My Elvis Presley Blog

Like millions of people around the world, I am deeply shocked and saddened by the passing of Michael Jackson yesterday. Over the next few weeks, as with every iconic passing, all the skeletons and dirty little secrets will be exposed and every news agency in the world will have the latest dirt or suspicious item.  We will all shake our heads and judge the decadence, the waste, the narcissistic need to be idolized and that same self-destruct button every celebrity seems to possess after they’ve made too much money. Self righteously we will reaffirm to ourselves that all that money sure can’t buy you happiness and Michael’s untimely death is more proof positive of that. We sleep well knowing that our commonality will protect us from ever having to walk in those shoes.

Invariably as you read the articles surrounding Michael’s passing you will encounter a strange need to compare this death with Elvis’.  Every blog worth it’s salt is asking the questions:

Did the King of Pop’s death have more of an impact on the world then the King of Rock & Roll? Who was the bigger star, who had the most impact on the world, the music and the culture. Who sold more albums, had more platinum’s, bill board top 10’s? Was there prescription drugs involved and if so, where’s the damned doctor responsible for providing those drugs? Why wasn’t there an intervention? Couldn’t somebody have saved our precious star? How come we didn’t know he was addicted to prescription drugs? I’ve even read some moron comparing Michael’s child molestation issues with Elvis’ raping young girls. What?

The issue of the crowns they wore are being parallelled with Elvis fans reminding everyone that Jackson’s crown was self anointed while Elvis’ crown was bestowed on him by the fans, the critics, his peers and others. Remember also that Elvis disliked being referred to as a king of anything stating that there was only one king and he had died on the cross. He was just a singer, he said.  Ah but what a singer he was. 

The need to parallel is further driven by the fact that the King of Pop was actually the King of Rock & Roll’s son-in-law for a couple of years. Many Elvis fans have stated, as if knowing this to be fact, that Elvis would flip in his grave if he knew that Lisa Marie had married Michael Jackson. I can’t say myself but I would hope not. But unless Elvis comes back to tell us how he felt about it, everyone else is just guessing and adding their own racial prejudice to the mix.

Frankly I’m not seeing the parallels at all.  Elvis was and is still the biggest thing to ever have hit the music world in modern history.  His death rocked the world on it’s axis and to this day, people still cry in grief for his passing.  Yes, me too.  His fan base is loyal to a degree unheard of by any other artist with new fans, including young ones, signing up everyday.  Elvis brought the black man out of the closet musically and allowed the white people to let their hair down and “dig” the beat.  It’s my contention that Elvis also helped the woman’s movement significantly by giving women permission to publicly express their sexual response to his eroticism.  This was something they had never been permitted to do before.  No, not even Frank Sinatra was able to bring that gift to women.  Suddenly after Elvis showed up, women were wearing pants a lot more and bikinis.  Think about it.

Elvis impact on the culture of North America is unparalleled and even though I will concede that Michael Jackson’s contribution to the music world was huge, that he was brilliant, that he had huge talent and that he was a great creative force, he was not up to the level of Elvis. Frankly, I don’t think anyone could ever achieve that level ever again and the loss of Elvis back in 1977 is still going to remembered long after the loss of Michael Jackson yesterday has been all but forgotten.  

And yet the whole world monumentally changed yesterday because Michael Jackson is no longer in it. Rest in peace, Michael. Free at last, free at last, Thank God you are free at last.

I was born in August of 1957 when Elvis’s career was just a little over a year in the making. So growing up, Elvis was not a big part of my music scene although I remember loving Return to Sender, In the Ghetto and Suspicious Minds anytime I heard it on the radio. Being of the age, I was into David Cassidy, The Monkees, Bobby Sherman etc.

Like everybody else, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the news came on TV exactly 20 years later in August of 1977 that Elvis had died. Despite never having been a big fan, I sat down on my couch and cried. The world had lost an icon, that much I knew for sure.

So 30 years later, in January of 2007, when I heard that Elvis would have turned 72 years old that month had he lived, it was startling to me when something clicked somewhere in my brain and I felt my world shift. It was a whisper that simply said “Elvis”. I can’t explain it and I’ve now given up trying but ever since that day, Elvis has never been out of my thoughts. And so my quest began.

I had the 30 Greatest Hits CD only because I got it erroneously from a music club and had never broke the seal or played it but had never returned it either. I also had the 2 CD set Christmas Peace that I only ever played during the holiday season once in awhile. I quickly broke open the 30 Greatest Hits CD and ripped it to my computer and sync’d it to my mp3 player. Since that day, I have listened to nothing but Elvis. I simply can’t listen to anything else because nothing else compares.  Listening to him sing gospel almost makes me believe again but listening to him sing anything brings me great peace of mind.  

Elvis recorded over 900 songs in his brief 24 year career and I now have more then half of those. Approximately 200 of these are on my favorites playlist which I listen to daily commuting back and forth to work and even work sometimes when I need to really buckle down and work. I stick an earphone in my left ear and I’m more productive then I am not listening to him. 

I’ve read over a dozen books about his life and music and will be featuring my reviews, my book reports in essence, here on this blog.  I have others on the nightstand waiting to be read and there’s a stack at amazon that are just waiting to be ordered.  I never do anything half heartedly and I’ll probably die before I have every book written about him, every movie he ever did and every song Elvis ever recorded.   

My affair with Elvis began full of lust, grief, bitterness and butterflies. For the first few months I almost couldn’t read the end of any of the books because they all ended the same.  Tragically.  I would put myself to sleep at night wondering what it would have been like to have known him, loved him, been loved by him, held by him.  It was lust and grief, then grief and lust.

