did Aron commit TU-ICIDE?

Rather it was inflicted upon him. Let those who have not ascended to any level of Aron-Understanding call his weight gain irreverently what they will. I see the weight gain near death in Mother and Son as the added weight of the brother who is returned. In the belly of Gladys, on the back of Aron. Like the death image of mortality clinging to us all, holding us like a baby. A brother named death. A brother who died before he was ever born. A brother who died before you were born and returned because family is the most important thang there is.

Imagine if you will the death mask of Elvis at birth resting in a poverty grave one hundred miles from the death mask of 42 year old Elvis, buried in opulence and finery. No better fairy tale was ever woven, and this one is true. The Humes graduate tried to exhume his little brother from the Priceville grave in 1975, but there was nothing there. The tiny body, buried in a pine box, had rotted back into the Earth. Nature held Jesse in the palm of her hand. There was something money couldn't buy. Elvis would only be allowed to touch his brother when he too was made ephemeral.

When Aron would hit certain notes or push-pull vocal emotive to play up the 'dramatis personae' of his best songs - he is playing out the parts of life and death, sex and violence, christian and pagan, Cain and Abel.

Aron and Garon.

We'll never know if Aron killed Garon in the womb. An innocent unborn baby struggle that lead to accidental stillbirth. We do know he loved him to death. Aron sings with the conviction and passion of someone who is afflicted by an abstract murder. Haunted by the absence of energy. Rock critics, in their struggle to be writers, have attributed this to the Pentecostal influence and I must tell you that is TRIVIAL and only proven by the dull facts. Here we have the modern Marlowe pining away his guilt by releasing his passion secretly through Shakespeare. If you will allow a conspiracy theory to explain something that is far beyond and much purer than the essence of tabloid.

The Pentecostal flavor, or the gospel flavor, or the chain gang blues is merely a cloak to cover the death of a brother in a dark corner of a dionysisian well. The happy struggle between dark and light becoming Apollo and Dionysis.

Aron and Garon.

But for us in our millennial world it is the struggle between christianity and paganism. A delicate balance, not the absolution of one over the other. The tension betwixt the TU. This gave Americans a Pop Culture that we still remember today. And the best of us try and emulate. Being bored with what is in front of us brings out the bohemian in us. I see Aron and Garon as symbols of a schizo American myth process, anxious to embrace its own original archetypes, but tied to a religion thousands of murderous miles away, thousands of years away, created by prototypes of the first Americans.

To be honest, not really our own culture.

What we have been taught to believe in, as Americans, are the archetypes of ancient myth not the ARCHETUPE of modern America. The ARCHETUPE are the archetypes from Tupelo. The Archetupe is a variation of a Gemini symbol. It is one man who is split in half on the inside and casts TU shadows. A man who contains a subconscious memory of a fetal past that is only heard (abstract at best) in his singing. Gemini Super Tupelo born May 29, 1963.

Aron faltered, indifferent to progression, not made 'bohemian' by it. His voice remained fixed in time. This is the eerie ghost-like quality of a man already dead. A Dorian Gray quality to a voice that is strong while the body that produces it is moments away from a massive cardiac seizure. It is what Peter Guralnick calls a "grotesque triumph". The same could be said of an Edgar Allan Poe story. "Descent into the Maelstrom" is the last four years of Elvis' life.

The guilt trip that Elvis Presley encountered as a thinking man over the absence of his brother is the same guilt trip Americans feel toward the absence of a spiritual soul that would be entirely 'American'. A religion where capitalism is the ambiguous god and rock and roll it's sainthood. It is not that Americans are amoral or atheistic, just give us something to believe in that is our own.

For a time Pop Culture was that 'something'. But it's memory, like the loss of loved one, is not a thousand years away though it may seem so in dark times. It is as far away as a record player and a private moment.

That is why we hear so much in the voice of Aron. If we know HOW to hear then we hear TU voices.

Why was Elvis Presley the greatest singer of all time? Why did his voice possess the transcendent potential to become impervious to mortality? Why does his voice still send shivers down our spine?

Elvis wasn't singing to you. Elvis was singing to his brother.