Elvis Blog Archives — July 2008
Entry #17: Posted July 3, 2008 For several years now, I’ve been a member of the Elvis Insiders, a fan organization operated by Elvis Presley Enterprises. Among the regular features of the Insiders e-mail newsletter and web site are profiles of members. I always read the profiles because it’s interesting to see how people came to be Elvis fans. From the start it seems that the Insider profiles have almost always been of fans who either were very young when Elvis died or weren’t even born by 1977. Most of them seem to have inherited their love for Elvis from their parents. It’s rare to see an Insider profile of a member who actually saw Elvis in concert in the seventies, and I can’t remember even one profile of a fan dating back to the fifties or sixties. Part of the reason for the group emphasis on youth is that it operates online, and older Elvis fans are less likely to be into the Internet and e-mail than younger ones. Still, I’ve always been amazed and pleased that Elvis apparently has so many young fans. Lately, though, I’ve begun to have doubts about his power to attract new followers from the 20-something set. My reservations started mildly enough with an isolated fact here and there. First, there was Elvis being overtaken by Kurt Cobain for the top spot on Forbes magazine’s list of highest-earning dead celebrities. Then, a while back, Dan Webster, a local Spokane entertainment writer, reported that he had checked the music download site, mp3.com, and found that Presley ranked just 27th as the most popular artist of the day. “That placed him between the Beatles and Michael Jackson,” Webster noted, “and behind such contemporary artists as Rihanna, Eminem and Fergie and such older acts as the Backstreet Boys, AC/DC and Celine Dion.” That caused Webster to ask the question, “How relevant is Presley to the iPod generation?” It’s an interesting question for long-time Elvis fans. It’s an absolutely crucial question, however, for Elvis Presley Enterprises, whose long-term financial health depends on attracting younger fans to replace the baby-boomer fans who will soon begin moving on to that great rock ’n’ roll dance party in the sky. So what is EPE’s strategy for creating a younger fan base before it’s too late? That was the subject of Woody Baird’s Associated Press article in January 2007. “I can’t try to sell somebody Elvis who doesn’t know who he is,” explained Paul Jankowski, the first chief of marketing for EPE. “Our opportunity demographic is really going to be 12 to 24 (years old), with a sweet spot around the 18-to-24 area.” So how does Elvis reach the younger set? By establishing a presence on the web sites where they hang out, said Jankowski. “We will take our MySpace page and we will focus on expanding our number of friends on MySpace, that kind of thing,” he explained. “There’s all kinds of Elvis content on YouTube, things that we put up, things that fans put up. The Elvis archives offer a rich source of material for ‘digital tactics.’ You know, for cell phones or doing wallpaper or doing podcasts.” Such a digital gimmick and gadget approach might bring EPE moderate financial returns in the short run, but surely it won’t produce the life-long Elvis fans the company needs in the long-haul. Oh, EPE might be able to entice some young people to purchase some of its licensed products with a youthful flair, such as Hershey’s peanut butter and banana cream candy bar with a picture of the King on the wrapper or the PEZ set with three different vintage Elvis dispensers heads (1958, 1968, 1973). Of course, at $50,000 each hardly any Presley fan, young or old, is going to purchase one of the 30 custom-made motorcycles Harley-Davidson is producing under an EPE license. But the bike promotion is just part of enhancing Elvis’s “cool factor” in appealing to the young hipsters, according to Jankowski. The problem with EPE’s approach is that it supposes bombarding young people with Elvis images will make them fans. It won’t. What will is making Elvis relevant in the lives of young people today. The 20-something crowd already knows who Elvis was, but that doesn’t make them fans. Listen to how 25-year-old Chris Kornelius, Web editor for the Seattle Weekly newspaper, assesses Presley’s importance to his generation. Kornelius admits that if he hears Presley “in a movie or on a soundtrack, you know, I enjoy it. But I don’t think I’ve ever owned an Elvis record. I don’t have Elvis on my iPod.” And, perhaps most revealing, he says, “I’ve never had a conversation about Elvis with anyone my age.” It may be difficult for current Elvis fans to accept, but the unpleasant truth is that recruiting Presley fans from among today’s youth is a lost cause. Every generation asserts its independence by defining its own music and entertainment