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Elvis Presley Wiki
Elvis Aaron (or Arona)
Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was one of the most
popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is
widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as
the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family at the age of 13. He
began his career there in 1954 when Sun
Records owner Sam Phillips, eager to bring the sound of African American
music to a wider audience, saw in Presley the means to realize his
ambition. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty
Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was one of the originators
of rockabilly,
an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country
and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal
arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage the
singer for over two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", released in January 1956, was a number one
hit. He became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock
and roll with a series of network television appearances and
chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs, many from
African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made
him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, he made his
film debut in Love Me Tender.
Conscripted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his
recording career two years later with some of his most commercially
successful work. He staged few concerts, however, and, guided by Parker,
proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood movies and
soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, after seven
years away from the stage, he returned to live performance in a
celebrated comeback television special that led
to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string
of profitable tours. In 1973, Presley staged the first concert broadcast
globally via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii, seen by approximately 1.5 billion
viewers. Prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he
died suddenly in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of
20th-century popular culture. He had a versatile voice and unusually
wide success encompassing many genres, including country, pop ballads, gospel,
and blues.
He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music.
Nominated for 14 competitive Grammys,
he won three, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award at age 36. He has been inducted into four music halls of fame. History
Early
years (1935–53)
Childhood in
Tupelo
Presley's birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Elvis and Gladys Love
Presley. In the two-room shotgun
house built by his father in readiness for the birth, Jesse Garon
Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before
him, stillborn. As an only child, Presley became close to both parents
and formed an unusually tight bond with his mother. The family attended
an Assembly of God church
where he found his initial musical inspiration.
Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix—Scots-Irish, with some French
Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee
and, according to family accounts, one of her great-grandmothers was
Jewish.
Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of
the small family. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evidencing
little ambition.
The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food
assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty
of altering a check written by the landowner. He was jailed for eight
months, and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo
Consolidated, where his instructors regarded him as "average".
He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his
schoolteacher with a rendition of Red
Foley's country song "Old Shep" during morning prayers. The
contest, held at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October
3, 1945, saw his first public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the
ten-year-old Presley stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang
"Old Shep". He recalled placing fifth.
A few months later, Presley received for his birthday his first guitar.
He had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle
or a rifle.
Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of
his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled,
"I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little
bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."
Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946,
Presley was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing
his guitar in on a daily basis. He would play and sing during lunchtime,
and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly
music. The family was by then living in a largely African American
neighborhood.
A devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio
station WELO,
Presley was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother,
a classmate of Presley's, who often took him in to the station. Slim
supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques.
When his protégé was 12 years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air
performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but
succeeded in performing the following week.
Teenage life
in Memphis
In November 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. After residing for nearly a year in rooming houses, they were granted a two-bedroom apartment in
the public housing complex
known as the Courts.
Enrolled at Humes High School, Presley received only a
C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher told him he had no
aptitude for singing, he brought in his guitar the next day and sang a
recent hit, "Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me", in an effort to prove
otherwise. A classmate later recalled that the teacher "agreed that
Elvis was right when he said that she didn't appreciate his kind of
singing."
He was generally too shy to perform openly, and was occasionally
bullied by classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy".
In 1950, he began practicing guitar regularly under the tutelage of
Jesse Lee Denson, a neighbor two-and-a-half years his senior. They and
three other boys—including two future rockabilly pioneers, brothers Dorsey and Johnny Burnette—formed a loose musical collective that
played frequently around the Courts.
That September, he began ushering at Loew's State Theater.
Other jobs followed during his school years: Precision Tool, Loew's
again, and MARL Metal Products.
During his junior year, Presley began to stand out more among his
classmates, largely because of his appearance: he grew out his sideburns
and styled his hair with rose oil and Vaseline. On his own time, he
would head down to Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and gaze longingly at the
wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing them.
Overcoming his reticence about performing outside the Courts, he
competed in Humes's "Annual Minstrel" show in April 1953. Singing and
playing guitar, he opened with "Till I Waltz
Again With You", a recent hit for Teresa
Brewer. Presley recalled that the performance did much for his
reputation: "I wasn't popular in school ... I failed music—only thing I
ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show ... when I
came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and whispering and so
forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I
became after that."
Presley, who never received formal music training or learned to read
music, studied and played by ear. He frequented record stores with jukeboxes
and listening booths. He knew all of Hank
Snow's songs
and he loved records by other country singers such as Roy
Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Ted
Daffan, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmie
Davis, and Bob Wills.
The Southern Gospel singer Jake
Hess, one of his favorite performers, was a significant influence on
his ballad-singing style.
He was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings
downtown, where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected
the influence of African American spiritual music.
He adored the music of black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Like some of his peers, he may have attended blues venues—of necessity,
in the segregated South,
only on nights designated for exclusively white audiences.
He certainly listened to the regional radio stations that played "race
records": spirituals, blues, and the modern, backbeat-heavy sound of rhythm and blues.
Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African American
musicians such as Arthur Crudup and Rufus
Thomas.[34]
B.B.
King recalled that he knew Presley before he was popular when they
both used to frequent Beale Street.
By the time he graduated high school in June 1953, Presley had already
singled out music as his future.
First recordings (1953–55)
Sam
Phillips and Sun Records
- To find related topics in a list, see Elvis Presley's Sun recordings.
In August 1953, Presley walked into the offices of Sun
Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a
two-sided acetate disc: "My Happiness" and "That's When
Your Heartaches Begin". He would later claim he intended the record as a
gift for his mother, or was merely interested in what he "sounded
like", though there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at
a nearby general store. Biographer Peter Guralnick argues that he chose Sun in the hope of
being discovered. Asked by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of
singer he was, Presley responded, "I sing all kinds." When she pressed
him on whom he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, "I don't sound like
nobody." After he recorded, Sun boss Sam
Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young man's name, which she
did along with her own commentary: "Good ballad singer. Hold."
Presley cut a second acetate in January 1954—"I'll Never Stand In Your
Way" and "It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You"—but again nothing came of
it.
Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the
Songfellows. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing."
Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he
did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time.
In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a
truck driver.
His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him,
suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith's professional band,
which had an opening for a vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout,
advising Presley to stick to truck driving "because you're never going
to make it as a singer."
Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could
bring the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused to a broader
audience. As Keisker reported, "Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If
I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I
could make a billion dollars.'"
In June, he acquired a demo recording of a ballad, "Without You", that
he thought might suit the teenaged singer. Presley came by the studio,
but was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to
sing as many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what
he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield
"Scotty" Moore and upright
bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for
a recording session.
The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful
until late in the night. As they were about to give up and go home,
Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur
Crudup's "That's All Right". Moore recalled, "All of a
sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting
the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the
fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door
to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said, 'What are
you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try
to find a place to start, and do it again.'" Phillips quickly began
taping; this was the sound he had been looking for.
Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red,
Hot, and Blue show.
Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The
interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the
last two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked
him what high school he attended in order to clarify his color for the
many callers who had assumed he was black.
During the next few days the trio recorded a bluegrass number, Bill
Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky", again in a distinctive
style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed
"slapback". A single was pressed with "That's All Right" on the A side
and "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the reverse.
Early live performances
and signing to RCA
The trio played publicly for the first time on July 17 at the Bon Air
club—Presley still sporting his child-size guitar.
At the end of the month, they appeared at the Overton Park Shell, with Slim
Whitman headlining. A combination of his strong response to rhythm
and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his
legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements,
causing young women in the audience to start screaming.
Moore recalled, "During the instrumental parts he would back off from
the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild".
Black, a natural showman, whooped and rode his bass, hitting double
licks that Presley would later remember as "really a wild sound, like a
jungle drum or something".
Soon after, Moore and Black quit their old band to play with Presley
regularly and DJ and promoter Bob Neal became the trio's manager. From
August through October, they played frequently at the Eagle's Nest club
and returned to Sun Studio for more recording sessions,
and Presley quickly grew more confident on stage. According to Moore,
"His movement was a natural thing, but he was also very conscious of
what got a reaction. He'd do something one time and then he would expand
on it real quick."
Presley made what would be his only appearance on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry on October 2; after a polite audience
response, Opry manager Jim Denny told Phillips that his singer
was "not bad" but did not suit the program.
Two weeks later, Presley was booked on Louisiana Hayride, the Opry's chief, and more adventurous,
rival. The Shreveport-based show was broadcast to
198 radio stations in 28 states. Presley had another attack of nerves
during the first set, which drew a muted reaction. A more composed and
energetic second set inspired an enthusiastic response.
House drummer D.J. Fontana brought a new
element, complementing Presley's movements with accented beats that he
had mastered playing in strip clubs.
Soon after the show, the Hayride engaged Presley for a year's
worth of Saturday-night appearances. Trading in his old guitar for $8
(and seeing it promptly dispatched to the garbage), he purchased a Martin instrument for $175, and his trio
began playing in new locales including Houston, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas.
