Elvis Inspirational, RCA's 2006 compilation, is part of a set of six theme-based compilations that also includes
Elvis Rock,
Elvis Country,
Elvis Movies,
Elvis Live and
Elvis R&B and is made up of
pop and
gospel recordings seen to be inspirational, including
Paul Simon's "
Bridge Over Troubled Water,"
Neil Diamond's "
And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind,"
Mac Davis' "
In the Ghetto," "
Danny Boy," and "
The Impossible Dream".
| Elvis Presley |
|---|
|
| Born |
Elvis Aaron Presley
January 8, 1935
Tupelo, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Died |
August 16, 1977 (aged 42)
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Resting place |
Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Education |
L.C. Humes High School |
| Occupation |
Singer, actor |
| Home town |
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Spouse(s) |
Priscilla Beaulieu (m. 1967; div. 1973) |
| Children |
Lisa Marie Presley |
| Relatives |
Danielle Riley Keough (granddaughter) |
| Military career |
| Allegiance |
 United States of America |
| Service/branch |
 United States Army |
| Years of service |
1958–1960 |
| Rank |
 Sergeant |
| Unit |
Company A, 1st Medium Tank Battalion, 32nd Armor Regiment, 3rd Armored Division |
| Musical career |
| Genres |
|
| Instruments |
Vocals, guitar, piano |
| Years active |
1953–1977 |
| Labels |
Sun, RCA (Victor), HMV |
| Associated acts |
The Blue Moon Boys, The Jordanaires, The Imperials |
| Website |
www.elvis.com |
| Signature |
 |
Elvis Aaron Presley[a] (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor.
Regarded as one of the most significant
cultural icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as
"the King of Rock and Roll", or simply, "the King".
Presley was born in
Tupelo, Mississippi as a
twinless twin, and when he was 13 years old, he and his family relocated to
Memphis, Tennessee.
His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song with producer
Sam Phillips at
Sun Records. Accompanied by guitarist
Scotty Moore and bassist
Bill Black, Presley was an early popularizer of
rockabilly, an uptempo,
backbeat-driven fusion of
country music and
rhythm and blues.
RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by
Colonel Tom Parker, who managed the singer for more than two decades.
Presley's first RCA single, "
Heartbreak Hotel", was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States.
He was regarded as the leading figure of
rock and roll
after a series of successful network television appearances and
chart-topping records.
His energized interpretations of songs and
sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly
potent mix of influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn
of the
Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously popular—and controversial.
In November 1956, he made his film debut in
Love Me Tender.
In 1958, he was drafted into military service.
He resumed his recording
career two years later, producing some of his most commercially
successful work before devoting much of the 1960s to making Hollywood
movies and their accompanying soundtrack albums, most of which were
critically derided.
In 1968, following a seven-year break from live
performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed televised
comeback special
Elvis, which led to an extended
Las Vegas
concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours.
In 1973,
Presley was featured in the first globally broadcast concert via
satellite,
Aloha from Hawaii. Several years of prescription drug abuse severely damaged his health, and he died in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of
the 20th century.
Commercially successful in many genres, including pop,
blues and
gospel, he is the
best-selling solo artist in the history of recorded music, with estimated record sales of around 600 million units worldwide.
[9]
He won three
Grammys, also receiving the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music
halls of fame.
Life and career
Early years (1935–53)
Childhood in Tupelo
Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in
Tupelo, Mississippi,
the son of Gladys Love (n̩e Smith; April 25, 1912 РAugust 14, 1958)
and Vernon Elvis Presley (April 10, 1916 – June 26, 1979), in the two-room
shotgun house built by Vernon's father in preparation for the child's birth.
Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered
stillborn 35 minutes before him.
[11]
As an only child, Presley became close to both parents and formed an
especially close 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, including
Scots-Irish,
Scottish, German, and some
French Norman.
Gladys' great-great-grandmother, Morning Dove White, was possibly a
Cherokee Native American.
[15][b]
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.
The Presleys survived the F5 tornado in the
1936 Tupelo-Gainesville tornado outbreak.
In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of
kiting a check
written by the landowner, Orville S. Bean, the dairy farmer and
cattle-and-hog broker for whom he then worked. 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, was 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 his first guitar for his birthday;
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 played and sang 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 into 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 Lauderdale Courts.
Enrolled at
L. C. 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 usually 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, including 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 Lauderdale
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 also 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, on only the nights designated for exclusively white audiences.
He certainly listened to the regional radio stations, such as WDIA-AM,
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.
[46]
B.B. King recalled that he had known Presley before he was popular, when they both used to frequent Beale Street.
By the time he graduated from high school in June 1953, Presley had already singled out music as his future.
First recordings (1953–55)
Sam Phillips and Sun Records
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"
[50]
and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin".
He would later claim that he
intended the record as a gift for his mother, or that he was merely
interested in what he "sounded like", although 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 who 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."