idols. When I was young, there was no way I would have accepted Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, or even Frank Sinatra as a musical favorite. They were too tied to the past. Why, then, should we expect young people today to feel a connection with an entertainer who died over 30 years ago? The best chance EPE has of earning new Elvis fans and retaining them through the years is to selectively and creatively market Elvis’s music. (Forget about portraying him as a movie star.) In recent years, a few projects featuring Presley tunes have been effective in keeping his name before the public. The 2002 Disney animated feature Lilo and Stitch introduced thousands of youngsters to Presley’s music. Some Elvis fans have criticized the recent retooling of a few Elvis tunes for modern audiences. However, if updating the sound of his music, as was done with “A Little Less Conversation,” “Rubberneckin’,” and, most recently, “Baby, Let’s Play House,” earns Elvis some recognition from the 20-somethings, I’m all for it. Also, the use of Presley tunes in profitable motion pictures helps give his music a contemporary jolt. The latest example is the use of Elvis’s “Hound Dog” over the opening credits of the new Indiana Jones movie. The musical All Shook Up was a great concept for presenting Elvis’s music to a new, wider audience, but unfortunately the production was flawed and closed on Broadway after just six months. If EPE wants to extend the Presley fan base into today’s teen and young adult market, it should focus on placing Elvis’s music within entertainment concepts that appeal to young people. Doing so won’t stop the inevitable decline in the number of Elvis fans over the coming years, but it will slow it down. — Alan Hanson
Entry #18: Posted July 10, 2008 Two of my weekly blogs back in May dealt with the people who were part of Elvis’s 1957 concert tours and what had happened to them during the intervening 50 years. As I explained then, that information was originally intended to be used in the final chapter of my Elvis ’57 book. However, I decided to pull that chapter from the book just before publication. That “lost” chapter not only included information about the people involved in Elvis’s 1957 tours, but also the physical sites connected with the tours. I know there are Elvis fans who love to spend their vacations visiting “Elvis Sites,” places connected with the King during his lifetime. Most Elvis fans certainly will never be able to visit the Pacific Northwest, where Elvis toured over the Labor Day weekend in 1957. However, while doing research for Elvis ’57, I found the time to visit the “Elvis Sites” in the five cities he played in the area during that tour. Here is what I found in those cities 50 years after that historic tour. Spokane, Washington This was Elvis’s first stop on his Pacific Northwest tour in 1957. After a 48-hour train ride from Memphis, he arrived at the Great Northern Depot. The station was torn down in 1973 to make way for Expo ’74, the world’s fair held in Spokane that year. One part of the depot still remains, however. It is the 155-foot-high, brick clocktower that today stands like a sentinel in the city’s Riverfront Park, the former world’s fair site. An Elvis fan who stands at the base of the clocktower today can be sure that nearby is the spot where Elvis stepped off the Great Northern Empire Builder late on the night of August 29,1957, and reboarded the westbound train the next night on his way to Vancouver, B.C. While in Spokane, Elvis stayed at the Ridpath Hotel, located on Sprague Avenue several blocks south of the train station in the downtown area. The hotel remains in business today, but it is no longer the first-class hotel it was in 1957. In recent years there have been plans to convert the building to condos or commercial shops, but it still continues to operate as a hotel. You can stand in its lobby today and envision the dozens of teenagers who gathered there hoping to see Elvis on the morning of August 30, 1957. First opened in 1950, Memorial Stadium sat 25,000 spectators when Elvis appeared there in 1957. In 1962 the stadium was renamed Joe Albi Stadium in honor of a renowned local sports booster. Fifty years after Elvis left the stadium, it still sits in the northwest corner of the city, bounded by Wellesley Avenue and Assembly Street, five miles from the city center. It is primarily used today for high school football games. The dirt track surrounding the original football field—the track Elvis knelt on and from which fans scooped handfuls of souvenir dirt—has long since been covered with artificial turf. Vancouver, British Columbia Canadian National Station, now called Pacific Central Station, the point of Elvis Presley’s arrival in and departure from Vancouver, B.C., still