By early 1955, Presley's regular Hayride appearances, constant
touring, and well-received record releases had made him a substantial
regional star, from Tennessee to West Texas. In January, Neal signed a
formal management contract with Presley and brought the singer to the
attention of Colonel Tom Parker, whom he considered
the best promoter in the music business. Parker—Dutch-born, though he
claimed to be from West Virginia—had acquired an honorary colonel's
commission from country singer turned Louisiana governor Jimmie
Davis. Having successfully managed top country star Eddy
Arnold, he was now working with the new number one country singer,
Hank Snow. Parker booked Presley on Snow's February tour.
When the tour reached Odessa,
Texas, a 19-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time:
"His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. ... I just
didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the
culture to compare it."
Presley made his television debut on March 3 on the KSLA-TV broadcast of Louisiana Hayride.
Soon after, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts
on the national CBS network. By August, Sun had released ten sides
credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill"; on the latest recordings,
the trio were joined by a drummer. Some of the songs, like "That's All
Right", were in what one Memphis journalist described as the "R&B
idiom of negro field jazz"; others, like "Blue Moon of Kentucky", were
"more in the country field", "but there was a curious blending of the
two different musics in both".
This blend of styles made it difficult for Presley's music to find
radio airplay. According to Neal, many country music disc jockeys would
not play it because he sounded too much like a black artist and none of
the rhythm and blues stations would touch him because "he sounded too
much like a hillbilly."[63]
The blend came to be known as rockabilly.
At the time, Presley was variously billed as "The King of Western Bop",
"The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash".
Presley renewed Neal's management contract in August 1955,
simultaneously appointing Parker as his special adviser.
The group maintained an extensive touring schedule throughout the
second half of the year.
Neal recalled, "It was almost frightening, the reaction that came to
Elvis from the teenaged boys. So many of them, through some sort of
jealousy, would practically hate him. There were occasions in some towns
in Texas when we'd have to be sure to have a police guard because
somebody'd always try to take a crack at him. They'd get a gang and try
to waylay him or something."
The trio became a quartet when Hayride drummer Fontana joined as
a full member. In mid-October, they played a few shows in support of Bill
Haley, whose "Rock Around the Clock" had been a number one hit
the previous year. Haley observed that Presley had a natural feel for
rhythm, and advised him to sing fewer ballads.
At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November, Presley was
voted the year's most promising male artist.
Several record companies had by now shown interest in signing him.
After three major labels made offers of up to $25,000, Parker and
Phillips struck a deal with RCA
Victor on November 21 to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an
unprecedented $40,000.b
Presley, at 20, was still a minor, so his father signed the contract.
Parker arranged with the owners of Hill and Range Publishing, Jean and
Julian Aberbach, to create two entities, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys
Music, to handle all of the new material recorded by Presley.
Songwriters were obliged to forego one third of their customary
royalties in exchange for having him perform their compositions.c
By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and
before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.
Commercial
breakout and controversy (1956–58)
First national TV
appearances and debut album
On January 10, 1956, Presley made his first recordings for RCA in
Nashville.
Extending the singer's by now customary backup of Moore, Black, and
Fontana, RCA enlisted pianist Floyd
Cramer, guitarist Chet
Atkins, and three background singers, including Gordon Stoker of
the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill
out the sound.
The session produced the moody, unusual "Heartbreak Hotel", released as a single on January 27.
Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on
CBS's Stage Show for six appearances
over two months. The program, produced in New York, was hosted on
alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy
and Jimmy Dorsey. After his first appearance, on January 28,
Presley stayed in town to record at RCA's New York studio. The sessions
yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl
Perkins' rockabilly anthem "Blue Suede Shoes". In February, Presley's "I Forgot to Remember to Forget",
a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top
of the Billboard country chart.
Neal's contract was terminated and, on March 2, Parker became Presley's
manager.
RCA Victor released Presley's self-titled debut album on March 23.
Joined by five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently
recorded tracks were of a broad variety. There were two country songs
and a bouncy pop tune. The others would centrally define the evolving
sound of rock and roll: "Blue Suede Shoes"—"an
improvement over Perkins' in almost every way", according to critic Robert Hilburn—and three R&B numbers that had been part
of Presley's stage repertoire for some time, covers of Little Richard, Ray
Charles, and The Drifters. As described by Hilburn, these
"were the most revealing of all. Unlike many white artists ... who
watered down the gritty edges of the original R&B versions of songs
in the '50s, Presley reshaped them. He not only injected the tunes with
his own vocal character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead
instrument in all three cases."
It became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard
chart, a position it held for 10 weeks.
While Presley was not an innovative instrumentalist like Moore or
contemporary African American rockers Bo
Diddley and Chuck Berry, cultural historian Gilbert B.
Rodman argues that the album's cover image, "of Elvis having the time of
his life on stage with a guitar in his hands played a crucial
role in positioning the guitar...as the instrument that best captured
the style and spirit of this new music."
Milton
Berle Show and "Hound Dog"
Presley made the first of two appearances on NBC's Milton Berle Show on
April 3. His performance, on the deck of the USS Hancock in San
Diego, prompted cheers and screams from an audience of sailors and
their dates.
A few days later, a flight taking Presley and his band to Nashville for
a recording session left all three badly shaken when an engine died and
the plane almost went down over Arkansas.
Twelve weeks after its original release, "Heartbreak Hotel" became
Presley's first number one pop hit. In late April, Presley began a
two-week residency at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino
on the Las Vegas Strip. The shows were poorly received by the
conservative, middle-aged hotel guests—"like a jug of corn liquor at a
champagne party", wrote a critic for Newsweek.
Amid his Vegas tenure, Presley, who had serious acting ambitions,
signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures.
He began a tour of the Midwest in mid-May, taking in 15 cities in as
many days.
He had attended several shows by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys
in Vegas, and was struck by their cover of "Hound Dog", a hit in 1952 for blues singer Big Mama Thornton. It became the new closing number of his
act.
After a show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, an urgent message on the
letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It warned that "Presley is a definite
danger to the security of the United States. ... [His] actions and
motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. ...
After the show, more than 1,000 teenagers tried to gang into Presley's
room at the auditorium. ... Indications of the harm Presley did just in
La Crosse were the two high school girls ... whose abdomen and thigh had
Presley's autograph."
The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at
NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded the
singer to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son."
During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of
"Hound Dog" with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding
version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.
Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy.
Television critics were outraged: Jack
Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no
discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that,
consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria
in a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body
... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of
the burlesque runway."
Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular
music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of
one Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an
exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of
animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos".
Ed
Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular,
declared him "unfit for family viewing".
To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as
"Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish
expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."
Steve Allen Show
and first Sullivan appearance
The Berle shows drew such high ratings that Presley was booked for a
July 1 appearance on NBC's The Steve Allen Show in New York. Allen, no
fan of rock and roll, introduced a "new Elvis" in a white bow tie and
black tails. Presley sang "Hound Dog" for less than a minute to a basset hound wearing a top hat and bow tie. As
described by television historian Jake Austen, "Allen thought Presley
was talentless and absurd... [he] set things up so that Presley would
show his contrition".
Allen, for his part, later wrote that he found Presley's "strange,
gangly, country-boy charisma, his hard-to-define cuteness, and his
charming eccentricity intriguing" and simply worked the singer into the
customary "comedy fabric" of his program.
Presley would refer back to the Allen show as the most ridiculous
performance of his career.
Later that night, he appeared on Hy
Gardner Calling, a popular local TV show. Pressed on whether he
had learned anything from the criticism to which he was being subjected,
Presley responded, "No, I haven't, I don't feel like I'm doing anything
wrong. ... I don't see how any type of music would have any bad
influence on people when it's only music. ... I mean, how would rock 'n'
roll music make anyone rebel against their parents?"
The next day, Presley recorded "Hound Dog", along with "Any Way You Want Me" and "Don't Be Cruel". The Jordanaires sang harmony, as they had on The
Steve Allen Show; they would work with Presley through the 1960s. A
few days later, the singer made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis
at which he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not
gonna change me none. I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like
tonight."
In August, a judge in Jacksonville, Florida, ordered Presley
to tame his act. Throughout the following performance, he largely kept
still, except for wiggling his little finger suggestively in mockery of
the order.
The single pairing "Don't Be Cruel" with "Hound Dog" ruled the top of
the charts for 11 weeks—a mark that would not be surpassed for 36 years.
Recording sessions for Presley's second album took place in Hollywood
during the first week of September. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller,
the writers of "Hound Dog", contributed "Love Me".
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan,
despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances
for an unprecedented $50,000.
The first, on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million
viewers—a record 82.6 percent of the television audience.
Actor Charles Laughton hosted the show, filling
in while Sullivan recuperated from a car accident.
Presley appeared in two segments that night from CBS Television City in Hollywood. According to
Elvis legend, Presley was shot only from the waist up. Watching clips of
the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that
Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his
pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline
of his cock. ... I think it's a Coke bottle. ... We just can't have this
on a Sunday night. This is a family show!"
Sullivan publicly told TV Guide,
"As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera
shots."
In fact, Presley was shown head-to-toe in the first and second shows.
Though the camerawork was relatively discreet during his debut, with
leg-concealing closeups when he danced, the studio audience reacted in
customary style: screaming.
