Elvis Presley

• 1. Introduction

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  Elvis Aaron Presley walked onto the stage of the International Hotel in Las Vegas on the 31st of July 1969, without a single word of introduction. The audience of 2,200 people gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note. Another followed his performance. A third came after his encore. He had not performed live in eight years. What had happened in between, and what brought him back, is one of the stranger stories in the history of popular music. A boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who could not read sheet music and was told by a teacher that he had no aptitude for singing, he went on to sell an estimated 500 million records worldwide. He held the most RIAA-certified gold and platinum albums of any artist. He put more songs in the top 100 in a single year than any act since records were first charted. And he did it while triggering a letter to the FBI warning that he was a danger to national security. How a shy kid who played guitar in the hallways of L. C. Humes High School became the most commercially successful solo act on both the US and UK charts is the subject of this documentary.

• 2. Tupelo and Memphis

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  Elvis's twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn 35 minutes before Elvis arrived on the 8th of January 1935. That loss bound the surviving child tightly to his parents, especially his mother, Gladys. The family's circumstances were precarious from the start. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon Presley was jailed for eight months for altering a check. The family relied on government food assistance and neighbors.

  Elvis's first public performance came at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on the 3rd of October 1945, when he was 10. He sang "Old Shep" and recalled placing fifth. A few months later he received his first guitar for his birthday, taking lessons from two uncles and a pastor at the family's church. He later 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."

  The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in November 1948. At L. C. Humes High School, Elvis received a C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher said he had no aptitude for singing, he brought his guitar to class and sang to prove otherwise. He was occasionally bullied as a "mama's boy" and was too shy to perform openly for much of his school years.

  Memphis changed him. He headed down to Beale Street, the city's blues hub, and spent hours admiring the flashy clothes at Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing those clothes. He attended all-night gospel singings downtown, where white groups performed music shaped by African American spirituals. He listened to stations like WDIA that played what were then called "race records": spirituals, blues, and the heavy-backbeat rhythm and blues that would later mark his own sound. Guitarist Lee Denson, a neighbor, became his tutor. Practicing with Denson were two boys who would become future rockabilly pioneers: brothers Dorsey and Johnny Burnette.

  At Humes' 1953 annual talent show, Elvis sang Teresa Brewer's "Till I Waltz Again with You". He recalled that the audience had no idea he could sing: "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... It was amazing how popular I became in school after that." He graduated that June, already certain that music was his future.

• 3. The Sun Sessions

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  In August 1953, Elvis walked into Memphis Recording Service, the studio Sam Phillips ran before formally launching Sun Records, and paid to cut two sides onto an acetate disc: "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". He would later claim he wanted a birthday gift for his mother, or that he was simply curious about what he sounded like. Biographer Peter Guralnick argued it was really about being discovered.

  Phillips, for his part, had a specific mission: to bring the sound of Black musicians on the Sun roster to a wider audience. He was seeking someone who could carry that sound across the color line. He invited guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bassist Bill Black to work with Elvis for a session on the evening of the 5th of July 1954. The session went nowhere for hours. Then, late in the night, Elvis picked up Arthur Crudup's 1946 blues number, "That's All Right", and started playing it loose and fast. 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." Phillips started the tape rolling. That was the sound he had been looking for.

  Three days later, disc jockey Dewey Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listener response was intense enough that Phillips kept playing it for the remaining two hours of the broadcast. During an on-air interview, he asked Elvis which high school he attended - a way of clarifying for callers who had assumed, based on the sound, that the singer was Black.

  The trio followed with a distinctive version of Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky", recorded using a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips called "slapback". The blend of styles that resulted was so unusual that many radio programmers would not touch it. Country stations felt Elvis sounded too Black; R&B stations felt he sounded too country. That sound would eventually be named "rockabilly". Promoters of the period billed him as "The King of Western Bop", "The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash".

  By November 1954, Elvis had earned a year's worth of Saturday-night slots on Louisiana Hayride, a show that aired on 198 radio stations across 28 states. His first nervous set drew little reaction; his second, more composed performance drew an enthusiastic crowd. He traded his old guitar in for $8 and bought a Martin instrument for $175. Drummer D. J. Fontana joined the lineup in 1955, completing the classic quartet.