occupies the same historic building just east of downtown at the intersection of Stadium Street and National Avenue. A terminal of the Great Northern Railroad in 1957, the station now services Amtrak and Canadian Rail, as well as Greyhound Bus. The spot where Elvis left the train on his arrival is now a shared passenger platform for trains on the north side and Greyhound buses to the south. Somewhere to the east end of the platform is where Elvis stepped off the train and into Zollie Volchok’s rented Cadillac for the drive to the Georgia Hotel. In addition to Elvis Presley, the Georgia Hotel (now the Crowne Plaza Hotel Georgia) also hosted Louis Armstrong; Nat “King” Cole; Edward, Prince of Wales; and the Beatles. Located at 801 West Georgia Street in the heart of downtown Vancouver, the lavish twelve-story hotel has undergone extensive renovations in recent years. Room 1226, where Elvis spent the night following his infamous concert on August 31, 1957, no longer exists as a guest room. It and former rooms 1227 and 1228 have been combined into the current top floor club lounge. Seven years after Presley’s appearance there, Empire Stadium was the site of another raucous concert by the Beatles. In the early 1980s the stadium was demolished, and the site was used as a parking lot for many years. However, in 2002 the old stadium location was turned into a public recreation area that today includes two soccer fields, two baseball diamonds and a dirt jogging track. Located in the southeast corner of Hastings Park four miles east of downtown, the current Empire Fields retains the same bowl configuration as the old stadium. The pitcher’s mound on the baseball field at the north end of the bowl marks the approximate spot where Elvis performed on a makeshift stage in 1957. Tacoma, Washington Of the three performing venues that survive from Elvis’s 1957 tour of the Pacific Northwest, the Lincoln Bowl is both the smallest and the most attractive. Now, as then, the property of the Tacoma public school system, the Lincoln Bowl is adjacent to Lincoln High School, located at 701 S. 37th Street in south central Tacoma. The bowl is the home field of the Lincoln Abes football team. It also hosts school district soccer matches and track meets. The small stadium, its surface and seating area below street level, sits in a natural, steep-sided hollow north of the high school. The surface of the bowl has been updated since Elvis appeared there. The natural grass has been replaced with artificial turf for football and soccer contests. The running track, on which some girls stooped to gather dirt after the 1957 concert, has been replaced with an eight-lane, hard-surface track. Neatly landscaped with trees on the higher area around it, the Lincoln Bowl is best viewed from its north end. From there, between the bowl and the school baseball field, a clear view of the entire stadium is available. Since Elvis commuted by car from his Seattle hotel to the Lincoln Bowl, there are no other sites in Tacoma associated with his afternoon performance in that city on September 1, 1957. — Alan Hanson
Entry #19: Posted July 17, 2008 Last week I described some of the present day sites in the Pacific Northwest associated with Elvis’s tour of the region in 1957. We looked at railroad stations, hotels, and stadium venues in Spokane, Vancouver B.C., and Tacoma, Elvis’s first three stops on that tour. This week we’ll do the same for Seattle and Portland, the cities Elvis played on September 1 and 2, 1957. Seattle, Washington Elvis actually passed through Seattle’s King Street Station three times during his 1957 Labor Day weekend tour. He arrived there from Spokane early on the morning of August 31. Quickly changing trains, he headed north for that night’s show in Vancouver, B.C. The next day a train brought him back to Seattle for his performances there and in Tacoma. On September 2, he boarded another train bound for Portland. Opened in 1906 to service the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads, King Street Station gradually fell into disrepair in the years after Elvis was there. The station was saved from closing in 1971, when Amtrak moved its passenger service there from nearby Union Station. Increasing interest in train travel led to a renovation project starting in 2003. Today, with its signature red brick clock tower, the King Street Station is the largest passenger rail station in the Northwest. Quest Field, home of the football Seattle Seahawks, sits next to the station. The luxurious Olympic Hotel, where Elvis spent the night of September 1, 1957, later fell on hard times in the 1970s. Marked for demolition, the hotel was saved when public outcry led to a restoration of the Olympic. The Four Seasons Hotels, Inc., completed the remodeling and the hotel, renamed The Four