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| ELVIS PRESLEY c 1957 |
Elvis Presley once held the record for being the most frequently photographed celebrity in the world and the same claim could also be made for him being the most frequently written about celebrity in the world. The sheer quantity of Presley-related literature –– ranging from tawdry tabloid shockers that focus on his drug addiction and/or fame-induced weirdness to heartfelt memoirs penned by friends and family to more scholarly efforts which attempt to dissect and analyze his enduring appeal –– is so vast that it can be difficult to separate what is actually worth reading from what is merely forgettable or, at worst, unnecessarily salacious and intentionally misleading. For this reason I've limited my selections to books I've personally read since discovering his music at the age of ten and becoming, as I remain to this day, fascinated by it and the unprecedented cultural phenomenon he so rapidly became following the release of his debut RCA single in January 1956.
Performed live on The Milton Berle Show
3 April 1956
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| Eel Pie Publishing UK, 1982 |
Elvis: The Complete Illustrated Record (1982) by ROY CARR and MICK FARREN
This book, co-written by two respected British music journalists, lists 'every official Elvis release in chronological order accompanied by composer credits, matrix number, catalogue number, month and year of release, personnel (where known), studio location, precise date of recording and a critical commentary.' A mammoth undertaking which, in addition to serving as the definitive Presley discography until the advent of the digital age, is also packed with photographs from every phase of the singer's career, often accompanied by short summaries of what was concurrently occurring in it as well as in his sometimes turbulent personal life.
The book is notable for the quality of its writing, the intelligence of the opinions it offers (some of which I strongly disagree with) and its attempt to move beyond the myths surrounding Presley and reveal him as what he was for more than twenty years –– a hard-working professional musician, actor and live performer whose personal problems rarely affected the quality of the product he created or the consistency of the concerts he gave right up to the end of his life. (And yes, I'm aware that my 'quality' claim is open to debate, particularly when discussing some of the more ridiculous recordings he released during his later Hollywood period.) Approximately the same size as a vinyl LP and clocking in at a colorful and generously spaced 192 pages, complete with short sections covering spoken word, bootleg and mail order recordings, Elvis: The Complete Illustrated Record remains –– along with the two Peter Guralnick biographies discussed below –– the one Presley book I find it indispensable to own given the sheer wealth of information it contains about his music and how it was created, packaged and marketed to a fanbase for whom too much of 'The King' was never enough.
Elvis: The Complete Illustrated Record is no longer in print.
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| Ballantine Books US edition, 1977 |
Elvis: What Happened? (1977) by STEVE DUNLEAVY (as told to by RED WEST, SONNY WEST and DAVE HEBLER)
This still rates as one of the most shocking (if not most lurid) Presley biographies, published just two weeks prior to his death on 16 August 1977 from what was widely reported at the time as being 'a suspected drug overdose.' Written by Steve Dunleavy, an Australian journalist who would go on to become one of the creators of tabloid television, it examines the singer's life through the eyes of three recently fired members of his so-called 'Memphis Mafia' who felt hurt and betrayed that their years of loyal service had been abruptly terminated for economic reasons by a man they claimed to have loved like a brother. And Presley did himself no favors by having his father Vernon fire them rather than seeing to the task himself. What hurts us only hurts us more when the blow is delivered second-hand.
Red West had been with Presley right from the beginning, having become his self-appointed protector when they attended the same Memphis high school in the late 1940s. West's cousin Sonny joined his team of bodyguards in 1960 while Dave Hebler, a former karate instructor, did so twelve years later. They clearly had a score to settle with their former boss, prompting them to make what were, at the time, shocking allegations about his large daily intake of prescription medications, his love for and sometimes irresponsible use of firearms (they were the first to reveal his entirely understandable penchant for shooting television sets) and his plans to have Mike Stone, the lover of his ex-wife Priscilla, assassinated by a mafia hitman. Confronting stuff for Presley fans, most of whom, like my naïve eleven year old self, preferred to dismiss their revelations as the product of revenge fueled invention.
