Elvis: Long live the KingBy Matthew Martin| September 17, 2015 Music Blogs Previous Page ALOHA FROM HAWAII: One last hurrah Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Elvis had been nervous about performing at Madison Square Garden in late 1972. He was afraid the tough New York crowd would not enjoy his “hillbilly” style or old fashioned songs. Instead, he electrified. As soon as it was over the plans for the Hawaii show kicked into high gear. The show, to be held in January of ’73, would be recorded and simulcast live—via satellite—to a “worldwide” audience (except in the US, who would watch it in April). As nervous as he was to be performing in front of one tough New York crowd, that was nothing compared to the eyes of the whole world. Immediately he worked to get in shape, going to some unnatural and unhealthy extremes (including, among other things, a protein injection taken from the urine of a pregnant woman) in order to look his best. In terms of his size, it was the best he had looked since 1970, but the years of late-night Vegas shows, concerts on tour and prescription drug abuse had already taken a great toll. The “Aloha from Hawaii” concert, better than any other performance (on video or on vinyl), highlights this dichotomy. From a distance, standing still, he looks the part. His beautiful star-spangled outfit did exactly what Elvis intended: To be a visual representation of the USA. Unlike his recent suits of powder blue or fiery red, this one was stark-white, covered in red, white and blue stones, and adorned with an eagle in front and back. It looked stellar, and from a distance so did he. But when the camera cuts in closer, you can see it in his puffy face, in his eyes, and in his stiff movements: He was not alright. Listening to him is likewise a two-sided coin. On long sustained notes, his deep baritone bellowed like an opera singer. But when singing faster lyrics, or even just introducing the members of his group, his voice is weak and shaky and noticeably slurred. And yet, despite knowing all the physical turmoil he is going through, you can’t help but be amazed at the show. More people—said to be upwards of a billion—tuned in to watch him than any other single person in human history (and more people in the US watched the special than watched the moon landing a few years earlier), but despite that he never misses a beat. His only major flub came early in the show when trying to sing Burning Love (then a very new song) from memory, but he powers through it and laughs it off with his trademark half-smile. In terms of energy, the 1972 film has it in spades, but here it is muted. In terms of raw intensity, this concert doesn’t compare to the ones captured in the 1970 film. What you get with the Aloha special is a performer no where near his peak and in fact very close to having the bottom fall out, yet still skilled enough as a pure entertainer to convince you—even if for a moment—that he was at the top of his game. ELVIS IN CONCERT: Self-parody Sure enough, after the huge hit that was the Aloha concert, there was no where to go but down. Even though he had been steadily going that way for years, the Hawaii show offered a temporary reprieve and a bit of fool’s gold to those closest to him. Elvis, of course, was oblivious (and entirely in denial) to his own failing health. His weight fluctuated wildly throughout in 1974-1975 until it finally settled into a constant, bloated state. His hangers-on tried half-heartedly to wean him off of the drugs he was abusing, but they never gave much effort for fear of being cut out of his inner circle and also because they themselves simply didn’t want to be cut off from his supply of narcotics. These were the days before the Betty Ford clinic. There was no discrete place for someone of Elvis’s stature to go in order to quietly sober up and clean himself up. He would regularly cancel tours and spend days in Memphis’ Baptist Hospital, with an entire wing on the 16th floor reserved for him. The press would be told it was because Elvis was battling “an infection” but really it was a detox cleanse. He would be treated until he was well enough to leave, but would then return home to his pill bottles, continuing the cycle. He continued to tour, out of financial necessity more than desire. He lost all of his money in late 1974, going totally bankrupt except for filing the paperwork. He then made it all back after just two shows. That was how he was living. Not paycheck to paycheck, but concert to concert. In December of 1975, Elvis performed at the Silverdome in Michigan, to bone-chilling temperatures. A winter concert was unheard of for him, but he did it because he was entirely broke. The show itself was a disaster: He forgot lyrics to regularly performed songs, shouted obscenities at the band (who were placed awkwardly on a lower level than Elvis, instead of his preferred arrangement of having them directly behind and beside him) and even, due to another sudden weight gain, split his pants when bending over to say hello. And yet the show earned $800,000, making it the then-single biggest one-night gross for a concert in US history (beating out the Beatles’ Shea Stadium show from a decade prior). Elvis pocketed half of the money himself, and had it almost entirely spent by the time Christmas had ended. 