SEARCHING FOR IMAGES ON THE INTERNET for one project often leads to some very unexpected discoveries. In this case, I was looking for some sharp photos of a couple of rather rare Elvis Presley records from the ’50s when I came across True Strange magazine. There I saw what looked like a hint of prescience.
The cover of the June 1957 issue of True Strange magazine is a sensationalized painting of Elvis from Jailhouse Rock—at least the large head in the background looks like it’s from his third movie. The foreground image looks like it’s based on one of his television appearances from 1956.
The June ’57 issue of True Strange magazine features three stories that sound like they are presciently addressing issues of the 21st century.
So, after saving the image to my hard drive for future use in an article for my Elvis blog, the titles of the three featured stories on the right side of the cover jumped to my attention.
Instead of reading them for what they were probably intended to be in 1957, I read them as examples of prescience—articles that presciently address 21st-century America.
This is the June 1957 issue of True Strange with its fantastic cover art of Elvis Presley. The magazine was co-founded by bodybuilder Joe Weider and was like a cross between a men’s pulp mag and a wonderfully wacky supermarket tabloid.
Prescience and élite alien reptiles
Here are the three articles with an interpretation of what they could mean to a reader from 2022:
• “The Shrunken Heads that Talk” could be addressing statements made by various intellectual “giants” in American political and social life.
• “The Strange Mystic Power of Hitler” could be addressing the endless attraction Der Führer holds for millions of people around the world.
• “Snake Worship in America” could be addressing the belief held by millions of people that ancient, technologically-advanced, shape-shifting, élite reptilian aliens from another planet actually rule this world.
Finally, I found the info about True Strange magazine that is included in the caption to the cover of the magazine above on the Men’s Pulp Mags website. Staring at the sexed-up covers of men’s magazines at Max’s Grocery Store in Kingston, Pennsylvania, was a naughty pleasure for my brother and me back in the early ’60s.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
Do you say “press-see-yent” or “preshent”?
Fantastic cover art of Elvis! Unfortunately, some haven’t been kind to Elvis.
The major media (or, as we can say today but would have sounded weird sixty years ago, the corporate media) has never been kind to Elvis. He had to overcome their prejudices, narrow-mindedness, and now-legendary stoopitidy (my spelling) from the moment he became a national figure in 1956.
Would he have been even bigger had the critics embraced him even a teeny-weeny bit? It’s hard to say. Being called silly names and getting branded “Elvis the Pelvis” probably only made him more attractive to the youth of the ’50s.
I have never been a fan of the “humor” of the idjits at National Lampoon and still think their “fat Elvis” cover was tacky and the polar opposite of good caricature but I do dig the artist’s skill ...
Elvis would have been bigger had the critics embraced him, but the only one who could have turned the tide on this would have been Elvis himself -- if he had done more interviews, especially after the ’68 Singer TV Special. It wouldn’t be until ’71 that Elvis appeared on a major publication magazine.
Alas, we will never know. But, as someone once famous once said, “I think I’ll put a strap on this and stand up.”