Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Weftsetts Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Peter Garralman, who has a new book,
Speaker 1: The Colonel and the King, Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and
Speaker 1: the Partnership that Rocked the World.
Speaker 2: Peter, why this book? Why? Now?
Speaker 3: Well, it's been thirty years. It's been it's almost exactly
Speaker 3: thirty years from the time I first got access to
Speaker 3: the Colonel's archives in nineteen ninety five. And although I
Speaker 3: had known Colonel at that point for almost ten years,
Speaker 3: and I'd had engaged in a considerable amount of correspondence
Speaker 3: with him. This and I had done a great deal
Speaker 3: of research for my Elvis biography, this opened up an
Speaker 3: entirely different picture of the Colonel than I had ever
Speaker 3: had before. And really, from that moment I wanted to
Speaker 3: do a book that I mean, I just thought, we've
Speaker 3: got to do a collection of Colonel's letters. Well, that
Speaker 3: didn't happen, and a lot of things intervened, and here
Speaker 3: we are thirty years later.
Speaker 2: So what made it happen.
Speaker 3: What made it happen was it was just I stayed
Speaker 3: at it. You know, this is the same. This is
Speaker 3: a good example of the little engine that could you know,
Speaker 3: the tiny engine that could not. I mean, I just
Speaker 3: stayed with it. It was something that I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: But by the time I finally got around to it
Speaker 3: and I started working on it six or seven years
Speaker 3: ago by then. Colonel's widow, lo Anne Parker, actually quite
Speaker 3: some time before that, and I had known her for
Speaker 3: a while. I talked to her about the book I
Speaker 3: was doing, this book of letters that I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: She said, can I help, well? Who knows where that where?
Speaker 3: A thing like that can lead? But I said, sure,
Speaker 3: you know, I figured why not? That led to so
Speaker 3: many revelations beyond the letters themselves, which for me were
Speaker 3: a window into a world that Colonel had never revealed
Speaker 3: in public. He didn't reveal it in interviews, and reveal
Speaker 3: it in his letters, which were great playful things in
Speaker 3: which no matter what I put out in my letter,
Speaker 3: he taught me every time. It was like I was
Speaker 3: playing checkers and he was playing. He was a grand
Speaker 3: master at chess. But in the letters themselves he revealed himself.
Speaker 3: Then when I started talking to Loeanne, she began to
Speaker 3: tell me all the stories he had told her about
Speaker 3: growing up in Holland, and also about his vulnerabilities, his weaknesses,
Speaker 3: his sensitivities, things that I just never could have gotten.
Speaker 3: So that at that point I realized I can't just
Speaker 3: do the book of letters. I've got to do something
Speaker 3: which includes at least a biographical portrait. And I started
Speaker 3: doing interviews for that, and you know, books take a
Speaker 3: long time, but that's where it began.
Speaker 2: Okay, Historically, Colonel Tom Parker has not had a good
Speaker 2: image in the public. Ay when you first started with
Speaker 2: Colonel Tom Parker, what was your perception of him? And
Speaker 2: what is your perception of him now? And what does
Speaker 2: the public get wrong or right?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean there are a number of things about
Speaker 3: Colonel's image. You've got to remember that, at least up
Speaker 3: until nineteen seventy, Colonel was considered the most brilliant manager
Speaker 3: in the business. All of the things which have attached
Speaker 3: to him since Elvis's death were simply not applied to him.
Speaker 3: And if Brian Epstein wanted to find out about the business,
Speaker 3: he went to Colonel Parker. If Brian Epstein beatles manager,
Speaker 3: If George Hamilton, who's newly arrived in Hollywood and made
Speaker 3: home from the Hill, if he wanted advice about how
Speaker 3: to proceed with his career. This is in nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: one or so. He sought out Colonel Parker because Colonel
Speaker 3: was considered the canniest, the smartest, the funniest, the most animated.
Speaker 3: It it's nothing like what the image is of now.
Speaker 3: I'm well aware of what the image is of him now,
Speaker 3: But it wasn't the image that I started out with.
Speaker 3: When I I mean, in other words, I did not
Speaker 3: have a negative image when I wrote Last Trained of
Speaker 3: Mephic and Careless Love back in ninety four ninety nine,
Speaker 3: my two volume biography of Elvis, I had an image,
Speaker 3: in a sense of somebody who, as Jack soon Ceo
Speaker 3: at Graceland, as Jack Soten said, a lovable rascal. I
Speaker 3: thought of him if you look, if you read the
Speaker 3: portrait of him in Careless Love, he plays almost a
Speaker 3: Falstaffian role, sort of a comic role, a grand master role,
Speaker 3: but not a villainous role at all. Now again, I
Speaker 3: recognize that through a combination of circumstances, particularly in the
Speaker 3: wake of Elvis' death, but really even more so recently,
Speaker 3: he has been cast in a role that he never occupied.
Speaker 3: In this villainous role, but that's not the way I
Speaker 3: ever saw.
Speaker 2: Okay, historically people believe that it was a fift fifty partnership.
Speaker 2: In your book, you go through a lot of details
Speaker 2: that every deal was different in that live was one thing,
Speaker 2: recordings were another. But also there was this concept of
Speaker 2: special projects. What was really going on here because you
Speaker 2: make the point that he had a rationalization for all
Speaker 2: these different numbers, but in reality, was he self dealing?
Speaker 3: He was. You know, I would say everybody in the
Speaker 3: music business is self dealing up to a certain point,
Speaker 3: that's what the music business is based on. But no,
Speaker 3: he wasn't. And in fact, for the first ten years,
Speaker 3: the first nine years of his management of Elvis, he
Speaker 3: was operating on a twenty five percent managerial basis, straight
Speaker 3: twenty five percent, no special deals, no bonuses, no nothing
Speaker 3: like that. And this is a person who was not
Speaker 3: just the manager. He was also the pr man. He
Speaker 3: did all the advertising, he did the promotion of all
Speaker 3: the shows, he did the promotion of all the records.
Speaker 3: He even designed the record the record covers got nominated
Speaker 3: for Grammy. I don't know why, but he did. So.
Speaker 3: He was not only a one artist manager, he was
Speaker 3: a one man operation. He had virtually no overhead. He
Speaker 3: paid all of his expenses out of his twenty five percent,
Speaker 3: out of his twenty five percent commission as manager, and
Speaker 3: he was providing a service and all purpose service. It changed,
Speaker 3: as you say, as you've indicated in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 3: and there were a number of reasons that changed. One
Speaker 3: was that Elvis by then had become a lot more
Speaker 3: difficult to manage. Elvis was encountering problems of his own.
Speaker 3: He had, but his biggest problem and it was one
Speaker 3: that stayed with him all his life. And I'm not
Speaker 3: saying this is a criticism of just describing what happened.
Speaker 3: He simply spent, not just more than what he made.
Speaker 3: And he was making two million dollars a year, which
Speaker 3: is the equivalent of twenty million today. He was making
Speaker 3: four million dollars a year, which is the equivalent of
Speaker 3: double that. He If he made two million, he spent
Speaker 3: three million. And this is born out in the letters
Speaker 3: that Elvis's father, Vernon Presley, the only other person in
Speaker 3: the world other than Colonel and Elvis who knew what
Speaker 3: the business in the room was. Vernon was part of everything.
Speaker 3: Vernon and Elvis Presley were part of every business conversation
Speaker 3: with colonel. But Vernon wrote not letter after letter, only
Speaker 3: a few of which I have in the book, But
Speaker 3: he wrote letter after letter to colonel, You've got to
Speaker 3: help out. We're on the verge of losing graceland. We
Speaker 3: can't pay our taxes, we can't pay our IRS bill.
Speaker 3: You've got to come up with more money. That began,
Speaker 3: that became more and more of a problem as time
Speaker 3: went on. And so Colonel's explanation, and you can call
Speaker 3: it a rationalization, you can call it an explanation, is
Speaker 3: he simply had to take or he felt he was
Speaker 3: entitled to take a greater piece of the pie. And
Speaker 3: with the deal that he made with Elvis in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty seven, he entered into a limited joint venture agreement.
Speaker 3: Joint venture is like a partnership, as you know, and
Speaker 3: that the partnership, the twenty five percent commission remained on
Speaker 3: things like movies, on publishing royalties, on just about everything.
Speaker 3: But they split everything that colonel, every bonus payment that
Speaker 3: Colonel got beyond the contracted amount fifty to fifty. Now,
Speaker 3: anybody could understand that the temptation in that kind of
Speaker 3: a deal is to have less and less, less and
Speaker 3: less money in the actual contract, and more and more
Speaker 3: put into bonus situations. And that basically is what happened
Speaker 3: to a degree, not completely, but to a degree, over
Speaker 3: the next five or six years. Nineteen seventy three, Elvis
Speaker 3: and Colonel entered into what I think can fairly be
Speaker 3: called a partnership, except as you say, there were several
Speaker 3: things that were exempted. Publishing was exempted, the personal appearances
Speaker 3: were on a two thirds one third basis. But it
Speaker 3: was entered into so gladly on Elvis's part. It basically
Speaker 3: comprised six different contracts, all of which Colonel and his
Speaker 3: assistant Tom Diskott went over in great detail with Elvis
Speaker 3: and Vernon at Elvis's Hollywood home, and when everything was signed,
Speaker 3: Elvis announced there were many things involved in this agreement.
Speaker 3: But when everything was signed, Elvis announced to the guys
Speaker 3: around him, and he rarely told them about business. As
Speaker 3: much as they put out the I mean it, as
Speaker 3: much as they had ideas about what his business was.
Speaker 3: Was they honest, they really didn't know, and I'm not
Speaker 3: putting them down, but they didn't. But Elvis announced to
Speaker 3: them what a great deal he had made with colonel,
Speaker 3: so you can say, well, Elvis was foolish, he hadn't
Speaker 3: made such a great deal. On the other hand, I
Speaker 3: would say there was nobody else in the world who
Speaker 3: could have made the money for Elvis that Colonel Parker did.
Speaker 3: There was no manager Moore Kenny, and there was no
Speaker 3: one more who was better at both manipulating the record
Speaker 3: company in particular and turning a chore into something which
Speaker 3: generated so much money it almost met Elvis's expenses.
Speaker 2: Let's flip the story over, as I say, if you
Speaker 2: read the book, Parker looks pretty good. He is someone
Speaker 2: you knew you subsequently interacted with the widow and the letters.
Speaker 2: What are some negative feelings you feel towards Parker.
Speaker 3: The simplest negative feeling and the biggest revelation to me
Speaker 3: in the book, and the place where I really was
Speaker 3: unhappy to end up with, was that his gambling predilection,
Speaker 3: which was something again I think I mentioned to you
Speaker 3: I saw him as this, let's call him a lovable
Speaker 3: rascal if in my view, and you can read what
Speaker 3: I wrote previously, and I'm not trying to disown it,
Speaker 3: It's just represented my best understanding of the situation. But
Speaker 3: my understanding of him over the years was simply that
Speaker 3: if he lost a million dollars at the gaming table,
Speaker 3: which he didn't, I think eight hundred thousand may have
Speaker 3: been the most. It was the most I could ever document.
Speaker 3: But he did lose that much that he could walk
Speaker 3: away from that and just shrug his shoulders and not
Speaker 3: care at all. Now I was write in one respect,
Speaker 3: he didn't care about the money. He didn't care about
Speaker 3: the money anymore than Elvis did. Neither one of them
Speaker 3: cared the least bit about money. They weren't interested in
Speaker 3: accumulating money. They weren't interested in accumulating in the state
Speaker 3: that meant nothing to them. But from talking to lo Aanne,
Speaker 3: and from having her document from her journals and diary,
Speaker 3: something I want to say one thing about lo Anne.
Speaker 3: No one could have been a more loving wife than
Speaker 3: Loe Anne was. She adored Colonel She absolutely adored it.
Speaker 3: And as much as she adored him, she admired him.
Speaker 3: Maybe she admired him even more. I mean, to him,
Speaker 3: she was the greatest person in the world. And I'm
Speaker 3: not knocking that. But and yet when we started, when
Speaker 3: I started on the book, and she started helping me
Speaker 3: out with it. She was committed to telling the truth,
Speaker 3: and she said to me at one point after we've
Speaker 3: been tied, and I can only imagine how painful it
Speaker 3: was for her to say this. Colonel was a gambling addict,
Speaker 3: and she could document that from her journals and her diaries,
Speaker 3: and you know, and say, no matter how difficult it
Speaker 3: was for her to say this, and say there were
Speaker 3: times when he would spend three days in the strait
Speaker 3: in the casino, not come back to the room until
Speaker 3: the fourth day, and then just collapse. He was no
Speaker 3: good for anything. And she said, there's no other word
Speaker 3: for Peter, He's a gambling addict. So I ended up
Speaker 3: with a picture which I had not at all expected
Speaker 3: to end up with, in which you have two people
Speaker 3: addicted to two different things. Elvis to his pharmaceuticals has
Speaker 3: prescribed medications, Colonel to gambling, and neither one of them
Speaker 3: able to address the matter with the other because if
Speaker 3: one said, hey, you're doing this, the other would say, hey,
Speaker 3: what about you? And they literally they avoided it. For
Speaker 3: the most part, Colonel did everything he could for Elvis.
Speaker 3: There are many letters in here where he's trying to
Speaker 3: keep Elvis off the road, despite all the prevailing opinion.
Speaker 3: There are many letters in which he shares his concerns
Speaker 3: about Elvis with others. There are many letters in which
Speaker 3: he attempts to motivate Elvis to do better and to
Speaker 3: say that, you know, Elvis is the greatest entertainer he's
Speaker 3: ever known, and he Elvis alone can fix these problems.
Speaker 3: But nonetheless, neither one of them could confront the other's problems.
Speaker 3: And that was the revelation for me, and it's an
Speaker 3: unhappy revelation for me. And it doesn't undercut Colonel's genius.
Speaker 3: Is you know, Chuad de Vivra, his great sense of
Speaker 3: his embrace of life. I mean, he was just a
Speaker 3: true He was one of the most vital people I've
Speaker 3: ever known. And he exemplified that spirit of vitality and
Speaker 3: inventedness and sourcefulness all of his life. But that still
Speaker 3: doesn't take you wanted to know what I saw is
Speaker 3: his greatest weakness. Well, his other greatest weakness was a
Speaker 3: trauma that he carried with him from childhood. He was
Speaker 3: so mistrustful that it took a great deal for him
Speaker 3: to give himself to other people, to demonstrate love, to
Speaker 3: show his you know, to show his concern. But when
Speaker 3: he did, he gave it all out. And that's another
Speaker 3: thing in the book which surprised me, because I found
Speaker 3: all these extended families which he formed in the absence
Speaker 3: of the family he had left behind in Holland, Okay.
Speaker 2: Eldest dies in sevent According to the book, the recording
Speaker 2: rights were all sold to RCA before to help Elvis
Speaker 2: out financially. Elvis dies in seventy seven. From Elvis, does
Speaker 2: the colonel continue to make money after his death or
Speaker 2: is it pretty much stopped there?
