Elvis Blog Archives — March 2008
Entry #1: Posted March 13, 2008 I’ve been an Elvis fan for over forty years. I never tire of listening to his music (my iPod has over 800 of his songs on it), and I even like many of his movies. My professional life, however, has focused on the subject of history. My bachelor's and master's degrees are both in history, and I was a high school history teacher for thirty years. So, while I retain the deep affection for Elvis that first developed in my youth, I also look at his life and work through the eyes of a truth-seeking historian. And so, after retiring from teaching and taking up writing as a second career, it was natural for me to choose Elvis as the subject of my first book and to focus on the history of a little-known part of his life. The result was Elvis ’57: The Final Fifties Tours. That, in turn, has led me to writing this Elvis blog. Of course, for my book I spent a lot of time gathering information from the 1957 newspaper archives of the cities in which he appeared that year. Most of the factual information in the book came from that research. However, I conducted interviews as well. Jordanaires Gordon Stoker and Hugh Jarrett provided invaluable information, as did a number of disc jockeys, like Red Robinson in Vancouver, B.C. I also knew it was important to listen to the memories of fans, who, as teenagers in 1957, saw Elvis perform live back then. I decided that the member directory of the Elvis Insiders, the fan group sponsored by Elvis Presley Enterprises, might be a good source of interview subjects. It wasn’t. I sent e-mails to about three dozen Insiders who lived in cities he visited in 1957, but most of those who responded explained they had been very young or not even born when he died in 1977. Other contacts with Elvis fans, especially through the Insiders, eventually made it clear to me that there is quite a large number of these second-generation fans, ones whose love for Elvis has been passed down to them by their parents. For example, Heidi Lively-Melton of Wilsonville, Oregon, was born just a few years before Elvis's death. She shared the following story with me: "My mother-in-law had attended a Portland concert of his in 1970 and kept her ticket stub all these years in her wallet with her pictures of her sons. I got to hold it on my wedding day as my 'something old.' When she passed away last year, my father-in-law gave me the ticket stub to keep (which I treasure). It has a wonderful spot in my wedding album and photos." While we older fans share our devotion with the Generation-X fans, there are obvious differences between the two groups. Like that ticket stub, much of what younger Presley fans know about the King of Rock and Roll has been handed down to them. He came to them with his whole life and body of work laid out in front of them. They know him through his music on CDs and his movies on video. They’ll never know the joys, the anticipation, and the tragedy of growing up with him, like we first-generation fans do. They'll never recall the excitement and controversy as he exploded on the national stage in 1956 and 1957 or the dismal cloud of uncertainty that came when he went into exile in the Army in 1958. They'll never have the memories of waiting for each new record release, of hurrying down to the record store to buy it, and then putting it on the record player and listening to it for the first time. Then there were the movies. Each time a new one came out, I went to a downtown theater early on a Sunday afternoon to watch it. I wouldn't come out until five hours later. After watching Elvis's movie, I'd sit through the meaningless second feature and then watch the Elvis movie a second time on my one-dollar ticket. Nor will the new generation fans know the thrill that we old-timers felt when we realized that we were actually going to be able to see our idol in person! (I first saw him on stage in Seattle in 1970, the day after Heidi's mother-in-law saw him in Portland. What a reward it was for remaining a loyal fan through all the dismal movie years.) The second-generation fans won't even know the pain and dismay we boomers felt on that mid-August day in 1977. As an aging fan, I am both amazed and pleased that this new generation of fans has risen up to embrace Elvis. For some reason, though, the historian in me wants to help them understand who the man really was. He was more than a voice on an iPod or a character in a movie. A real person with unique talents, he had a profound influence on American popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like all human beings, though, he had good and bad qualities, to be sure, but in learning to understand and accept them, we learn about ourselves as well. Where do we send those fans who wish to learn the truth about Elvis? It would seem an easy task, considering the multitude of books that have been written, and continue to be written, about him. Then there's the Internet. Certainly everything you'd ever want to know about him can be found there. (Surely Wikipedia wouldn’t lead us astray!) As it turns out, this proliferation of Presley material in recent years complicates the process of discerning the truth about the man and his work. Some of it is simply false. Other sources mix half-truths and bias to distort, both positively and negatively, the real legacy of Elvis Presley. The goal with this blog, then, is to provide an accurate historical perspective on Elvis's life and career for all his fans, both young and old. This will be done by unearthing new information through research and reviewing books, movies, fan magazines, and articles. Also, there are some myths about him that deserve debunking, and they'll get it here from time to time. All of it will be done by a long-time fan with an eye for historical honesty. — Alan Hanson