Seasons Olympic Hotel, reopened in 1982 after being shut down for nearly two years. Purchased in 2003 by Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel is located at 411 University Street in Seattle’s Rainier Square downtown neighborhood. The building is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. Sicks’ Seattle Stadium, where Elvis performed in 1957, later became a major league baseball site as the home of the Seattle Pilots during the 1969 season. The next year both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin performed concerts in the stadium, and in 1976 a professional wrestling show, featuring future Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, was held there. By then the stadium was falling into disrepair, and the opening of the Kingdome in 1977 marked the end for Sicks’ Stadium. The stadium was demolished in 1979. Today a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse at 2700 Rainier S. occupies the entire site. A plaque at the front entrance marks the original location of home plate on the baseball field. The stage on which Elvis performed in 1957 stood near second base, the location of which today would be in the store’s lumber section, about forty yards southwest of the plaque at the store’s entrance. The view from “Tightwad Hill” is still available. Located to the east beyond the stadium’s left field fence, the hill is now covered with apartment houses. However, there is a parking lot between the crest of the hill and the apartment buildings. Off McClellan Street, one block east of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is an access road leading up to the parking lot, from where 16-year-old Jimi Hendrix and many others watched Elvis perform for free, although from a distance, on the evening of September 1, 1957. Portland, Oregon Located at 800 NW 6th Avenue, at the northern end of downtown Portland, Union Station has retained the name, location, and feeling it had when Elvis Presley arrived there the afternoon of September 2, 1957. Originally opened in 1896, the station today is home to Amtrak and Greyhound Bus. The station is directly accessible via off-ramps from both the Broadway and Steel Bridges across the Willamette River. For seven decades after it first opened on September 8, 1912, the Multnomah Hotel was Portland’s most prestigious up-scale hotel. During those years, it accommodated most celebrities who came to town. In the 1980s, however, the establishment experienced financial difficulties, which forced its closure in 1991. “Embassy Suites” purchased the facility, restored it to its former glory, and reopened it in 1995. Under the name “Embassy Suites Hotel Portland-Downtown,” the historic Multnomah Hotel, at 319 SW Pine Street, appears much the same as it did 50 years ago, when Elvis Presley spent the night there on September 2, 1957. Converted from a dog racing track to a baseball stadium in 1956, the year before Elvis appeared there, Multnomah Stadium has been the home of Portland’s minor league baseball teams ever since. In 1966 the Multnomah Athletic Club sold the stadium to the city of Portland, and it was renamed Civic Stadium. After a 2001 renovation, the stadium was given its current name, PGE (Portland General Electric) Park. Located at 1844 SW Morrison Street, in the northwest corner of Portland’s downtown area, PGE Park today includes many modern amenities, while retaining the classic feel of the old Multnomah Stadium that hosted Elvis in 1957. The Multnomah Athletic Club, where Elvis held his pre-concert press conference, is located on Salmon Street adjacent to the stadium. The best view of the interior of the stadium is from the S. 18th Avenue side. As part of the 2001 renovation, the wall on the east side of the stadium was torn down so that pedestrians could peer through a wrought-iron fence and see the playing field, 26 feet below street level. Having personally visited all of these “Elvis Sites” in the Pacific Northwest, I can assure you that the image of a vital, 22-year-old Elvis easily comes to the mind’s eye when viewing these places sacred to the most devoted of Elvis Presley fans. — Alan Hanson