Speaker 3: No, No, he made a great deal of money for
Speaker 3: himself and for the estate. He again generated more money
Speaker 3: I think than any other manager could have, and it
Speaker 3: was an enormous amount of money for the estate. And
Speaker 3: he found ingenious ways of getting RCA to pay more
Speaker 3: money than they would have otherwise, to advance money. And
Speaker 3: he made deals for the showings, basically with Colonel Parker,
Speaker 3: just as with you know, most good businessman. Ownership was everything,
Speaker 3: and the television specials that Elvis did the estate came
Speaker 3: to all And so he made deals after Elvis died
Speaker 3: for the reshowings of the very lucrative deals for the
Speaker 3: reshowings of the television specials that Elvis had, so he
Speaker 3: made a great deal of money for the estate, and
Speaker 3: both Vernon Presley and Priscilla Presley were very at Priscilla
Speaker 3: Presley wasn't part of the estate, but she was involved
Speaker 3: as the mother of Elvis's heir, Lisa Marie, and they
Speaker 3: were very happy with it. But when Vernon died, the
Speaker 3: court came in and I think it was the Chancery
Speaker 3: Court of Memphis, and they ordered that there'd be an
Speaker 3: adlita attorney to take up the interests of the miner
Speaker 3: who was now the sole heir of Elvis' estate. This
Speaker 3: was Lisa Marie and she was at this point, I
Speaker 3: think twelve years old. And the court ordered that the
Speaker 3: estate sued the colonel. The estate did not want to
Speaker 3: so the colonel and it ended up being a money
Speaker 3: drained for everybody, but they were ordered by the court
Speaker 3: to do it. The ad Leadam attorney made a report
Speaker 3: which and you asked earlier what the source of Elvis's
Speaker 3: bad reputation is, it was primarily, I would say, the
Speaker 3: odd Leadam report, which involves involved a considerable misunderstanding by
Speaker 3: someone who really did not know much about show business
Speaker 3: or the entertainment world of many of the deals Colonel
Speaker 3: had made by for simple example, he upbraided Colonel. Well,
Speaker 3: first of all, one thing was he saw Colonel is
Speaker 3: taking fifty percent of everything, which from the beginning, which
Speaker 3: wasn't true. But the main thing that I think he misunderstood,
Speaker 3: he just misunderstood the terms of the deals. And for example,
Speaker 3: he upbraided Colonel for having maintained for having let Elvis
Speaker 3: continue to collect a five percent royalty on his records
Speaker 3: at a time when other artists were making a great
Speaker 3: deal more. That was not what the contract called for.
Speaker 3: The contract was improved every year. The first year, the
Speaker 3: first year of the contract RCA in fifty six, eleven
Speaker 3: months after the initial signing, it was improved by a
Speaker 3: million dollars. It continued to be improved. The royalties continued
Speaker 3: to be improved. But because of and I don't know
Speaker 3: you want to hear all this, but because of the
Speaker 3: most Favored Nations agreements, which everybody knows. You know, every
Speaker 3: any manager worth assault is going to get the most
Speaker 3: Favored Nations agreement for his artist if the artist is
Speaker 3: enough of a start. That means that you know, if
Speaker 3: you get one hundred and ten dollars, I get one
Speaker 3: hundred and ten dollars even if I signed for ninety.
Speaker 3: So the problem was that if Elvis got more than
Speaker 3: five percent, which was a top royalty rate that RCA
Speaker 3: was paying, that would mean a lot of other people
Speaker 3: would get more than five percent. Well, Elvis got a
Speaker 3: lot more than five percent, but it wasn't written in
Speaker 3: the contract. It was part of an unwritten agreement of
Speaker 3: the recon agreements which were attached to every contract that
Speaker 3: he went on from nineteen fifty six on.
Speaker 2: Okay to put a bow on it. Because Elvis dies
Speaker 2: in seventy seven, it's a very different circumstance. And today
Speaker 2: with streaming, where all the music of the deceased artists
Speaker 2: at a fingertip, they have to produce albums, they get
Speaker 2: all the factories, et cetera. The word at the time
Speaker 2: was that all of these rights had been sold to
Speaker 2: RCA and Elvis and Elvis's estate Elvis' is obviously deceased,
Speaker 2: did not get another penny from the sale of the records.
Speaker 2: Is that true? No?
Speaker 3: I mean what was sold Elvis and Vernon's demand in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three were future royalties on recordings made before
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, that's royalties. The RCA, the record company
Speaker 3: owned the masters, as every record company at the time,
Speaker 3: didn continue to get royalties on everything that he recorded.
Speaker 3: After nineteen seventy three, Colonel continued to put in bonus points.
Speaker 3: I don't know how best to describe it, but for example,
Speaker 3: one of the things that Colonel ensured was that if
Speaker 3: pre nineteen seventy three recordings were released, post nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: three recordings were included on the same album. Therefore the
Speaker 3: Elvis Elvis estate would get royalties. I mean, it's a
Speaker 3: very complicated thing, but he got concessions. Having made one deal,
Speaker 3: he got concessions out of URCA, first for Elvis and
Speaker 3: then for the estate, so that Elvis would continue to
Speaker 3: make and the estate continued to make extraordinary amounts of money.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't have all this my fingertips, But
Speaker 3: for example, let's say, in order for the Colonel owned
Speaker 3: all the photographs, and it was within in RCA's power
Speaker 3: to pay a great deal more for photographs to Colonel
Speaker 3: and into the estate than they would have otherwise. But
Speaker 3: the income stream never stopped, and Elvis in the immediate
Speaker 3: aftermath of his death was the Elvis estate was making
Speaker 3: a great deal of money. One of the ways they
Speaker 3: were making the money was it was the Colonel's greatest
Speaker 3: concern and I think people who are concerned with intellectual
Speaker 3: property today, which is you know, the word on the street,
Speaker 3: the word everywhere is IP intellectual property. Colonel was concerned
Speaker 3: in the immediate from the day of Elvis's death on
Speaker 3: that what he called vultures would come in, swoop in
Speaker 3: and basically they would merchandise. They would sell merchandise, making
Speaker 3: money off of Elvis's name and likeness. There was no
Speaker 3: law at that time that prevented them from doing that.
Speaker 3: There was no lot exactly the prevented them. There was
Speaker 3: eventually an Elvis Law which people in Hollywood, stars in
Speaker 3: Hollywood were able to take advantage of. It was the
Speaker 3: first law was in Tennessee, but that was in the future.
Speaker 3: But Colonel set up a Then he made a deal
Speaker 3: with a company called Factors Incorporated, which had represented I
Speaker 3: think Faara Facet Majors and made a huge amount of
Speaker 3: money off of merchandise in her stuff. And he made
Speaker 3: a deal which brought a great deal into the estate.
Speaker 3: Factors actually ended up losing money, because what they guaranteed
Speaker 3: was to go after every malefactor who attempted to make
Speaker 3: money off of Elvis's name and likeness. And so you know, again,
Speaker 3: I'm not saying this is a perfect thing. I don't
Speaker 3: know what the perfect thing would have been. But Colonel
Speaker 3: took an extremely proactive role. And if you look at
Speaker 3: the I don't have this in front of me right now,
Speaker 3: but if you were to look at I have all
Speaker 3: the you know, all the information. And if you were
Speaker 3: to look at the income there was general for the
Speaker 3: estate in the three years between Elvis's death and Vernon's death,
Speaker 3: the estate made a great deal of money.
Speaker 2: If this lead deep if RCA, if a song is
Speaker 2: stream or a songness sould, does the eldest estique get
Speaker 2: any money?
Speaker 3: One of the things Colonel insisted on. And again, anybody
Speaker 3: in the music business would understand this. Most people outside
Speaker 3: of music business wouldn't. Where is the money situated in
Speaker 3: the music business. It's in publishing. It's all very well.
Speaker 3: If let's say let's let's say I put out a
Speaker 3: record and I have a hit. That's great. I'll make
Speaker 3: a certain amount of money. Maybe I make five percent royalty,
Speaker 3: maybe at this point, I'll make twelve percent. I don't
Speaker 3: know what I'll make. But when the record is done,
Speaker 3: it's done. However you may go on. You may cover
Speaker 3: that record. There may be a polka band that covers it.
Speaker 3: It may be come back as he hit twenty five
Speaker 3: years from now. The person who owns the publisher is
Speaker 3: the person who makes the money. The thing that Colonel
Speaker 3: set up from the beginning was a partnership with for Elvis,
Speaker 3: with Hill and Range, which is one of the pioneer
Speaker 3: and BMI, which was the you know, the rebel rights group.
Speaker 3: I mean they set up against ASCAP back in I'm
Speaker 3: trying to think when I think, probably in the early forties,
Speaker 3: but they didn't come really come into their own. BMI
Speaker 3: and Hill and Range is one of the leading publishers
Speaker 3: until the late forties, and they essentially represented those groups
Speaker 3: which had not BMI represented those groups which hadn't been
Speaker 3: represented before, which was primarily hillbilly and black music. Elvis
Speaker 3: had a partnership with Hill and Range, so that virtually
Speaker 3: every song that he recorded, at least for the ten years,
Speaker 3: the songs that formed the basis for the Elvis Library,
Speaker 3: the Elvis Archive. He was a fifty to fifty partner
Speaker 3: with Hill and Range in the publishing, so he continues
Speaker 3: to make to this day. Elvis, by the way, would
Speaker 3: not participate in the more common practice of putting his
Speaker 3: name on a song. He did that with three songs
Speaker 3: at the beginning. One of them was Don't Be Cruel,
Speaker 3: one was Love Me Tender, and he said, I've never
Speaker 3: written a song. I don't want to do this, and
Speaker 3: he dropped out. Hill and Range wanted him to do
Speaker 3: it because it was a clearer it was a clearer
Speaker 3: right of property. I think I read an argument about it,
Speaker 3: and I can't recapitulate it. But Elvis wouldn't do it anyway.
Speaker 3: But he did have the publishing, and he had the
Speaker 3: publishing it because Colonel. There are several letters in the
Speaker 3: book in which Colonel tells him, you know you've got
Speaker 3: lots of friends. Your friends may come to you and
Speaker 3: they'll say, Elvis, I have the most wonderful song for you.
Speaker 3: It's going to make you more money, but I'm going
Speaker 3: to keep the publishing. And Colonel said, those are not
Speaker 3: your friends.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: If they are your friends, they'll want to see you
Speaker 3: make money too. And it is that by owning the
Speaker 3: by calling the publishing on all of his songs. As
Speaker 3: Colonel wrote to me, he says, you will have income
Speaker 3: coming to you long after you have ceased performing. And
Speaker 3: to a degree that's true. To another degree it may
Speaker 3: not be true because the problem I think with Elvis
Speaker 3: owning the publishing and not having the co writing is
Speaker 3: that once Elvis recorded a song on the hits anyway,
Speaker 3: he put such a stamp on the song that I'm
Speaker 3: not sure how many covers a lot of those songs got.
Speaker 3: I mean, they continue to be recorded, but I don't
Speaker 3: know how many hits. I don't know how many people
Speaker 3: have re recorded Jailhouse Rock and had a hit with it,
Speaker 3: or don't be cruel or that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Okay, So definitively, at this point in time, the estate
Speaker 2: still gets publishing income.
Speaker 3: As far as I knows, unless they change the deal.
Speaker 3: But yes, okay to the destory.
Speaker 2: And although it is a smaller amount than publishing income,
Speaker 2: does the estate still get recording royalties?
Speaker 3: No, they get recording recording royalties. They tried to reverse
Speaker 3: the deal in more recent times, but the deal was
Speaker 3: pretty much irreversible. They get recording. They get royalties from
Speaker 3: the records that were cut after nineteen from nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: three on, and that's a considerable number of records, and
Speaker 3: they continue to be repackaged, so they do get those,
Speaker 3: and they will also get and I mean if albums
Speaker 3: still sell, and that's a big if they would continue
Speaker 3: to get income from albums which include not only songs
Speaker 3: recorded before seventy three, but signs recorded after nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 3: which was something that Colonel insisted on during his tenure.
Speaker 2: Okay, back to the kernel. Elvis was the first big
Speaker 2: rock star, organic rock star prior to the Beatles. Conventional
Speaker 2: wisdom at this point in time is Brian Epstein was
Speaker 2: great in promoting the Beatles, not so great financially. Brian
Speaker 2: Epstein dies in the late sixties. A lot of things
Speaker 2: change in the music business in the seventies. First and foremost,
Speaker 2: the record companies end up being owned by larger conglomerates, etc.
Speaker 2: But you get this era of supermanagers. You know, there're
Speaker 2: a lot from Jerry Weintraub who worked with Elvis, to
Speaker 2: David Geffen to Irving as Off, etc. Was the Colonel
Speaker 2: just as good as them. It was a different era,
Speaker 2: or was he superseded by a later generation of managers, a.
Speaker 3: Lot of exempt Jerry Wintrop, I don't, I mean Jay,
Speaker 3: but leaving that outside, I think he was just as good.
Speaker 3: I mean he The biggest thing was, as he said,
Speaker 3: he says, I'm not a polo lounge manager. I don't
Speaker 3: just sit back and collect my money. I don't have
Speaker 3: a stable of artists, each of whom pay me my money,
Speaker 3: and none of whom I fully support. I am out
Speaker 3: there with my artist, and I am out there one
Speaker 3: hundred percent. And I'm not just out I'm out there
Speaker 3: on tour with them. I'm involved in every aspect of
Speaker 3: their business, of his business. I mean, you're talking about one,
Speaker 3: one artist manager of so this is it's a very
Speaker 3: different kind of situation. You would You wouldn't have this
Speaker 3: degree of dedication, devotion or just pure I would call
Speaker 3: love and admiration for the artist. You you don't see
Speaker 3: that kind of thing to that extent. The other thing
Speaker 3: is that Elvis's and Colonel's business was entirely separate. When
Speaker 3: Elvis's money came to Elvis directly, there was no pass through,
Speaker 3: there wasn't anything. I mean, Colonel got his twenty five
Speaker 3: percent in one check, Elvis got his seventy five percent
Speaker 3: in another check. Whether it was from RCA or you know,
Speaker 3: the promoter or anybody else, but the biggest thing, and
Speaker 3: I honestly think that this is a huge difference, and
Speaker 3: it's what was revolutionary. Well, Colonel did I I can't
Speaker 3: you know the name. I know all the names that
Speaker 3: you mentioned, but the only name that I would say
Speaker 3: was comparable to colonel and I know a lot of
Speaker 3: people would dismiss this would be Alan Klein. And the
Speaker 3: biggest difference between Colonel and Allen and Alan Klein. I'll
Speaker 3: say I knew Alan Klein very well. I would say,
Speaker 3: against what most people would want me to say, he
Speaker 3: was a very good friend, but perhaps the most difficult
Speaker 3: friend you could ever have. But Alan Klein essentially did
Speaker 3: attempted to do the same thing. I mean, if you
Speaker 3: were to look at the situation that the Rolling Stones
Speaker 3: were in through Andrew Andrew lou Goldham's management when Alan
Speaker 3: Klein took over. I know that Mick Jagger hates him.
Speaker 3: I know Jack Keith Richards likes I don't want to
Speaker 3: make it personal, and I know that Keith and that
Speaker 3: this is not the way MC Jagger sees it. Keyth
Speaker 3: Richards was always close to Alan. But the point is
Speaker 3: what Alan did in terms of allowing them to be
Speaker 3: in charge of their business well at the same time
Speaker 3: taking control of all the publishing, which will be a
Speaker 3: source of conflict to this day. But that was what
Speaker 3: Colonel did for Alan. By the way, the huge, biggest difference,
Speaker 3: a huge difference between Alan Klein and Colonel Parker was
Speaker 3: that Alan didn't have a sense of humor. Colonel had
Speaker 3: a great sense of humor. It was what kept him going.
Speaker 3: But the thing that with Colonel, and I think that
Speaker 3: has to be taken into account, and the thing that
Speaker 3: sets him apart from virtually every other manager you can name.
Speaker 3: He loved his artist. He signed his artist, the greatest,
Speaker 3: the greatest entertainer, the greatest singer, the greatest visionary that
Speaker 3: he had ever known. He believed in him one hundred percent,
Speaker 3: and he did everything from the very beginning. And this
Speaker 3: is I mean, I call one of the early chapters
Speaker 3: about his association with Elvis, and there's a lot of
Speaker 3: story before Elvis and Colonel's career with Eddie Arnold mirrors
Speaker 3: what he did with Elvis almost exactly and made out
Speaker 3: Eddie Arnold into a superstar such as country music did
Speaker 3: never saw again until Garth Brooks. But with Elvis, I
Speaker 3: call the chapter defending Elvis, and he defended Elvis at
Speaker 3: every turn, and most of all, he defended his artist
Speaker 3: artistic choices. And no matter who came at him, whether
Speaker 3: RCA came at him, whether William Barris said, look, the
Speaker 3: way he's appearing on television is terrible, whether the movies
Speaker 3: or television or anybody else asked him to change his
Speaker 3: artist approach or change his approach to promoting his arts,
Speaker 3: he says, you know, my artist knows what he's doing.