Entry #2: Posted March 20, 2008 In my first Elvis blog entry, I stated that the large amount of information about Elvis that has appeared in print form and on the Internet actually makes it difficult to get a clear picture of Elvis Presley. Some of what has been written in recent years is just downright false. Other sources mix half-truths and bias to distort, on both the positive and negative sides, the real legacy of Elvis Presley. Let me support that contention by giving a couple of examples. Let’s start with what I call the “Elvis myth-makers.” These are Elvis fans on steroids. They bombard us with testimonials of Elvis’s talent and generosity (and I’m certainly not denying that he had a lot of both), and they neither offer nor want to hear a word of criticism directed toward him. They seek to exalt Elvis and to raise him up to a level of hero- worship. (One well-known Elvis fan once predicted that someday Elvis would be revered in the music world on the same level as Beethoven.) Some Elvis fan web sites and fan magazines purvey this kind of sanctified and distorted image of Elvis. And I must say that, in general, the younger generation of Elvis fans are most prone to believe it. Most often this hero-worship is offered openly, but sometimes the Elvis mythmakers work subtly. For example, consider the 1995 book, Did Elvis Sing in Your Hometown? This book, which is still widely available (I bought my copy at Graceland in 2006), contains lots of information about Elvis’s stage shows in the 1950s. I found the book useful in a number of ways while I was writing Elvis ’57. Unfortunately, it also contains a lot of inaccurate information, and its tone reveals the author’s bias toward Elvis despite his pretense to be fully factual. For instance, the author claims that many Elvis concerts were sell-outs, when they were not. In Chicago in 1957, he claims “thousands of fervent fans made a mad dash for the stage,” when, in fact, only several dozen young girls surrounded the stage. He goes on to say that a dozen women climbed on the stage, “effectively putting an end to the show.” The truth is that not a single fan got on the stage in Chicago, and Elvis performed his full show before leaving. The book also claims that in Portland in 1957, fans staged a riot that forced Elvis to leave the stage after just fifteen minutes. However, in their editions on the following day, both Portland newspapers reported that not a single person in the well-behaved crowd left the seating area as Elvis gave his complete forty-five minute show. The book also offers exaggerated attendance figures and refers to “thousands” of fans threatening police and so forth when the terms “dozens” would be more accurate. So what’s wrong with getting a few facts wrong? What’s wrong is that the cumulative effect of the inaccuracies, misinformation, and exaggeration throughout this book, and others like it, misrepresents Elvis, and in doing so, does historical damage to his legacy. Instead of the exciting entertainer that he was, such distorted accounts depict him as a freak, who instigated riotous and bizarre behavior wherever he went. (I even read one article that claimed some girls were so out of control that they went down on the ground and ate dirt after Elvis’s 1957 concert in Tacoma. Give me a break!) But it isn’t just the sometimes-misguided fan press that needs monitoring for accuracy. Sometimes Elvis’s most respected biographers get it wrong too. Take Peter Guralnick, author of the accepted definitive two-volume Presley biography. For starters, Guralnick cites Did Elvis Sing in Your Hometown? in the source notes of the second volume of his biography. As a result, some of Guralnick’s information is necessarily false, it having come from a tainted source. Also, consider the story about Johnny Rivers included in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. Guralnick reported in the book that Rivers musically sucker-punched Elvis by rushing out his version of “Memphis” in 1964, when he knew Elvis planned to release the same song as a single. Guralnick had interviewed Rivers and knew his side of the story, but chose to believe some of Elvis’s “boys,” who claimed Rivers had blindsided Elvis. After Elvis heard Johnny’s version of “Memphis,” Guralnick claimed that Elvis said he “didn’t want to see Johnny anymore.” When Careless Love was published in 1999, an angry Johnny Rivers quickly reacted. “Elvis and I were friends for years,” he stated, “and I am personally offended and outraged that Peter Guralnick has joined the ranks of writers who have tried to profit from Elvis’ downfall by taking a cheap shot with information that was not accurate.” Producer Lou Adler, Larry Geller, James Burton, and even Chuck Berry, the song’s writer, issued statements supporting Johnny’s contention that he had not stolen the song from Elvis. In my eyes, at least, the incident made Guralnick’s entire biography a little less definitive. If he got this story wrong, how many other stories in his books did he also get wrong? When he came across conflicting stories, instead of guessing which was right, a better philosophy would have been to either leave the story out or present both versions and let the reader make a judgment. Guralnick’s big mistake in the Rivers incident was in not double-checking a story told by the “boys” formerly in Elvis’s inner circle. One would think that the various members of Elvis’s entourage, having worked and socialized closely with Elvis for years, would be credible sources of information. However, over the years several of the “boys” have proved themselves far from reliable when recalling their times with Elvis. Back in 1977, Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler’s book, Elvis: What Happened?, was filled with bias and inaccuracies, Lamar Fike was a main conduit of misinformation for Albert Goodman’s deeply flawed 1981 Elvis biography, and Byron Raphael’s article about Elvis’s sex life in a 2005 issue of Playboy is completely bogus. Of course, not all those close to Elvis have proved unreliable. Joe Esposito, for one, seems to have told his story about Elvis with honesty and balance. The lesson here is that when reading these “I-was-there-books,” the reader must keep an open mind when it comes to accuracy, honesty, and bias. In the end, I’m not suggesting we should all be cynical about everything that has been and will be written about Elvis. And I don’t think there is anything to be gained by arguing over isolated facts. However, the legacy of Elvis should be important to all of his fans. And if it takes setting the record straight once in awhile, then sign me up for the crusade. — Alan Hanson