Presley's performance of his forthcoming single, the ballad "Love Me Tender", prompted a
record-shattering million advance orders.
More than any other single event, it was this first appearance on The
Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity of barely
precedented proportions.
Accompanying Presley's rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking
place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the
"biggest pop craze since Glenn
Miller and Frank Sinatra ... Presley brought rock'n'roll
into the mainstream of popular culture", writes historian Marty Jezer.
"As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed ... Presley,
more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a
distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to
feel the power of an integrated youth culture."
Crazed
crowds and movie debut
The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly
fevered. Moore recalled, "He'd start out, 'You ain't nothin' but a Hound
Dog,' and they'd just go to pieces. They'd always react the same way.
There'd be a riot every time."
At the two concerts he performed in September at the
Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, 50 National
Guardsmen were added to the police security to prevent crowd
trouble.
Elvis, Presley's second album, was
released in October and quickly rose to number one. Assessing the
musical and cultural impact of Presley's recordings from "That's All
Right" through Elvis, rock critic Dave
Marsh wrote that "these records, more than any others, contain the
seeds of what rock & roll was, has been and most likely what it may
foreseeably become."
Presley returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its
namesake, on October 28. After the performance, crowds in Nashville and
St. Louis burned him in effigy.
His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released
on November 21. Though he was not top billed, the film's original title—The
Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on his latest number one
record: "Love Me Tender" had hit the top of the charts earlier that
month. To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical
numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role. The
movie was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office.
Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.
On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins
and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed
with them. Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any
Presley material, he made sure the session was captured on tape. The
results became legendary as the "Million Dollar Quartet" recordings—Johnny
Cash was long thought to have played as well, but he was present
only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity.
The year ended with a front page story in the Wall Street Journal
reporting that Presley merchandise had brought in $22 million on top of
his record sales,
and Billboard's
declaration that he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other
artist since records were first charted.
In his first full year on RCA, one of the music industry's largest
companies, Presley had accounted for over 50 percent of the label's
singles sales.
Leiber and
Stoller collaboration and draft notice
Presley made his third and final Ed Sullivan Show appearance
on January 6, 1957—on this occasion indeed shot only down to the waist.
Some commentators have claimed that Parker orchestrated an appearance of
censorship to generate publicity.
In any event, as critic Greil
Marcus describes, Presley "did not tie himself down. Leaving behind
the bland clothes he had worn on the first two shows, he stepped out in
the outlandish costume of a pasha, if not a harem girl. From the
make-up over his eyes, the hair falling in his face, the overwhelmingly
sexual cast of his mouth, he was playing Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, with all stops out."
To close, displaying his range and defying Sullivan's wishes, Presley
sang a gentle black spiritual, "Peace in the Valley". At the end of the show, Sullivan
declared Presley "a real decent, fine boy".
Two days later, the Memphis draft board announced that
Presley would be classified 1A and would
probably be drafted sometime that year.
Each of the three Presley singles released in the first half of 1957
went to number one: "Too Much", "All
Shook Up", and "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear". Already an international
star, he was attracting fans even where his music was not officially
released. Under the headline "Presley Records a Craze in Soviet", The
New York Times reported that pressings of his music on discarded
X-ray plates were commanding high prices in Leningrad.
Between film shoots and recording sessions, the singer also found time
to purchase an 18-room mansion eight miles south of downtown Memphis for
himself and his parents: Graceland.
Loving You—the soundtrack to his
second film, released in July—was Presley's third straight number
one album. The title track was written by Leiber and Stoller, who were
retained to write four of the six songs recorded at the sessions for Jailhouse Rock, Presley's next
movie. The songwriting team effectively produced the sessions, and they
developed a close working relationship with Presley, who came to regard
them as his "good-luck charm".
Their title track was yet another number one
hit, as was the Jailhouse Rock EP.
Presley undertook three brief tours during the year, continuing to
generate a crazed audience response.
A Detroit newspaper suggested that "the trouble with going to see Elvis
Presley is that you're liable to get killed."
Villanova students pelted him with eggs
in Philadelphia,
and in Vancouver, the crowd rioted after the end of the show,
destroying the stage.
Frank Sinatra, who had famously inspired the swooning of teenaged girls
in the 1940s, condemned the new musical phenomenon. In a magazine
article, he decried rock and roll as "brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious.
... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in
young people. It smells phoney and false. It is sung, played and
written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. ... This rancid-smelling
aphrodisiac I deplore."
Asked for a response, Presley said, "I admire the man. He has a right
to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but
I think he shouldn't have said it. ... This is a trend, just the same
as he faced when he started years ago."
Leiber and Stoller were again in the studio for the recording of Elvis' Christmas Album. Toward
the end of the session, they wrote a song on the spot at Presley's
request: "Santa Claus Is Back In Town", an innuendo-laden blues.
The holiday release stretched Presley's string of number one albums to
four and would eventually become the best selling Christmas album of all time.
After the session, Moore and Black—drawing only modest weekly salaries,
sharing in none of Presley's massive financial success—resigned. Though
they were brought back on a per diem basis a few weeks later, it was
clear that they had not been part of Presley's inner circle for some
time.
On December 20, Presley received his draft notice. He was granted a
deferment to finish the forthcoming King
Creole, in which $350,000 had already been invested by
Paramount and producer Hal Wallis. A couple of
weeks into the new year, "Don't", another Leiber and
Stoller tune, became Presley's tenth number one seller. It had been only
21 months since "Heartbreak Hotel" had brought him to the top for the
first time. Recording sessions for the King Creole soundtrack were held in Hollywood
mid-January. Leiber and Stoller provided three songs and were again on
hand, but it would be the last time they worked closely with Presley.
A studio session on February 1 marked another ending: it was the final
occasion on which Black was to perform with Presley. He died in 1965.
Military
service and mother's death (1958–60)
On March 24, Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private at Fort
Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Captain
Arlie Metheny, the information officer, was unprepared for the
media attention drawn by the singer's arrival. Hundreds of people
descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus; photographers then
accompanied him into the base.
Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint,
saying he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else:
"The Army can do anything it wants with me."
Later, at Fort Hood, Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten gave
the media carte blanche for one day, after which she declared Presley
off-limits to the press.
Soon after Presley had commenced basic training at Fort Hood, he
received a visit from Eddie Fadal, a businessman he had met when on tour
in Texas. Fadal reported that Presley had become convinced his career
was finished—"He firmly believed that."
During a two-week leave in early June, Presley cut five sides in
Nashville. He returned to training, but in early August his mother was
diagnosed with hepatitis and her condition worsened. Presley was
granted emergency leave to visit her, arriving in Memphis on August 12.
Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged 46. Presley was
devastated;
their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his
adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would
address her with pet names.
After training at Fort Hood, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division
in Friedberg, Germany, on October 1.
Introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant
while on maneuvers, he became "practically evangelical about their
benefits"—not only for energy, but for "strength" and weight loss, as
well—and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging.
The Army also introduced Presley to karate,
which he studied seriously, later including it in his live performances.
Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley's wish to be seen as an able,
ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity while in the
service. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the
base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.
While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a
seven-and-a-half-year courtship.
In her autobiography, Priscilla says that despite his worries that it
would ruin his career, Parker convinced Presley that to gain popular
respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier rather than in
Special Services, where he would have been able to give some musical
performances and remain in touch with the public.
Media reports echoed Presley's concerns about his career, but RCA
producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared
for his two-year hiatus. Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased
material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases.
Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits,
including "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck",
the best-selling "Hard Headed Woman", and "One Night" in 1958, and "(Now and Then There's) A
Fool Such as I" and the number one "A Big Hunk o' Love" in 1959.
RCA also managed to generate four albums compiling old material during
this period, most successfully Elvis' Golden Records (1958),
which hit number three on the LP chart.
Focus
on movies (1960–67)
Elvis Is Back
Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was
honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant on March 5.
The train that carried him from New
Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called
upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans.
Back in Memphis, he wasted no time in returning to the studio. Sessions
in March and April yielded two of his best-selling singles, the ballads
"It's Now or Never" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?",
and Elvis Is Back! The album features several
songs described by Greil Marcus as full of Chicago
blues "menace, driven by Presley's own super-miked acoustic guitar,
brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph. Elvis's singing wasn't sexy, it was
pornographic."
As a whole, the record "conjured up the vision of a performer who could
be all things", in the words of music historian John Robertson: "a
flirtatious teenage idol with a heart of gold; a tempestuous, dangerous
lover; a gutbucket blues singer; a sophisticated nightclub entertainer;
[a] raucous rocker".
Released only days after recording was complete, it reached number two
on the album chart.
Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on The Frank
Sinatra Timex Special—ironic for both stars, given Sinatra's
not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome
Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all
year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker secured an
unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing. The broadcast drew
an enormous viewership.
G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to
Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in
October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached
number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain,
remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley
performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24
local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA presented
him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records.
A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of
Presley's next studio album, Something for Everybody.
As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that
would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to
come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is
largely "a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once
been Elvis's birthright."
It would be his sixth number one LP. Another benefit concert, raising
money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii.
It was to be Presley's last public performance for seven years.