Speaker 3: He knows his business. I stand behind him one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And that's something I don't think he's ever gotten credit for.
Speaker 3: And yet I think it's incontrovertible if you look at
Speaker 3: the effects.
Speaker 2: Okay, you have all these letters, and some of them
Speaker 2: are very lengthy. Needless to say, we don't live in
Speaker 2: the same era now, we live in a text email world.
Speaker 2: But certainly when Elvis is the star, there is the telephone.
Speaker 2: Do you find that he would write letters when other
Speaker 2: people did not, or it was just a different era
Speaker 2: and everybody wrote letters.
Speaker 3: I think it was a different era, you know. And
Speaker 3: you mentioned the differences. Short attention span might be the
Speaker 3: biggest difference of all. I mean, try writing an email
Speaker 3: that people can will actually read. I mean, I'm told
Speaker 3: by by kiss you've got to keep your email, show
Speaker 3: one one topic to the email. But I'm not convinced
Speaker 3: that even that will work. But no, I mean looking,
Speaker 3: I mean looking at the correspondence. And I went through
Speaker 3: thousands and thousands of letters, and they weren't just those letters.
Speaker 3: Everybody wrote letters. The thing that was most entertaining was
Speaker 3: that everybody that Colonel liked, all of Colonel's pals in
Speaker 3: a sense, tried to top each other even in the
Speaker 3: midst of doing business with jokes with you know, just
Speaker 3: it was a kind of a generation. It was a
Speaker 3: generation that prized kid in as much as anything else,
Speaker 3: and you get each of them that in the way.
Speaker 3: Was one of the things that was so wonderful was
Speaker 3: to see the extent to which they engaged with each other,
Speaker 3: and engage with each other even in business on a
Speaker 3: kind of amicable basis, but definitely on a basis to
Speaker 3: try to get the best deal possible in the Colonel's case,
Speaker 3: for his.
Speaker 2: Artists, when one reads the letters. To use the vernacular,
Speaker 2: the Colonel's kissing a lot of butt. You're so great,
Speaker 2: You're so great. I may not be aware of what's
Speaker 2: going on, Okay, was his style in general.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't call it kissing, but I think that he
Speaker 3: is having a He's having a laugh at their expensiveness.
Speaker 3: He's recognizes that nobody is going to take them seriously
Speaker 3: when he says that, I mean, this is a very
Speaker 3: very canny person. He's dealing with people, he's dealing with
Speaker 3: Ivy Lee. I mean, one of one of the things.
Speaker 3: This is a class revolution on both his part and Elvis's.
Speaker 3: When they came to Hollywood, everybody looked at them and
Speaker 3: they said, oh, look at those roofs, look at those
Speaker 3: country bumpkins. And he and Elvis proved, you know, all
Speaker 3: these sophisticated people may have gone to Cornell, might have
Speaker 3: gone to Kolgi, might have gone to Harvard, might have
Speaker 3: gone to well wherever, And they proved them wrong. And
Speaker 3: within within two or three months. And I think one
Speaker 3: of the great jokes that Elvis and Colonel shared was
Speaker 3: to look at each other to recognize that Elvis had
Speaker 3: overcome the doubters with his talent. Colonel had overcome, you know,
Speaker 3: the doubters with his call it his brilliance, his sophistication
Speaker 3: while playing the part of the country roup. And they
Speaker 3: could look He and Elvis could look at each other
Speaker 3: because they shared a sense of humor and they shared
Speaker 3: an appreciation, I think for the way the world was
Speaker 3: and for the way the world looked down upon people
Speaker 3: of a lower class, I mean, of a lower economic class,
Speaker 3: And they could look at each other and say, who's
Speaker 3: the room now. But I know, I think that there
Speaker 3: is an engagement in the letters occasionally, and they were
Speaker 3: also there are so many letters in which Colonel just
Speaker 3: upbraids when he is not writing to a friend and says,
Speaker 3: how could you do this? How could you release the
Speaker 3: movie follow That Dream as just another Elvis movie Following
Speaker 3: a Dream? Actually, I think is one of them better
Speaker 3: movies that Elvis made after I'm not a big advocate
Speaker 3: of the movies, but but it was intended as a
Speaker 3: different kind of comedy, almost an Andy Griffith kind of comedy.
Speaker 3: And when it was released, Colonel wrote to the record,
Speaker 3: to the movie company and studio and said, you know
Speaker 3: you've released this out this record this. You've released this
Speaker 3: movie which has its own unique tone in which Elvis
Speaker 3: gives a good comic performance, and he released it as
Speaker 3: if it were just another Elvis movie and people are
Speaker 3: going to flock to it because it's another Elvis movie.
Speaker 3: That's not the way this business works. You have to
Speaker 3: sell what you're presented, and you had an opportunity here,
Speaker 3: or you maybe you still have an opportunity here to
Speaker 3: sell the product which you are putting out, but you're
Speaker 3: not doing your job. So I would say he was
Speaker 3: pretty frank where he was really frank and where he
Speaker 3: was direct and where he was in his dealings with RCA.
Speaker 3: And very soon after the Grand High Pubas at RCA,
Speaker 3: Bill Bullock and Steve Sholes and well variety people expressed
Speaker 3: their disapproval and displeasure with the direction that Elvis was
Speaker 3: taking and Colonel was taking and promoting him. In early
Speaker 3: fifty six, very soon after that, Elvis's success and Colonel's
Speaker 3: belief in Elvis completely disproved what the people at RCA were,
Speaker 3: what the executives RCA were calling for, And he became
Speaker 3: great friends with someone like Bill Bullock and they exchanged
Speaker 3: all kinds of all kinds of joky letters, but also
Speaker 3: letters in which they were negotiating for high stakes. And
Speaker 3: when Bill Bullock comes to Colonel, for example, I think
Speaker 3: around nineteen sixty and says, I've had a great idea,
Speaker 3: we should record Elvis with a symphony orchestra. Colonel just says, look,
Speaker 3: that's a terrific idea, but it does a disservice both
Speaker 3: symphony orchestra into Elvis, and that's a terrible idea, and
Speaker 3: I don't think you should do it. I mean, he
Speaker 3: wasn't hesitant about expressing his views, but always expressing his
Speaker 3: views after first after first consulting with Elvis and determining
Speaker 3: that these were Elvis's views.
Speaker 2: Okay, Also talking about conventional wisdom, which is debunked in
Speaker 2: your book, A conventional wisdom is that Colonel was not
Speaker 2: a citizen in the United States, and therefore he didn't
Speaker 2: want Elvis playing outside the country. You debunked that. But
Speaker 2: parallel to that in the book is ultimately the family
Speaker 2: in the Netherlands find out who he is and that
Speaker 2: he's had success. He keeps them at arm's length.
Speaker 3: He does.
Speaker 2: Do you believe how much was keeping arm's length because
Speaker 2: he was fear of being exposed. How much was he
Speaker 2: wanted nothing to do with these people? How much is
Speaker 2: he he hated the family? How much he feel you know,
Speaker 2: what was really going on there? Why was she really
Speaker 2: keeping the family at arms with?
Speaker 3: All? Right, I'm going to say yes to all of
Speaker 3: the above, because honestly, you've touched on I mean when
Speaker 3: you say I've debunked, I hope I haven't debunked. I
Speaker 3: hope I've introduced issues that can continue to be discussed
Speaker 3: and debated and in which people can make up their
Speaker 3: own minds by both the facts that I'm presenting and
Speaker 3: sometimes the theories that I'm presenting. But this was a
Speaker 3: very different world, and I want to be in terms
Speaker 3: of citizenship. I want to put forward a few things,
Speaker 3: but I want to start out by saying something terrible
Speaker 3: must have happened to Andreas Cornelius one Kirk, the young
Speaker 3: Colonel Drees was how he was known when he was
Speaker 3: and I don't know what it was, And Colonel never
Speaker 3: spoke of what it was. He spoke of his father
Speaker 3: to his widow. He was a bad, bad man. He
Speaker 3: said this several times. He loved his mother dearly. What
Speaker 3: happened and what should have caused such a sense of
Speaker 3: total dislocation and alienation. I don't know, and Colonel would
Speaker 3: never address it, and I think that had to play
Speaker 3: in to the sense. It was he adored his mother,
Speaker 3: his sisters seemed to adore him, so I can't really
Speaker 3: say what happened. But to get back to the citizenship question,
Speaker 3: Colonel served in the Army for more than three years
Speaker 3: the US Army as Tom Parker, a Dutch national. I mean,
Speaker 3: the name was made up, but he did not masquerade
Speaker 3: as an American.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 3: He went in as he's listed as a Dutch national.
Speaker 3: He married an American citizen, either one of which would
Speaker 3: have gotten him American citizenship had he applied. Now, I
Speaker 3: think not everybody agrees with me that life is full
Speaker 3: of mysteries and that those mysteries cannot all be plumped.
Speaker 3: I can't, for the life of me, understand why he
Speaker 3: didn't simply become become an American citizen. There was even
Speaker 3: at one point around nineteen forty or forty one, amnesty
Speaker 3: was offered to everybody who would now be called an
Speaker 3: illegal or whatever, who could become American citizens. He didn't,
Speaker 3: And when I spoke to LeeAnne about it. She could
Speaker 3: offer no explanation either other than Colonel didn't ask for favors.
Speaker 3: I mean, he was friendly, he was great friends with
Speaker 3: Lyndon Johnson. He could have asked Lindon Johnson to intercede.
Speaker 3: I do understand why he wouldn't do that, because, as
Speaker 3: you know, Colonel was the kind of person who might
Speaker 3: say Colonel Parker Grant's favors. He doesn't ask favors. But
Speaker 3: there's no good explanation for it. But to go back
Speaker 3: again to the citizenship thing, the artist Will M d'cooney
Speaker 3: came to America in nineteen twenty six, same year as Colonel,
Speaker 3: as a stowaway, same as Colonel from Rotterdale. Same as Colonel.
Speaker 3: He did not get his citizenship until nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 3: He went to Venice in nineteen he was worried about
Speaker 3: but he was worried about what this could mean. But
Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty seven, as I understand it from reading
Speaker 3: his biography, he went to Venice for celebration of his work.
Speaker 3: Obviously he had a passport. You know, not everybody had
Speaker 3: a birth certificate in those days. Prince, oh God, Prince
Speaker 3: Mike Romanov a prominent Hollywood restaurateur who claimed, you know,
Speaker 3: everything he claimed was false, but he claimed my other
Speaker 3: things to be an air. I think he was a Lithuanian,
Speaker 3: but Lithuanian Jew, but he claimed to be heir to
Speaker 3: the Russian throne. He entered this country before either Bill
Speaker 3: helmdacone nor a colonel. He got his citizenship in the
Speaker 3: last years of the Eisenhower administration. It didn't I got
Speaker 3: thrown out of this country several times, but he always
Speaker 3: came back. It didn't affect his life in any way.
Speaker 3: Colonel was planning a world tour for Elvis up until
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty. You mentioned his brother coming over here in
Speaker 3: sixty one. In some way way, I agree with you
Speaker 3: that that was a traumatic record realization in his part.
Speaker 3: There's a letter in the book which is the most
Speaker 3: extraordinarily almost when I say schizophrenic, I don't mean it's
Speaker 3: mental illness. But it's the most extraordinarily divided letter I've
Speaker 3: ever seen, in which Colonel writes back to his brother's son,
Speaker 3: his nephew, whom he didn't know, but writes back and
Speaker 3: starts out in the third person as if he was
Speaker 3: some obscure, obscure worker for this man, Colonel Parker, whom
Speaker 3: he rarely saw. And by the end of the book,
Speaker 3: it's almost by the end of the letter, which is
Speaker 3: not that long a letter, it's a confessional and the
Speaker 3: first person, somehow or that that really spooked to him
Speaker 3: his brother coming over. There was no more talk of
Speaker 3: a world tour after that. But what's weird if you
Speaker 3: want to think about the differences in the world, and
Speaker 3: we talked about reduced attention span, There's all kinds of
Speaker 3: things we could talk about that are different the globe, well,
Speaker 3: you know, network whatever. But everybody in Holland from nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty one on knew that Colonel Parker was Andreas van Kirk.
Speaker 3: Nobody in this country. Nobody, I mean, I'm not saying
Speaker 3: one or two knew. The only person in this country
Speaker 3: who knew that Colonel was Dutch was Elvis Presley, because
Speaker 3: Colonel introduced him to his brother. I find that virtually inexplicable,
Speaker 3: So I'm not going to try to explain it. But
Speaker 3: in the end, at the time when it was most
Speaker 3: likely that Elvis would tour, in the seventies, when he
Speaker 3: had begun making personal appearances again, and when the opportunity
Speaker 3: seemed to the opportunity did come up, there were offers.
Speaker 3: There were two things about this. One was when I
Speaker 3: spoke to Brazilla Press when I was writing The Last
Speaker 3: Trained to Memphis and Caroless Love. She said, you know,
Speaker 3: Elvis was great for working up enthusiasm when he was
Speaker 3: talking with the guys, the guys who worked for and
Speaker 3: they were they all wanted to go to Europe. This
Speaker 3: is in the sixties, and they were so excited about it,
Speaker 3: and Elvis would be in there saying, man, that would
Speaker 3: be the greatest thing we could ever do. Let's go
Speaker 3: to Europe. And she said he would get back behind
Speaker 3: closed doors. He said, I'm not going to Europe, but
Speaker 3: I've been to Germany. Why don't I want to go
Speaker 3: back to Europe? She said he had no win. Now,
Speaker 3: maybe that's not just as Priscilla said, they didn't know
Speaker 3: what he said behind the closed does with me. I
Speaker 3: didn't know what he said behind closed doors with them.
Speaker 3: So maybe maybe that's not true, but that certainly appeared
Speaker 3: to be the case as far as touring either Europe
Speaker 3: or Japan in the in the seventies, and that was
Speaker 3: born out by Tom Hewlett. You mentioned Jerry Weintraub. The
Speaker 3: person who worked with with with Elvis was not Jerry Wintrub.
Speaker 3: Who was Tom Hewlett, with whom Jerry Wintrub was partners
Speaker 3: And he was a person who had pioneered in rock
Speaker 3: in cross country rock tours with Jimmy Hendrix, with the
Speaker 3: Creedence clear Water, with Everybody in the sixties, with concerts
Speaker 3: West and he knew everything and he was the closest
Speaker 3: per to Colonel. In the latter years he worked as
Speaker 3: much as a partner. I mean, colonel had no partners.
Speaker 3: Every people worked for him. Tom Hulett was a virtual
Speaker 3: partner with him and they did the toys together.
Speaker 2: Okay, everywhere the Colonel goes, he makes these friends and
Speaker 2: he maintains the relationships. You're someone who actually knew the colonel.
Speaker 2: Too many people write books about people they never met.
Speaker 2: You knew the guy. Is this just his personality? He
Speaker 2: meets you, your best friend, he never forgets I realized
Speaker 2: kept you personally at arm's length at first, but it
Speaker 2: was a different situation. But he's in the army in Hawaii,
Speaker 2: he meets his family, maintains the relationship for decades.
Speaker 3: You know, no, that's I don't want to pretend. I mean,
Speaker 3: you stated it correctly. I'm not pretending to an intimate
Speaker 3: relationship with Colonel. I would have liked to have had one.
Speaker 3: I've been friendly with lots of people. I could say, well, eventually,
Speaker 3: after many years, Sam Phillips and I became true friends.
Speaker 3: I mean not just you know, but I would never
Speaker 3: boast about something that wasn't true. And with Colonel I
Speaker 3: loved the relationship I had, but it was not a
Speaker 3: you know, intimate. But I would say, you can look
Speaker 3: at Colonel's life and again this runs all through the book.
