Over the past 20 years, the man has become invisible behind the kitsch iconography. And his music, some of the freshest on the planet, is so familiar it’s hard to hear. Luckily, we’ve got the new four-CD ““Platinum: A Life in Music,’’ with alternate takes to shake up our synapses; next year we’ll have the final volume of Peter (““Last Train to Memphis’’) Guralnick’s biography; his project has been to ““rescue Elvis Presley from the dreary bondage of myth, from the oppressive aftershock of cultural significance.’’ These are tributes that make sense. It’s a good week to forget what he ““means’’ and remember what he did.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking to people for whom ““Elvis’’ is simply the first name of a man they used to know. They told us stories about two different people: the kid who was the original alternative rocker, and the aging idol who was the apotheosis of showbiz. Memphis Elvis, Vegas Elvis. Minimalist Elvis, over-the-top Elvis. The Hillbilly Cat, the King. Whichever one you think was the real Elvis Presley, think again.
title: “Elvis Lives” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-19” author: “Paul Cirrincione”
Even as 70,000 fans descend on Memphis, Tenn., this week for the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death Aug. 16, the corporate types who view the late King as a $35 million annuity can’t get away from a haunting reality: Presley’s biggest admirers now qualify for Graceland’s senior discount. “It’s been on our minds since as far back as the 10th anniversary,” admits Jack Soden, chief executive of Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc., the company owned by Presley’s daughter and sole heir, Lisa Marie. And RCA, which owns Elvis’s records (the singer sold his royalties to the label for $5.4 million in 1973), realizes “we’ve got to refresh Elvis’s image and contemporize his music,” says Richard Sanders, general manager of the label. But how do you make Elvis appealing to people who weren’t even born when he died?
With more than a bit of urgency, Elvis Inc. has engineered a 25th-anniversary “comeback” that might well have you believing those ELVIS LIVES! tabloid headlines (assuming you didn’t think that already). Turn on the radio and there’s Elvis with his new techno dance hit, “A Little Less Conversation.” Take your kid to see Disney’s animated hit “Lilo & Stitch,” and you’ll hear Elvis belting out “Hound Dog.” Go to the furniture store, and you can pick out a $3,000 bedroom suite from that hot new designer, Elvis (you’ll find his taste in furniture has gotten a bit more conventional, apart from the gilded “Burning Love” mirror). Even Presley’s house is headed your way. Mobile Graceland, an 18-wheeler packed with the King’s clothes and toys, will tour the United States after stopping in Times Square for the Sept. 24 release of his newest album, “Elvis 30 #1 Hits.” And next year you may find Elvis on Broadway: ex-wife Priscilla is planning a musical about her relationship with the King, inspired by the records they sent one another when they first met. “I still have those 45s. They say everything he felt and I felt,” she says. “Young and old will leave the theater very upbeat, just like ‘Mamma Mia’”–the hit musical from those other jumpsuit lovers, Abba.
To extend Presley’s afterlife expectancy, the keepers of the flame knew they had to do something drastic: they had to bury Fat Elvis. “The biggest challenge is to erase the memory of the caricature of Elvis, the one ingrained for so many years as a bloated icon,” says RCA’s Sanders. So sensitive to the parodies are the folks at Graceland, they can barely talk about mid-’70s Elvis without getting defensive. Describing various materials in Graceland’s archives, director of media Todd Morgan accidentally lets slip the word “polyester.” “Not that Elvis wore a lot of polyester,” he insists. “His jumpsuits were made of wool gabardine.” You can hardly blame them for wanting to wrest their idol from the clutches of Vegas’s celebrity impersonators. “No one wants their last image of the King to be of a fat guy dying on the john,” actor Bruce Campbell tells the audience at the Vegas premiere of “Bubba Ho-Tep,” a B movie in which he plays an elderly Elvis in a rest home.
Presley’s handlers want people to pay attention to the music more than the man. “We’ve stripped it back to what made him so successful: the voice,” says RCA’s Sanders. Or what you might call Disembodied Elvis. “Lilo & Stitch” features six Elvis songs, but the Elvis that kids see is Stitch performing in a jumpsuit and pompadour. The video for “A Little Less Conversation” features Elvis only in a brief shot on a fuzzy TV monitor. And the promotional art for “Elvis 30 #1 Hits” won’t depict the King, but his body parts: slicked-back hair, leather jacket, a close-up of his chin (single, not double).
It hasn’t been easy figuring out how much nipping and tucking can be done before Elvis starts to look like Cher. When Presley Enterprises’ Soden learned Nike wanted to do a techno version of a 1968 song for a World Cup commercial–using a Dutch DJ named Junkie XL–his first thought was “how techno?” But the remix of “A Little Less Conversation” hit the right note, and the DJ even changed his name to JXL for the release. The single soared to No. 1 from England to Japan, and debuted in first place on the U.S. sales charts. Every day, Soden weighs how to extend Brand Elvis, whether through an interactive museum in the Far East (a good possibility), or a developer’s plan for a “themed” cemetery, complete with the King’s hits playing in an eternal loop over loudspeakers (“sounds like hell to me” was Soden’s response).
Such Solomonic decisions are critical to the health of the Presley estate, which has grown exponentially in value from less than $5 million when Elvis died, thanks primarily to the opening of Graceland in 1982. Yet Graceland attendance has flattened to around 600,000 annual visitors, and even the most devout fans seem perturbed at having to shell out $25 for the Platinum Tour of mecca. “It’s kind of outrageous the way these people are using his name and all that to make money,” says Randy Allen, 32, of Joshua, Texas, who keeps a black-velvet Elvis framed in tracer lights on his dining-room wall, next to a life-size cardboard standee.
Yet in life as in death, there were always two Elvises: the singer and the souvenirs. Long before the ‘N Sync boys were action figures, Elvis’s manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, was stamping the artist’s swivel hips on plastic belts, purses and stuffed hound dogs for the sock-hop set. The same approach is helping woo young fans today. There’s an Elvis Kids shop at Graceland packed with “Lilo & Stitch” dolls, $29.95 Elvis teddy bears and teeny-bopper tees that read GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! (title of the 1962 movie). " ‘Lilo & Stitch’ really opened our eyes to the possibilities,” says Carol Butler, director of worldwide licensing.
But can remixes and plush toys really sustain a comeback? That will depend on the likes of Maaike Vanderveldt, a pierced 16-year-old from the Netherlands who is visiting Graceland this summer with her family. She says she likes dancing to the new “A Little Less Conversation.” But that hardly makes Elvis cool in her eyes. “He was cool. Not now,” she says. “Now he is a legend.” For Elvis Inc., the key will be to figure out what becomes a legend most.
