The premature death of Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Make no mistake—if there had never been an Elvis Presley, this blog would not exist. Which is not to say that Presley’s increasingly odd behavior leading up to his premature death at the age of 42 can be entirely explained by the pressure which he felt as the King of Rock, but the expectations of others clearly contributed to his tragic belief that he was infallible, immortal and in a word, Godlike.
When Elvis made his first records for Sam Phillip’s Sun label in Memphis, he was a truck driver without prospects, living in a house that was little more than a shack. His father was a convicted criminal who was charged with forgery after altering the figures on a cheque he was given from $4 to $40 in 1937, when Elvis was two years old. This resulted in an initial sentence for Vernon Presley of three years at the infamous Parchman Farm prison (later the title of a celebrated R&B song written by Mose Allison), although Vernon probably served less than one year of his term. Gladys Presley, Elvis’ mother, was thus forced to work at menial jobs to earn a pittance in her attempts to provide the necessities for her baby, especially since she actually gave birth to twins when Elvis arrived, although his brother, who was 35 minutes older than Elvis, was stillborn, which made Gladys almost unnaturally protective of her surviving child.
Elvis led a very sheltered life—for many months, his mother took him school and met him at the school gates afterwards, and he reportedly accompanied her everywhere, which almost certainly embarrassed him as he grew older.

Then came his meteoric and totally deserved rise to fame in the mid-Fifties, when he forged a blueprint for rock n’ roll from which the world continues to reverberate, The records Presley made before his two years in the US Army between 1958 and 1960 remain the yardstick by which everything which has subsequently occurred in rock n’ roll is measured. By the time he went into the Forces, he had acquired a manager in the shape of the Machiavellian self-styled ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, previously a carnival hustler who had earned a living in earlier times with his celebrated sideshow featuring dancing chickens—any chicken in a cage whose floor was an electric hotplate would dance, and probably squawk!

Parker shrewdly decided when Elvis call up papers arrived that any application for deferment might affect his meal ticket’s credibility as the archetypal All American Boy, but made sure that enough recordings were available to satisfy public lust for new Elvis material during his stay with Uncle Sam, and even arranged for film footage to be shot in Germany to be used in Presley’s fifth feature movie, G.I. Blues, his first film after a two year gap following the release of four commercial blockbusters in under two years prior to his induction as Private US53310761.
The fatal mistake, artistically speaking, was Parker’s only partially successful attempt to make Elvis the hillbilly cat into Elvis the all around family entertainer. It became clear that Presley lost control over the material he was told to sing and especially over the movies in which he was obliged to appear, probably because demand for more and more Elvis was insatiable—some years later, an execrable LP of Elvis’s between songs dialogue with dubious title Having Fun with Elvis On Stage was released, which contained no singing To his credit, Elvis was less than keen for this pathetically banal artifact to reach the market, but since by the time of its release, he only had three years to live, and was some distance down the road to self-inflicted oblivion, his protests were over-ruled, as they had been a year earlier, in 1973, when the rights to his back catalogue had been sold by Parker to RCA Records for a reported five and a half million dollars, of which Presley himself only netted $750,000. This must have been one of the shrewdest investments ever made by a record company, as the Presley catalogue continues to sell to the point where the company must have recouped its investment many times over.
At some point, probably around 1970. Elvis seems to have given up worrying about the quality of his output, and mat even have begun to despise the fans who, lemming-like, consumed everything marketed with his name on it—dollar bills with his face in the place of that George Washington have become very popular curios, and it is easy to purchase in gift shops in America facsimiles of Elvis’s last will and testament. His marriage to exceptionally photogenic Pricilla Beaulieu (who later appeared in a leading role in the TV soap opera, Dallas) ended in divorce apparently because Elvis preferred the company of the ‘Memphis Mafia’, a group of bodyguards and hangers-on, many of whom were reportedly prone to agreeing with Elvis, however outlandish and unreasonable his behavior became. Accusations have been made suggesting that such people’s spineless strongly contributed to Presley’s downfall, and it is hard to deny that a rather more strong-minded approach might have prevented his self-destruct mechanisms from extracting the ultimate toll. On the other hand, he was so convinced, rather like a religious zealot, that everything he thought and did was beyond reproach that he would simply have fired anyone who dared to suggest that he might be human, then there’s the possibly apocryphal story about Elvis playing scrabble— to ensure that he had a better chance of winning, other players were restricted to five tiles (or letters) from which to construct words, while Elvis alone was allowed seven.

His drug intake, perhaps resulting from extreme hypochondria, was said to be immense, and eventually was a major contributory factor to his death on 16 August 1977, when his heart finally gave up the unequal struggle against the weight of increasingly powerful chemicals which were, as far as can be ascertained, prescribed for him by three doctors who were prone to writing out prescriptions if Elvis asked them to. Once again, had any of these medics been sufficiently intrepid, Presley’s life might have been extended, but, as in the case of the Memphis Mafia, [to kill the goose which laid golden egg would have resulted in banishment from the kingdom of plenty—] Elvis was extremely generous with gifts to his close associates—and almost definitely someone else would have emerged who would be prepared to do precisely what Elvis wanted.
The subject of Presley ranks with that of the The Beatles as the one about which most books have been written in the annals of rock music, simply because his popularity and influence have never been surpassed. In the world of the cinema, the equivalent figure was Marilyn Monroe, and it is no accident that the legends of Monroe, The Beatles and Presley continue to make headlines decades after the deaths of Elvis, Marilyn and John Lennon—each of the three lived a life which was subject to microscopic scrutiny from the media. Only an extra-terrestrial might be able to survive such pressure, and Elvis Presley, sadly, was a mere mortal.