Speaker 3: There was something missing in his life. He had left
Speaker 3: his family behind. We don't know why he had left
Speaker 3: his family behind. I mean, we don't know why he
Speaker 3: never went back to it. You know, he stayed in
Speaker 3: touch with his mother until thirty two or I think
Speaker 3: thirty nineteen, thirty two or thirty three, and then he
Speaker 3: was no longer in touch, although he always spoke fondly
Speaker 3: and lovingly. But I would say he created these families,
Speaker 3: these extended families which were too substitute for the family
Speaker 3: he didn't have. And the Cuferrats in Hawaii, he met them,
Speaker 3: they took him in when he was in the army
Speaker 3: and in Hawaii station. In Hawaii, he met a man
Speaker 3: walking a Russian wolf. Found he colonel loved animals. He
Speaker 3: was drawn to the animal he spoke to. I can't
Speaker 3: remember what. Carl Koufrath, Papa Koufrath took him home. He
Speaker 3: became great friends with the youngest son in the family,
Speaker 3: and also with one of the guys who was married
Speaker 3: to one of the daughters. Very close friends and with
Speaker 3: the whole family. He's transferred to the mainland. He's transferred
Speaker 3: to Fort Barancas. I think in nineteen thirty two he
Speaker 3: leaves Hawaii. The Kufirats, who saw him virtually every weekend
Speaker 3: spent he spent almost all of his weekend with him.
Speaker 3: He couldn't have been closer. And they all say, we
Speaker 3: don't know what's going to happen to our friend Tom,
Speaker 3: the smartest, one of the smartest young man we've ever met.
Speaker 3: But he's going to do something wonderful. They didn't here
Speaker 3: from him again until nineteen fifty seven. He didn't have
Speaker 3: the wherewithal to be in touch. He brings Elvis to
Speaker 3: Hawaii in nineteen fifty seven on a bet with one
Speaker 3: of his protegees, a promoter from Detroit who had taken
Speaker 3: up residents in Australia, brought rock and Roll to Australia.
Speaker 3: He's a very interesting guy and another member of this
Speaker 3: extended family of Colonels. The members of Alvin Colonel's extended
Speaker 3: families didn't necessarily know each other, but anyway, he supposedly
Speaker 3: he takes Elvis to Hawaii on a bet. It takes
Speaker 3: him to Hawaiian a bet because he can't bring him
Speaker 3: to Australia because there wasn't time to fly there. But
Speaker 3: the real reason they went to Hawaii, I'm convinced, is
Speaker 3: to make contact with the Cuparrats. And the first call
Speaker 3: he makes when he gets there is to the Kupfarrass
Speaker 3: Old number. He finds out that Papa Cufarrat has died.
Speaker 3: He goes the next day and places a lay on
Speaker 3: his grave. Got a picture of that in the book.
Speaker 3: And he remains in contact with the family until he dies,
Speaker 3: and they were and they remain friends. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: a very close relationship and one that means a great
Speaker 3: deal to him.
Speaker 2: Okay. In the book, there ends up being a tension
Speaker 2: between the Colonel and the so called Memphis Mafia. Can
Speaker 2: you tell my listeners about that.
Speaker 3: Well, this is a direct correlation between Colonel's reputation and
Speaker 3: that tension, and there's a real reason for the tension.
Speaker 3: And I don't want to call the so called Memphis
Speaker 3: Mafi and I try to avoid the term. I mean,
Speaker 3: but they are the people who the men who worked
Speaker 3: for Elvis, his closest associates in France. They were all
Speaker 3: on the payroll. They're all quite different. Many of them
Speaker 3: were very creative. Someone like Red West, who was a
Speaker 3: tough guy, was a wonderful songwriter and a very good actor.
Speaker 3: Jerry Show is entirely different from others in the group.
Speaker 3: I mean, they're all quite different. But the one thing
Speaker 3: that and Joe Esposito, Jerry Shelling and Joe Esposito, Alan
Speaker 3: Fordyce nephew of Justice fortis they all were ultimately became
Speaker 3: great I don't want to say friends of Colonel's, but
Speaker 3: they came to admire Colonel a great deal. But Colonel
Speaker 3: from the very beginning, from the time that Elvis, especially
Speaker 3: from the time that Elvis came back from Germany, saw
Speaker 3: these guys around Elvis much as they loved Elvis, much
Speaker 3: as they were devoted to him, has not fulfilling any function,
Speaker 3: as not carrying out their jobs. And he wrote a
Speaker 3: number of very sharp tons letters to Elvis and to
Speaker 3: them saying, you know it's your business, Elvis, what you
Speaker 3: I wouldn't have these people working for me because they're
Speaker 3: not doing their jobs. And if they are going to
Speaker 3: continue working for you, if I were you, it's up
Speaker 3: to you. But if I were you, I would have
Speaker 3: them work for their money because they would then be
Speaker 3: they would think better of themselves if they did. Vernon
Speaker 3: Pressley had a less shaded view of them. He just
Speaker 3: viewed them really as people who were not worth hanging around.
Speaker 3: He really did view them as leeches. So you had
Speaker 3: these guys who worked for Elvius who were genuinely dedicated
Speaker 3: to Elvis in most cases in different ways. I mean,
Speaker 3: George Klein was different from Lamar Fike would really be
Speaker 3: doing a disservice to them to act as if they
Speaker 3: all had the same motivations. But Vernon just would just
Speaker 3: would just as soon have thrown them all out on
Speaker 3: their ear. And he wrote letters also. I got one
Speaker 3: letter in the in the book, but he wrote out
Speaker 3: of letters, so it would It's totally understandable that they
Speaker 3: should have had a certain resentment up to a point anyway,
Speaker 3: and sometimes that point was exceeded of Colonel Parker and
Speaker 3: of Vernon, who didn't think well of them. And in
Speaker 3: the end, one of the reasons that I think Colonel's
Speaker 3: reputation has suffered is that so many of these guys,
Speaker 3: and maybe with the best of motives, have written about Colonel,
Speaker 3: and sometimes their portrait of Colonel is not a negative,
Speaker 3: but their portrait of the business dealings which they truly
Speaker 3: knew nothing about and yet could make observations as any
Speaker 3: of us can. If we're standing outside the room, we
Speaker 3: can all guess what's going on inside the room. But
Speaker 3: that is what has come to characterize Colonel's has come
Speaker 3: to characterize Colonel to a fire greater extent than one
Speaker 3: might have wished, and to a fire greater extent than
Speaker 3: is merited by any of their involvement in the actual business.
Speaker 2: The Colonel breaks through in the carnival circus world then
Speaker 2: gets into music. Did he care about music at all
Speaker 2: or he just liked the action?
Speaker 3: No, I think he loved music. I mean I think
Speaker 3: in different ways. Instance, his first musical contact was roy
Speaker 3: A and I think struck What struck him there was
Speaker 3: the authenticity of the music. I don't think he knew
Speaker 3: this is way back in nineteen thirty six or so.
Speaker 3: I may have the date run, but thirty six thirty seven,
Speaker 3: somewhere in there, roy Acuff was the King of the Hillbillies,
Speaker 3: and roy Acuff asked Colonel to be his manager, to
Speaker 3: move to Nashville and be his manager, which shows the
Speaker 3: extent to which Colonel made an impression on him. But
Speaker 3: I think I don't think Colonel was drawn as much
Speaker 3: to his music as to the authenticity of the music
Speaker 3: and the way it reached its audience. What he was
Speaker 3: drawn to was I think when he started managing Eddie
Speaker 3: Arnold in nineteen forty four, and in the brief time
Speaker 3: before then that he knew Eddie Arnold, I think what
Speaker 3: he saw in Eddie Arnold was a different kind of music.
Speaker 3: I want to back up one second. Colonel was not
Speaker 3: on musical I mean, one of the things I have
Speaker 3: in the book is what the story that Loanne told
Speaker 3: me that he told her about his career as a
Speaker 3: prepubescent opera singer. And this is the reason, because the
Speaker 3: reason is that Colonel's mother, who was a whose whole
Speaker 3: family were water peddlers. They traversed Holland selling all kinds
Speaker 3: of things. Well, colonel's mother's one of Colonel's mother's sisters
Speaker 3: was an opera singer who lived abroad, but she would
Speaker 3: come back to Holland and Colonel and his mother and
Speaker 3: maybe other members of the family would go to see
Speaker 3: the operas. Colonel learned all the arias and as a
Speaker 3: very young kid eight nine, ten would go out on
Speaker 3: this lake where all the rich people lived outside of
Speaker 3: Breda and seeing the arias, and they would come out
Speaker 3: on as he told the table, they'd come out on
Speaker 3: their porches and bravo, bravo, and maybe they would flaming,
Speaker 3: you know, two coins at him. And he loved operating
Speaker 3: the end of his life. But with ed Arnold, I
Speaker 3: think he found an artist quite similar to Elvis, who
Speaker 3: reached people with what was then called heart music, reached
Speaker 3: them with a kind of music that truly touched them.
Speaker 3: And I think Colonel was drawn to that music and
Speaker 3: saw it. It wasn't It's not like you know, everybody
Speaker 3: would want Elvis's manager should be a rock and roll fan. Well,
Speaker 3: not even Elvis. Elvis was an everything music fan. He
Speaker 3: loved every kind of music. Colonel definitely, it wasn't like
Speaker 3: he was a rock and roll you know, impassioned rock
Speaker 3: and roll fan. But first with Ddy Arnold, with Elvis,
Speaker 3: he saw artists who had a vision that carried them
Speaker 3: beyond the common heard, and also with a vision that
Speaker 3: enabled them even if they couldn't articulate it, and I
Speaker 3: don't think Elvis could at the beginning. But even if
Speaker 3: they couldn't articulate, was going to carry them and allow
Speaker 3: them to grow almost day by day. In Elvis's case,
Speaker 3: from the time Colonel first met him, when he was funny,
Speaker 3: just grow and develop and create something that had never
Speaker 3: been created before. That's what I think he was drawn to.
Speaker 3: He was drawn to the wonderful world of show business,
Speaker 3: and he to him, Elvis was the pinnacle of the
Speaker 3: wonderful world of show business.
Speaker 2: Okay, this, of course is a theoretical question, but you
Speaker 2: set it up in the book that Elvis is on
Speaker 2: sun but he's on low rent tours. He's not always
Speaker 2: performing in a way that's endearing himself to the local
Speaker 2: authorities in the audience. What would have happened to Elvis
Speaker 2: if he never met Colonel Tom Parker.
Speaker 3: Well, the story of Elvis is the story of the
Speaker 3: confluence of three of the most extraordinary people I ever.
Speaker 3: I didn't know Elvias sciety, I don't want, but three
Speaker 3: of the most extraordinary people I've ever encountered or known about.
Speaker 3: The idea that Elvis should first be taken up by
Speaker 3: Sam Phillips, and the Sam Phillips, who was a person
Speaker 3: of the most extraordinary vision, should have let's reverse it
Speaker 3: should have been taken up by Elvis sort of seen
Speaker 3: in Elvis someone a talent that he had never envisioned before.
Speaker 3: And then for Colonel Parker, a person of a completely
Speaker 3: different type of personality and vision, but with an equal
Speaker 3: There were no true people in the world who believed
Speaker 3: in Elvis more than Sam Phillips and the Colonel Parker,
Speaker 3: however little they may have had in common, and however
Speaker 3: little they may have liked each other. But I don't
Speaker 3: know what would have happened. I mean, Sam Phillips as
Speaker 3: little as he liked Colonel until Colonel until they actually
Speaker 3: finally sat down at Colonel's eightieth birthday, which was just
Speaker 3: an amazing private event. I mean, not the birthday party.
Speaker 3: But the dialogue which I just happened to, I was
Speaker 3: trying to leave, and I happened to over here or
Speaker 3: listen to. But but Sam Phillips always and all the
Speaker 3: time that I knew that nobody could have carried Elvis
Speaker 3: to the heights that Elvis wanted to achieve. Elvis did
Speaker 3: not want it. He wanted to be a movie star.
Speaker 3: He wanted to be a movie star like James Dean
Speaker 3: and Marilon Brendo. He wanted the world to know him,
Speaker 3: which is similar to the ambition of another person that
Speaker 3: I wrote about extensively, Sam Cook. He wanted to be
Speaker 3: accepted and loved by everyone. Sam Phillips, first of all,
Speaker 3: would have gone bankrupt if he hadn't sold Elvis' contract.
Speaker 3: Second of all, was not equipped, as he himself said,
Speaker 3: to promote Elvis. And even if he happened and equipped
Speaker 3: to hisself, that wasn't what he wanted to do. And
Speaker 3: he saw in Colonel Parker someone who, as I say
Speaker 3: at the beginning, he loathed. He saw one of the
Speaker 3: few people in the world who could have taken Elvis
Speaker 3: to the heights to which Elvis aspired, not the artistic heights,
Speaker 3: Colonel had nothing to do with Elvis's music, nothing to
Speaker 3: do with his artistry, and I think Sam Phillips was
Speaker 3: well of that. But you know, again, Sam Phillips did
Speaker 3: not believe in coincidence. I don't know what I believe in.
Speaker 3: Colonel believes in the wonderful world of show business. I'm
Speaker 3: not prepared to state my beliefs, but I've got to
Speaker 3: say it's an amazing thing that the three of them
Speaker 3: should have interacted in that way, and that it should
Speaker 3: have resulted in such extraordinary achievements by all three of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, to get the contract to RCAA. Actually it's the
Speaker 2: Colonel who makes the deal, and it seems like an
Speaker 2: incredibly small amount of money that RCAA balks at and
Speaker 2: ultimately pays. What happened to Seam financially after that? Did
Speaker 2: he blow the money or did he manage to live
Speaker 2: on that money for the rest of his life?
Speaker 3: Neither one. I mean, Sam had enormous ambitions of his own. Again,
Speaker 3: I've never met anyone who's more of a musical visionary
Speaker 3: than Sam Phillips. He did not want to be a
Speaker 3: one artist label. Well, he couldn't have been. He was
Speaker 3: literally on the verge of losing his company because his
Speaker 3: brother Judd owned something like fifty percent, was about to
Speaker 3: turn it over to the bank. He was out of money.
Speaker 3: He was out of luck. With the thirty five thousand
Speaker 3: dollars that RCA paid for Elvis's contract, Sam was finally
Speaker 3: able to get his label, Son, this tiny little label.
Speaker 3: He was like Colonel. He was a one man operation.
Speaker 3: I mean, the two of them, it's an amazing parallel story.
Speaker 3: Is as unlike each other as they were. But Sam
Speaker 3: was finally able to get his label, tiny little label.
Speaker 3: Son was one man operation on point and with the
Speaker 3: first record that he made, the first record that he
Speaker 3: released after selling Elvis' contract was Kyle Bracon's Blue Sweede Shoes,
Speaker 3: which was a bigger hit at least from the start
Speaker 3: in Elvis's first record for Urica Heartbreak Hotel and which
Speaker 3: went to the up with the country R and B
Speaker 3: and pop charts. That was the beginning and from that
Speaker 3: point on, Sam had the money to operate his to
Speaker 3: operate his label. He had. I think Johnny Cash was
Speaker 3: then next person to come in, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Speaker 3: h Kyle Prikins was the first person. Johnny Cash and
Speaker 3: the others Charlie Rich and he operated one of the
Speaker 3: most extraordinary labels, one of the most extraordinary musical presentations
Speaker 3: that the world has ever seen. And before Elvis, he
Speaker 3: had done the same thing with blues and rhythm and blues. So,
Speaker 3: I mean, there's an amazing story there too, But that's
Speaker 3: not our story today.
Speaker 2: Okay. Vernon is writing letters and constantly telling the colonel
Speaker 2: that Elvis is spending more than he's making. The press
Speaker 2: are portrayed a Hillbillies. It's one thing to be the
Speaker 2: conveyor of the message, Hey, we're in the red. We're
Speaker 2: in the red. Was Vernon Street smart to me, have
Speaker 2: any level of sophistication or was he just flipping out
Speaker 2: that Elvis was spending more than he was earning.
Speaker 3: Well, you're really you're understating the case. Elvis was making
Speaker 3: millions of dollars and he was spending millions of dollars more.