In January 1954, Presley cut a second acetate at Sun Records—"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 to a broader audience the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun
focused. 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 teenage 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.
|
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Presley transformed
not only the sound but the emotion of the song, turning what had been
written as a "lament for a lost love into a satisfied declaration of
independence."
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The session, held the evening of July 5, 1954, 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.
[50]
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 with 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 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. Having successfully managed top country star
Eddy Arnold, Parker 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
CBS
television 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."
[76]
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.
[c]
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 the new material recorded by Presley.
Songwriters were obliged to
forgo one third of their customary royalties in exchange for having him
perform their compositions.
[d]
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 1st tenor 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, introduced by disc jockey
Bill Randle, 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.
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Presley exhorts guitarist Scotty Moore during his break. "Let's go, cat!" was in the Perkins original. "Aw, walk the dog!" is all Elvis.
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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,
[50] 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 guitarist 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
[99]—"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 1953 for blues singer
Big Mama Thornton by songwriters
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
[99]
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.
Newspaper 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
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.
Just before the final rehearsal for the show, Presley told a reporter,
"I'm holding down on this show. I don't want to do anything to make
people dislike me. I think TV is important so I'm going to go along, but
I won't be able to give the kind of show I do in a personal
appearance."
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. Leiber and Stoller, the writers of
"Hound Dog," contributed "
Love Me."
[99]
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's
Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan, despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances for an unprecedented $50,000.
[99]
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 Los Angeles. According to Elvis legend, Presley was shot from only the waist up.
[99]
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
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Presley's definition
of rock and roll included a sense of humor—here, during his second
Sullivan appearance, he introduces one of his signature numbers.
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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 at its main studio in New York,
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.
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 at 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 (13 km) 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 then 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
Jailhouse sessions and developed a close working relationship with Presley, who came to regard them as his "good-luck charm".
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.
[148]
Military service and mother's death (1958–60)
Elvis with his parents upon Army induction, March 24, 1958
On March 24, Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private at
Fort Chaffee, near
Fort Smith, Arkansas.
His arrival was a major media event. Hundreds of people descended on
Presley as he stepped from the bus; photographers then accompanied him
into the fort.
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."
Soon after Presley commenced basic training at
Fort Hood,
Texas, he received a visit from Eddie Fadal, a businessman he had met
on tour.
According to Fadal, Presley had become convinced his career was
finished—"He firmly believed that." But then, during a two-week
leave in early June, Presley recorded five songs in Nashville.
[152]
In early August, his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis and her
condition rapidly worsened. Presley, granted emergency leave to visit
her, arrived 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, 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.
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.
During his time in Friedberg, Elvis lived in nearby
Bad Nauheim, which, since 2002, has held an annual Elvis festival.
[158]
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"
[162] 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 generated 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
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Presley broke new
stylistic ground and displayed his vocal range with this number one hit.
The quasi-operatic ballad ends with Presley "soaring up to an
incredible top G sharp."
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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.
On the night of March 20, he entered
RCA's Nashville studio to cut tracks for a new album along with a single, "
Stuck on You", which was rushed into release and swiftly became a number one hit.
Another Nashville session two weeks later yielded a pair of his best-selling singles, the ballads "
It's Now or Never" and "
Are You Lonesome Tonight?",
[169] along with the rest of
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".
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.
Among the 27 movies he made during the 1960s, 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 Marsh described, 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 in
Burbank, California, 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.
Bill Belew,
who designed this outfit, gave it a Napoleonic standing collar (Presley
customarily wore high collars because he believed his neck looked too
long), a design feature that he would later make a major trademark of
the outfits Presley wore on stage in his later years.
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."
Dave Marsh 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
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Beginning with his
American Sound recordings, soul music became a central element in
Presley's fusion of styles. Here, he revels in lyrics full of sexual
innuendo.
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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."
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, scheduling him 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, and he had neither forgotten nor forgiven that
failure.
To revise his approach to performances, Presley visited Las
Vegas hotel showrooms and lounges, at one of which, that of the
Flamingo, he encountered
Tom Jones, whose aggressive style was similar to his own 1950s approach; the two became friends.
Already studying
karate at the time, Presley recruited Bill Belew to design variants of karatekas's
gis
for him; these, in jumpsuit form, would be his "stage uniforms" in his
later years.
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 2200,
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.
[208]
Cassandra Peterson,
later television's Elvira, met Presley during this period in Las Vegas,
where she was working as a 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
1970 mug shot of Presley. This is likely a routine security record, since Presley was never arrested.
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 meeting with President
Richard Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the
hippies, the growing
drug culture, and the
counterculture in general.
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 he "felt a bit betrayed" and commented: "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 into 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.
According to Joe Moscheo of the Imperials, the failure of Presley's marriage "was a blow from which he never recovered."
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 millions of 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.
[239]
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 Mike 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, Michigan,
"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,
[251]
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.
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 adult contemporary hit in 1975, and "
Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the adult contemporary chart 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
Presley and Linda Thompson split in November 1976, 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.
