When I first visited Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis Presley had not been dead a full year. The city was yet to adjust to his gilded afterlife. His 23-year career as a live rock idol had just come to its close. His far longer career as a dead rock icon was yet to get fully into its stride. As his manager “Colonel” Tom Parker was said to have told the grieving household when he arrived at Graceland that day, “this changes nothing”. Even Parker couldn’t possibly have seen how true that was, although he had taken the step of taking meetings with the people who sold Elvis records and trinkets on the way to meet the mourning family. Parker could never abide the idea of a cash register that wasn’t ringing.
At the time you could enter the grounds of Graceland to visit the grave but there was no admission to the house. Elvis Presley Enterprises had not yet bought up all the businesses bordering on the estate and turned them into car parks for the millions of visitors who would arrive in the Eighties and Nineties; by then music tourism had become Memphis’s biggest industry and Beale Street, the Black Broadway that was once at the heart of its industries of sin, had to be rebuilt in effigy to make up for the fact that it had been bulldozed in real life.
Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE) was initially formed to protect the rights of Elvis’s heirs, including his daughter, Lisa-Marie. Since Elvis and Tom Parker had sold the rights to most of his big records to his record company for what turned out to be a pittance and he had to keep touring to pay his household expenses, he was nothing like as rich as his celebrity might have suggested. The new company went on to do what such companies do, licensing his name and image to products it favoured while sending out cease-and-desist letters to the rest. EPE pioneered a business that is now carried on by the commercial heirs of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, the Ramones, Whitney Houston and whoever comes next. The majority owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises is now the self-described “intellectual property corporation” Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which also represents the commercial legacies of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali.
ABG acquired Elvis in 2013; 2022 is the year of his relaunch. The intention is that the inescapable sign of that relaunch should be the Baz Luhrmann film Elvis, which stars Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Parker.
Rock stars don’t achieve iconic status by accident. Even the dead ones have to be managed. As Eamonn Forde points out in his 2021 book Leaving the Building, a study of how the estates of rock stars are managed, which takes its name from the PA announcement used to mark the end of Elvis Presley shows, the companies who own the rights to their recordings and their images are constantly measuring their salience with emerging audiences and looking for the right opportunity to reposition them while taking advantage of new technologies. This is how Peter Jackson ends up making a six-hour streaming epic from the discarded footage from a 1969 Beatles film. This is how people not born when Abba broke up end up paying over £200 for a ticket to not see them at the Abba Arena.
Advertisement
Estate management is all about doing fewer, bigger, costlier things. Elvis is one such bigger thing, a no-expense-spared biopic that tells the story of Elvis from the Louisiana Hayride in 1954 to his death in 1977. It’s in the same spangly mould as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet and demands to be seen on the biggest screen you can possibly have access to. Since it’s almost three hours long, that cinema should ideally also offer the most comfortable seats.
It’s not entirely true to say that Austin Butler looks just like Elvis Presley. Nobody could carry that weight. It would be too much to ask a mere actor to imitate a face that is as deeply imprinted on all of us as those of our own families. However, he looks sufficiently like him that when Luhrmann and his designers recreate one of those pictures with which we have become so familiar — Elvis playing gospel at the piano during rehearsals for The Steve Allen Show in 1956, Elvis and his dad weeping on the steps of Graceland following the death of his mother in 1958, the King standing in front of his name in lights yay high at the end of his 1968 TV special — I was content to suspend disbelief. There are sequences for which there is no reference, sequences such as when the young Elvis collapses into the arms of worshippers at a revival tent or when the mature Elvis leaves the stage during a Vegas show and moves among his adoring fans, bestowing deep kisses on a series of women who will remember his touch to their dying day, where it would be churlish to argue. Luhrmann’s a fan, not a critic, and Elvis is certainly the most expensive fan letter ever made.
Elvis would have loved it. If he were to return 45 years after his death he would be pleased by the fuss, pleased to see that he was being celebrated in a version in which all his shortcomings could be laid at the door of his manager Parker, an undocumented Dutch immigrant who never had a US passport and therefore could never accompany his charge on any overseas tour, who made him join the army so that he might emerge a more malleable all-round entertainer, who banged him up in Las Vegas because that’s the only way he could pay what he owed to the casino owners, and who worked him so hard that he took to the diet of uppers and downers that led inevitably to an early grave.
This kind of portrayal also chimes with the aims of Authentic Brands Group, according to whose brand book Elvis stands for “individuality, freedom and authenticity”.