Lost in Hollywood
Parker had by now pushed Presley into a heavy moviemaking schedule,
focused on formulaic, modestly budgeted musical-comedies. Presley at
first insisted on pursuing more serious roles, but when two films in a
more dramatic vein—Flaming
Star (1960) and Wild in the Country (1961)—were less commercially
successful, he reverted to the formula. For the remainder of the decade,
during which he made 27 movies, there were few further exceptions.
His films were almost universally panned; one critic dismissed them as a
"pantheon of bad taste".
Nonetheless, they were virtually all profitable. Hal Wallis, who produced nine of them, declared,
"A Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood."
Of Presley's films in the 1960s, 15 were accompanied by soundtrack
albums and another 5 by soundtrack EPs. The movies' rapid production and
release schedules—he frequently starred in three a year—affected his
music. According to Jerry Leiber, the soundtrack formula was already
evident before Presley left for the Army: "three ballads, one
medium-tempo [number], one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie".
As the decade wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew
"progressively worse".
Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style
(1966), says that he hated many of the songs chosen for his films.
The Jordanaires' Gordon Stoker describes how Presley would retreat from
the studio microphone: "The material was so bad that he felt like he
couldn't sing it."
Most of the movie albums featured a song or two from respected writers
such as the team of Doc Pomus and Mort
Shuman. But by and large, according to biographer Jerry
Hopkins, the numbers seemed to be "written on order by men who
never really understood Elvis or rock and roll."
Regardless of the songs' quality, it has been argued that Presley
generally sang them well, with commitment.
Critic Dave Marsh heard the opposite: "Presley isn't trying, probably
the wisest course in the face of material like 'No Room to Rumba in a
Sports Car' and 'Rock-a-Hula Baby.'"
In the first half of the decade, three of Presley's soundtrack albums
hit number one on the pop charts, and a few of his most popular songs
came from his films, such as "Can't Help Falling in Love"
(1961) and "Return to Sender" (1962). ("Viva Las Vegas", the title track to
the 1964 film, was a minor hit as a B-side, and became truly popular
only later.) But, as with artistic merit, the commercial returns
steadily diminished. During a five-year span—1964 through 1968—Presley
had only one top ten hit: "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), a gospel number
recorded back in 1960. As for non-movie albums, between the June 1962
release of Pot Luck and the November 1968 release of the
soundtrack to the television special that signaled his comeback, only
one LP of new material by Presley was issued: the gospel album How Great Thou Art
(1967). It won him his first Grammy
Award, for Best Sacred Performance. As described in The New
Rolling Stone Album Guide, Presley was "arguably the greatest white
gospel singer of his time [and] really the last rock & roll artist
to make gospel as vital a component of his musical personality as his
secular songs."
Shortly before Christmas 1966, more than seven years since they first
met, Presley proposed to Priscilla Beaulieu. They were married on May
1, 1967, in a brief ceremony in their suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las
Vegas.
The flow of formulaic movies and assembly-line soundtracks rolled on.
It was not until October 1967, when the Clambake
soundtrack LP registered record low sales for a new Presley album, that
RCA executives recognized a problem. "By then, of course, the damage
had been done", as historians Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx put
it. "Elvis was viewed as a joke by serious music lovers and a has-been
to all but his most loyal fans."
Comeback
(1968–73)
Elvis:
the '68 Comeback Special
Presley's only child, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, during a period
when he had grown deeply unhappy with his career.
Of the eight Presley singles released between January 1967 and May
1968, only two charted in the top 40, and none higher than number 28.
His forthcoming soundtrack album, Speedway, would die at number 82 on the Billboard
chart. Parker had already shifted his plans to television, where
Presley had not appeared since the Sinatra Timex show in 1960. He
maneuvered a deal with NBC that committed the network to both finance a
theatrical feature and broadcast a Christmas special.
Recorded in late June, the special, called simply Elvis, aired
on December 3, 1968. Later known as the '68 Comeback Special, the show
featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed
with a band in front of a small audience—Presley's first live
performances since 1961. The live segments saw Presley clad in tight
black leather, singing and playing guitar in an uninhibited style
reminiscent of his early rock and roll days. Director and coproducer Steve
Binder had worked hard to reassure the nervous singer and to
produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had
originally planned.
The show, NBC's highest rated that season, captured 42 percent of the
total viewing audience.
Jon
Landau of Eye magazine remarked, "There is something magical
about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home. He
sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock 'n' roll
singers. He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that
must have made Jim Morrison green with envy."
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide calls the performance one of
"emotional grandeur and historical resonance."
By January 1969, the single "If I Can Dream", written for the special, reached number 12.
The soundtrack album broke into the top
ten. According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what "he
had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people;
being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the
soundtrack. ... He was out of prison, man."
Binder said of Presley's reaction, "I played Elvis the 60-minute show,
and he told me in the screening room, 'Steve, it's the greatest thing
I've ever done in my life. I give you my word I will never sing a song I
don't believe in.'"
From Elvis In
Memphis and the International
Buoyed by the experience of the Comeback Special, Presley engaged in a
prolific series of recording sessions at American Sound Studio, which led to
the acclaimed From Elvis in Memphis. Released in June 1969,
it was his first secular, non-soundtrack album from a dedicated period
in the studio in eight years. As described by Dave Marsh, it is "a
masterpiece in which Presley immediately catches up with pop music
trends that had seemed to pass him by during the movie years. He sings
country songs, soul songs and rockers with real conviction, a stunning
achievement."
The album featured the hit single "In
the Ghetto", issued in April, which reached number three on the pop
chart—Presley's first non-gospel top ten hit since "Bossa Nova Baby" in
1963. Further hit singles were culled from the American Sound sessions:
"Suspicious Minds", "Don't Cry Daddy", and "Kentucky
Rain".
Presley was keen to resume regular live performing. Following the
success of the Comeback Special, offers came in from around the world.
The London Palladium offered Parker $28,000 for
a one-week engagement. He responded, "That's fine for me, now how much
can you get for Elvis?"
In May, the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas, boasting the largest
showroom in the city, announced that it had booked Presley. He was
scheduled to perform 57 shows over four weeks beginning July 31. Moore,
Fontana, and the Jordanaires declined to participate, afraid of losing
the lucrative session work they had in Nashville. Presley assembled new,
top-notch accompaniment, led by guitarist James
Burton and including two gospel groups, The
Imperials and Sweet Inspirations.
Nonetheless, he was nervous: his only previous Las Vegas engagement, in
1956, had been dismal. Parker, who intended to make Presley's return
the show business event of the year, oversaw a major promotional push.
For his part, hotel owner Kirk Kerkorian arranged to send his own plane to New York
to fly in rock journalists for the debut performance.
Presley took to the stage without introduction. The audience of
2,200, including many celebrities, gave him a standing ovation before he
sang a note and another after his performance. A third followed his
encore, "Can't Help Falling in Love" (a song that would be his closing
number for much of the 1970s).
At a press conference after the show, when a journalist referred to him
as "The King", Presley gestured toward Fats
Domino, who was taking in the scene. "No," Presley said, "that's
the real king of rock and roll."
The next day, Parker's negotiations with the hotel resulted in a
five-year contract for Presley to play each February and August, at an
annual salary of $1 million.
Newsweek commented, "There are several unbelievable things about
Elvis, but the most incredible is his staying power in a world where
meteoric careers fade like shooting stars."
Rolling Stone called Presley "supernatural, his own
resurrection."
In November, Presley's final non-concert movie, Change of Habit, opened. The double album From
Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis came out the same month;
the first LP consisted of live performances from the International, the
second of more cuts from the American Sound sessions. "Suspicious
Minds" reached the top of the charts—Presley's first U.S. pop number one
in over seven years, and his last.
Cassandra Peterson, later television's
Elvira, met Presley during this period in Las Vegas, where she was
working as showgirl. She recalls of their encounter, "He was so
anti-drug when I met him. I mentioned to him that I smoked marijuana,
and he was just appalled. He said, 'Don't ever do that again.'"
Presley was not only deeply opposed to recreational drugs, he also
rarely drank. Several of his family members had been alcoholics, a fate
he intended to avoid.
Back
on tour and meeting Nixon
Presley returned to the International early in 1970 for the first of
the year's two month-long engagements, performing two shows a night.
Recordings from these shows were issued on the album On Stage.
In late February, Presley performed six attendance-record–breaking
shows at the Houston Astrodome.
In April, the single "The Wonder of You" was issued—a number one hit in Great
Britain, it topped the U.S. adult
contemporary chart, as well. MGM filmed rehearsal and concert footage
at the International during August for the documentary Elvis: That's the Way It Is.
Presley was by now performing in a jumpsuit, which would become a
trademark of his live act. During this engagement, he was threatened
with murder unless $50,000 was paid. Presley had been the target of many
threats since the 1950s, often without his knowledge.
The FBI took the threat
seriously and security was stepped up for the next two shows. Presley
went onstage with a Derringer in his right boot and a .45 pistol in
his waistband, but the concerts went off without incident.
