This year, 2019, has already taken the lives of two of those who – although virtually unknown in the outside world – were very closely associated with Elvis Presley, singer, who died in 1977. They were members of what the press dubbed the “Memphis Mafia,” a circle of men who were around Presley more or less constantly, fulfilling his every command and bowing to his every whim. For these guys, he was without a doubt the Boss.
The first to die this year was Rick Stanley, who, in law, was Presley’s stepbrother, because his mother married Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon, in 1960, two years after the death of Presley’s own mother. Stanley passed away on January 7 at the age of 65. After Presley died in August 1977, just a month or so later, Stanley had some sort of religious experience, and became a Baptist minister. One is left to wonder why it is that Stanley didn’t have this “religious experience” before Presley died, and he wouldn’t have been so complicit in supplying the King of Rock with powerful prescription narcotics.
The second person from Presley’s inner circle to die this year was George Klein, who met Presley when in the Eighth Grade at school in 1948, almost as soon as the Presley family had moved to Memphis from Mississippi in search of a better life. Klein remained friends with Elvis until the singer’s death almost thirty years later. Klein had forged a career of his own as a television and radio disc jockey, and my dear wife Jane and I both remember listening to him on Elvis’ own digital radio station on Sirius during our visits to the USA in 2006, 2007 and 2008. He was a great deal of fun with a wonderful sense of humour and a generous spirit.
I have always been intrigued by the story of Elvis Presley, as many of my fans – almost one – know only too well, but they may not be so aware of the reasons behind my fascination with Presley, his life and career, not to mention the lives of those around him.
Elvis Presley became a huge star – so massive a legend, in fact that it is said that there is nary a human on this planet who doesn’t know Presley at least by name. You would have to go to the darkest recesses of the Amazon to find someone who would answer the question, “Do you know of Elvis Presley?” with, “Who?”
When an 18-year-old Elvis Presley first entered a recording studio with his beat-up guitar in the summer of 1953, the idea of becoming one of the 20th Century’s most recognised cultural icons was very far from his mind. He probably wanted fame, and very likely money, and the visit to the studio that day was purely so that he could find out if his voice sounded as good as he thought it did. It did. The recordings themselves were not found and released until July 1992, upon the release of the boxed set The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Complete 50s Masters (1992). They are artistic milestones in themselves; but at the time neither Presley nor the other person in the room that day, Sun Studio owner Sam Phillips’ secretary, Marion Keisker, were aware of this.
When Elvis Presley first opened his mouth to sing ‘My Happiness,’ Ms Keisker immediately realised that here was a young man with considerable ability and a great deal of raw talent, and switched on the tape machine to record it for Sam Phillips to hear later on. Presley had paid $4 to record a demo which in those days was cut directly on to the lacquer disc, and not recorded to tape unless, as in his case, they were really good. When one listens to the tape today, one gets a real sense of being there at that moment in time, always a sign that it is a great record, despite the fact that Elvis’ guitar is not quite in tune, and neither is his voice on every single note, because here is an untrained singer in the technical sense.
Eventually, of course, Phillips got to hear the tape, and the rest is history. And it is those last five words that are the key ones. Elvis Presley became history; a man who has been written about more than most other artists in his field combined. Certainly, the number of books I have read about him and his music would number well into the hundreds.
Indeed, I am reading two now: one is called simply Being Elvis by the respected journalist Ray Connolly; while the other is called Baby Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley & the Women Who Loved Him, published in 2010. After August 16 this year, when the 42nd anniversary of Elvis’ death is commemorated by a candlelight vigil at his grave on the grounds of his legendary home, Graceland, we will be just a few months from the fact that the singer will have been dead for longer than he was alive. And the amount of interest around the world shows no sign of abating whatsoever.
Why is this? What is/was it about Elvis Presley that made him so well-known, so respected – and also disrespected, too, let’s acknowledge that – just so…famous?