• 4. RCA and the Breakthrough

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  At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November 1955, Elvis was voted the year's most promising male artist. Three major labels had already made offers of up to $25,000 for his Sun contract. On the 21st of November 1955, Colonel Tom Parker, who had been managing Elvis since January, struck a deal with RCA Victor for an unprecedented $40,000. Elvis was 20 and still legally a minor; his father signed the contract.

  Parker also arranged with the Aberbach brothers, owners of Hill and Range Publishing, to create two entities called Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music. Songwriters who wanted Elvis to record their work had to forgo one-third of their customary royalties in exchange. It was an arrangement that would shape the entire arc of his recording career.

  The first RCA session, held in Nashville on the 10th of January 1956, added pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarist Chet Atkins, and three background vocalists including Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires to the existing band. That session produced "Heartbreak Hotel", released on January 27. Within twelve weeks it became Elvis's first US number-one pop hit. Within a year, RCA Victor had sold ten million Presley singles.

  Parker booked Elvis onto CBS's Stage Show for six appearances over two months, beginning the 28th of January 1956. His self-titled debut album followed on March 23 and included covers of Little Richard, Ray Charles, and the Drifters, alongside Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes". Critic Robert Hilburn called the Presley version of "Blue Suede Shoes" "an improvement over Perkins' in almost every way". The album topped the Billboard chart for ten weeks, becoming the first rock and roll album to reach number one.

  Cultural historian Gilbert B. Rodman argued 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." Historian Marty Jezer later wrote that Elvis began the "biggest pop craze" since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra, and that he gave young Americans "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."

• 5. Scandal and Censorship

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  After a show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, an urgent message was sent on Catholic diocese letterhead to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, warning that Elvis was "a definite danger to the security of the United States". It cited his movements as capable of rousing the sexual passions of teenagers and reported that more than 1,000 of them had tried to rush his room after the show.

  The storm broke fully on the 5th of June 1956, when Elvis appeared on NBC's Milton Berle Show without his guitar - Berle had persuaded him to leave it backstage. During the performance, Elvis abruptly halted an up-tempo version of "Hound Dog" and slowed it into a grinding rendition with exaggerated body movements. Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote that Elvis had "no discernible singing ability" and that his one specialty was a body movement "primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway". Ben Gross of the New York Daily News called the performance the lowest point popular music had reached. Ed Sullivan, whose variety show was then the nation's most watched, declared Elvis "unfit for family viewing".

  Steve Allen booked Elvis for a July 1 appearance and introduced a "new Elvis" in a white bowtie and tails, having him sing "Hound Dog" to a basset hound wearing a top hat. Television historian Jake Austen described Allen as setting things up so that Elvis "would show his contrition". Elvis told a reporter beforehand, "I don't want to do anything to make people dislike me... but I won't be able to give the kind of show I do in a personal appearance." He later called it the most ridiculous performance of his career.

  Allen's show, partly because of the controversy, beat The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings for the first time. Sullivan then booked Elvis for three appearances at an unprecedented $50,000. The first, on the 9th of September 1956, drew approximately 60 million viewers, a record 82.6 percent of the television audience. Presley's performance of the forthcoming ballad "Love Me Tender" generated a record-shattering million advance orders. The single "Don't Be Cruel" paired with "Hound Dog" ruled the charts for eleven weeks - a record that would not be surpassed for 36 years.

  On his third Sullivan appearance, the 6th of January 1957, Elvis was famously shot only from the waist up. Some observers believed Parker had engineered an appearance of censorship to generate further publicity. At the end of that broadcast, Sullivan declared Elvis "a real decent, fine boy". The Memphis draft board announced two days later that Elvis would likely be conscripted that year.

• 6. Hollywood and Decline

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  Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender on the 21st of November 1956. The original title was The Reno Brothers, but the studio renamed it to capitalize on his current number-one single. Critics panned it, but the box office was strong. Presley received top billing on every film he made after that.

  Producer Hal Wallis, who produced nine of the films, summarized the formula plainly: "A Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood." Parker pushed Elvis into a schedule of formulaic, modestly budgeted musical comedies. When two more dramatically ambitious films, Flaming Star and Wild in the Country, performed less commercially in 1960 and 1961, Elvis reverted to the formula.