The album That's the Way It Is,
produced to accompany the documentary and featuring both studio and live
recordings, marked a stylistic shift. As music historian John Robertson
notes, "The authority of Presley's singing helped disguise the fact
that the album stepped decisively away from the American-roots
inspiration of the Memphis sessions towards a more middle-of-the-road
sound. With country put on the back burner, and soul and R&B left in
Memphis, what was left was very classy, very clean white pop—perfect
for the Las Vegas crowd, but a definite retrograde step for Elvis."
After the end of his International engagement on September 7, Presley
embarked on a week-long concert tour, largely of the South, his first
since 1958. Another week-long tour, of the West Coast, followed in
November.
Presley meets U.S. President Richard
Nixon in the White House Oval Office, December 21, 1970
On December 21, 1970, Presley engineered a bizarre meeting with
President Richard Nixon at the White House, where he
expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippie drug culture. He asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun
collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts.
Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief
that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it
was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon
that The Beatles, whose songs he regularly performed in concert
during the era,
exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse
in popular culture.
(Presley and his friends had had a four-hour get-together with The
Beatles five years earlier.) On hearing reports of the meeting, Paul McCartney later said that he "felt a bit betrayed.
... The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look
what happened to him", a reference to Presley's death, hastened by
prescription drug abuse.
The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce
named Presley one of its annual Ten Most Outstanding Young Men of the
Nation on January 16, 1971.
Not long after, the City of Memphis named the stretch of Highway
51 South on which Graceland is located "Elvis Presley Boulevard".
The same year, Presley became the first rock and roll singer to be
awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award
(then known as the Bing Crosby Award) by the National
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy Award
organization.
Three new, non-movie Presley studio albums were released in 1971, as
many as had come out over the previous eight years. Best received by
critics was Elvis Country, a concept
record that focused on genre standards.
The biggest seller was Elvis Sings the
Wonderful World of Christmas, "the truest statement of all",
according to Greil Marcus. "In the midst of ten painfully genteel
Christmas songs, every one sung with appalling sincerity and humility,
one could find Elvis tom-catting his way through six blazing minutes of 'Merry Christmas, Baby,' a raunchy old Charles Brown blues. ... If
[Presley's] sin was his lifelessness, it was his sinfulness that brought
him to life".
Marriage breakdown and Aloha
from Hawaii
MGM again filmed Presley in April 1972, this time for Elvis
on Tour, which went on to win the Golden Globe Award
for Best Documentary Film that year. His gospel album He
Touched Me, released that month, would earn him his second
Grammy Award, for Best Inspirational Performance. A 14-date tour
commenced with an unprecedented four consecutive sold-out shows at New
York's Madison Square Garden.
The evening concert on July 10 was recorded and issued in LP form a
week later. Elvis: As Recorded
at Madison Square Garden became one of Presley's biggest-selling
albums. After the tour, the single "Burning
Love" was released—Presley's last top ten hit on the U.S. pop
chart. "The most exciting single Elvis has made since 'All Shook Up'",
wrote rock critic Robert Christgau. "Who else could make 'It's coming
closer, the flames are now licking my body' sound like an assignation
with James Brown's backup band?"
Presley in Aloha From Hawaii,
broadcast live via satellite on January 14, 1973. The singer himself
came up with his famous outfit's eagle motif, as "something that would
say 'America' to the world."
Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant,
barely cohabiting. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova
resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often
raised the possibility of her moving in to Graceland, saying that he was
likely to leave Priscilla.
The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed
her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had
recommended to her. Priscilla relates that when she told him, Presley
"grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a
real man makes love to his woman."
Five months later, Presley's new girlfriend, Linda Thompson, a songwriter and
one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him.
Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18.
In January 1973, Presley performed two benefit concerts for the Kui Lee
Cancer Fund in connection with a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii. The first show served as a practice
run and backup should technical problems affect the live broadcast two
days later. Aired as scheduled on January 14, Aloha from Hawaii
was the first global concert satellite broadcast, reaching approximately
1.5 billion viewers live and on tape delay.
Presley's costume became the most recognized example of the elaborate
concert garb with which his latter-day persona became closely
associated. As described by Bobbie Ann Mason, "At the end of the show, when he spreads
out his American Eagle cape, with the full stretched wings of the eagle
studded on the back, he becomes a god figure."
The accompanying double album,
released in February, went to number one and eventually sold over 5
million copies in the United States.
It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his
lifetime.
At a midnight show the same month, four men rushed onto the stage in
an apparent attack. Security men leapt to Presley's defense, and the
singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the
stage himself. Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that
the men had been sent by Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to
have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in
me ... Stone [must] die." His outbursts continued with such intensity
that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large
doses of medication. After another two full days of raging, Red West,
his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract
killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just
leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy."
Health
deterioration and death (1973–77)
Medical crises and last
studio sessions
Presley's divorce took effect on October 9, 1973.
He was now becoming increasingly unwell. Twice during the year he
overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in
his hotel suite after the first incident. Toward the end of 1973, he was
hospitalized, semicomatose from the effects of Demerol addiction. According to his main
physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley "felt that by getting
[drugs] from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting
something off the street."
Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing
year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever.
Despite his failing health, in 1974 he undertook another intensive
touring schedule.
Presley's condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers the
singer's arrival at a University of
Maryland concert: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees.
People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.' He
walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes
like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour
gonna happen?"
Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring. He
was so fucked up. ... It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious
there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the
words to the songs were barely intelligible. ... I remember crying. He
could barely get through the introductions".
Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him
in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often
I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year
off...?' I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on
the back and said, 'It'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.'"
Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. As cultural critic Marjorie Garber describes, he was now widely seen as a
garish pop crooner: "in effect he had become Liberace.
Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired
grandmothers."
On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in
his son's financial affairs—fired "Memphis
Mafia" bodyguards Red West (Presley's friend since the 1950s),
Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to "cut back on expenses".
Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the
singer was too cowardly to face the three himself. Another associate of
Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped
because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits.
However, Presley's stepbrother David Stanley has claimed that the
bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about
Presley's drug dependency.
Presley and Linda Thompson split in November, and he took up with a new
girlfriend, Ginger Alden.
He proposed to Alden and gave her an engagement ring two months later,
though several of his friends later claimed that he had no serious
intention of marrying again.
RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for
over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the
studio waned. After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs,
enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio in 1974.
Parker sold RCA on another concert record, Elvis: As Recorded
Live on Stage in Memphis.
Recorded on March 20, it included a version of "How Great Thou Art"
that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award.
(All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total
nominations—were for gospel recordings.) Presley returned to the studio
in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another
session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful.
In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two
full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home.
Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a
struggle for him.
For all the concerns of his label and manager, in studio sessions
between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the
entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence
on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the
country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land
(1975), From Elvis
Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody
Blue (1977).
The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits,
but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but
on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight studio singles from this
period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both
charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy"
was a number one AC hit in 1975, and "Moody Blue" topped the country chart
and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976.
Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that
year, with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on
the soul classic "Hurt".
"If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's
performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but
that he managed to survive that long."
Final year and
death
Journalist Tony Scherman writes that by early 1977, "Elvis Presley
had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self.
Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopoeia he daily
ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated
concerts."
In Alexandria, Louisiana, the singer was
on stage for less than an hour and "was impossible to understand".
Presley failed to appear in Baton Rouge: he was unable to get out of his
hotel bed, and the rest of the tour was cancelled.
Despite the accelerating deterioration of his health, he stuck to most
touring commitments. In Rapid City, South Dakota, "he was
so nervous on stage that he could hardly talk", according to Presley
historian Samuel Roy, and unable to "perform any significant movement."
Guralnick relates that fans "were becoming increasingly voluble about
their disappointment, but it all seemed to go right past Elvis, whose
world was now confined almost entirely to his room and his spiritualism
books."
A cousin, Billy Smith, recalled how Presley would sit in his room and
chat for hours, sometimes recounting favorite Monty
Python sketches and his own past escapades, but more often gripped
by paranoid obsessions that reminded Smith of Howard
Hughes.
"Way
Down", Presley's last single issued during his lifetime, came out on
June 6. His final concert was held in Indianapolis at
the Market Square Arena, on June 26.
The book Elvis: What Happened?, cowritten by the three
bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1.
It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. He
was devastated by the book and tried unsuccessfully to halt its release
by offering money to the publishers.
By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments—glaucoma, high blood
pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and
possibly caused, by drug abuse.
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August
16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, Alden discovered him
unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and
death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited
Presley with having "permanently changed the face of American popular
culture".
Thousands of people gathered outside Graceland to view the open casket.
One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly
photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer's biggest-selling issue ever.
Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story,
but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement.
Presley left her nothing in his will.
Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18.
Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women
and critically injuring a third.
Approximately 80,000 people lined the processional route to Forest Hill
Cemetery, where Presley was buried next to his mother.
Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the country and UK pop charts.
An attempt was made to steal the singer's body in late August. After
zoning issues were addressed, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his
mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
Since 1977
Between 1977 and 1981, six posthumously released singles by Presley
were top ten country hits.
Graceland was officially opened to the public in 1982. Attracting over
half a million visitors annually, it is the second most-visited home in
the United States, after the White House.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in
2006.