Entry #3: Posted March 27, 2008 This week I’d like to do an update on what’s been happening around the Elvis-History-Blog site. I’ve committed myself to writing and posting a new blog entry each Thursday. However, I can’t guarantee what time of day it will be available for reading. Normally, I sit down to work at my computer at about 10 a.m. Pacific time. By the time I write and upload the blog entry, it could be early afternoon. Of course, for those of you on the East Coast, it could be early evening by that time. Naturally, life occasionally disrupts one’s plans, and so Thursday's blog might appear even later in the day. Wherever you might live, however, there should be new information on this page by the time the sun rises on Friday. Due to the possibility of a technical glitch now and then, I can’t absolutely guarantee that my weekly blog will always be here, but that’s my intention. I received an e-mail message from a woman who wanted to know why there are Xs on the photos in the photo galleries. Many of you know why, of course, but let me briefly explain for those who might not. I’m hoping that selling 8 X 10 prints of those photos will help defray the cost of maintaining this site. If viewers can download those images directly from the photo galleries, then they will have less incentive to purchase prints. So I put an X and the word “Preview” on the top of each Elvis photo to discourage viewers from downloading the images. I made the Xs and the work as thin as possible, however, so that viewers not interested in purchasing prints can at least see and appreciate the Elvis photos. By the way, for the Toronto photo and all the Ottawa photos, the enlargements I’m selling will be printed from high-resolution scans made directly from the original photographic negatives. And, of course, the prints will not have Xs across them. They really are spectacular images of Elvis at age 22. As you can see under the button bar above, I’m planning on sending out a monthly e-newsletter. It will not only include an update on what new content has been posted on the site, but also it will include information about Elvis that appears nowhere on Elvis-History-Blog.com. My schedule calls for the e-zine to be sent out to subscribers on or around the first of each month. So fill out the form above. It only takes seconds, and you can always unsubscribe if it gets on your nerves. Also, I’ve finally figured out how to include a form on the site so that viewers can contact me quickly and easily. The “Contact Us” button at the bottom of the button bar will take you to it, and I’ll post a permanent “Respond to This Blog” link at the bottom of this page. I really hope many of you will use the contact form to let me know what you think of my blogging, movie reviews, articles, and other content on this site. I have a tendency to get over-bearing sometimes and need to be put in my place. Please don’t hesitate to do so. If you contact me and don’t want your comments used in a future blog, please state as much in your message. Speaking of feedback, I received the following message concerning my comments critical of many of the Elvis books that have been published through the years. “One comment I would add about the multitude of Elvis books is that I have found some merit in almost all of them, even Goldman’s. By reading a couple of hundred over 10 years or so, I have come to know and understand Elvis, even though I never met him. There is a thread of truth in most books, I believe, and after reading so many I have been able to put these threads together and produce a fairly accurate picture of Presley. Your book remains one of the very best I have read and definitely adds to my knowledge and love for Elvis the man and the entertainer.” — Geoffrey in New Zealand First of all, any Elvis fan who has read as many Elvis books as Geoffrey would certainly learn quickly how to differentiate between what is fact and what is fiction in all those volumes. And that’s really what I was suggesting that all Elvis fans do. When you read an Elvis book, don’t just assume that everything you read is true. Use your judgment and common sense. I don’t know how many times another Elvis fan has said something to me, like, “Did you know that Elvis …” said something or did something? And I know it’s not true, but they read it somewhere and just accepted it as fact. When I was researching my book, I discarded many things people told me about Elvis in 1957 because they just didn’t jive with other information I already had confirmed. Speaking of my book, I’d like to thank Geoffrey for his perceptive comments about Elvis’57: The Final Fifties Tours. No reason to be shy; if you haven’t already, I’d like you to purchase a copy. Besides being a great read (look at Trevor Cajiao’s review), it’s a way you can help support this web site. After all, the hope of selling copies of my book is what originally motivated me to start Elvis-History-Blog. Already got a copy? Buy one for an Elvis friend as a gift. Ordering instructions can be found at the book title link at the top of this paragraph. — Alan Hanson Go to Current Blog
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