The publication of the book, which Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker tried to stop by offering the Wests and Hebler a quick cash settlement, couldn't have been better timed from a publicity point of view. After years of being routinely ignored by the media, the singer's death had suddenly thrust him back into the spotlight, with fans and non-fans alike struggling to understand what had gone so wrong in his life to cause it to end so ignobly in the bathroom of his Graceland home at the age of forty-two. Elvis: What Happened? seemed tailormade to answer that question despite being a hastily written, non-chronological stew of factual inaccuracies which contained no corroborating references or as much as one attributive footnote.
But does this mean that the book itself isn't worth reading? Not necessarily. While it is, for the most part, a mean-spirited project published for a specific commercial purpose, it nevertheless provides a fascinating if sometimes grotesque insight into the character of a man who, for all his fame and talent, was a deeply insecure individual who preferred to hide from the world surrounded by sycophantic hangers-on who catered to his every whim, no matter how outlandish or just plain bizarre those whims may have been. Most of its allegations have since been confirmed by others in the singer's inner circle, making it not so much a collection of outright lies as a collection of unpalatable truths selectively cherry-picked to titillate a public that revels in scurrility. Rarely if ever does it address Presley's work as a musician whose best work had a profound and lasting impact on the course of popular culture. It prefers, as such exposés generally do, to wallow in the mire of drug abuse and self-destructive behavior that his over-indulged and extremely isolated existence had undoubtedly become by the summer of 1977.
Red West would come to regret having participated in the project, telling George Klein, another Presley insider who published his own book about his time with 'The King' in 2010, that 'he hated "the damn book" and wished that he'd never had anything to do with it. He said that since the day the book came out, it had been nothing but a nightmare for him.' Sadly, it was only the first of what became a long list of such nightmares, with the hatchet job industry reaching its reputation destroying nadir with a 1981 biography by Albert Goldman, titled simply Elvis, in which he sneeringly accused the singer of being, among other things, a pervert and voyeur whose legendary promiscuity was nothing more than a desperate attempt to deny and disguise his rampant homosexuality. Goldman offered no substantive proof to support these claims, preferring to allow his obvious hatred of his subject to take precedence over solid research and the provision of verifiable facts.
Elvis: What Happened? is no longer in print and has now become something of a collector's item. Used copies range in price from $40 USD to $500 USD.
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| Grosset and Dunlap first US edition, 1976 |
The Illustrated Elvis (1976) by WA HARBINSON
This was the first Presley book I ever owned or read, given to me by my parents while we were holidaying in the United States a little over a month after the singer's death. As a boy I was fascinated by the wealth of photographs it contained, all of which are printed in black and white and include the now iconic shot of Presley in overalls and hat standing between his seated parents Vernon and Gladys, snapped when he was a toddler. It also includes his high school graduation picture, showing the sharply dressed, pimple-faced youth who would soon enter Sun Recording Studios in Memphis to cut a self-funded single as a birthday gift for his mother, his performance impressive enough to prompt Marion Keisker, the studio receptionist, to retain his name, address and telephone number and pass them along to her boss Sam Phillips with a note reading 'Good ballad singer.'
While the book is a competent pre-scandal biography, reeling off what were then the known facts about Presley's life and career –– his birth in Mississippi on 8 January 1935 and the haunting death of his twin brother Jesse Garon on the same day, his family's move to Memphis and his job as an apprentice electrician at that city's Crown Electric Company, his growing regional fame following the release of That's Alright, Mama on the Sun label in 1954 –– in a smoothly flowing journalistic style, Harbinson takes what, in 1976, was the unusual step of attempting to place Presley's achievements as a performer into a wider cultural context, using quotes by Bob Dylan and Don Maclean, among others, to support his thesis that his subject was a prisoner of his own celebrity long before this became the all-too-common phenomenon the world is so familiar with today. It makes an interesting contrast to the intentionally damning portrait of Presley painted by his former bodyguards in Elvis: What Happened?, arguing the case for his status as a cultural icon at least a decade before anybody else had dared to speak of him or his extensive body of work in such exalted terms.
The Illustrated Elvis is no longer in print.