Presley had a unique quality. First of all, there was the Voice. It was a good voice, for sure, and with work, became better and stronger throughout his career, but by good fortune it had the quality that record producer Sam Phillips was looking for – a white singer that could sound like a black one. The reason for that was because much of radio at that time, as well as people’s lives in general, was segregated, resulting in stations that played only “white music,” and others that played only “black music.” Phillips was a visionary; he wanted stations to play both. He believed this would break down the barriers of racial prejudice that was rampant in the USA at that time. And, to a degree it did, over time. Presley’s music was definitely a contributory factor, but that came later; first, came a great deal of racial name-calling and derision directed at the singer.
But, it wasn’t simply the voice. Presley initially struggled in the recording studio. Phillips asked the then-19-year-old singer what he knew; the young man ran through song after song after song, mostly ballads – unbelievably, Presley imagined himself being a lounge singer or a crooner like Dean Martin. In his wildest dreams, Presley’s ultimate wish was to sing lead in a four or five-part gospel group. I know, it’s difficult to believe, but that was the case. But none of the ballads that Presley offered seemed to be working; they tried ‘I Love You Because’ and ‘Harbor Lights’ in the studio, and while his voice sounded fine, it wasn’t setting the world on fire.
They took a break. To relax, Elvis picked up his guitar, and began to strum a blues tune, Arthur Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right.’ Elvis became known among his friends for his sense of humour, and here he began speeding up the tune, playing it like a fast country number, laughing all the time. The band, too, began to relax; and they joined in – Scotty Moore on lead guitar and Bill Black on bass. Producer Phillips came running in; the band stopped. “What in the hell was that?” he cried.
“We don’t know,” was Presley’s reply, “we were just goofing off.” “Well,” said a forthright Phillips, “find out, rehearse it, and let’s record it!” I would imagine that nobody was more amazed in the studio that night than Elvis Presley himselvis, as the late George Klein used to say. That was the ten or so minutes in July 1954, as the world carried on whatever it was doing, that popular music – indeed, popular culture, was changed forever. Sam Phillips had found exactly what he wanted. And, it turned out, he was right; he could cross racial barriers with music – reach out and cross lines that had not been crossed up to that point.
But, it wasn’t simply the good fortune. Elvis Presley was an extremely good-looking individual, blessed with a look that not only pleased his female audience, but meant that he photographed well and could be seen in many more magazines, newspapers and so on than most of his contemporaries. It is said that much of the credit for his good looks came from his partly Cherokee ancestry. He not only had the look, but the ability to move on stage in a way that pleased his female audiences, too. He took the uncontrolled bodily movements of the evangelical preachers he had watched all his life, and transformed them into pure, unadulterated (for that time) sex. Remember, much of white America at that time was not only racist but extremely prudish; when Elvis’ popularity began to spread, the parents said, “No!” while their daughters said, “Go!”
Finally, of course, there was his manager, a legend in his own right, a man with almost as much charisma and personal manager as his protogée, ‘Colonel’ Thomas Andrew Parker; or, simply, “The Colonel.’ Parker began to manage Presley in 1955, and remained his manager, while Presley remained Parker’s only client, right through to the bitter end, when Elvis was found face-down on that bathroom floor on August 16, 1977. Indeed, Parker managed Presley’s estate until 1982, when he was kicked out by Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla, and her lawyers. I never saw a sadder figure than a short video of Parker around 1987, a lifelong gambling addict, putting money into a slot machine over and over, trying to get that elusive high, nobody around him. His purpose in life was gone; he lived on until 1997, always convinced that he had done nothing wrong in the context of his management of Presley’s career – one that was littered with strange career choices highlighting and almost certainly caused by extremely bad management decisions.
All of the above factors combined for the kind of fame that seemed to have been predestined at the beginning of time; Elvis had it all. He wasn’t missing one thing; say, for example, possession of a great voice but with a face like the back end of a yak. No, he definitely had it all. He couldn’t simply sing but dance like a disabled octopus, he surely had it all. It wasn’t as though he was extremely good-looking but with a voice that sounded like an oil tanker in distress, it was obvious he had it all.