Speaker 3: And Vernon was very similar, I think to his son.
Speaker 3: He actually had a singing voice, very much like his sons,
Speaker 3: and he I think he had a dry sense of humor.
Speaker 3: He didn't have the talent that Elvis had, But no,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't I wouldn't call them hillbillies. They were people
Speaker 3: of limited education, like so many of the people I've
Speaker 3: written about, like virtually all of the people I've written about,
Speaker 3: but with you know, with extraordinary innate intelligence. I mean,
Speaker 3: the thing with Vernon was he loved his son. He
Speaker 3: did everything he could to protect his son. One of
Speaker 3: the most heartbreaking scenes that I've ever or encountered, or
Speaker 3: ever had to write was Vernon's reaction on Elvis's death
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy seven. But nobody, absolutely nobody, I mean
Speaker 3: I could start up, but nobody could control Elvis's spend it.
Speaker 3: And everybody knows the story about Elvis going to Washington
Speaker 3: to get his BMDD batch, you know, his narcotics batch,
Speaker 3: but not everybody knows what started that. And what started
Speaker 3: it was Vernon and Priscilla trying to tell Elvis that
Speaker 3: he had this is in nineteen seventy that he had
Speaker 3: to limit his spending. Elvis stormed out of the house.
Speaker 3: Because nobody told Elvis that he had to limit his spending,
Speaker 3: he stormed out his house. He flew first to La
Speaker 3: got the idea. I think maybe he flew on the
Speaker 3: same plane with George Murphy I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 3: But turned around, came back, had a girlfriend to see,
Speaker 3: Joyce Bovn in Washington, d C. Someone he was very
Speaker 3: close to. But he also was going to get that badge.
Speaker 3: But it all started with someone telling him that he
Speaker 3: had to control the spend and nobody threw out Elvis's
Speaker 3: life was able to do that. But it's not because
Speaker 3: Elvis was definitely not a hillbilly and neither one. I mean,
Speaker 3: I just wouldn't talk. I mean, that's not it was
Speaker 3: not limitations of common sense, it wasn't limitations of vision.
Speaker 3: But Elvis's Elvis was a very generous person towards others,
Speaker 3: and he was very generous towards himself. And he just
Speaker 3: and he had zero interest in saving money making money.
Speaker 3: Look at how he had at the beginning of his career.
Speaker 3: Colonel set up a savings account for Elvis in the
Speaker 3: bank in Madison where he lived, and the president of
Speaker 3: the bank of the vice president wrote Elvis about what
Speaker 3: a lucky young man he was to have such a
Speaker 3: wonderful manager, Colonel. Colonel deposited twelve hundred dollars of what
Speaker 3: appears to have been his own money. Although I wouldn't
Speaker 3: bet on that. But that's that's that's what that's what
Speaker 3: it said Elvis. Colonel also wrote letters to Vernon Elvis
Speaker 3: we're talking about back at the beginning in fifty six,
Speaker 3: about saving money, conserving money, conserving their assets. Recognizing that
Speaker 3: as much money as Elvis made, the government was going
Speaker 3: to demand a huge share of it, they should buy
Speaker 3: savings bunds. He set it up for Elvis, maybe for
Speaker 3: RCA to purchase savings bunds for Elvis. In any case,
Speaker 3: there was this money in the bank, the twelve hundred
Speaker 3: dollars the Colonel set up in Madison, there were the
Speaker 3: savings buns. Within weeks, maybe months, Elvis had cashed it
Speaker 3: all in. There was no savings account, there were no
Speaker 3: you know, there were no there were no savings bonds.
Speaker 3: That was all gone. And this was at the very beginning.
Speaker 3: And again it's not because Elvis was stupid. It's not
Speaker 3: because it's that's Elvis did what he wanted to do,
Speaker 3: and he had the ultimate belief that whatever he did,
Speaker 3: his talent was going to be able to save the day.
Speaker 3: And Colonel had the ultimate belief that whatever he did,
Speaker 3: his brains, his intelligence, resourcefulness, would be able to save
Speaker 3: the day. And they were both right.
Speaker 2: Okay when you met earlier. But which is made repeatedly
Speaker 2: in the book is that the Colonel left absolutely everything
Speaker 2: creative musically to Elvis. Subsequent to the Elvis generation, we
Speaker 2: have the Beatles and the people who come after them,
Speaker 2: who write all their own songs and seem to be
Speaker 2: very in control of their musical careers. That is not
Speaker 2: the image of the Elvis. So what was really going on?
Speaker 2: You know, the Colonel was hands off, and he would
Speaker 2: defend Elvis, but it was Elvis really good at picking material,
Speaker 2: getting the songs right, et cetera.
Speaker 3: He was great at it was fantastic. I mean, he
Speaker 3: was an autodidact who probably knew more about music and
Speaker 3: more about different kinds of music than any PhD in
Speaker 3: ethno musicology you could run into. I mean, you have
Speaker 3: only to look at the hound Dog Don't be Cruel
Speaker 3: session on July second, I think nineteen fifty six, where
Speaker 3: Elvis for the first time becomes his own producer and
Speaker 3: for the rest of his life, with one exception, will
Speaker 3: be his own producer. And you look at him. He
Speaker 3: still had Steve Sholz, the RCA executive as the an
Speaker 3: R man. What Steve Sholz was reduced to. And I'm
Speaker 3: not knocking Steve Shulz. I mean Steve Sholz had been
Speaker 3: a great an R man for Eddie Arnold and for
Speaker 3: Hank Snow and was a friend of Colonel's prior to this.
Speaker 3: But Steve Sholz was reduced from this point on to
Speaker 3: essentially being a timekeeper, announcing the takes, keeping the records
Speaker 3: of what was going on. But what Elvis did, for example,
Speaker 3: with hound Dog, which was a song initially he didn't
Speaker 3: want to record it was the showstopper on his live show,
Speaker 3: and he wasn't convinced they could get that same energy
Speaker 3: or just explosive in the studio. And one of the
Speaker 3: people who encouraged him to do it was Colonel and
Speaker 3: other I mean not to tell him you should do this,
Speaker 3: but to encourage him to believe that it was something possible.
Speaker 3: Scotty Moore was another. But Elvis went to and I'm
Speaker 3: not going to remember thirty two takes thirty five takes
Speaker 3: way past the point that Steve Schulz was ready to
Speaker 3: call it a day. Early on, Steve Schulz was ready
Speaker 3: to call it a day because he didn't say, then
Speaker 3: get it. Let's say after the eighth take or something.
Speaker 3: But on the twenty eighth take, Steve Shows is saying Okay,
Speaker 3: we've got it, and Elvis saying, no, we're going to
Speaker 3: do more. Then he goes on to a court. Don't
Speaker 3: be cruel. This is one of the great greatest sessions
Speaker 3: just in terms of the share, success and output of it.
Speaker 3: But this was true of all of Elvis's sessions. The
Speaker 3: sense of perfectionism, the sense of everybody I'm speaking now
Speaker 3: against myself as a kid, I mean myself as a kid,
Speaker 3: would just be horrified by what I'm about to say.
Speaker 3: But the recordings that Elvis made after he got out
Speaker 3: of the army, starting with the Elvis' Back Sessions, which
Speaker 3: is just such a great album, but the recordings he
Speaker 3: made in sixty sixty one, sixty two, sixty three are
Speaker 3: some of the most extraordinary recordings he ever made. And
Speaker 3: they're all the product of his vision of himself as
Speaker 3: something entirely different from what the world sees. And it
Speaker 3: includes Sure, it includes some great rock I mean Little
Speaker 3: Sister or all kinds of you know, songs that rock,
Speaker 3: but it includes some of the most beautiful ballads you'll
Speaker 3: ever hear, because Elvis saw himself as that too. And also,
Speaker 3: and maybe this is another parallel with Colonel. He was
Speaker 3: drawn to Italian Aria or something like Italian area, and
Speaker 3: so he's recording, you know, it's now or never songs
Speaker 3: like that because they were his ambition. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean Elvis was the thing that if you want to
Speaker 3: compare him with the Beatles, say or Bob Dylan for
Speaker 3: that matter, I mean what they brought to it was
Speaker 3: they wrote all their own songs. Elvis wrote one song
Speaker 3: in his life about about his mother, It's a Beautiful Sign.
Speaker 3: But and he may have only contributed the title, but
Speaker 3: he took credit for that. But but but but as
Speaker 3: far as the business hand of it, the Beatles were
Speaker 3: and like the Rolling Stones, we're in a complete fountain.
Speaker 3: What do we what do you call it? They were
Speaker 3: completely lost in terms of the business, Brian Epstein, as
Speaker 3: you said, you know, it was not somebody who was
Speaker 3: in command of the business. And Elvis, through Colonel, was
Speaker 3: far far more in control of his business and of
Speaker 3: his ability to force the record company to do whatever
Speaker 3: he wanted, whatever he wanted to do then than any
Speaker 3: than any artists for many years.
Speaker 2: Okay, it becomes clearer that Elvis is going in the
Speaker 2: wrong direction with drugs, food, et cetera. But a tour
Speaker 2: is booked and the Colonel is in the northeast promoting
Speaker 2: that advance to the dates and Elvis dies. If one
Speaker 2: reads the book and the letters, it appears relatively cold
Speaker 2: that I'm talking about. On one hand, you have the
Speaker 2: colonel saying, I'm the manager, this is my job. We
Speaker 2: put one foot in front of another. On another level,
Speaker 2: it's very dispassionate. So I have two questions. What were
Speaker 2: Colonel Tom Parker's real emotions at that point? And did
Speaker 2: he really foresee this was going to happen or was
Speaker 2: he shocked?
Speaker 3: I got so many yes and no answers. You know,
Speaker 3: so this will be another one. But no, he was devastated.
Speaker 3: He was absolutely devastated. And the picture that I've drawn,
Speaker 3: and I hope it comes across, but I try to
Speaker 3: state things not in extreme ways, not in over the
Speaker 3: top ways, but you know, in flat description he was
Speaker 3: in shock when he was in Portland and got the
Speaker 3: news from Joe Esposito and then from Vernon, and the
Speaker 3: shot carried through. I would say for I don't think
Speaker 3: he was ever the same, ever the same after that.
Speaker 3: I mean, Elvis was the person that he apart from
Speaker 3: his wife, I don't know who, you know, Elvis was
Speaker 3: the person that he loved the most. Elvis was you
Speaker 3: could say he was like a son, he was like
Speaker 3: a brother. It doesn't matter he was, he was. He
Speaker 3: was absolutely from the time he first met Elvis, immediately
Speaker 3: it was it was like he was just totally captured
Speaker 3: by Elvis as well as a person. He was Elvis
Speaker 3: was a kid, but as a person, as an as
Speaker 3: an artist. But once the new he got the news,
Speaker 3: he was behaved almost as an automaton. And he held
Speaker 3: a meeting of all the people who were in Portland.
Speaker 3: He said, we must uh. Nobody wanted to be this dinner.
Speaker 3: They had this dinner that he called. But he said,
Speaker 3: we have to carry on. We're still working for Elvis.
Speaker 3: We are you know, we can't shed a tear. We
Speaker 3: have to carry out the business because we're still carrying
Speaker 3: out the business for Elvis. We want him to be
Speaker 3: proud of us. But it carried through, I mean to
Speaker 3: the point where as they flew to Memphis and Colonel's wife,
Speaker 3: Leanne was horrified by this. Everybody who's crying, and Colonel says,
Speaker 3: stop your tears. We're representing Elvis. And when they got
Speaker 3: to Memphis, he told them, we will dress as we
Speaker 3: dressed when we were working for Elvis. Nobody will wear
Speaker 3: a suit and type because we never He never saw
Speaker 3: us like this, and we're going to do now. This
Speaker 3: can be vastly misunderstood and you and it's easy to
Speaker 3: take a negative view of it. But I don't think
Speaker 3: he went Colonel went from from Memphis too directly to Tampa.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: He hold up with another one of these families that
Speaker 3: you mentioned, the Renaldy family who had the Reality printing.
Speaker 3: The father the it's the grandfather by now, who started
Speaker 3: in Aldi printing, had been the first person to sort
Speaker 3: of take give him advice in business. He gave him
Speaker 3: when he could. He had no business of that. When
Speaker 3: he met them in thirty five thirty six. He gave
Speaker 3: them all the business, all the Elvis business forever after.
Speaker 3: But he holed up with them. He could speak with
Speaker 3: virtually no one, and he did everything he could to
Speaker 3: protect Elvis in the sense that he set up the
Speaker 3: deal with Factors Factors, Inc. I think that he felt
Speaker 3: would protect Elvis's name and image and the ability to merchandise,
Speaker 3: which would be the only thing or the principal thing
Speaker 3: that would bring income to Lisa Marie. So no, I
Speaker 3: think that he was He was absolutely devastating, but he
Speaker 3: did not behave like other people.
Speaker 2: Okay, you came up when Elvis was the star. Did
Speaker 2: you always have a fascination and want to write about Elvis?
Speaker 2: Or it's like, well I wrote about this person, I go, well,
Speaker 2: next we have eld this.
Speaker 3: No, No, not at all, neither one. It's just no.
Speaker 3: I what you know, as I always wanted to be
Speaker 3: a writer. I mean that has been my motivation from
Speaker 3: the beginning. I've written ten novels. I've got a collection
Speaker 3: of short stories coming out next a year from now,
Speaker 3: which is that's what I started out with when I
Speaker 3: was twenty. The first book I published when I was
Speaker 3: twenty was a collection of short stories, and I published
Speaker 3: the second when I was twenty three. Fell I fell
Speaker 3: into the blues when I was fifteen or sixteen. I
Speaker 3: had never heard anything like this. I can't describe what
Speaker 3: it was that captivated me, but it just totally, it
Speaker 3: just totally turned me around. And aside from baseball. That
Speaker 3: was the only thing that I was, you know, that
Speaker 3: I was drawn to, and it was just what happened though,
Speaker 3: and when I had the opportunity. This is when I'm
Speaker 3: fifteen or sixteen. A few years later, the underground press
Speaker 3: started up. I knew this kid who started a magazine
Speaker 3: called Crawdaddy, which preceded Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone started up
Speaker 3: after that, the Boston Phoenix and Boston after Dark. They
Speaker 3: were essentially the same thing. And I knew some people
Speaker 3: in different ways, and I got an opportunity. A couple
Speaker 3: of people said to me, well, how would you like
Speaker 3: to write about it? Maybe they might have said, how
Speaker 3: would you like to write about Cream? I said no,
Speaker 3: but I'd like to write about Skip James. I'd like
Speaker 3: to write about Muddy Waters. I'd like to write about
Speaker 3: Lightning Hopkins. I'd like to write about Howland Wolf. There
Speaker 3: was no money in it, there was no This was
Speaker 3: not a career. This was nothing other than pure love.
Speaker 3: And it was the opportunity to put those names down
Speaker 3: in print. You just didn't see those names in print
Speaker 3: at that time. And to put those names down on paper,
Speaker 3: see them in print, and tell people about this music.
Speaker 3: I thought it was so great. It was absolutely thrilling
Speaker 3: to me now to get back to Elvis when he
Speaker 3: was in the Army in nineteen sixty because Colonel had
Speaker 3: limited the number of things, the number of songs that
Speaker 3: could be kept in not the catalog, but I mean,
Speaker 3: there was no overage and Konnel was not going to
Speaker 3: have ourcas issue record after record. They and they put
Speaker 3: out an album called A Date with Elvis in nineteen
Speaker 3: six I think in fifteen nine or sixty, maybe it
Speaker 3: was fifty nine. This is after I had discovered the blues.
Speaker 3: On that record, On that album Date with Elvis, there
Speaker 3: were a number of the Sun sides. I'd never heard
Speaker 3: the blues sides, Mystery Train, that's all right, maybe good
Speaker 3: Rocket tonight. I had heard the originals of all these
Speaker 3: at that time I hear Elvis's versions, I said, oh
Speaker 3: my god, he's a blues singer. He's a great blue singer.