Presley has been inducted into four music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
(1986), the Country Music Hall of
Fame (1998), the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001),
and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007). In
1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first
Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' Award of Merit.
A Junkie
XL remix of Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" (credited as
"Elvis Vs JXL") was used in a Nike
advertising campaign during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It topped the charts in over 20
countries, and was included in a compilation of Presley's number one
hits, ELV1S,
that was also an international success. In 2003, a remix of
"Rubberneckin'", a 1969 recording of Presley's, topped the U.S. sales
chart, as did a 50th-anniversary re-release of "That's All Right" the
following year.
The latter was an outright hit in Great Britain, reaching number three
on the pop chart.
In 2005, another three reissued singles, "Jailhouse Rock", "One
Night"/"I Got Stung", and "It's Now or Never", went to number one in
Great Britain. A total of 17 Presley singles were reissued during the
year—all made the British top five. For the fifth straight year, Forbes
named Presley the top-earning deceased celebrity, with a gross income
of $45 million.
In 2009, he was ranked fourth.
Presley holds the records for most songs charting in Billboard's top 40 and top 100: chart
statistician Joel Whitburn calculates the respective totals
as 104 and 151;
Presley historian Adam Victor gives 114 and 138.
Presley's rankings for top ten and number one hits vary depending on
how the double-sided "Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel" and "Don't/I Beg of You"
singles, which precede the inception of Billboard's unified Hot 100 chart, are analyzed.d
According to Whitburn, Presley holds the record for most top ten hits
with 38;
per Billboard's
current assessment, he ranks second with 36 behind Madonna's 37.
Whitburn and Billboard concur that The Beatles hold the record
for most number one hits with 20 and that Mariah
Carey is second with 18. Whitburn has Presley also with 18 and thus
tied for second;
Billboard has him third with 17.
Presley holds the records for most British number one hits, with 21,
and top ten hits, with 76.
Musical style
Influences
Presley's earliest musical influence came from gospel.
His mother recalled that from the age of two, at the Assembly of God
church in Tupelo attended by the family, "he would slide down off my
lap, run into the aisle and scramble up to the platform. There he would
stand looking at the choir and trying to sing with them."
In Memphis, Presley frequently attended all-night gospel singings at
the Ellis Auditorium, where groups such as the Statesmen Quartet led the music in a style that,
Guralnick suggests, sowed the seeds of Presley's future stage act:
The Statesmen were an electric combination ... featuring some of
the most thrillingly emotive singing and daringly unconventional
showmanship in the entertainment world ... dressed in suits that might
have come out of the window of Lansky's. ... Bass singer Jim
Wetherington, known universally as the Big Chief, maintained a steady
bottom, ceaselessly jiggling first his left leg, then his right, with
the material of the pants leg ballooning out and shimmering. "He went
about as far as you could go in gospel music," said Jake Hess. "The
women would jump up, just like they do for the pop shows." Preachers
frequently objected to the lewd movements ... but audiences reacted with
screams and swoons.
As a teenager, Presley's musical interests were wide-ranging, and he
was deeply informed about African American musical idioms as well as
white ones (see "Teenage
life in Memphis"). Though he never had any formal training, he was
blessed with a remarkable memory, and his musical knowledge was already
considerable by the time he made his first professional recordings in
1954 at the age of 19. When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller met him two
years later, they were astonished at his encyclopedic understanding of
the blues.[269]
At a press conference the following year, he proudly declared, "I know
practically every religious song that's ever been written."
Genres
Music scholar Paul Friedlander describes the elements of the rockabilly
style, which he characterizes as "essentially ... an Elvis Presley
construction", that the singer and his band mates developed at Sun
Records: "the raw, emotive, and slurred vocal style and emphasis on
rhythmic feeling [of] the blues with the string band and strummed rhythm
guitar [of] country".[270]
Moore's guitar solo in "That's All Right", the group's first record, "a
combination of Merle Travis–style country finger-picking,
double-stop slides from acoustic boogie, and blues-based bent-note,
single-string work, is a microcosm of this fusion."[270]
At RCA, Presley's rock and roll sound grew distinct from rockabilly
with group chorus vocals, more heavily amplified electric guitars
and a tougher, more intense manner.
While he was known for taking songs from various sources and giving
them a rockabilly/rock and roll treatment, he also recorded songs in
other genres from early in his career, from the pop standard "Blue Moon" at Sun to the country ballad "How's the
World Treating You?" on his second LP to the blues of "Santa Claus Is
Back In Town". In 1957, his first gospel record was released, the
four-song EP Peace in the Valley. Certified as a million seller,
it became the top-selling gospel EP in recording history.
Presley would record gospel periodically for the rest of his life.
After his return from military service in 1960, Presley continued to
perform rock and roll, but the characteristic style was substantially
toned down. His first post-Army single, the number one hit "Stuck on You", is typical
of this shift. RCA publicity materials referred to its "mild rock
beat"; discographer Ernst Jorgensen calls it "upbeat pop".
The modern blues/R&B sound captured so successfully on Elvis Is
Back! was essentially abandoned for six years until such 1966–67
recordings as "Down in the Alley" and "Hi-Heel Sneakers".
The singer's output during most of the 1960s emphasized pop music,
often in the form of ballads such as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?",
a number one in 1960. While that was a dramatic number, most of what
Presley recorded for his movie soundtracks was in a much lighter vein.
While Presley performed several of his classic ballads for the '68
Comeback Special, the sound of the show was dominated by aggressive rock
and roll. He would record few new straight-ahead rock and roll songs
thereafter; as he explained, they were "hard to find".
A significant exception was "Burning Love", his last major hit on the
pop charts. Like his work of the 1950s, Presley's subsequent recordings
reworked pop and country songs, but in markedly different permutations.
His stylistic range now began to embrace a more contemporary rock
sound as well as soul and funk. Much of Elvis
In Memphis, as well as "Suspicious Minds", cut at the same
sessions, reflected his new rock and soul fusion. In the mid-1970s, many
of his singles found a home on country radio, the field where he first
became a star.
Vocal style and
range
Music critic Henry Pleasants observes that
"Elvis Presley has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor.
An extraordinary compass ... and a very wide range of vocal color have
something to do with this divergence of opinion."
He identifies Presley as a high baritone, calculating his range as two
octaves and a third, "from the baritone low G to the tenor high B, with
an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D-flat. Presley's best
octave is in the middle, D-flat to D-flat, granting an extra full step
up or down."
In Pleasants' view, his voice was "variable and unpredictable" at the
bottom, "often brilliant" at the top, with the capacity for "full-voiced
high Gs and As that an opera baritone might envy."
Scholar Lindsay Waters, who figures Presley's range as two and a
quarter octaves, emphasizes that "his voice had an emotional range from
tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles and sheer
gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to
fear. His voice can not be measured in octaves, but in decibels; even
that misses the problem of how to measure delicate whispers that are
hardly audible at all."
Presley was always "able to duplicate the open, hoarse, ecstatic,
screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless sound of the black
rhythm-and-blues and gospel singers," writes Pleasants, and also
demonstrated a remarkable ability to assimilate many other vocal styles.
Questions
over cause of death
"Drug use was heavily implicated" in Presley's death, writes
Guralnick. "No one ruled out the possibility of anaphylactic shock
brought on by the codeine pills ... to which he was known to have had a
mild allergy." A pair of lab reports filed two months later each
strongly suggested that polypharmacy
was the primary cause of death; one reported "fourteen drugs in Elvis'
system, ten in significant quantity."
Forensic historian and pathologist Michael Baden views the situation as
complicated: "Elvis had had an enlarged heart for a long time. That,
together with his drug habit, caused his death. But he was difficult to
diagnose; it was a judgment call."
The competence and ethics of two of the centrally involved medical
professionals were seriously questioned. Before the autopsy was complete
and toxicology results known, Medical
Examiner Dr. Jerry Francisco declared the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, a condition that
can be determined only in someone who is still alive.[285]
Allegations of a cover-up were widespread.
While Presley's main physician, Dr. Nichopoulos, was exonerated of
criminal liability for the singer's death, the facts were startling: "In
the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had [prescribed] more than
10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics: all in Elvis's
name." His license was suspended for three months. It was permanently
revoked in the 1990s after the Tennessee Medical Board brought new
charges of over-prescription.
In 1994, the Presley autopsy was reopened. Coroner Dr. Joseph Davis
declared, "There is nothing in any of the data that supports a death
from drugs. In fact, everything points to a sudden, violent heart attack."
Whether or not combined drug intoxication was in
fact the cause, there is little doubt that polypharmacy contributed
significantly to Presley's premature death.[285]
Racial issues
When Dewey Phillips first aired "That's All Right" on Memphis radio,
many listeners who contacted the station by phone and telegram to ask
for it again assumed that its singer was black.
From the beginning of his national fame, Presley expressed respect for
African American performers and their music and disregard for the norms
of segregation and racial prejudice then prevalent in the South.
Interviewed in 1956, he recalled how in his childhood he would listen to
blues musician Arthur Crudup—the originator of "That's All
Right"—"bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the
place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like
nobody ever saw."
