Elvis at 90 - Birthday tribute to King of Rock 'n' Roll who changed the world
Presley was born on this day in 1935. Author Aubrey Malone says: "Before Elvis there was nothing. The King is dead, long live the King"
Elvis Aaron Presley - the king of rock 'n’ roll - was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8, 1935, 90 years ago today.
He went on to become the greatest performer ever, revolutionising music and culture and changing the world. He remains the biggest selling solo artist of all time and an icon for the ages.
Here, author Aubrey Malone, who wrote a book about the King, looks at the life and legacy of Elvis, at 90.
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Elvis would have been 90 today. It’s hard to imagine a 90-year-old pop idol sitting on the porch at Graceland listening to the crickets.
Maybe some people are born not to last. They come around once in a generation and burn out like shooting stars.
Tragically, at the end of his life he was a parody of himself at times, playing to people who were entitled to be surprised that he was still able to stand, never mind sing, with all the drugs that were in him.
12 different types were found at his autopsy, but I still don’t think they were the immediate cause of his death. The day he died, August 16, 1977, was the first time he was going to be facing the public - he had a concert that night in Portland - since that tell-all tome from his bodyguards The West Brothers and Dave Hebler (Elvis – What Happened?) came out.
I believe stress was the immediate catalyst of his demise. His pride was at an all-time low thanks to the Wests and Hebler. They’d been fired by Vernon, Elvis’ dad, not long before and sought revenge.
John Lennon put it well: "It’s always the courtiers who kill the king."
Lennon was also the man who said: "Before Elvis there was nothing." That was the way I felt growing up, looking at this impossibly beautiful Adonis who moved so suggestively he had to be filmed from the waist up.
His music was the soundtrack of my youth. I saw him as a rebel like Dean. Though he would reportedly sleep with 1,000 women in his life, only one would really be important to him – his mother Gladys.
90 years ago today he came out of her womb, the surviving member of a pair of twins. Elvis’ twin, Jesse Garon, died. Gladys Love Presley – what a beautiful name, and how appropriate was the 'Love' part – clutched little Elvis closer to her bosom on that account. He grew up as a Momma’s boy.
Elvis felt he had to do everything twice as good as everyone else to make up for the death of Jesse.
All his life he carried with him a guilt complex of being "responsible" for the death of his twin. It made him even more perfectionist than he might otherwise have been.
He owned the '50s but went to sleep in the '60s. John Lennon, once again, put it in a nutshell: "Elvis died the day he went into the army."
That was in 1958. When he came out two years later he "took the soup," selling his soul to Hollywood in 30-plus mediocre movies, many of them made in little more than a fortnight, for $1 million and counting, to feed his ever-growing appetites - for food, sex and whatever you’re having yourself - before he got out of the Tinseltown straitjacket and reinvented himself in Las Vegas.
He did that in 1968 in "that" suit, on "that" TV Special, in "that" landmark year.
His reinvention cost him his marriage to Priscilla and his health. Making movies, he didn’t need the uppers. But for the concerts his notorious manager Colonel Parker made him do, often twice a day for up to 200 days a year, he did.
They bloated him. The king became the Burger King. "Fat and forty" screamed a newspaper headline in 1975. The description tortured him. By now he was on a downward spiral, the spiral that would end in a bathroom as the most famous man on the planet died alone, his teeth biting into a carpet as he suffered a massive coronary.
I nearly got to see him in performance when I was in America in 1972. I later met an Irish girl who went to over 30 of his concerts, a girl called Dee Maher who ran the Elvis Social Club in Dublin.
Dee even showed me a letter she got from him. I visited Graceland in 1980 but what was the point? He wasn’t there.
A few months ago I bought a book that was written by his granddaughter, Riley Keough, featuring tales of what it was like for his daughter, Lisa-Marie, to grow up in the presence of a legend. "Hush little Baby, don’t you cry," he sang to her in American Trilogy, "You know your daddy’s bound to die, all my trials, Lord, soon be over."
Lisa-Marie has also gone to that big recording studio in the sky. She died in 2023 at just 54. Born with everything, she ended with nothing. Elvis was born with nothing and died with everything.
Or did he? Ginger Alden, his partner when he died, didn’t stay awake as he went into the bathroom on that last night to read a book on The Turin Shroud. He was 43.
But the rest of us remember him. We remember his magic, his charisma, the electrical presence he brought into every room he entered. And that voice: soft and powerful, ranging from gospel to rock to rockabilly in a heartbeat.
The king is dead, long live the king.
Aubrey Malone is the author of The Elvis Diaries: A Glimpse Into The Life Of A Rock and Roll King, published in 2018.
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