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| Simon & Schuster US edition, 1971 |
Elvis: The Biography (1971) by JERRY HOPKINS
I find it slightly amazing, given his immense popularity, that no one had ever written a 'serious' biography of Presley prior to the publication of the original version of this book in 1971. (A revised edition was published in 2007, combining it with its 1981 sequel Elvis: The Final Years and a newly written chapter examining the singer's posthumous musical and financial legacies.) Until the first volume of the Guralnick biography appeared in 1994 it was considered the go-to biographical reference for anybody eager to move beyond the prevailing public image of Presley as a tired old has-been who was stretching out what was left of his career by playing two shows per night to squealing middle-aged women in Las Vegas. It depicted him as an artist in resurgence at a time –– the first year of the new decade –– when he was viewed as an embarrassment by the vast majority of North American music critics and as an irrelevant joke by a teenage record buying public still reeling from the unexpected break-up of The Beatles.
Hopkins was encouraged to write his well-balanced, scandal-free biography by Jim Morrison, charismatic lead singer of US rock band The Doors whose own death in a Paris hotel room in July 1971 remains shrouded in mystery to this day. Morrison had been fascinated by Presley as a teenager, particularly by his seemingly effortless ability to whip audiences into a frenzy by using movements copied from the fire and brimstone Baptist preachers whose sermons had been a regular feature of his pious, church-going youth. (Presley once claimed, and not without justification, to have known by heart every gospel song ever written.) Hopkins took his advice and dedicated the finished book to Morrison, no doubt pleased to see it become a respectfully reviewed bestseller that certainly remains worth reading for those who may be put off by the more detailed (and sometimes heartbreaking) Guralnick biographies. Its success prompted Hopkins to write No One Here Gets Out Alive, the first biography of Jim Morrison which also became a runaway bestseller when it was published by Warner Books in 1980.
The 2007 revised edition of Elvis: The Biography may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider. Sadly, its author JERRY HOPKINS died on 3 June 2018 of heart failure, leaving behind a legacy of more than thirty published works of non-fiction which includes two more Presley-related items –– Elvis in Hawaii (2002) and Aloha Elvis (2007).
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| Little Brown first US edition, 1994 |
Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994) by PETER GURALNICK
The publication of Last Train To Memphis and its companion volume, which followed it five years later, fulfilled a long-held private dream of mine. For years I had yearned for someone to write a fair but honest book about Elvis Presley that would do justice to his work both in and out of the recording studio and neither downplay nor needlessly sensationalize what, to my mind, ranks as the peculiarly North American tragedy his life became due to his inability (or unwillingness, opinion remains divided on this point) to take control of his own career. Presley is the classic example of an artist who allowed other people to make his most important artistic decisions for him because he preferred to avoid conflict and lacked the necessary faith in his own judgment to insist on recording the material he wanted to record rather than what was deemed to be 'commercially viable' by his manager and record label. While adhering to this policy made him famous and wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, it also deprived him of the opportunity to grow as a performer by interacting with musicians who were automatically denied entry to what was his lucrative if musically restrictive comfort zone. Guralnick, a much-awarded music journalist who has written many books about blues, country, R&B and soul music (all of which were crucial formative influences on Presley's music), seems to possess an innate understanding of what this policy of non-engagement cost his subject in both musical and personal terms and writes about his life honestly but never without compassion or respect for his humanity.
Last Train To Memphis covers the period between Presley's birth and his departure, as newly drafted US GI 53310761, for Germany in September 1958 a few weeks after the death of his beloved mother Gladys. These were the glory years which saw him move from being a regional sensation to a national star to an enduring international celebrity and, for a time, the highest paid actor in Hollywood. It was a whirlwind ride and Guralnick does a superb job of recreating it, showing Presley as the product not only of his dirt poor rural and urban childhood (he reveals, for example, that Vernon Presley served an eight month prison sentence in 1937 for altering the amount on a check given to him in payment for a hog) but also of the traditional southern institutions of church, home and family which did so much to form both his character and his love of music. He likewise does an excellent job of placing Presley's influences –– which ranged from black blues artists like Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup to country artists like Hank Snow and Eddy Arnold to black vocal groups like The Ink Spots to popular crooners like Dean Martin –– into context, showing why spending his late childhood and early teenage years in a musically open city like Memphis, with its rich heritage of both secular and sacred music and its frequent if unadmitted mingling of white and black cultures, was instrumental in making him the wildly successful performer he eventually became.