The Memphis World, an African American newspaper, reported that
Presley, "the rock 'n' roll phenomenon", "cracked Memphis's segregation
laws" by attending the local amusement park on what was designated as
its "colored night."
Such statements and actions led Presley to be generally hailed in the
black community during the early days of his stardom.
By contrast, many white adults, according to Billboard's Arnold Shaw, "did not like him,
and condemned him as depraved. Anti-negro prejudice doubtless figured in
adult antagonism. Regardless of whether parents were aware of the Negro
sexual origins of the phrase 'rock 'n' roll', Presley impressed them as
the visual and aural embodiment of sex."
Despite the largely positive view of Presley held by African
Americans, a rumor spread in mid-1957 that he had at some point
announced, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and
shine my shoes." A journalist with the national African American weekly Jet, Louie Robinson, pursued the story. On
the set of Jailhouse Rock,
Presley granted him an interview, though he was no longer dealing with
the mainstream press. He denied making such a statement or holding in
any way to its racist view. Robinson found no evidence that the remark
had ever been made, and on the contrary elicited testimony from many
individuals indicating that Presley was anything but racist.
Blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, who had heard the rumor
before he visited Graceland one evening, reported of Presley, "He showed
me every courtesy, and I think he's one of the greatest."
Though the rumored remark was wholly discredited at the time, it was
still being used against Presley decades later.
The identification of Presley with racism—either personally or
symbolically—was expressed most famously in the lyrics of the 1989 rap
hit "Fight the Power", by Public Enemy: "Elvis was a hero to most
/ But he never meant shit to me / Straight-up racist that sucker was /
Simple and plain."
The persistence of such attitudes was fueled by resentment over the
fact that Presley, whose musical and visual performance idiom owed much
to African American sources, achieved the cultural acknowledgment and
commercial success largely denied his black peers.
Into the 21st century, the notion that Presley had "stolen" black music
still found adherents.
Notable among African American entertainers expressly rejecting this
view was Jackie Wilson, who argued, "A lot of people
have accused Elvis of stealing the black man's music, when in fact,
almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from
Elvis."
And throughout his career, Presley plainly acknowledged his debt.
Addressing his '68 Comeback Special audience, he said, "Rock 'n' roll
music is basically gospel or rhythm and blues, or it sprang from that.
People have been adding to it, adding instruments to it, experimenting
with it, but it all boils down to [that]." Nine years earlier, he had
said, "Rock 'n' roll has been around for many years. It used to be
called rhythm and blues."[292]
Influence of Colonel Parker
and others
Parker and
the Aberbachs
Once he became Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker insisted on
exceptionally tight control over his client's career. Early on, he and
his Hill and Range allies, the Aberbachs, perceived the close
relationship that developed between Presley and songwriters Jerry Leiber
and Mike Stoller as a serious threat to that control.
Parker effectively ended the relationship, deliberately or not, with
the new contract he sent Leiber in early 1958. Leiber thought there was a
mistake—the sheet of paper was blank except for Parker's signature and a
line on which to enter his. "There's no mistake, boy, just sign it and
return it", Parker directed. "Don't worry, we'll fill it in later."
Leiber declined, and Presley's fruitful collaboration with the writing
team was over.
Other respected songwriters lost interest in or simply avoided writing
for Presley because of the requirement that they surrender a third of
their usual royalties.
By 1967, Parker had contracts with Presley that gave him 50 percent
of most of the singer's earnings on recordings, films, and merchandise.
Beginning in February 1972, he took a third of the profit from live
appearances;
a January 1976 agreement entitled him to half of that as well.
Priscilla Presley noted that "Elvis detested the business side of his
career. He would sign a contract without even reading it."
Presley's friend Marty Lacker regarded Parker as a "hustler and a con
artist. He was only interested in 'now money'—get the buck and get
gone."
Lacker was instrumental in convincing Presley to record with Memphis
producer Chips Moman and his handpicked musicians at American Sound
Studio in early 1969. The American Sound sessions represented a
significant departure from the control customarily exerted by Hill and
Range. Moman still had to deal with the publisher's staff on site, whose
song suggestions he regarded as unacceptable. He was on the verge of
quitting, until Presley ordered the Hill and Range personnel out of the
studio.
Although RCA executive Joan Deary was later full of praise for the
producer's song choices and the quality of the recordings,
Moman, to his fury, received neither credit on the records nor
royalties for his work.
Throughout his entire career, Presley performed in only three venues
outside the United States—all of them in Canada, during brief tours
there in 1957. Rumors that he would play overseas for the first time
were fueled in 1974 by a million-dollar bid for an Australian tour.
Parker was uncharacteristically reluctant, prompting those close to
Presley to speculate about the manager's past and the reasons for his
apparent unwillingness to apply for a passport. Parker ultimately
squelched any notions Presley had of working abroad, claiming that
foreign security was poor and venues unsuitable for a star of his
magnitude.
Parker arguably exercised tightest control over Presley's movie
career. In 1957, Robert Mitchum asked Presley to costar with
him in Thunder Road, on which Mitchum was both
writer and producer.
According to George Klein, one of his oldest friends, Presley was
offered starring roles in West Side Story and Midnight Cowboy.
In 1974, Barbra Streisand approached Presley to star
with her in the remake of A Star is Born.
In each case, any ambitions the singer may have had to play such parts
were thwarted by his manager's negotiating demands or flat refusals. In
Lacker's description, "The only thing that kept Elvis going after the
early years was a new challenge. But Parker kept running everything into
the ground."
The operative attitude may have been summed up best by the response
Leiber and Stoller received when they brought a serious film project for
Presley to Parker and the Hill and Range owners for their
consideration. In Leiber's telling, Jean Aberbach warned them to never
again "try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the
process known as Elvis Presley".
Memphis Mafia
Main article: Memphis
Mafia
In the early 1960s, the circle of friends with whom Presley
constantly surrounded himself until his death came to be known as the
"Memphis Mafia".
"Surrounded by the[ir] parasitic presence", as journalist John Harris puts it, "it was no wonder that as he
slid into addiction and torpor, no-one raised the alarm: to them, Elvis
was the bank, and it had to remain open."
Tony Brown, who played piano
for Presley regularly in the last two years of the singer's life,
observed his rapidly declining health and the urgent need to address it:
"But we all knew it was hopeless because Elvis was surrounded by that
little circle of people ... all those so-called friends".
In the Memphis Mafia's defense, Marty Lacker has said, "[Presley] was
his own man. ... If we hadn't been around, he would have been dead a lot
earlier."
Larry Geller became Presley's hairdresser in 1964. Unlike others in
the Memphis Mafia, he was interested in spiritual questions and recalls
how, from their first conversation, Presley revealed his secret thoughts
and anxieties: "I mean there has to be a purpose...there's got
to be a reason...why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley. ... I swear to
God, no one knows how lonely I get. And how empty I really feel."
Thereafter, Geller supplied him with books on religion and mysticism,
which the singer read voraciously.
Presley would be preoccupied by such matters for much of his life,
taking trunkloads of books with him on tour.
Sex symbol
The title and marketing of Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962) took
advantage of Presley's sex symbol status.
Presley's physical attractiveness and sexual appeal were widely
acknowledged. "He was once beautiful, astonishingly beautiful", in the
words of critic Mark Feeney.
Television director Steve Binder, no fan of Presley's music before
he oversaw the '68 Comeback Special, reported, "I'm straight as an
arrow and I got to tell you, you stop, whether you're male or female, to
look at him. He was that good looking. And if you never knew he was a
superstar, it wouldn't make any difference; if he'd walked in the room,
you'd know somebody special was in your presence."
His performance style, as much as his physical beauty, was responsible
for Presley's eroticized image. Writing in 1970, critic George
Melly described him as "the master of the sexual simile, treating
his guitar as both phallus and girl."
In his Presley obituary, Lester
Bangs credited him as "the man who brought overt blatant vulgar
sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America."
Ed Sullivan's declaration that he perceived a soda bottle in Presley's
trousers was echoed by rumors involving a similarly positioned toilet
roll tube or lead bar.
While Presley was marketed as an icon of heterosexuality, some
cultural critics have argued that his image was ambiguous. In 1959, Sight and Sound's Peter John Dyer described his
onscreen persona as "aggressively bisexual in appeal".
Brett Farmer places the "orgasmic gyrations" of the title dance
sequence in Jailhouse Rock within a lineage of cinematic musical
numbers that offer a "spectacular eroticization, if not
homoeroticization, of the male image".
In the analysis of Yvonne Tasker, "Elvis was an ambivalent figure who
articulated a peculiar feminised, objectifying version of white
working-class masculinity as aggressive sexual display."
Reinforcing Presley's image as a sex symbol were the reports of his
dalliances with various Hollywood stars and starlets, from Natalie
Wood in the 1950s to Connie Stevens and Ann-Margret
in the 1960s to Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s. June
Juanico of Memphis, one of Presley's early girlfriends, later
blamed Parker for encouraging him to choose his dating partners with
publicity in mind.
Presley, however, never grew comfortable with the Hollywood scene, and
most of these relationships were insubstantial.