Speaker 3: Not a great blue singer who was going to take
Speaker 3: the place for me of little Junior Parker who originated
Speaker 3: a Mystery Train, or after Crudup originated. It wasn't that
Speaker 3: Elvis was taking their place. He was taking the place,
Speaker 3: taking a place beside them. For me, that's what motivated
Speaker 3: me to write about Elvis, and it was the first
Speaker 3: I wrote about Elvis in nineteen sixty seven was when
Speaker 3: he put out three essentially blues singles in a row,
Speaker 3: and I wrote the thing, he's coming back, He's coming
Speaker 3: back to his first love. You know, he's rediscovering his
Speaker 3: love of the blues, his roots music, and that's what
Speaker 3: I wrote with I then reviewed the sixty eight specials
Speaker 3: sort of along the same lines. I was very myopic.
Speaker 3: I told you that my younger self would really reject
Speaker 3: some of the things I'm saying today. You know, for
Speaker 3: me at that early stage, you know, I would think
Speaker 3: every time Elvis sigen as On that wasn't a blues
Speaker 3: I would think, always selling out. I didn't recognize the
Speaker 3: full scope of his ambition or his talents. But what
Speaker 3: drew me to Elvis was the blues. And then Elvis
Speaker 3: educated me to a lot more.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you grow up where.
Speaker 3: Grew up in Brookline, Mass.
Speaker 2: Brookline, Mass. What did your appearance do for a living?
Speaker 3: There was an oral and Maxillo facial surgeon.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how many kids in the family?
Speaker 3: My family three?
Speaker 2: Okay, what happened to your two siblings. What did their
Speaker 2: lives turn out to be?
Speaker 3: They turned out to be great people, you know they
Speaker 3: I mean my family. I wrote quite a bit about
Speaker 3: my family in my last book, Looking to Get Lost.
Speaker 3: It's as close I had my father, my two grandfathers,
Speaker 3: something about other members of the family in a book
Speaker 3: that was primarily a book of profiles of Johnny cash
Speaker 3: Merle Haggard, Howland Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, it also includes
Speaker 3: profiles of people in my family. And all of them,
Speaker 3: you know, just each of them went his or her
Speaker 3: own way. My mother went back to school, got her
Speaker 3: master's and social work, went to work and Grove Hall
Speaker 3: in Roxbury and found them as satisfying, you know, work
Speaker 3: of her life in that. My father just you have
Speaker 3: to read about it, but he was just a very
Speaker 3: very admirable person. And my brother and sister. My brother
Speaker 3: became an out an outside an outside solo jazz saxophonist,
Speaker 3: traveled around quite a bit, now runs a performance space
Speaker 3: in Albuquerque which has been an incredible service to the community.
Speaker 3: My sister was a teacher and a counselor who you know,
Speaker 3: was equally notable. So I mean, I mean, none of
Speaker 3: us are perfect. But they were all great.
Speaker 2: They are. Okay, there's a couple of things. I'll get there.
Speaker 2: So you go to Boston University.
Speaker 3: I went to, I went, I went to I went
Speaker 3: to Columbia first.
Speaker 2: Then maybe I'm wrong. You went to Columbia undergrad.
Speaker 3: I hated Columbia.
Speaker 2: You went to Columbia undergrad and then you went to
Speaker 2: be You for graduate school.
Speaker 3: No, no, you, you weren't wrong. I went to Columbia
Speaker 3: for a year and a half, hated it, dropped out
Speaker 3: for two years. Then I went to Boston University. Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're right.
Speaker 2: What did you hate about Columbia and what did you
Speaker 2: do for those two years? This was an era when
Speaker 2: people didn't take time off from college.
Speaker 3: I felt that it was Columbia was a very closed off,
Speaker 3: prejudiced kind of self granddas, you know, I'm talking about
Speaker 3: the students there, and also the whole thing about you're
Speaker 3: going to learn enough so you can go to the
Speaker 3: cocktail of life and you can talk about any subject
Speaker 3: on a superficial level. This was a great books program.
Speaker 3: So I but you know, I was you know, I
Speaker 3: tell I tell my granddaughters, I say, you know, I
Speaker 3: was just a little asshole. I mean, yeah, I so
Speaker 3: don't take me seriously. I but I but I believed
Speaker 3: myself so but I I it was a very the
Speaker 3: community that I saw there was a very I felt,
Speaker 3: a very self serving self whatever you call proud.
Speaker 2: Of itself, self satisfy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, self satisfied community. I mean. And I had some
Speaker 3: friends there, but it just wasn't where I wanted to be.
Speaker 3: But I'd say that says more about me than it
Speaker 3: does about any than it does about the school.
Speaker 2: So what did you do for those two years? And
Speaker 2: then how did you decide to go to be you?
Speaker 3: I went to bu because it was convenient and because
Speaker 3: I finally I realized the advantage there would be to
Speaker 3: get in a degree staying out of the draft. You know,
Speaker 3: there were there were many aspects to it. But for
Speaker 3: the two years I worked for the Paperback Booksmith, mainly
Speaker 3: bookstore which was modeled on the Eighth Street Bookstore in
Speaker 3: New York, run by a guy named Marshall Smith who
Speaker 3: had been something like a stockbroker and then had a
Speaker 3: vision of paperbacks were the wave of the future and
Speaker 3: started a chain of stores in the Boston near He
Speaker 3: called the Paperback booksmith, and I worked most of them,
Speaker 3: and eventually I ended up driving as a kind of
Speaker 3: delivery driving the delivery trucked around to the various and
Speaker 3: I loved it. It was just great. And I love the
Speaker 3: people who worked there. And everybody was a dropout in
Speaker 3: one way or another, and everybody had a dream, and everybody,
Speaker 3: you know, had imagination, and they were not self satisfied.
Speaker 2: And how'd you get out of the draft?
Speaker 3: Well, I never I actually never got classified. I went
Speaker 3: back to school. I was two s I was married,
Speaker 3: so that was the second thing. And then just as
Speaker 3: they were started drafting married people, Alexander got pregnant, and
Speaker 3: so then I was a father. So all in all,
Speaker 3: I was just lucky. I don't know what I would
Speaker 3: my grandfather. My grandfather taught English at the Boston Latin School.
Speaker 3: He was prepared, I mean spoke seriously. I don't know
Speaker 3: if whatever would have happened. He was going to buy
Speaker 3: land in Canada and we could all go up there.
Speaker 3: So he was very approving of me. I mean, he
Speaker 3: was just he was a great grandfather, and both grandfathers
Speaker 3: were but he and he but what was best of all,
Speaker 3: even the only thing he disapproved of was my arm.
Speaker 3: He was a great athlete himself. He was a three
Speaker 3: sport athlete in college and a terrific baseball player. And
Speaker 3: you know, he thought I was a good hitter. I
Speaker 3: was a good fielder, you know, but I just didn't
Speaker 3: have much of an arm. I played the outfield, he said.
Speaker 3: I said to him. I said, well, I've got a
Speaker 3: quick release. He says, yeah, you got to work on
Speaker 3: the iron though. Other than that, though, he approved of
Speaker 3: everything I did, and he was talking about buying land
Speaker 3: in Canada so we could all go up there if
Speaker 3: I got drafted. But it never came to that.
Speaker 2: Of the three kids, where are you in the hierarchy.
Speaker 3: You should be able to guess you're the.
Speaker 2: Old obviously, right, Well I could tell that, but whatever, Okay,
Speaker 2: so you go back to college. Where in this story
Speaker 2: do you want to be a writer.
Speaker 3: From the time I was probably you know, eight or
Speaker 3: ten years old, I always wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 3: I wanted to be a writer and a baseball player.
Speaker 3: Those were my two ambitions. And I wrote and I'll
Speaker 3: tell you that when I was fifteen, that you know,
Speaker 3: seminal year. Maybe I don't know if that happened at
Speaker 3: exactly the same time I discovered The Blues. But I
Speaker 3: also read the interview with Ernest Hemingway in the Paris
Speaker 3: Review where he talked about his I think George Plumpton nos.
Speaker 3: Was it Terry Southern? No. George Plumpton conducted the interview
Speaker 3: and Hemingway spoke about his writing habits, and the thing was,
Speaker 3: no matter what you do the night before, and no
Speaker 3: matter what you plan to do with the rest of
Speaker 3: your day, you write every day, and you try to
Speaker 3: write a certain number of and not a specific number,
Speaker 3: but you and you don't stop until you you're If
Speaker 3: you're not satisfied with what you produced, at least you're
Speaker 3: satisfied you put in the effort. And I started that
Speaker 3: when I was fifteen, and I continued to this day.
Speaker 3: I mean to a degree. I mean, my life, life
Speaker 3: has gotten more complicated, but it's in essence, it's the
Speaker 3: same thing. And so all the time that I was
Speaker 3: in school, all the time that I was working at
Speaker 3: the book smith, you know, if work started at if
Speaker 3: classes started at eight o'clock, if work started at nine o'clock,
Speaker 3: I'd get up at five and I would write for
Speaker 3: an hour and a half before I went to work
Speaker 3: before and you know, it wasn't that I was. What
Speaker 3: I was writing was so great, And in many cases
Speaker 3: it was really painful because I would say, Okay, if
Speaker 3: he mary Way can do it. I'm not saying I've
Speaker 3: got the talent of him anyway, but at least I
Speaker 3: can put in the effort. And I would, so I
Speaker 3: would just force myself to I remember being at Columbia,
Speaker 3: just force myself to write five hundred words, some seven
Speaker 3: hundred words, and it just words that I might hate.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it was good. Then I'd go out to Tom's,
Speaker 3: which is the place where they filmed so much of Seinfelder.
Speaker 3: If they didn't film it, they they recreated it. And
Speaker 3: I would have French tows at times and go to class.
Speaker 3: But I mean, to me, it didn't matter if I
Speaker 3: came in at two in the morning, I was going
Speaker 3: to get up to write. And you know this sounds
Speaker 3: talk about self satisfied. You know this sounds like, oh man,
Speaker 3: I was so great. I mean, I'm not saying that
Speaker 3: I just but but I was determined to be a writer.
Speaker 3: And that's why, you know, when this guy in Cambridge,
Speaker 3: Larry Stark, decided that Cambridge in the sixties was just
Speaker 3: like Paris in the twenties, and said, I'm going to
Speaker 3: start my own press, and you called it the Larry
Speaker 3: Stark Press. Not surprisingly, the first book he published was
Speaker 3: a book of my short stories, and I think it
Speaker 3: was if it didn't come out the day I turned twenty,
Speaker 3: It came out just ye. It was supposed to come
Speaker 3: up before that, but came on when I it was
Speaker 3: just twenty, and you know it was cool.
Speaker 2: Okay, So you wanted to write fiction. Okay, you're writing
Speaker 2: these reviews and stories about blues musicians because you have
Speaker 2: a passion. You get out of school, what is the
Speaker 2: direction you take and how do you pay the bills?
Speaker 3: Everything I did was for the writing, to support the writing.
Speaker 3: You know that sounds like a an idealistic or maybe
Speaker 3: it sounds like a really selfish thing. I mean, you
Speaker 3: have to support your family, and you have to and
Speaker 3: the secondary thing is you had to support the writing.
Speaker 3: So everything I did as it happened. I fell into
Speaker 3: a job teaching classics at Boston University for seven years
Speaker 3: because it was a great guy named Charlie buy who
Speaker 3: ran the classics department, which is probably the most creative
Speaker 3: department at Boston University, and a woman who was to
Speaker 3: teach first year of Greek pregnant, I don't remember. She
Speaker 3: didn't show up, and he asked me if I would
Speaker 3: do it, and then I talked of for the next
Speaker 3: seven years, or I talked for the next seven years,
Speaker 3: a couple of years full time, but all of it
Speaker 3: was designed to support the writing, support the family, and
Speaker 3: support the writing. And he almost he almost. At the
Speaker 3: same time, my grandfather, who taught English Boston Latin School
Speaker 3: and to whom I was so close, ran a summer
Speaker 3: camp on Lake Winnipesaki, and he was kind of guy.
Speaker 3: He was like Colonel Parker. He didn't ask anybody's help.
Speaker 3: He did everything himself. And he was still running the
Speaker 3: camp himself, about two hundred and fifty campers in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy when he was seventy eight years old, and it's
Speaker 3: still very vigorous, and still took his cuts once in
Speaker 3: a while to play. The council would throw to him.
Speaker 3: Was just be scared to death that he was going
Speaker 3: to hit him. But he would call. He would call
Speaker 3: his fields, you know, he would still call his fields
Speaker 3: right fields, centerfield where he was.
Speaker 2: Going to hit.
Speaker 3: But in seventy he asked me in the middle of
Speaker 3: camp if I would help him out the next year.
Speaker 3: This was not what I wanted to do. It's not
Speaker 3: what I intended to do. It was not in my thoughts.
Speaker 3: But I would never turn him down, and so I
Speaker 3: said yes. Within I think within a few days, he
Speaker 3: had what appeared to be a stroke. It turned out
Speaker 3: to be a brain tumor. But he and I ended
Speaker 3: up finishing out the year at camp having no idea.
Speaker 3: Nobody knew how camp ran. I learned quickly and I
Speaker 3: was like working a forty eight hour day. And then
Speaker 3: I kept camp going over the winter because it looked
Speaker 3: like he was going to get better, he was improving
Speaker 3: from what appeared to be the stroke. And then he
Speaker 3: didn't get better, he got worse. And I carried on
Speaker 3: and I ran the camp the twenty two years, and
Speaker 3: again it was a wonderful thing, an incredibly rewarding experience,
Speaker 3: but also something that was very very it was it
Speaker 3: was no selling. It was all word of mouth. I mean,
Speaker 3: I wasn't going to go out and you know, go
Speaker 3: out and sell the camp.
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 3: I was going to write and but the camp sustained itself.
Speaker 3: It remained a wonderful experience. It was a very rewarding experience.
Speaker 3: It was probably the best thing in the world I
Speaker 3: could ever have done in terms of writing, because it
Speaker 3: took me out of myself. It took me out of
Speaker 3: my If I had an ivory it wasn't so much
Speaker 3: an ivory tower. It's my own head, you know. And
Speaker 3: I had to deal with all these different people, all
Speaker 3: these different problems, all these different you know, and it
Speaker 3: was so it was great. And I ran it for
Speaker 3: twenty two years, and you know, so it was it was.
Speaker 3: It was a terrific experience.
Speaker 2: So what happened after twenty two.
Speaker 3: Years we sort of reached the end of the line.
Speaker 3: I mean, the last few years I think were the
Speaker 3: best years of camp. But I've felt like I was
Speaker 3: just repeating myself that I didn't want to do that
Speaker 3: I didn't. I mean, I think that's unfair both to yourself.
Speaker 3: It's unfair of the job, it's unfair of the people
Speaker 3: who are dependent on you. And I reached a point
Speaker 3: where I and also I was working on the Elvis biography,
Speaker 3: the writing was becoming more and more demanding, involving you know, it,
Speaker 3: and so I tried to find someone to take it over.
Speaker 3: I mean I tried and and and didn't and so
Speaker 3: we so we ended up I ended up closing camp.
Speaker 3: And two years later we were able to sell it.
Speaker 2: Is it still a camp or just you sold as
Speaker 2: a piece of property.
Speaker 3: I didn't sell it as a piece of property. I
Speaker 3: sold it to a nature conservancy thing that said they
Speaker 3: would never let it be sold as a piece of property,
Speaker 3: and then sold it as a piece of property. Okay,
Speaker 3: you know, you do you do the best you can.
Speaker 3: And as Sam Phillips said and Colonel said, you never
Speaker 3: looked back, because what's the point. You did the best
Speaker 3: you could. You looked into every aspect and you know,
Speaker 3: and that was it.