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| Little Brown first US edition, 1999 |
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999) begins with Presley's return from the Army in March 1960 after a seventeen month stint in Germany where he had served as a member of the Third Armored Division, eventually rising to the rank of Sergeant. Guralnick leads us through the ensuing years –– the return to Hollywood and the damage that remaining on its formulaic treadmill did to his career and artistic credibility, his 1967 marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu and the birth of their only child Lisa-Marie virtually nine months later to the day, his 1968 television comeback special and subsequent conquering of Las Vegas (where he had flopped spectacularly when he appeared there in 1956), his 1973 divorce and the increasingly damaging behavior that preceded his untimely death –– without succumbing to the need to moralize or point the finger of blame, as so many other biographers have before him, at the shadowy figure of his manager, a canny Dutch immigrant and former carnival barker who re-invented himself as 'Colonel' Tom Parker.
Guralnick is particularly effective when it comes to untangling what was Presley's complicated and sometimes fractious relationship with Parker, a man well known for putting business first and everything else, especially his client's musical integrity, second. He shows that Parker was no more capable of preventing his client from destroying himself than anybody else was, that the singer was as much the victim of his own ego as he was of his addictions to drugs, food and the profligate spending of money –– a commodity that was in increasingly short supply until his death triggered a surge in his record sales, ensuring he remained one of the top selling recording artists of all time.
These are the two biographies that every Presley fan and anybody even remotely interested in understanding the Western world's ongoing obsession with celebrity need to read. As journalist and novelist Nick Tosches so eloquently put it: 'In a work of lucent prose and rare perception, Peter Guralnick has given us not only the definitive biography of Elvis Presley, but also a luminous portrait of the America that made, and was in turn swayed by him.'
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.
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| Collier Books UK edition, 1979 |
Elvis '56: In the Beginning (1979) by ALFRED WERTHEIMER
In March 1956 a young New York-based freelance photographer named Alfred Wertheimer was called by Anne Fulchino, head of Public Relations at RCA Records, and asked if he was free to take some shots of Elvis Presley, an exciting new vocalist the company had recently signed. 'Elvis who?' Wertheimer replied. 'I'd never heard of the man,' he later confessed to a reporter from Time magazine. 'He didn't have a gold record yet.'
Wertheimer nevertheless accepted the assignment, which saw him shoot over 2000 candid photographs of Presley on three separate occasions, beginning with the singer's fifth television appearance on Jackie Gleason's Stage Show, a variety program then being hosted by jazz musician brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and ending with a self-funded trip to Memphis to observe him relaxing at home with friends and family. The majority of these photographs remained unpublished and uncollected until 1979, when a relatively small number were finally made available to the ravenous Presley fanbase by Collier Books.
The photographs are, as they were in 1979, a revelation, showing a very different Presley to the carefully groomed and slickly marketed star he became within months of his career taking off and would remain until his death. They capture him, as one online reviewer so astutely put it, before the craziness began, when he was a strikingly dressed young man from Memphis who could still eat a meal in a diner like an ordinary person and find time to kiss a girl in a dimly lit stairwell before taking the stage. This is the Presley that many of his fans like to remember and rightly so in my opinion, given what he achieved in terms of both record sales and popularity in the months following the release of Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis '56 offers us a rare glimpse of a performer who had no inkling of what lay ahead of him over the next twenty-one years, a wide-eyed boy who could still enjoy his newfound celebrity because he had yet to become imprisoned and enslaved by it.
'The wonderful thing about Elvis,' Wertheimer later recalled, 'was that he permitted closeness. Later on, I found out he also made the girls cry. Those were the two qualities that made him different from other performers I had met. Others would let you to come within six or eight feet, but that was it. They'd get nervous, or they'd start to ham it up. Not Elvis. He was always just himself.' It could be argued that he was never allowed to be himself quite so freely again, making these photographs all the more valuable as a record of an artist on the cusp of musical immortality.
Elvis '56: In the Beginning is no longer in print. A new book titled Alfred Wertheimer, Elvis and the Birth of Rock and Roll –– edited by CHRIS MURRAY with a contributory essay by ROBERT SANTELLI –– was published by Taschen Books GmbH in 2015.
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Last updated 16 October 2021 §
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