1976 was no better. His manager, Tom Parker, had sold the rights to Elvis’s music (recorded between 1954 and 1974) for a cool $6 million. Holding on to the rights would have yielded more long term money, but Parker was greedy (and desperate) to find cash, so he took the short-term fix. Later, Elvis and RCA restructured their recording contract, which meant the company was to put out three new Elvis albums per year. Some of that could be sustained by re-releasing older material, but some new songs needed to be done. Trouble was Elvis hadn’t recorded since early 1975 (which spawned the better-than-average “Today” album) and was in no mood to record. The studio, his manager, his dad, everyone tried to coax their overweight, drug-addled gravy train into a recording studio, any studio. But Elvis wasn’t having it. Finally, RCA packed up a quarter of a million dollars worth of recording equipment and set up shop in the den of his Graceland estate. They managed to squeeze a dozen or so, mostly sappy and sloppy-written, songs about love lost and depression out of him and then left him to wallow in his misery. By 1977 Elvis was taking some combination of twenty different uppers, downers and pain killers per day. Still in denial about his health, he nonetheless continued to go on crash-diets in order to look the best he could for his tours. In between shows, however, he was eating too much and taking too many pills. He signed a deal with CBS to air a TV special highlighting an upcoming summer tour. CBS recorded material from two concerts in June, with the intent to air the special that fall. Elvis lost a little weight—enough to fit into a jumpsuit he wore in 1974—but he could only do so much to hide the rest of his fallen state. The CBS show was a disaster. Of course, it aired only a couple months after his death, with the height of nostalgia clouding everyone’s judgment. Looking back with enough time having passed, however, it’s clear the man was in no condition physically or emotionally to be anywhere but in a hospital bed. His voice was weak, his body was bloated, his “act” had become a comedian’s take on an Elvis concert, except the audience wasn’t laughing; it was too blinded by adoration to notice. The video above was chosen for a reason: Despite better-sung songs available from the “Elvis in Concert” show, this one works to summarize everything that had gone wrong over the years and how all the bad decisions had come to a head in this TV special. Elvis tossing his scarf into the crowd used to be a natural reaction in his performances. His shakes and gyrations would work the scarf loose and Presley would rip it off from around his neck and launch it into the crowd. It was never “a thing;” it was an involuntary reflex. Fast forward several years and now he’s too out of shape (and out of his mind) to do much of anything. He just lazily wanders the stage, throwing scarves at people, while lackey Charlie Hodge follows with another thirty draped over his arms. He keeps the stock well-supplied, as he drapes a new one over Elvis’s neck as fast as the king can toss them. The silk barely has time to collect a drop of sweat before it is handed off. I’m sure they’re worth a lot on eBay though. I checked. They go anywhere from $200 to $1000. Two months after this footage was taken, Elvis would be dead. _____ His legacy became frozen at that point and thanks to some skilled marketing and a bit of rose-colored memory-making, everyone’s image of Elvis is either of the striking 1950’s young rocker/crooner, or of the sleek, leather-bound 1968 rocker/blues singer. The idea of “Elvis in the 70’s” has been cast aside, and because of that, it is often considered the years where he quit caring, got fat, and started wearing embarrassing white jumpsuits. That’s a superficial and misunderstood take on the last decade of his life. Elvis in the ’70s is not to be dismissed. Was he out of shape? Was his voice weaker, and his speech slurred? Did he lack most of the fire that made him such a star in the first place? Yes to all, but he didn’t start out that way. He began the decade as “alive” as he had ever been. Released from the creative shackles of mindless movie soundtracks, he was free to be a live performer again, which he was always born to be. A combination of bad decisions, selfish hangers-on, a broken marriage and an addiction to drugs in an era where treatment was not available for men of his celebrity, all played a part to bring about the downfall of the King of Rock and Roll. And yet, cutting through all the weights that dragged him down, there is still, at the center of it all, a natural entertainer, a kind soul and a brilliant singer. His legacy is etched in stone, for good and for ill, and even knowing how sad the fall was, we remain in awe of the peak he reached. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content
