Word: elvises
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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"Before Elvis there was nothing," John Lennon stated in one of his last interviews. The exaggeration was permissible; Elvis Presley, a Memphis hillbilly shouter, did, in fact, radically transform popular music in America. Prior to "the Pelvis," the rhythms of rock were buried in the funk of "race" music. In...
At home in Memphis the blue-suede revolutionary was a pussycat with a distinctly warped psyche. His father Vernon Presley was convicted in 1938 of altering a check and sent to prison. The three-year-old Elvis was fiercely coddled by "the Hillbilly Cassandra," his mother Gladys. Until he was...
Other adults mesmerized Elvis as well. With a gravel-voiced, paunchy old carnival huckster, Colonel Thomas Parker, Presley zoomed from white gospel singalongs to gold-record celebrity. The Colonel, claims Goldman, was actually an illegal Dutch immigrant, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. According to Goldman, the manager's alien status...
When the commitment to rock faded, however, Elvis romped in the Hills of Beverly. Like much of Presley's life, this ordinary greed offends Goldman. It is "What makes him so ... echt Amerikan."
Elvis made 31 excruciating formula films in 13 years. One off-screen date, Natalie Wood, said he was "terribly conventional ... He didn't drink. He didn't swear. He didn't even smoke! It was like haying the date that I never ever had in high school...