Entry #20: Posted July 24, 2008 It’s only a little over two weeks now until the start of Elvis Week in Memphis. I’ll be there Wednesday and Thursday signing copies of my book, Elvis ’57: The Final Fifties Tours, at the Elvis Expo trade show. If you’re going to be there, I hope you’ll stop by to say hello. I’ll be in booth #44. Two people I had really been looking forwarding to meeting in Memphis are Rex and Elisabeth Mansfield, who also had reserved a booth at Elvis Expo. In addition, they were scheduled to make a guest appearance at the Elvis Insiders Conference. Unfortunately, I received an email message from Rex earlier this week explaining that due to health problems, he and Elisabeth have had to cancel their plans to be in Memphis for Elvis Week. I first became interested in Rex and Elisabeth, and their connection with Elvis, this past winter after finding a copy of Andreas Schröer’s book, Private Presley (1993), at a used book store. Since I have always been a fan of Elvis the entertainer, the details of his two years in the army had never held much interest for me. Still, Private Presley drew me in, and after finishing it, I wrote and posted a review of it in the “Elvis Books” section of Elvis-History.com. Rex Mansfield and Elisabeth Stefaniak both figure prominently in Schröer’s book, since both had close relationships with Elvis while he was in the army. After Elvis was discharged and returned to Memphis in 1960, Rex and Elisabeth left his entourage and got married. It turns out that one of Schröer’s majors sources was an earlier book, entitled Elvis the Soldier, written by the Mansfields. On Amazon.com I was able to purchase a copy of the out-of-print book for $24. It’s an odd volume, actually first printed in German in the early 1980s by a West German Elvis fan club. Later it was translated into English. Most of the text in the 160-page book is written by Rex, with Elisabeth contributing several chapters. The two of them certainly were positioned well to observe Elvis during his two years in the military. Rex was inducted into the army with Elvis and the two were close friends throughout their two-year hitches. Elisabeth met Elvis soon after his arrival in Germany. In addition to their personal relationship, she served as his personal secretary through his time in the army. However, over the years I’ve learned to suspect the accuracy of such books written by people who wandered in and out of Elvis’s life. And so I was suspicious when I started reading the Mansfields’ book. After all, they were writing strictly from memory about events that happened over 20 years before. After reading Rex’s preface, however, I decided to give the Mansfields the benefit of the doubt. First of all, Rex pointed out that he and his wife were writing without a ghost writer. Although this resulted in a fair number of misspellings and grammatical errors, it also guaranteed that their observations were not run through the filter of a biased collaborator. Also, Rex asserted that the book was “truthful and straight forward” and that it included the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Add to that his self-professed deep religious faith, and I was convinced that what I was about to read would be an honest record of their years with Elvis. “Fair and balanced” is an overused expression these days, but I think it fits the Mansfields’ book. Among the many stories they share about Elvis the soldier are some that reflect well on him and others that reflect poorly. First we hear about Elvis getting mad at a young hotel doorman in Dallas and getting him fired, but then later we see him willingly give his time to produce and direct a troop ship talent show on the way to Germany. Rex tells how Elvis loaned money to many of his fellow GIs, but then Elisabeth tells how Elvis got angry with her over a harmless comment on a shopping trip. On one hand, there are stories of Elvis’s generosity, his sense of humor, and his kind-hearted treatment of his fans. On the other hand, there are anecdotes that show he could be selfish, possessive, suspicious, and threatening. Despite Rex’s declaration that the book told “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” there is one obvious omission from their narrative. That is the nature of Elisabeth’s personal relationship with Elvis. In the second volume of his Presley biography, Peter Guralnick quotes Elisabeth as saying that she and Elvis slept in the same bed for over a period of months. In Elvis the Soldier, however, she never addresses the issue, and Rex only hints at it. I applaud them for refusing to discuss this highly personal side of Elvis’s life—and their own. Some of Elvis’s so-called friends have chosen to write accounts of his sex life. The worst was a particularly crude article in Playboy magazine a few years ago. For me it’s not a morality issue. I just don’t understand why some people feel entitled to expose the most private part of Elvis’s personal life. I respect Rex and Elisabeth for refusing to do so in Elvis the Soldier. The Mansfields are currently marketing a book entitled Sergeant Presley. I haven’t read this volume, but from the description given on the book’s web site, the content of Sergeant Presley appears to be much the same as in Elvis the Soldier. If you’re an Elvis fan interested in learning more about his army years, I recommend reading either Elvis the Soldier or Sergeant Presley by Rex and Elisabeth Mansfield. It’s a highly entertaining account of how two young people once fell under the spell of Elvis Presley. — Alan Hanson