Legacy
"His music and his personality, fusing the styles of white country
and black rhythm and blues, permanently changed the face of American
popular culture. His following was immense, and he was a symbol to
people the world over of the vitality, rebelliousness, and good humor of
his country."
Presley's rise to national attention in 1956 transformed the field of
popular music and had a huge effect on the broader scope of popular
culture.
As the catalyst for the cultural revolution that was rock and roll, he
was central not only to defining it as a musical genre but in making it a
touchstone of youth culture and rebellious attitude.
With its racially mixed origins—repeatedly affirmed by Presley—rock and
roll's occupation of a central position in mainstream American culture
facilitated a new acceptance and appreciation of black culture.[324]
In this regard, Little Richard said of Presley, "He was an integrator.
Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn't let black music through. He opened
the door for black music."
Al
Green agreed: "He broke the ice for all of us."
Presley also heralded the vastly expanded reach of celebrity in the era
of mass communication: at the age of 21, within a year of his first
appearance on American network television, he was one of the most famous
people in the world.
Presley's name, image, and voice are instantly recognizable around
the globe.
He has inspired a legion of impersonators.
In polls and surveys, he is recognized as one of the most important
popular music artists and influential Americans.e
"Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth
century", said composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. "He introduced the beat to everything
and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It's a whole new
social revolution—the sixties came from it."
Bob
Dylan described the sensation of first hearing Presley as "like
busting out of jail".
A New York Times editorial on the 25th anniversary of
Presley's death observed, "All the talentless impersonators and
appalling black velvet paintings on display can make him seem little
more than a perverse and distant memory. But before Elvis was camp, he
was its opposite: a genuine cultural force. ... Elvis's breakthroughs
are underappreciated because in this rock-and-roll age, his hard-rocking
music and sultry style have triumphed so completely."
Not only Presley's achievements, but his failings as well, are seen by
some cultural observers as adding to the power of his legacy, as in this
description by Greil Marcus:
Elvis Presley is a supreme figure in American life, one whose
presence, no matter how banal or predictable, brooks no real
comparisons. ... The cultural range of his music has expanded to the
point where it includes not only the hits of the day, but also patriotic
recitals, pure country gospel, and really dirty blues. ... Elvis has
emerged as a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor
of schlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a
great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice
person, and, yes, a great American.
Discography
A vast number of recordings have been issued under Presley's name.
The total number of his original master recordings has been variously
calculated as 665
and 711.
His career began and he was most successful during an era when singles
were the primary commercial medium for pop music. In the case of his
albums, the distinction between "official" studio records and other
forms is often blurred. In addition, for most of the 1960s, his
recording career focused on soundtrack albums. In the 1970s, his most
heavily promoted and best-selling LP releases tended to be concert
albums. This summary discography lists only the albums and singles that
reached the top of one or more of the following charts: the main U.S. Billboard
pop chart; the Billboard country chart, the genre chart with
which he was most identified (there was no country album chart before
1964); and the official British pop chart.f
In the United States, Presley also had five or six number one R&B
singles and seven number one adult contemporary singles;g
in 1964, his "Blue Christmas" topped the Christmas singles
chart during a period when Billboard did not rank holiday singles
in its primary pop chart.
He had number one hits in many countries beside the United States and
United Kingdom, as well.
Number one albums
Number one singles
Filmography
See also
Notes
- ^ Note a:
The correct spelling of Presley's middle name has long been a matter of
debate. The physician who delivered him wrote "Elvis Aaron Presley" in
his ledger.
The state-issued birth certificate reads "Elvis Aron Presley". The name
was chosen after the Presleys' friend and fellow congregation member
Aaron Kennedy, though a single-A spelling was probably intended by
Presley's parents in order to parallel the middle name of Presley's
stillborn brother, Jesse Garon.
It reads Aron on most official documents produced during his lifetime,
including his high school diploma, RCA record contract, and marriage
license, and this was generally taken to be the proper spelling.
In 1966, Presley expressed the desire to his father that the more
traditional biblical rendering, Aaron, be used henceforth, "especially
on legal documents."
Five years later, the Jaycees citation honoring him as one of the
country's Outstanding Young Men used Aaron. Late in his life, he sought
to officially change the spelling to Aaron and discovered that state
records already listed it that way. Knowing his wishes for his middle
name, Aaron is the spelling his father chose for Presley's tombstone,
and it is the spelling his estate has designated as official.
- ^ Note b:
Of the $40,000, $5,000 covered back royalties owed by Sun.
- ^ Note c:
In 1956–57, Presley was also credited as a cowriter on several songs
where he had no hand in the writing process: "Heartbreak Hotel"; "Don't Be Cruel"; all four songs from his first film,
including the title track, "Love Me Tender"; "Paralyzed"; and "All
Shook Up".
He received credit on two other songs to which he did contribute: he
provided the title for "That's Someone You Never Forget"
(1961), written by his friend Red West; Presley and West collaborated
with another friend, guitarist Charlie Hodge, on "You'll Be Gone" (1962).
- ^ Note d:
Whitburn follows actual Billboard history in considering the
four songs on the "Don't Be Cruel/Hound Dog" and "Don't/I Beg of You"
singles as distinct. He tallies each side of the former single as a
number one (Billboard's
sales chart had "Don't Be Cruel" at number one for five weeks, then
"Hound Dog" for six) and reckons "I Beg of You" as a top ten, as it
reached number eight on the old Top 100 chart. Billboard now
considers both singles as unified items, ignoring the historical sales
split of the former and its old Top 100 chart entirely. Whitburn thus
analyzes the four songs as yielding three number ones and a total of
four top tens. Billboard now states that they yielded just two
number ones and a total of two top tens, voiding the separate chart
appearances of "Hound Dog" and "I Beg of You".
- ^ Note e:
VH1 ranked
Presley #8 among the "100 Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll" in 1998.
The BBC
ranked him as the #2 "Voice of the Century" in 2001.
Rolling Stone placed him #3 in its list of "The
Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004.
CMT ranked him #15 among the "40 Greatest Men in
Country Music" in 2005.
The Discovery Channel placed him #8 on its
"Greatest American" list in 2005.
Variety put him in the top ten of its
"100 Icons of the Century" in 2005.
The Atlantic Monthly
ranked him #66 among the "100 Most Influential Figures in American
History" in 2006.
- ^ Note f:
(1) The year given is the year the record first reached number one,
rather than its original year of release. For instance, in 1974, Elvis'
40 Greatest, a compilation on the budget Arcade label, was the
fourth highest selling album of the year in the United Kingdom; at the
time, the main British chart did not rank such compilations, relegating
them to a chart for midpriced and TV-advertised albums, which Elvis'
40 Greatest topped for 15 weeks.
The policy was altered in 1975, allowing the album to hit number one on
the main chart in 1977, following Presley's death.
(2) Before late 1958, rather than unified pop and country singles
charts, Billboard had as many as four charts for each, separately
ranking records according to sales, jukebox play, jockey spins (i.e.,
airplay), and, in the case of pop, a general Top 100. Billboard
now regards the sales charts as definitive for the period. Widely cited
chart statistician Joel Whitburn accords historical releases the highest
ranking they achieved among the separate charts. Presley discographer
Ernst Jorgensen refers only to the Top 100 chart for pop hits. All of
the 1956–58 songs listed here as number one U.S. pop hits reached the
top of both the sales and, with three exceptions, the Top 100 charts: "I
Want You, I Need You, I Love You" (three), "Hound Dog" (two, behind its
flip side, "Don't Be Cruel"), and "Hard Headed Woman" (two). (3)
Several Presley singles reached number one in the United Kingdom as
double A-sides; in the United States, the respective sides of those
singles were ranked separately by Billboard.
- ^ Note g:
Whitburn calculates a total of six number one R&B singles,
including "Don't Be Cruel", released as a double A-side with "Hound
Dog";
Billboard's Keith
Caulfield excludes "Don't Be Cruel".
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Further reading
- Allen, Lew (2007). Elvis and the Birth of Rock. Genesis. ISBN 1905662009.
- Ann-Margret and Todd Gold (1994). Ann-Margret: My Story. G.P.
Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0399138919.
- Cantor, Louis (2005). Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a
Rock 'n' Roll Deejay. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 025202951X.
- Dickerson, James L. (2001). Colonel Tom Parker: The Curious Life
of Elvis Presley's Eccentric Manager. Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0815412673.
- Finstad, Suzanne (1997). Child Bride: The Untold Story of
Priscilla Beaulieu Presley. Harmony Books. ISBN 0517705850.
- Goldman, Albert (1981). Elvis. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070236577.
- Goldman, Albert (1990). Elvis: The Last 24 Hours. St.
Martin's. ISBN 0312925417.
- Marcus, Greil (1999). Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural
Obsession. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674194225.
- Marcus, Greil (2000). Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis
Presley in a Land of No Alternative. Picador. ISBN 057120676X.
- Moscheo, Joe (2007). The Gospel Side of Elvis. Center Street.
ISBN 1599957299.
- Nash, Alanna (2010). Baby, Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and
the Women Who Loved Him. It Books. ISBN 0061699845.
- West, Red, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler (as told to Steve Dunleavy)
(1977). Elvis: What Happened? Bantam Books. ISBN 0345272153.
External links
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