Journalist Tony Scherman writes that by early 1977, "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
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. Recent genetic analysis of his DNA suggests genetic variants that could have caused his glaucoma, migraines and hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy.
[274][275]
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August
16, 1977, to begin another tour.
That afternoon, Ginger 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.
Following an attempt to steal the singer's body in late August, the
remains of both Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's
Meditation Garden on October 2.
Since his death, there have been numerous alleged sightings of
Presley.
A long-standing theory among some fans is that he faked his
death.
[page needed]
Fans have noted alleged discrepancies in the death certificate, reports
of a wax dummy in his original coffin and numerous accounts of Presley
planning a diversion so he could retire in peace.
[page needed]
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.
[289]
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.
Amidst mounting pressure 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.
[289]
Since 1977
Between 1977 and 1981, six posthumously released singles by Presley were top ten country hits.
Graceland was 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 five 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), the
Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007), and the
Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2012).
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 the
United Kingdom. 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.
He placed second in 2006, returned to the top spot the next two years, and ranked fourth in 2009.
The following year, he was ranked second, with his highest annual
income ever—$60 million—spurred by the celebration of his 75th birthday
and the launch of
Cirque du Soleil's
Viva Elvis show in Las Vegas.
In November 2010,
Viva Elvis: The Album was released, setting his voice to newly recorded instrumental tracks.
As of mid-2011, there were an estimated 15,000 licensed Presley products. He was again the second-highest-earning deceased celebrity.
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.
[e]
According to Whitburn's analysis, Presley and
Madonna share the record for most top ten hits with 38; per
Billboard 's current assessment, he ranks second with 36.
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 retains the record for cumulative weeks at number one: alone at
80, according to Whitburn and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; tied with Carey at 79, according to
Billboard.
He holds the records for most British number-one hits with 21, and top-ten hits with 76.
In 2008, an 1800-year-old Roman bust described as bearing a
"striking" resemblance to Elvis was displayed ahead of an intended
auction.
[315]
A spokesman for the auctioneers said that fans could "be forgiven for
thinking that their idol may well have lived a previous life in Rome."
[315]
On the anniversary date of his death, every year since 1997,
thousands of people gather at his home in Memphis to celebrate his
memory, during a
candlelight ritual.
[316]
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.
[319]
At a press conference the following year, he proudly declared, "I know
practically every religious song that's ever been written."
Genres
Presley was a central figure in the development of
rockabilly, according to music historians. Katherine Charlton even calls him "rockabilly's originator", though
Carl Perkins has explicitly stated that "[Sam] Phillips, Elvis, and I didn't create rockabilly."
[321] and, according to Michael Campbell, "
Bill Haley recorded the first big rockabilly hit."
[322]
"It had been there for quite a while", says Scotty Moore. "Carl Perkins
was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I
know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever
since he was ten years old."
[323]
However, "Rockabilly crystallized into a recognizable style in 1954
with Elvis Presley's first release, on the Sun label", writes Craig
Morrison.
Paul Friedlander describes the defining elements of rockabilly, which
he similarly characterizes as "essentially ... an Elvis Presley
construction": "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".
[325]
In "That's All Right", the Presley trio's first record, Scotty Moore's guitar solo, "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."
[325]
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 "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 2¼ 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.
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."
Dudley Brooks,
an African-American composer and studio musician who worked with
Presley during the 1950s and 1960s, also disputed allegations that
Presley was a racist.
[341]
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."
[345]
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.
Songwriter
Robert B. Sherman (of the
Sherman Brothers) bore witness to the deal being forged between
Hill and Range co-owner
Jean Aberbach and
The Colonel in 1955.
Early on, "The Colonel" and his Hill and Range allies, the brothers
Jean and
Julian Aberbach, 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's contracts with Presley gave him 50 percent of most
of the singer's earnings from 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 the 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 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 never grew comfortable with the Hollywood scene, and most of these relationships were insubstantial.
Legacy
"I know he invented rock and roll, in a manner of speaking, but ...
that's not why he's worshiped as a god today. He's worshiped as a god
today because in addition to inventing rock and roll he was the greatest
ballad singer this side of Frank Sinatra—because the spiritual
translucence and reined-in gut sexuality of his slow weeper and torchy
pop blues still activate the hormones and slavish devotion of millions
of female human beings worldwide."
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.
[379]
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."
President
Jimmy Carter
remarked on his legacy in 1977: "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 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.
[f]
"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".
On the 25th anniversary of Presley's death,
The New York Times
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. 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.
The year given, in the table below, is the year the record first
reached number one, rather than its original year of release. For
instance:
Elvis' 40 Greatest, released in 1974, 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.
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 US 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).
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.
[g]
In the United States, Presley also had five or six number one R&B singles and seven number one adult contemporary singles;
[h] 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 also had number-one hits in many countries beside the United States and United Kingdom.
Source: Wikipedia.org
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