If rock’n’roll music really is, as the song goes, here to stay, it’s going to be needing some help. Elvis’s entire recorded repertoire dates from an era that can no longer get on the radio without a note from the doctor. Oldies radio now means Britney Spears. A lot of Presley’s classic sides sound plain tinny to the contemporary ear. Although most of the music from Elvis comes from his original releases, at least as much prominence is given to hip-hop tunes like Vegas from Doja Cat, which quotes Hound Dog, and Swae Lee and Diplo’s Tupelo Shuffle, which samples That’s Alright, Mama.
Advertisement
The film’s messaging is aimed at an 18-year-old, and 18-year-olds are inclined to mark people on their performance against the -isms. You can see why the film goes to such lengths to present Elvis as a soul brother. He and the young BB King are depicted as bosom buddies, he’s a regular on Beale Street, his conversion to the transformational power of black music is traced to him eavesdropping on the tent meeting of a black evangelical church. The truth, that he liked Mario Lanza every bit as much as Arthur Crudup and that he learnt gospel from the Blackwood Brothers, who were white, is the kind of weed the present day has trouble accommodating in its garden of good and evil.
Elvis also treads lightly when it gets near any of the shameful behaviours that we once admired in rock’n’roll stars. Priscilla Presley, who has welcomed the film, is positioned as his one true love and not much is made of the still hair-raising fact that she began dating him when she was 14 and he was ten years older and she was allowed to move in with him when she was still under 16. Elvis is for the most part always active and engaged. He shows his band how he wants things played, which was in real life a job given to an arranger. Of the guy who slept until late in the afternoon, who had his every interaction with the world mediated through a bunch of oafs who were paid to be his friends, and who so often took the line of least resistance, there is little sign. This is as near as you’ll get to Woke Elvis, which is what 2022 wants. The original fans are passing on. From here on he’s the future’s to play with.
I repeat, he would love it. He might be even more excited about the next stage in his relaunch. This is Agent King, a new adult animation from Netflix in which El moonlights from his day job as the king of rock’n’roll to do secret work on behalf of the government as an agent. That’s the thing about Elvis. Being the King was never quite enough. He dreamt of being a secret agent. In Brand Valhalla he gets his wish.
The King sings: Elvis’s hottest hits by Will Hodgkinson
That’s All Right (1954)
Where it all started: with a sped-up version of an obscure 1946 blues track by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. From that moment on, rock’n’roll, pioneered by black artists and seen as a threat to society accordingly, crossed the colour divide and became a phenomenon.
Mystery Train (1955)
A rockabilly masterpiece, with the blues singer Junior Parker’s original transformed by Bill Black’s thumping bass, Scotty Moore’s country guitar twang, a touch of echo and Presley’s vocals capturing the spirit of the American South.
Advertisement
Love Me Tender (1956)
Someone as handsome as Presley needed a love ballad to drive his fans wild and this theme to his film about brothers in the Civil War, itself an adaptation of an old Civil War tune, did the trick. It showcased a softer side to Elvis and his morality-corrupting pelvis.
Hound Dog (1956)
The songwriters Leiber & Stoller always said they didn’t like Presley’s version of a song they wrote for the blues belter Big Mama Thornton. When it became one of the bestselling singles yet, they said they liked it a little more. The original is about a gigolo, but Presley sang it like it really was about a dog.
Jailhouse Rock (1957)
Leiber & Stoller again, now amusing themselves by getting America’s number one star to sing lines like, “You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see”, slipping gay prison references into a straight-up rocker. The censors never even noticed.
(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame (1961)
Presley slipped into bad taste all too often but this is a beauty, a tale of heartbreak driven by a Bo Diddley beat. Presley’s delivery captures the pathos of trying to wish someone well while burning up inside.
Suspicious Minds (1969)
Credibility restored by the ’68 Comeback Special after years of cheesy movies, Presley followed up that television show with his bona fide mid-period masterpiece: an epic of emotion, delivered with increasingly frenzied passion.
Advertisement
In the Ghetto (1969)
Nobody pulled maudlin sentimentality out of a song like Elvis. Mac Davis wrote a portrait of the cycle of poverty and violence in the Chicago slums for the King to do his magic on and Presley, who knew a fair bit about poverty himself, sang the words as if his life depended on it.
An American Trilogy (1972)
Yes, he was fat, sweaty and dripping in rhinestones, but by his Las Vegas years Presley was turning showbusiness into some kind of ecstatic communion. Here was his apex, a combination of Southern folk song, marching hymn of the Union Army and African-American spiritual transformed into a glitzy, nylon-clad epic.
Burning Love (1972)
Before Presley dissolved entirely into schmaltzy balladry, he left behind one last gem. Wallowing in self-pity after Priscilla walked out on him, Presley had to be talked into recording a rock’n’roller that harked back to his youth. The result was his final capture of the old magic.