  Over the 1960s, he made 27 films. Fifteen were accompanied by soundtrack albums and another five by soundtrack EPs. The rapid pace affected the quality of the music. Songwriter Jerry Leiber described the formula that was already set before Elvis left for the Army: "three ballads, one medium-tempo, one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie." Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires recalled how Elvis would retreat from the studio microphone when the material was particularly weak: "The material was so bad that he felt like he couldn't sing it."

  From 1964 to 1968, Elvis had a single top-ten hit on the US pop chart - "Crying in the Chapel", a gospel number actually recorded in 1960. Between the June 1962 album Pot Luck and a November 1968 release, only one studio LP of new non-soundtrack material appeared: the gospel album How Great Thou Art in 1967. It won him his first Grammy, for Best Sacred Performance.

  His personal life was also in motion. He had met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu while stationed in Bad Nauheim, West Germany. They married on the 1st of May 1967, in a ceremony at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, after a courtship of seven and a half years. Their only child, Lisa Marie, was born on the 1st of February 1968. That same year, of the eight singles released between January 1967 and May 1968, only two charted in the top 40. His forthcoming soundtrack album, Speedway, would rank at number 82.

• 7. Comeback and Las Vegas

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  The NBC television special simply called Elvis aired on the 3rd of December 1968. Director Steve Binder had worked hard to prevent it from becoming the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned. The live segments showed Elvis in tight black leather, performing in front of a small audience for the first time since 1961. Jon Landau of Eye magazine wrote: "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." The show captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience and was NBC's highest-rated program that season.

  Buoyed by the Comeback Special, Elvis recorded at American Sound Studio in a prolific series of sessions. The resulting album, From Elvis in Memphis, released in June 1969, was his first secular, non-soundtrack record from a dedicated studio period in eight years. Critic Dave Marsh called it "a masterpiece in which Presley immediately catches up with pop music trends that had seemed to pass him by during the movie years". The single "In the Ghetto" reached number three on the pop chart, his first non-gospel top ten hit in six years.

  "Suspicious Minds", drawn from the same sessions, reached the top of the US charts in November 1969, his first number-one pop single in over seven years. It would also be his last.

  At the International Hotel engagement beginning the 31st of July 1969, costume designer Bill Belew, who had created the leather look for the Comeback Special, gave Elvis a new stage wardrobe inspired by his passion for karate. Parker negotiated a five-year contract with the hotel for Elvis to play each February and August, at an annual salary of $1 million. In January 1973, the satellite broadcast Aloha from Hawaii aired live to prime-time audiences in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as to US servicemen across Southeast Asia. In Japan it broke viewing records, capping a nationwide Elvis Presley Week. The next night it was simulcast to 28 European countries. The accompanying double album went to number one and eventually sold over five million copies in the US, his last US number-one pop album during his lifetime.

• 8. Decline and Death

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  By late 1973, Elvis had been hospitalized from a pethidine addiction and had twice overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma after the first incident. His primary care physician, George C. Nichopoulos, later said that Elvis "felt that by getting drugs from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street". That year also saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever.

  Keyboardist Tony Brown described Elvis's arrival at a University of Maryland concert in September 1974: "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 mic for the first thirty minutes like it was a post." Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled crying backstage as Elvis struggled to get through the songs, "so fucked up" that the lyrics were barely intelligible.

  On the 13th of July 1976, Vernon Presley fired three longtime bodyguards including Red West, Elvis's friend since the 1950s, citing the need to cut expenses. Elvis was in Palm Springs at the time and was not present for the dismissals. In 1976, RCA sent a mobile recording unit to Graceland to coax him back to work, producing two sessions, but the process had become a struggle.

  Elvis's cousin, Billy Smith, recalled hours of late-night conversations in which Elvis recounted favorite Monty Python sketches alongside his own past escapades, but was more often gripped by paranoid obsessions. Journalist Tony Scherman wrote that, by early 1977, Elvis "had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self. Grossly overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopoeia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts".

  "Way Down", his last single issued during his lifetime, was released on the 6th of June 1977. CBS filmed two concerts for a television special that month. In Rapid City, South Dakota, on June 21, two days after a show described as nearly unrecognizable, Elvis looked healthier and performed better - one of his last documented good nights on stage. He died on the 16th of August 1977, at Graceland, at the age of 42. He won three Grammy Awards over his career. All three of his competitive wins, from fourteen total nominations, were for gospel recordings.