Originally published in Take 244 (September 2017 issue…)
What does ELVIS PRESLEY mean in 2017? Forty years after his death, we investigate the current cultural status of the man who was King. Does that charisma translate 60 years after his rise? Why do new generations worship The Beatles, but rarely Elvis? How’s business for the World’s Greatest Elvis Impersonator? And why are those treasured old records diminishing in value?
“When you go through Graceland, it’s the weirdest vibe you’re ever going to feel in your life…”
When Shawn Klush was in LA filming episodes of Martin Scorsese’s HBO series Vinyl, he made a pilgrimage to 1174 Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills, where Elvis Presley once lived. It’s a sprawling, L-shaped house, a mashup of modern and French Regency styles, built in 1957 and set low on the hill for privacy, with a geometrically complex swimming pool in the backyard and a clear view of the city below. Among the three houses he owned in California – another in Beverly Hills and one in Palm Springs – it was Elvis’ favourite, and he would often greet fans at the gate, shaking hands and signing autographs, occasionally even practising karate moves.
For Klush, it was both a personal and a professional journey. In addition to being an enormous fan of Elvis, he is the world’s most accomplished impersonator – not merely a tribute act, but an artist in his own right. Originally from Pittston in north-west Pennsylvania, he can’t exactly remember how he got into the business, but says he just woke up one day in front of a crowd, clad in a rhinestone-crusted jumpsuit and belting “Burning Love”. Since then he has toured with some of Elvis’ original backing band, including members of the Stamps and the Inspirations. In 2013, he was voted World’s Greatest Elvis by BBC viewers and was named the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist by Elvis Presley Enterprises in Memphis. He has channelled the King’s spirit and sung his songs all over the world, including sold-out shows at the 15,000-seat Movistar Arena in Santiago, Chile.
And yet, as close to Presley as Klush may be, visiting that Hillcrest home was overwhelming. He did not go into the house; like every other fan, he just stood at the gates looking into the property and imaging the man himself coming out to greet him. And then he went back downtown to play Elvis for HBO, a performance that earned him rave reviews. “When you go through Graceland, it’s the weirdest vibe you’re ever going to feel in your life,” says Klush. “It’s almost like touching royalty. When I drove up to his house on Hillcrest, I got the exact feeling as I did when I was in Graceland. That told me right there something about his charisma. It could be the bubblegummiest music ever or it could be one of the dumbest movies, but you’ll listen to it again and again because he recorded it. There’s something mesmerising about it.”
That’s why we’re still talking about Elvis on the 40th anniversary of his death. His charisma lingers, not only in songs like “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Suspicious Minds”, but also in the assembly-line films he made, disposable fare that nevertheless feature Presley giving loose, comfortable, often comic performances, with a magnetism so natural many critics took it for not acting at all. He’s become an oddball figure in contemporary pop culture. In May, Harry Styles sported a pink-and-black suit when he performed on The Today Show, a knowing homage to one of his formative influences. The former One Direction star says that Presley’s 1960 version of “The Girl Of My Best Friend” was the first song he ever learned.
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is even touring an Elvis show, based on a pair of albums featuring new symphonic arrangements over archival Elvis vocals; 2016’s The Wonder of You debuted at No 1 in the UK. More recently, Michael Eavis (born the same year as Elvis) kicked off this year’s Glastonbury by leading the crowd in a spirited karaoke singalong of “Always On My Mind”. In addition to that bit part on Vinyl, Elvis has been a recurring role on CMT’s Sun Records, played by 18-year-old tribute artist Drake Milligan.
Especially at Graceland, Elvis is still big business. Welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, his home remains largely how he left it, complete with shag carpet and Jungle Room décor. Across Elvis Presley Boulevard, however, Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc recently completed a $45 million renovation that includes a 450-room hotel. A new, 200,000-square-foot entertainment complex houses a museum devoted to his life, another featuring his extensive fleet of cars, and space for rotating exhibitions. Elvis, it seems, is everywhere.