The kind of odds against having half a dozen factors in place, maybe more that I’ve missed out, are astronomical – and I kind of mean that literally. The world success he experienced, while not that important in a universal context, but seemingly came prepackaged from the Universe at the beginning of time, just as it would be for some poor sod to be born with a face like a sack of carrots, a voice like the end of a bagpipe concert, and movements that could be used to demonstrate electrical impulses in the brain, that even his parents have hardly heard of. Furthermore, in Presley’s case, it was very much a factor of the old cliché, being born at the right place and at the right time. How many millions, or billions, of us, go unrecognised because we have no gift, no power to work hard, their breath gets lost in the wind, and their voice is silenced by the Universe. But one – a young trainee electrician from Memphis, Tennessee, becomes one of the most famous men in world history.
Unfortunately, Presley’s unique and very significant gifts did not extend into his private life; his life was something he was totally unable to control. He had – and it seems obvious from certain family members on his mother’s side in particular that it was genetically inherited – what I think appears to be some sort of full-functioning bipolar disorder. I am no doctor, I could not offer a final and conclusive diagnosis, but there is evidence for this in certain incidents in his life. I do not think it is wise or sensible to go through them now; perhaps in another blog.
Being brought up in the South, Elvis was very much the Southern man. He could be racist without realising it, yet at the same time could not help but acknowledge the influence that black music and its musicians had upon his life; during his ‘Vegas’ years, he brought in a black vocal group called The Sweet Inspirations, and used them right to his very last concert in 1977. Elvis could be sexist also; he considered that his wife, Priscilla, should be obedient to him; she should stay at home looking after the family, while he went to Hollywood, or later on tour, having sex with any girl who took his fancy. It was no wonder she divorced him in 1973, although they did remain friends until his death, sharing responsibility for their daughter, Lisa Marie. When Priscilla first heard of her ex-husband’s death, the first thing she did was to hop on the plane named after their daughter, head for Graceland, run upstairs and collect a number of video tapes containing pornographic footage of herself that were made for Elvis’ pleasure in the 1960s. God, if those tapes ever got out…
Elvis had a foul temper. It could, typically, withstand major stresses and psychological trauma but then explode in a volcano of inappropriate severity over some extremely trivial matter. Again, the temper was in part genetic, but it was also affected in the negative by the ever-increasing amount of prescription painkillers that he was taking.
Then there were the two sources of both derision and humour that continue to this day: his drug habits and his eating habits. Again, Presley was so famous that whole documentaries have been made on the foods that he ate. Well, one, anyway. Called The Burger & the King, it told of the massive, 14-inch long, bacon rolls that allegedly contained a gut-busting forty-two thousand calories each, and Presley didn’t stop at eating one of them. He would delight at being able to show off to his friends. Here he was, a poor Southern kid, who could call a pilot at his command, have him prepare a four-engine jet that he owned, and fly from Memphis to Denver, Colorado, to pick up an order of ‘Fool’s Gold’ sandwiches, as they were called, and fly back home again. Elvis could do that, and he wanted people around him to know it.
Of course, in studying Elvis’ place in the Order of Things, it is worth considering that his friends, each one of them, must have come through the kind of extraordinary genetic lottery in order to have even been born around the same time as Elvis, as stupid as that sounds. Since Elvis died, each one of them has written a book, in some cases more than one. That’s around twenty books right there. Each one telling the story from their own perspective, and each one’s primary purpose being to exonerate themselves from any blame whatsoever when it comes to Elvis’ drug addiction and death.
Why am I here? Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why did this happen to me? These are all questions that Elvis pondered very deeply indeed throughout his life. There are explanations which can be made both physically and logically, and some which perhaps will forever remain a mystery, and could be applied to anyone whose place on Earth has had a profound effect upon people in all corners of the world, but also has remained so for many decades after his death and shows no sign of slowing down. And – who knows? – Elvis Presley, along with The Beatles and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts, may well be remembered for many decades and centuries to come. x
Stephen Butler - Rant Music 