Entry #21: Posted July 31, 2008 I’ve just returned from a five-day vacation (if you can call visiting relatives a “vacation”). First, I drove across Washington State from my home in Spokane to Seattle. After fulfilling my family obligations in the Emerald City, I headed south on Interstate 5 toward Portland, home to more of my relatives. About 35 miles north of Portland, I pulled off at a freeway exit labeled “Kalama.” For many years now, I’ve wanted to visit this small Washington town, and finally my chance had come. Many of you probably don’t know about Elvis’s relationship with Kalama. You can read the whole story elsewhere on Elvis-History-Blog.com about Elvis in Kalama. For now, though, I’ll give a quick summary. On September 3, 1962, a large recreational vehicle, carrying Elvis and nine members of his personal entourage, headed north out of Los Angeles on Interstate 5. They were bound for Seattle, where location filming was scheduled to begin on September 6. After driving all day Sunday and through the night, Elvis’s group pulled off the freeway at Kalama, where they rented rooms at the new Columbia Inn Motel. While Elvis slept through the day, word spread and a crowd of fans was waiting in the parking lot when he emerged from his room that evening. Before climbing back on his bus, Elvis signed autographs and posed for pictures. Then it was back on the road to Seattle. I had heard from several sources through the years that some of the photos taken of Elvis that night were on display in the motel lobby. It had been 46 years since Elvis passed through Kalama, and until recently I didn’t know if those photos were still on the wall at the Columbia Inn Motel. Heck, I didn’t even know if the Columbia Inn Motel still existed. After some checking on the Internet a few months ago, I determined that the motel did indeed still exist in Kalama but had changed its name to the “Kalama River Inn.” I called and spoke to one of the motel’s owner (it had changed hands several times since Elvis was there) and she confirmed that the Elvis photos were still on the wall in the lobby. That’s when I decided I was not only going to see those photos but I also was going to get copies of them. So when I left Spokane I had my laptop computer and a scanner packed in the back of my car. Driving up to the motel, I saw a rather ordinary-looking establishment with just a few cars in the parking lot. The only other structure around was a restaurant bordering the parking lot to the north. Immediately I saw Elvis’s image, along with Jack Benny’s, on an outside wall of the restaurant. Above them were the words, “Famous Visitors to the Columbia Inn.” After walking into the motel office, it didn’t take me long to spot the photos in question. There were five; Elvis was prominent in four of them. They were all 5” X 7” horizontal color prints in inexpensive wood frames. They were hanging in a vertical row by the side of a doorway behind the front desk. I was amazed at how clear and sharp the photos were, considering they were probably taken with a cheap instamatic camera almost 46 years ago. With the moment of decision at hand, I began to get nervous. Would the motel owner allow me to scan the photos? There was one of those “press for service” bells on the counter, so I gave it a thump. That brought out the owner, Charan Sandhu. I introduced myself and explained I had written a book about Elvis and was now trying to find out as much as I could about Elvis’s 1962 stay at his motel. Mr. Sandhu, who along with his wife had purchased the motel six years ago, could tell me little I didn’t already know. He confirmed that occasionally Elvis fans dropped by to see the photos. A couple recently came from California. Then I took a deep breath and asked the big question. “Would you mind if I used my computer to make copies of your photos?” Mr. Sandhu looked at me for a few seconds. I was sure he was going to say no. Instead, he asked, “Would you have to take them?” When I assured him the photos would never leave the lobby,” he agreed. I quickly set up my computer and scanner and went to work. Carefully I removed the photos from the frames and scanned each one. After putting them back in the frames, I thanked Mr. Sandhu and offered to send him a CD with the scans so that he could make copies of the photos to sell to other Elvis fans who dropped by. He wasn’t interested for some reason. The accompanying photos are recent ones I took in and around the Kalama River Inn a few days ago. You can see the actual Elvis in Kalama photos in Photo Gallery #9 in the Elvis Photos section of Elvis-History-Blog.com. — Alan Hanson Go to Current Blog
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