Or is he? Does that star quality translate 60 years after his rise? Fifty years after his comeback? Forty years after his death? Reports of his waning popularity are nothing new, but have grown more intense as the anniversary of his death affords a fresh opportunity to assess his legacy. A recent YouGov poll, admittedly not the most scientific undertaking, had alarming news for Elvis fans. Of the 2,000 Britons questioned, 29 per cent of listeners aged 18-24 had never listened to an Elvis song. Only 12 per cent said they actually liked Elvis. That puts him far below The Beatles, David Bowie and Michael Jackson. Similarly, recent reports by The Guardian and The Observer have pondered the King’s fading popularity, citing millennial indifference and shuttered memorabilia shops to support their claims of diminished relevance. He’s a singles artist in a market ruled by albums, a figure so close to black blues, R’n’B and gospel that he’s routinely accused of cultural appropriation. The controversies surrounding him – the hip swivels and pelvic thrusts, in particular – are so far in the past that they seem quaint. It can be difficult to gauge his popularity. Does the charisma still cling?
“Are you kidding me?” says Klush. “I just did 10 cities in England, sold out five-, six-, seven-thousand seats a night. I don’t know where they’re getting their information, as that’s not what I’m seeing every night.” Klush has become, for better or worse, a barometer of Elvis’ enduring appeal. “If I’m going through all this, what did Elvis go through?”
“He became such a big star after that…”
One thing Elvis did go through was grappling with an intense fear of being forgotten, of not leaving a deep enough mark on the world – a worry that has roots in the earliest stages of his career. It may have driven him to Sun Records in the first place, where he paid to cut a song for his mother called “My Happiness”. The desire to preserve something of himself compelled him back to Sun to audition repeatedly for Sam Phillips, who not only recorded the boy, but helped make him a star. Almost immediately, Elvis began touring throughout the mid-South, along with the friendly competition of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and others in the Sun stable.
“We all toured together,” recalls WS “Fluke” Holland, who played drums for Perkins and later for Cash. “I have a poster from a show we played in 1956 at the National Guard Armory in Amory, Mississippi, and I remember that show. Carl would do an old song by The Platters, ‘Only You’, and the people would have a fit. As we were walking out the door, we walked by Elvis, and he looked up at Sun’s booking agent Bob Neal and said, ‘Bob, don’t ever book me on another show with those Perkins boys!’ He was just kidding, but it’s funny how it worked out. He became such a big star after that, that we never did work another show together.”
Elvis’ success became too unwieldy for an independent label like Sun, and in 1955 Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA Victor for what many now view as a shockingly low sum. Hits like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” eclipsed his Sun singles, and Elvis eventually broke into the movies, first as a doomed cowboy in 1956’s Love Me Tender. His performance might have drawn pans from critics, but he quickly became as big at the box office as he was on the pop charts. Yet, like so many reasonable young men his age, Elvis dreaded the draft. America was not at war, but Cold War tensions were escalating. Enlisting would involve basic training and most likely an overseas assignment, along with an even worse fate: while he may already have felt suffocated by celebrity, he was not prepared to trade the glamour in from the Army greens, to sacrifice his pompadour to the military barber, to take such a hefty pay cut from $200,000 a month to $78 a week.
But a deeper fear churned within Elvis, and he fought not to show his concern in public. Elvis did not want to be forgotten. He confided to his coterie of friends and hangers-on that his career was surely finished; his fans would forget him, and he would be displaced from radio playlists and pop charts by younger, hipper artists who could tour, record, give interviews to teenybopper magazines, and stay on top of the latest trends and fashions. Elvis had no idea how or if he would be remembered, and he feared he would go back to driving a truck. To make matters worse, Colonel Tom Parker, who never achieved any military rank and who saw enough of a marketing opportunity that he sold Elvis dog tags, banned him from performing, even in army talent shows.
After receiving an extension to film one more movie, King Creole, Elvis enlisted on March 24, 1958, dubbed “Black Monday” by fans. Private Presley US53310761 reported to basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, where he learnt, among other things, to drive a tank. Before accepting an assignment to the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, two important things happened. First, he did one more recording session, still dressed in his army greens, laying down a handful of tracks to be released as singles during his absence. Second, his beloved mother died of heart failure brought on by hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. The dutiful son was crushed.
“There was a more brittle, impatient, even arrogant edge to him”
Elvis didn’t need to worry about being forgotten – at least not yet. During his two years in the army, he never saw combat, but he did grow increasingly dependent on amphetamines, which he insisted had no side effects. He met a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would groom to be his wife. Back in the US, his popularity barely dimmed. King Creole was a huge box office hit, and “A Fool Such As I” and “A Big Hunk O’ Love”, both recorded after basic training, had sold well and helped keep his name in the papers.
He returned a hero. However, as Ray Connolly recalls in his new biography, Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, “After two years in the army, his ambition burned as brightly as ever, but now some of the wonder and romance of youth was gone. There was a more brittle, impatient, even arrogant edge to him.”