Speaker 2: Okay, subsequent to your twenty two years of camp? Did
Speaker 2: you ever have a so called day job after that?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, my life has been a series of
Speaker 3: somewhat of a series of fortuitous events. And in two
Speaker 3: thousand and five I was offered a one year appointment
Speaker 3: at Vanderbilt teaching teaching creative writing at Vanderbilt as a
Speaker 3: I can't think what the title was, and so I
Speaker 3: thought this would be interesting, this to be great. I
Speaker 3: would never do it for more than one semester. We
Speaker 3: camp took about three months of the year, maybe four
Speaker 3: months of the year, but that left me free to
Speaker 3: write eight months of the year. And with Vanderbilt think
Speaker 3: it was a one semester thing. And so I did it.
Speaker 3: And I wound up staying there teaching one semester a
Speaker 3: year until twenty sixteen. So I got twelve years out
Speaker 3: of it out of a one year appointment. Was pretty good.
Speaker 3: And that was also very rewarding. And you know, and
Speaker 3: for the most part, during the time that I was teaching,
Speaker 3: it was very difficult to write, but I recognized that
Speaker 3: I was being given the opportunity to support the writing
Speaker 3: through my commitment to this teaching for a period of
Speaker 3: time that was three and a half months, and the
Speaker 3: rest of the year I had free So that worked
Speaker 3: out great. It wouldn't have worked out great if I
Speaker 3: hadn't found it, but you know, so rewarding, and I
Speaker 3: hadn't enjoyed the teaching and enjoy it. I'd say I
Speaker 3: enjoyed the kids I taught, both undergraduates and MFAs. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure that I enjoyed the faculty aspect. I didn't
Speaker 3: have any faculty aspect. I wasn't interested in it, but
Speaker 3: that would not have been something I would have enjoyed.
Speaker 2: It as a lifelong writer, someone wanted to be a
Speaker 2: writer as a young age. How do you feel that
Speaker 2: you're mostly known for your non fiction as opposed to
Speaker 2: your fiction.
Speaker 3: That's a question I ask myself all the time. But
Speaker 3: you know, I've never been asked that on Zoom. I
Speaker 3: know we're not on Zoom. We're whatever we're on. But I,
Speaker 3: you know, I sometimes I think that, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: it just turned out that I was better at the
Speaker 3: non fiction and the fiction. But say, I've never stopped
Speaker 3: writing the fiction. I'm working on a novel that I
Speaker 3: broke off at one point while I was writing the
Speaker 3: Elvis biography because it became so all consuming. The biographies
Speaker 3: are just a matter of total immersion. But I've worked
Speaker 3: on it off and on since then, and I'm working
Speaker 3: on that again now. I've worked on these short stories
Speaker 3: which are coming up next year. If the world doesn't
Speaker 3: come to an end, you know, or I don't come
Speaker 3: to an end, but some work. I've been working on
Speaker 3: these short stories over the year, so I never gave
Speaker 3: up the fiction, but it has occurred to me that
Speaker 3: maybe I was just better. But the other thing, and
Speaker 3: this was really the great revelation to me, was when
Speaker 3: I was working on the Elvis, it suddenly occurred to me,
Speaker 3: this really is a novel. This is a novel on
Speaker 3: a grand scale. I mean, it's not that everything is
Speaker 3: nothing is made up, everything is factual, everything is based
Speaker 3: on research. But it's developing. It's a great story with
Speaker 3: great characters on a landscape that maybe I couldn't imagine
Speaker 3: in terms of fiction. I probably couldn't. And so that
Speaker 3: was all of this was satisfied. Writting about Solomon Burke,
Speaker 3: watting about Dick Curlis, writing about Muddy Waters, all of
Speaker 3: those were satisfying, particularly when I started working writing Profiles,
Speaker 3: which was my first couple of books from books of Profiles,
Speaker 3: and they were like short stories in a sense, but
Speaker 3: not in quite the way that the Elvis biography and
Speaker 3: then the Sam Cook and the Sam Phillips were. These
Speaker 3: they were they were like novels to me, and to me,
Speaker 3: the whole thing it was all about telling the story,
Speaker 3: developing the characters, and always making sure that you moved
Speaker 3: forward and that you didn't introduce either anecdotes or you
Speaker 3: didn't repeat the same thing over and over again. You
Speaker 3: tried to have a sense of development of the How
Speaker 3: did the characters, each character, whether it was Dewey Phillips
Speaker 3: or it was you know, Sam Phillips, or it was
Speaker 3: Sam Cook or J. W. Alexander, how did they develop
Speaker 3: over the course of the time of writing about them,
Speaker 3: and how does the story proceed. So in a way,
Speaker 3: it became very much like writing novels. So I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's not a very good answer. That's the
Speaker 3: best I've.
Speaker 2: Got, Okay, In terms of other than assemblage of previously
Speaker 2: written pieces. Prior to the Elvis books, you did one
Speaker 2: on Robert Johnson, and what else was a book from
Speaker 2: scratch prior to Elvis.
Speaker 3: Well, the first book Feel Like Going Home. Those were
Speaker 3: not previously published pieces. The most recent book, Looking to
Speaker 3: Get Lost, although it's a collection of profiles, two thirds
Speaker 3: of it is new to you know in its form,
Speaker 3: Lost Highway probably comes closest to being previously published pieces.
Speaker 3: But given that every single piece I've written has come
Speaker 3: out of my personal commitment, I've never written anything on assignment,
Speaker 3: which is not a good way to make a living.
Speaker 3: I should say if we have any you know, kids
Speaker 3: listening out there, any writing students don't do what I did,
Speaker 3: but because you know, it's probably smart to take the
Speaker 3: assignments you've give them, But I didn't. I never did.
Speaker 3: Every single story I've ever done has come out of
Speaker 3: personal commitment, So even Lost Highway, which in some ways
Speaker 3: is as personal as any of the books, although I
Speaker 3: think in that case each of the stories had been
Speaker 3: published elsewhere. It's written as a book with interpolated passages
Speaker 3: and with you know, with the profiles rewritten to fit
Speaker 3: a format and not to include and chosen. I guess
Speaker 3: that's the thing most of all, chosen to represent a
Speaker 3: progression within this book, rather than this be random pieces.
Speaker 3: So I none of them were collections per se.
Speaker 2: Okay, And you had these ideas you started writing before
Speaker 2: you had a publishing deal on these books.
Speaker 3: No, the well, yeah, I mean I feel like going
Speaker 3: Home came about. This is a sad story, Is that? Okay?
Speaker 2: With you?
Speaker 3: I can see you've got a tissue there, so you
Speaker 3: know you're ready for No. I knew this editor who
Speaker 3: was sort of the enfantiable of publishing at the time,
Speaker 3: and he had turned down two or three of my novels,
Speaker 3: and he told me the next novel you write, which
Speaker 3: I think was called improvised people. He says, I'm positive
Speaker 3: I'll publishing. He was, he was doing pretty well in publishing,
Speaker 3: and he was the good guy and everything. So I
Speaker 3: sent it to him, and you know, he couldn't. He
Speaker 3: rejected it. He just and maybe he was right. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to argue with him, but I think
Speaker 3: he felt badly about it because he had promised me
Speaker 3: that he was going to take the next one. So
Speaker 3: and this is this is a whether this is a
Speaker 3: sad story or cynical story. Somebody had come to him,
Speaker 3: let's call it an agent with the idea of doing
Speaker 3: a history of the Blues. Now I know editors never
Speaker 3: do this, publishers never do this. Agents never do this.
Speaker 3: But he came to me and he said, look, somebody
Speaker 3: wants to write a history of the Blues. Why don't
Speaker 3: you write a history of the Blues? And I said,
Speaker 3: I don't want to write a history of the books.
Speaker 3: And then I proposed I did the book that I wrote,
Speaker 3: Feel Like Going Home, which was a progression of profiles
Speaker 3: telling a story that I wanted to tell. So that
Speaker 3: was how I got How I got that, and I
Speaker 3: brought the Last Highway I put together. I wrote it,
Speaker 3: and I brought it to David Godean, who's the head
Speaker 3: of Godean in seventy nine started publishing house, and who
Speaker 3: are going to publish. David Godean is no longer at Godean,
Speaker 3: but Godan is going to publish the Short Stories, my
Speaker 3: collection Short Stories next fall.
Speaker 2: Just to be clear, Lost Highway, you wrote it before
Speaker 2: you made the publishing deal, or you made a deal
Speaker 2: and then wrote it.
Speaker 3: I had feel like going home, I wrote after I
Speaker 3: made the publishing deal, but it basically was you know.
Speaker 3: For instance, I did a story on Muddy Waters, first
Speaker 3: time I ever got on an airplane. I never thought
Speaker 3: I'd get in an airplane in my life, only for
Speaker 3: Muddy Waters, you know, to write that story. So I
Speaker 3: was very excited. But the Last Highway I had in
Speaker 3: my mind to do a book that sort of covered
Speaker 3: the range of American music, country or roots music, the
Speaker 3: music that I loved. And so I was writing stories
Speaker 3: for various periodicals, stories which I initiated. In many cases
Speaker 3: I had to figure out ingenious ways of financing them
Speaker 3: because nobody was going to pay me to go to
Speaker 3: Memphis to write a story on Rufus Thomas or Charlie Feathers,
Speaker 3: let's say. And so I put together on my own,
Speaker 3: I put together a sequence, a kind of itinerary in
Speaker 3: which one publication might put up a certain amount of
Speaker 3: money another and another. But it was all to do
Speaker 3: the work that I wanted to do. And it was
Speaker 3: all with this aim of what else wanted to do
Speaker 3: in Las Vegas, bring all the various strands of his
Speaker 3: music together and present them in one thing. And that's
Speaker 3: what I wanted to do with Last Highway. So having
Speaker 3: written these stories, all of which, as I say, were
Speaker 3: self initiated, whether it was Charlie rich Or as Charlie
Speaker 3: Feathers or howld Wolf or it was, and I put
Speaker 3: them together to otis span Big Joe Turner. And so
Speaker 3: I put them together, rewrote them, wrote them so that
Speaker 3: they would they could be presented both in a sequence
Speaker 3: and in a way that sort of made them into
Speaker 3: what I thought of as a book. And that's what
Speaker 3: I brought to God in So it's somewhere in between
Speaker 3: what you said.
Speaker 2: The Robert Johnson book. There was the double CD set
Speaker 2: around the turn of the decade from the eighties to
Speaker 2: the nineties. Your Robert Johnson book comes out in eighty nine.
Speaker 2: Certainly people are aware of Robert Johnson, certainly all the
Speaker 2: English blues musicians. I'm not sophisticated enough to know. Was
Speaker 2: it your book that really broke it wide open? Were
Speaker 2: you really pushing the envelope further? Was there something before?
Speaker 2: What was the experience there?
Speaker 3: I would never claim that kind of credit. I mean
Speaker 3: I was fortunate in the sense the book came out,
Speaker 3: as you said, in eighty nine, the box set came
Speaker 3: out in ninety. The book achieved a certain amount of
Speaker 3: success and reached a niche audience, as we say. But
Speaker 3: then when the box set came out, although Columbia, I
Speaker 3: mean nobody was aware, the publisher was not aware of
Speaker 3: the box set. In the box that may not have
Speaker 3: been aware of the book, but they got placed together
Speaker 3: in tower. But you know, I wouldn't call it a
Speaker 3: great popular success, but I think it reached a lot
Speaker 3: of people. And the point about the book was that
Speaker 3: one of the things I write about in the book,
Speaker 3: which is more like a biographical essay, a personal biographical essay,
Speaker 3: is that there were all these people around the world.
Speaker 3: I mean, who discovered Robert Johnson at the same time,
Speaker 3: But they weren't that many, so that Mick Jagger or
Speaker 3: Keith Richards or Eric Clapton and I were all discovering
Speaker 3: the music and equally moved by it and equally passionate
Speaker 3: about it, let's say, in nineteen sixty one, all discovered
Speaker 3: at the same time, and yet Robert Johnson did not
Speaker 3: certainly become a household name in any way. And much
Speaker 3: like the early writing that I had done about Howland
Speaker 3: Wolfer Muddy Waters, the opportunity to write about Robert Johnson
Speaker 3: was a thrill for me. But what it came out
Speaker 3: of was entirely out of going to Texas, going to Houston,
Speaker 3: going to Otaga Street. That's one of the things I
Speaker 3: can remember a few things still to talk to interview
Speaker 3: Mack McCormick, who had done all this incredible research about
Speaker 3: Robert Johnson. This was back in Oh God, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: I'm thinking it was. Could it have been seventy two.
Speaker 3: I'm not getting the right date on this. I just can't. No,
Speaker 3: it's seventy six, I'm sorry, right, it was around Jimmy
Speaker 3: Carter's inauguration. But so I went there because he was
Speaker 3: in a dispute with Columbia about who owned the photographs
Speaker 3: of Robert Johnson. Columbia was going to put out that
Speaker 3: Blox cent it would have been a series of three
Speaker 3: LPs at the time, and Mack McCormick was disputing their
Speaker 3: right to use the photographs. And in the end the
Speaker 3: Block Center the collection got held up for fourteen years.
Speaker 3: But so I interview mac McCormick, who had written a
Speaker 3: book called Biography of Phantom. He'd finished it at that time.
Speaker 3: It didn't come out until two years ago, I guess.
Speaker 3: But and he was very generous in the time he
Speaker 3: spent with me, and he told me a great deal,
Speaker 3: and he shared some of his research. And I wrote
Speaker 3: an article in Rolling Stone about this great work Mike
Speaker 3: McCormick had done and how his book, Biography of a
Speaker 3: Phantom would be coming out any day. Well, it didn't
Speaker 3: come out, and it didn't come out, and I think
Speaker 3: after five or six years I wrote to him and
Speaker 3: I said, would you mind if I wrote about Robert
Speaker 3: Johnson using some of them beyond the Rolling Stone article,
Speaker 3: using some of the material that you spoke to me
Speaker 3: about crediting you for your research, and he said, no, no,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't mind at all, go right ahead. I mean
Speaker 3: his book, like I say, he had a lot of
Speaker 3: problems with completion. I think he was a really great guy,
Speaker 3: but parts of them maybe weren't that great or whatever.
Speaker 3: He had problems and he didn't and so so I wrote,
Speaker 3: I wrote this essay and it came out and Living
Speaker 3: Blues I think in eighty two, which again talking about
Speaker 3: making money. There's no money in that. It was it
Speaker 3: was a great opportunity to get the word out about
Speaker 3: something I was passionate about. And then a guy named
Speaker 3: Toby Byron came along and had the idea of packaging
Speaker 3: it and you know, as the book that stood alone,
Speaker 3: and and I did it with Susan myershes designed all
Speaker 3: my books, and it came out in eighty nine.
Speaker 2: So how did the Elvis Journey begin? Which which which
Speaker 2: party were you end up writing the first book of
Speaker 2: the trilogy? How did that come to be?
Speaker 3: It was, well, I'll tell you exactly how. I mean,
Speaker 3: I had retained I'd written about Elvis considerably over the years,
Speaker 3: but always from the outside. I mean, I wrote the
Speaker 3: chapter on Elvis and the Rolling Stone Illustrated History, which
Speaker 3: is the same as the chapter on Elvis in Last Highway.
Speaker 3: It's the longest chapter in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History.
Speaker 3: And that had been after I had reviewed from Elvis
Speaker 3: in Memphis, which was such a revolutionary album in Rolling Stone,
Speaker 3: and I had written about him in The Phoenix and whatever.
Speaker 3: So at a certain point a filmmaker, to a pair
Speaker 3: of filmmakers came to me about writing the script for
Speaker 3: a documentary called Elvis fifty six, which is going to
Speaker 3: be based on al Werthheimer's just incredible photographs. And they
Speaker 3: have formed a partnership or made a deal without work
Speaker 3: time whom I met at that time and saw six
Speaker 3: thousand whatever you come up negative six thousand contacts, you know,
Speaker 3: contact sheats with six represented six thousand negatives, something like that.