After 2 years, my relationship with him is somewhat calmer although I still get butterflies in my stomach whenever I hear his voice, or look at a picture of him or even just think about him, and I think about him a lot.

And whenever he says “Yeah baby” during a song, my head bows, my heart flips and my knees get weak. But I don’t cry so much anymore that he’s gone and I don’t despise the people  who were around him so much anymore who did nothing to try to save him.  Oh there are a couple of people I resent deeply for their part in his downfall and you’ll read more about these as I discuss the books but essentially the downfall was Elvis’s doing.

I have finally come to terms “somewhat” with the fact that Elvis’s life was exactly as it was meant to be and nothing anybody did was going to change the outcome.  Bigger then life he was but inside, a shy naive southern boy with a huge heart who just wanted to be loved.  He is the undisputed King of Rock and Roll and his musical influence changed the world as we knew it.  

Elvis, we will meet again someday on that beautiful shore by the river of  life. Meanwhile, I will love you forever and this site is dedicated to your legacy.
My very first video made for E – Just Pretend_Elvis Lives

By Ernst Jorgensen, Foreword by Peter Guralnick

Elvis Presley - A Life in Music

This book is essentially my Elvis bible. My copy looks slightly travel weary with pieces of paper, paperclips, and bookmarks stuck in various points and some corners bent up from being in my purse a lot of the time. While listening to the over 400 favorite songs by Elvis on my music player, I sometimes need to refer to this book to remind myself where he was, who were the musicians and back up singers playing with him, what was his state of mind and all the other hundreds of little details that go into knowing as intimately as possible what it was like to be in the studio with Elvis on any given day.

And let there no mistake about it, Elvis was a genius when it came to knowing what he wanted in the studio and getting it. Most people don’t know that Elvis produced nearly every song he recorded.  He did the arrangments and he decided who did what on every song.

This book gives us details of the frustration Elvis had with all the really crappy tunes that came his way thanks to Tom Parker’s influence. You must understand that the sham that was Parker was a formula kind of flim flam man who felt that if something worked and made a lot money, then everything after that should be pretty much the same. Just look at Elvis’s movie career and tell me I’m wrong. But Elvis was anything but formula and if you know his music, you know that he could and would sing anything that he felt like singing. Thankfully, a lot of the recordings that were never released because they didn’t meet the “Parker formula” have been released in later years and Elvis fans worldwide are being given a chance to hear what Elvis really could do with a microphone and tape machine.

On the other hand, we also get to feel what it must have been like to be in the presence of genius. Elvis could nail a song with one take and would memorize words to songs after only one reading. In contrast, he could also take all night to get a song  just the way he wanted it to sound. He was enormously patient with the studio musicians and back up singers seldom losing his temper because somebody wasn’t getting it right. Elvis was never a diva, he just wanted to sing a great song.  In this book you almost get the feeling that you’re there during the rehearsals.

Another little known fact is that although Elvis was often seen with a guitar, it was the piano that he was really proficient at playing and many of his recordings include him on the piano, not the guitar.  The guitar was used as a prop in his earlier years but notice that once he hit Vegas and was doing the big concerts, you rarely saw him with a guitar.

In this book, we also learn a lot more about the players in Elvis’s life who helped him make his way up from a no name Memphis boy who sang at the fairgrounds once a awhile to the international household name he eventually became. From Sam Phillips at Sun Studios to Steve Sholes at RCA, everybody who had a hand in Elvis recording career is introduced to us in this book.  Love them or hate them, they were instrumental in helping Elvis become the icon he is and this book shows them all without bias.

Even though it’s obvious the author loves Elvis and his music, there is no sugarcoating things trying to make Elvis look like anything but a regular human being. If Elvis was in a crappy mood, late for the session or just being difficult, the author brings that to the story. If he had a cold or was otherwise sick, you’ll know it and once you do, you will actually listen closer and hear the music differently. Because now you can hear Elvis sniffle or wheeze slightly while taking a breath. As an example, listen again closer to Tomorrow Never Comes.  He’s actually very congested and you can hear it him snort or sniffle 2 or 3 times. Miraculously, his voice never falters.  These small nuggets of information somehow bring Elvis back to life for the true Elvis music fan. We are reminded of what Elvis was really about when you banish all the bad press that overshadowed his career after his death. It was the music.

Between the covers of this book, there is more factual information about Elvis’s music and recordings then can be found anywhere else, including complete recording information and session data keys on every song Elvis recorded, both in the studios and at home.

If you love the music of Elvis, old fan or new, you absolutely must have this book.

What Others Said:
“A comprehensive, insightful, and absorbing account of Presley’s recording career…focuses the reader on the one thing that truly matters in the Presley saga – the music – and it belongs on every rock fan’s bookshelf.” BILLBOARD

“Even for important pop artists…there are only one or two books that actually matter. And for Elvis Presley, there has been only one book of real consequence, Peter Guralnick’s brilliant biography, Last Train to Memphis. Now, there are two.” THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“Of the hundreds of books written about Elvis Presley, only a handful are worthy of a music library. Elvis Presley; A Life in Music…is one of the few…We gain insight into Elvis the artist, of course, but also get a new perspective on Elvis the man. The book, beautifully illustrated with great photos, is a must for the Elvisphile.” THE WASHINGTON POST

“Far and away the most detailed guide to Elvis’s recordings and one of the small handful of indispensable books about Presley.” BOSTON HERALD

“This is a gloriously obsessive book that revels in endlessly fascinating detail and returns the focus to where it should have been all along: the music.” COLIN ESCOTT, AUTHOR OF GOOD ROCKIN’ TONIGHT AND HANK WILLIAMS: THE BIOGRAPHY