John Lennon once declared that Elvis really died when he joined the army, but presumably the former Beatle hadn’t yet heard “Suspicious Minds”. It wasn’t a death, but the first in an endless series of rebirths. He would return a box office draw, declawed and dull in countless cinema cheapies; by the end of the ’60s he had re-reinvented himself as a commanding live performer, prowling the stage during his ’68 Comeback Special on NBC. Ten years later, a new version of Elvis would emerge: the rock’n’roll casualty, bloated, unhealthy, his body distorted, but his voice intact until he died in August 1977. Death did nothing to settle such transformations, as Mondo Elvis replicated itself endlessly into an army of impersonators, each exaggerating the man in different ways. He inspired a cult-like fervour, the faithful making pilgrimages to Graceland to celebrate his birth or commemorate his death. Tabloids claimed he had risen from the grave or maybe had never actually died.
As a rock star Elvis Presley was a malleable entity, one that could change and adapt to new trends and teen movements. Along the way he shed relics like a secular saint: not just singles and LPs, but concert posters, tour books, teddy bears, sunglasses, locks of hair, vials of sweat, soiled underwear, even the Cadillacs he gave away to friends and strangers – each of which allowed fans in the pre-digital world to feel like they owned a piece of the King. Elvis became endlessly reproducible and repackagable, to the extent that we understand him today primarily through stuff.
Some of that stuff has become all too easy to ridicule, especially later in his career, when Elvis sported big sunglasses, wore elaborate jumpsuits, drove fancier cars, and maintained an unhealthy diet. As a tribute act, Klush rejects the easy jokes made at Elvis’ expense, which means watching his wardrobe as well as his mouth. “I’m not going to walk around saying ‘Thankyouverymuch’. That always bothered me. The man said ‘Thank you very much’ because he sincerely believed in expressing his gratitude. And he ate peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches because he grew up poor. The only thing Gladys had in the house was peanut butter and a couple of pieces of bread and butter. So she did what any mother would do to feed her child. She made him a sandwich. But that’s become such a joke, such a cliché.”
“They’re going to want the originals…”
No other rock star has that kind of material footprint, but that makes Elvis a cumbersome figure, hard to pin down and therefore potentially difficult to sell to new generations of listeners. It also means the market for all that stuff can be extremely volatile, and few know that as much as Jerry Osborne, who has made Elvis ephemera his business since the 1970s. A former radio DJ and a long-time newspaper columnist, he runs a publishing company that specialises in memorabilia catalogues, including the popular Presleyana series, updated every five years with prices for thousands of pieces of Presley artefacts: concerts posters, tour books, teddy bears, library cards, magazines. The eighth edition is out in August, and it points to some interesting developments in the market for Elvis memorabilia. “In the last five years, original first and second pressings that would have come out in the ’50s and ’60s have dropped considerably,” says Osborne. “But reissues and repressings that were done in the ’70s and ’80s are now in some cases worth more than the originals. That flies in the face of all we’ve ever thought about collectables.”
The reason for that strange trend, he says, may be less musical than mathematical. “First of all, the reissues were done in much smaller quantities, and they were purchased by far fewer people. The reprints don’t sell very well, so by virtue of how many were pressed, they have become much rarer than the originals, which sold millions of copies. How rare is an album from 1956 or ’57? Not very, because they sold so many.” Mint copies – pristine, virtually unplayed – can still fetch thousands of dollars, but even slightly used copies are so common as to be uncollectable. That trend cannot continue, says John Tefteller, a rare-record dealer based in Oregon and a contributor the Presleyana series. “There are people who are completists on artists like Elvis and The Beatles, and they buy every single reissue, no matter what it is, because they want to have every single release by that artist,” he explains.
“That kind of thinking didn’t start until the ’70s, so they had to go back and pick up reissues from the ’60s. So it’s a completely artificial market. The future is what the young people will be buying, not the older, hardcore collectors. The young people are going to revert back to the normal marketplace. They’re going to want the originals.”
As older collectors die off and the market contorts to accommodate a new generation, those prices may go down, but there is still interest in these collectables and relics. People still want some piece of Elvis, if only as a talisman of remembrance. Elvis didn’t want to be forgotten, and his fans don’t want his memory to diminish either. Some collect items he touched; others re-create the music and the attitude onstage. Says Klush, “It’s all because of this man who left the world too early, who still had more to give, who would still be giving more and more if he were alive today. I’m hell-bent on people remembering who this man was.”