Speaker 3: But in the course of writing the script, and I
Speaker 3: dropped out of this after a while because our visions,
Speaker 3: our visions clashed. But I mean I wrote a couple
Speaker 3: I wrote a draft of the script, or maybe a
Speaker 3: couple of drafts. But in the course of doing it,
Speaker 3: I got access. And you remember this is in the
Speaker 3: days before the internet. You remember those days before the internet,
Speaker 3: yea and so, and I got access to all the
Speaker 3: interviews that Elvis had done prior in fifty five fifty six,
Speaker 3: actually a coupled from sixteen sixty two, but mainly, I
Speaker 3: think mainly fifty five fifty six. And I listened to them.
Speaker 3: I'd never heard them before. They weren't available, and I said,
Speaker 3: oh my god, he can speak for himself. And that
Speaker 3: was when I sort of had his vision, which was reinforced.
Speaker 3: I was driving around Memphis with a friend of mine
Speaker 3: named Rose Clayton while I was writing Sweet Soul Music,
Speaker 3: which was another book that was from inception to I
Speaker 3: mean it just it was self generated entirely. But I
Speaker 3: was driving around Memphis with Rose Clayton, who was a
Speaker 3: native of South Memphis, and we drove by the drug
Speaker 3: store where Elvis's cousin Jean had worked. It was all
Speaker 3: boarded up, and she described how Elvis would come in
Speaker 3: to wait for Jean and sit at the counter and
Speaker 3: his face was sort of all pimply, and he was
Speaker 3: just all he was beautiful, but pimply, but he and
Speaker 3: he was just you know, he would tap his fingers
Speaker 3: on the countertop and stuff. And she said, Rose said,
Speaker 3: poor baby, and that was really that was the thing
Speaker 3: that crystallized everything for me. It was just like Elvis
Speaker 3: poor maybe. And it was right after that that I
Speaker 3: wrote a proposal for the Elvis, which I didn't think
Speaker 3: anybody would take because nobody took Elvis seriously. And it
Speaker 3: turned out I was wrong, and I'm glad.
Speaker 2: I was. Okay, you've written books previously, you write about Elvis,
Speaker 2: it becomes a phenomenon, it makes your name. What was
Speaker 2: it like for you?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't think you know. It was
Speaker 3: an opportunity. I mean, the point is the next book
Speaker 3: I wrote was Sam Cook, and I didn't have an
Speaker 3: agent at that point. I don't have an agent. I've
Speaker 3: been agenting myself for twenty five years now, but I
Speaker 3: was looking for an agent at that time, and so
Speaker 3: I I wanted to do this book on Sam Cook
Speaker 3: because I had interviewed Sam Cook's business partner J. W.
Speaker 3: Alexander and eighty two and from that moment I knew
Speaker 3: I wanted to do book on Sam Cook. So I
Speaker 3: go around and I met a lot of agents I
Speaker 3: think it was seventeen or eighteen, and they all said
Speaker 3: they wanted to work with me. I mean I didn't
Speaker 3: test the proposition, so maybe they didn't, but they said
Speaker 3: they did. And many of them said, hey, listen, I
Speaker 3: can get you a seven figure advance if you do
Speaker 3: a book on the Rolling Stones, on Bob Dylan, on whatever,
Speaker 3: Eric Clapton, and I said no, no, I'm doing a book
Speaker 3: on Sam Cook. And they all made a face and
Speaker 3: walked away, until finally I ran into someone, David Gurnett,
Speaker 3: who said, what a great idea to do a book
Speaker 3: on Sam Cook. Well, the book on Sam Cook I
Speaker 3: got a third of the advance that I've gotten for Elvis,
Speaker 3: as opposed to the seven figure advance that these guys.
Speaker 3: So that's not what I'm in it for. I mean,
Speaker 3: it means as much to me to write about Dick Curlis,
Speaker 3: who's the centerpiece of Looking to Get Lost, my last book,
Speaker 3: as it does to write about Elvis. Not to denigrate
Speaker 3: Elvis in any way, but just because it's Stony Edwards.
Speaker 3: You know, these are people that I care about. Charlie Rich,
Speaker 3: I mean, what did I I met Charlie and Margaret
Speaker 3: an Rich at the Vapors in nineteen seventy out by
Speaker 3: the airport, where they had a tea dance that went on.
Speaker 3: They had three acts and they all did about five
Speaker 3: or six sets, and I talked to Charlie and his
Speaker 3: wife Margaret in between sets, and I've never I just
Speaker 3: fell in love with him. I've never liked anybody more.
Speaker 3: And the music was great and it was something. And
Speaker 3: I wrote about him and feel like going home, and
Speaker 3: I thought he'll never talk to me again, because he
Speaker 3: had spoken about the guilt that he felt over being
Speaker 3: from a fundamentalist background and also being an alcoholic. And
Speaker 3: he was also a what do you call it, somebody
Speaker 3: who hates crowds. It's a great it's a Latin word. Anyway,
Speaker 3: didn't like to be out among people, which is a
Speaker 3: difficult situation for entertainer. But I write about him like
Speaker 3: this because it was honest. And I wrote about how
Speaker 3: much I loved his music and how much admired him.
Speaker 3: But I thought I'll never see him again. I liked
Speaker 3: him so much. Then he ordered thirty I got a
Speaker 3: call from the secretary at the publisher who said, well,
Speaker 3: Charlie Riches called and ordered thirty books. And afterwards he
Speaker 3: said to me, he said, well, it was painful, but
Speaker 3: it was honest, and that's what's important. And I was
Speaker 3: very close to him till till the end of his life.
Speaker 3: But these are the things that matter. It doesn't matter
Speaker 3: what people think of you.
Speaker 2: So who deserves a book? Who doesn't have one?
Speaker 3: So many people, so many people. I mean I always
Speaker 3: said that after I'd finished Sam Cooke Sam Phillips biography
Speaker 3: in twenty fifteen, and that began with first meeting Sam
Speaker 3: seventy nine. But after I finished that, I said, I'm
Speaker 3: never going to do another biography because it just it
Speaker 3: takes too much out of you. I mean, I've done it,
Speaker 3: I've been doing it. This is twenty fifteen. I'd started
Speaker 3: the Elvis in eighty eight, so this is now in
Speaker 3: twenty seven years. You know, I figured I've done my time,
Speaker 3: I said, but I will. The only thing that would
Speaker 3: change that. There were two things that would change it.
Speaker 3: One was I would have loved to have done a
Speaker 3: book with Solomon Burke, and he would have loved to
Speaker 3: have done a book with me. But you know, he
Speaker 3: wasn't the kind of guy. If he said I'll fly
Speaker 3: you out to la well, that would be the first
Speaker 3: stumbling book. Never accept an airline ticket from Solomon, because
Speaker 3: you just don't know where that airline ticket has come from.
Speaker 2: But more than that, you don't wait wait, what does
Speaker 2: that mean? You don't know where the airline ticket has
Speaker 2: come from?
Speaker 3: Actually, it doesn't mean. What it means is how much
Speaker 3: the cost if it's free?
Speaker 2: Oh okay, just want to make sure. But I don't
Speaker 2: know whether you were speaking of his financial situation.
Speaker 3: Okay, No, no, no, no, not at all. No, It's
Speaker 3: just Solomon was a man. He was a great fabulous
Speaker 3: to a great dreamer. But I never felt that I
Speaker 3: could count on the fact that if I would fly,
Speaker 3: if I was going to fly out to LA, would
Speaker 3: I would fly out under my own I mean, on
Speaker 3: my own money. But but I couldn't be certain that
Speaker 3: you would be in LA. So it's just as much
Speaker 3: as we talked about it, and we talked about it
Speaker 3: a lot. But the other thing was, I said, the
Speaker 3: only thing that would cause me to write another biography
Speaker 3: would be if Merle Haggart called, and if he said,
Speaker 3: you know, Pete, i've been reading some of the stuff
Speaker 3: you've written, and it's not too bad. You know, I
Speaker 3: think maybe we could do something together. And I know
Speaker 3: that I knew that this would have been not a
Speaker 3: disaster would have been very, very difficult to do, and
Speaker 3: yet I would have felt compelled to do it. So
Speaker 3: that's the kind of person that I mean. There's so
Speaker 3: many people that that that you know, deserve a real
Speaker 3: biography or just telling that story, just you know, giving it.
Speaker 3: It's not so much that it has to be defined
Speaker 3: into something. I mean, you know, biography is a biography,
Speaker 3: but it could just it could be a book, it
Speaker 3: could be a voice. It couldn't. Solomon's book would have
Speaker 3: been in his voice and it would have been incredible,
Speaker 3: but I couldn't get him to commit to it enough
Speaker 3: to make me believe that it was going to happen.
Speaker 2: Can you name a couple of music biographies that you
Speaker 2: feel strongly positive about that you didn't write, If there
Speaker 2: are any.
Speaker 3: I tell you I don't read much nonfiction, so it's
Speaker 3: I don't. I just read a wonderful book by Paul Birch,
Speaker 3: a musician named Paul Birch, called Ridy and Rising, which
Speaker 3: is a fictional biography of Jimmy Rodgers, and it's it's
Speaker 3: really uh uh in rapturing or it's just it's just
Speaker 3: a wonderful book. I know there are books I'm not
Speaker 3: thinking very We've been talking a long time, and I
Speaker 3: don't want to do an injustice to books.
Speaker 2: Well, let me shift the gears here. We only had
Speaker 2: a couple of minutes left. But since you're a reader
Speaker 2: of fiction, what are two of your favorite fiction books?
Speaker 3: Were two of my favorite writers? My favorite writer of
Speaker 3: alved I guess Chekhov would be up near the top,
Speaker 3: But of contemporary writers, Aliceman Rowe was for years and
Speaker 3: years my absolute favorite. And I would tell all the
Speaker 3: classes of the writing classes at Vanderbilt that she would
Speaker 3: never win a Nobel Prize, first because she was a woman,
Speaker 3: and second because she was a Canadian. But of course
Speaker 3: I was wrong. I have not gone back to her,
Speaker 3: to reading her since all these you know, the writing
Speaker 3: about her has come out, and that's not a fair thing.
Speaker 3: None of us are perfect, none of us. But it's
Speaker 3: just it's such an awful story, and it's my own failing.
Speaker 3: Perhaps I haven't gone, but she Another writer that I've
Speaker 3: read my enormously is Grace Paley, and she's somebody whom
Speaker 3: I knew very slightly, very slightly, but the voice that
Speaker 3: she achieves and the surprises that come from that voice
Speaker 3: and she wrote a fair amount of nonfiction towards the
Speaker 3: end of her life, and also very politically socially committed writing.
Speaker 3: And those were as good as but the little diservances
Speaker 3: a man enormous changes at the last minute. It's just
Speaker 3: fantastic books. There are so many. I really feel terrible
Speaker 3: and I'm not thinking of all these great books.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, that's good. There's a lot of great stuff.
Speaker 2: Let's wrap it up here. Elvis, Okay, Elvis dies in
Speaker 2: seventy seven. Certainly, for at least the first decade, all
Speaker 2: the tabloids are He's still alive, He's you know, somewhere whatever.
Speaker 2: They have the eldest character in Honeymoon in Vegas. Still
Speaker 2: have Elvis impersonators in Vegas. However, the audience that remembers
Speaker 2: the heyday of Elvis is dying off. And my understanding
Speaker 2: is that actually Elvis business is off. Memorabilia prices have dropped.
Speaker 2: What is the future of Elvis in Tom Parker in
Speaker 2: the national consciousness, will be a moment in time or
Speaker 2: is it forever?
Speaker 3: I don't know about merchandising. You'd have to talk to
Speaker 3: Colonel about that. That just doesn't enter into my into
Speaker 3: my consciousness. But you know, I would say that Elvis,
Speaker 3: Colonel Parker, Sam Phillips, Sam Cook there there, they're they're
Speaker 3: in eternity. I mean, they're as long as people care
Speaker 3: about music and or aren't. It doesn't you know, it's
Speaker 3: like talking about writers. I mean they you can go
Speaker 3: in or out of fashion. That really is not Robert
Speaker 3: Johnson took he died in thirty eight. He became an
Speaker 3: international icon in ninety. Look at John Donne, it took
Speaker 3: him three hundred years. Look at her in Melville. It
Speaker 3: just doesn't matter what the state of acceptance of somebody
Speaker 3: is at any given moment. I think that the impact
Speaker 3: of Elvis's voice, let's just talk about Elvis, is the
Speaker 3: same today in his best work as it was when
Speaker 3: he first arrived on the scene in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty five. It just there's no way to describe
Speaker 3: it exactly. Somebody like Jake Hess, the great lead singer
Speaker 3: for The Statesman, one of Elvis's idols, whom Elvis News
Speaker 3: from the time he was a little kid said about,
Speaker 3: and he's a much technically, he's a virtuosic singer, and
Speaker 3: he's a better singer in many ways than Elvis. But
Speaker 3: he said Elvis had something. It just reached people in
Speaker 3: a way that you simply can't define. And I would
Speaker 3: say that's what you know, Elvis fans today are going
Speaker 3: to have very different tastes. I mean, individuals always are
Speaker 3: going to have different tastes. If I tell you that
Speaker 3: one of my favorite songs is I need Somebody to
Speaker 3: lean on that, it's a sign that just kills me.
Speaker 3: Every time we're trying to get to you. That might
Speaker 3: not be what you know. Maybe somebody else is going
Speaker 3: to tell you it's burning love. But there is that
Speaker 3: direct impact, emotional conveyance that existed in Elvis's voice from
Speaker 3: the start, long before he developed his voice. I mean
Speaker 3: just from the start, and say, I think Sam Cook
Speaker 3: there are very few people who have that. I mean
Speaker 3: Sam Cook had it, whereas somebody like Johnny Taylor, who
Speaker 3: sounded just like Sam Cook didn't. And I think that's
Speaker 3: what continues to make the impact. And I just think
Speaker 3: art exists, you know, whether it's music or writing or
Speaker 3: theater or film, it exists in a realm outside of
Speaker 3: time if it's good enough, and the sales just don't
Speaker 3: anything to do whether it's continuing relevance.
Speaker 2: We've been talking to Peter Geroalnick his new book about
Speaker 2: Colonel Tom Parker. I have to say, generally speaking, to
Speaker 2: be a little bit extreme, but not much. I have
Speaker 2: no interest in Elvis because if you're a person of
Speaker 2: the Beatles of my age Boomer, Elvis was the enemy.
Speaker 2: Elvis was already you know in Hollywood, the Beatles come along, etc.
Speaker 2: Then of course we do get suspicious minds in the ghetto,
Speaker 2: which are good Top forty tracks. Then we have Elvis
Speaker 2: in Vegas. So ay, I went to Memphis, which is
Speaker 2: so different from Nashville, and I went to Graceland blew
Speaker 2: my mind. And without making a whole speech about that,
Speaker 2: I got your book, and I have to say two things.
Speaker 2: I am trying to read this very well reviewed biography
Speaker 2: of Robert Crumb. The information is there, but it's not
Speaker 2: an easy book to read. You are a good writer
Speaker 2: because the book is easy to read on the subject
Speaker 2: and it calls out you want to read it more
Speaker 2: certainly for those of us interested in music business. Just
Speaker 2: the managerial style of Colonel Tom Parker was amazing. And
Speaker 2: I had not read the first two books, and needless
Speaker 2: to say they're on my list because you go so
Speaker 2: deep and you make these characters come alive. In in addition,
Speaker 2: as a student of the game, you know you're peeling
Speaker 2: back the layers, revealing truth that were previously unknown because
Speaker 2: you've done this level of research. So this is not
Speaker 2: blowing smoke. I mean really, I was stunned, how interested
Speaker 2: and how fascinating the book was. I really have to
Speaker 2: give you credit, and I want to thank you Peter
Speaker 2: for taking this time to speak with my audi. Well.
Speaker 3: Thanks, I've really enjoyed it, and we certainly ranged Firefield
Speaker 3: to areas that I have rarely spoken about in an interview,
Speaker 3: although in real life I may have. But it's been fun.
Speaker 3: It's really been fun.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you want to know where somebody is
Speaker 2: coming from informs what they do. Any event, till next time.
Speaker 2: This is Bob left Sex