LARRY SCHWARTZ
HE WAS standing around backstage after a performance in Las Vegas when someone asked how he felt about the new job. “Working with Elvis is like following a marble rolling down concrete steps, I says, I can’t keep up with it.”
Joe Guercio has been musical director for the likes of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. But Elvis was “on a whole ‘nother plateau,” he says. Presley, for whom he was musical director from 1970 until close to his death in 1977, would change song lists at whim.
Guercio remembers his first gig with Presley. He raised his hand, expecting to lead the 25-piece orchestra in the agreed number, when Presley began Steamroller Blues. “… and I’ve got the orchestra sitting there with a whole ‘nother chart up, ” he says. “The next day I came down to the Hilton.
I opened up my dressing-room door and it’s really tight and there it is. There’s marbles everywhere. The sink was full of marbles. My suit. All the pockets were loaded with marbles.
“There were marbles on the floor. And written on the mirror was , `Follow the Marble, EP’.”
Twenty-two years after the death of Elvis Aron Presley, Guercio is still following that marble, as musical director of a travelling show with a virtual Elvis – original musicians and backing vocalists playing on stage and on two screens to vocals “performed” by Presley projected on to a massive
screen (seven-by-five metres), culled from hundreds of hours of concert footage.
The virtual Elvis concert is the latest project initiated by Elvis Presley Enterprises, a company co-administered by Presley’s former wife, Priscilla, and owned by a trust set up by his daughter, Lisa Marie.
“The show as an entertainment concept … can be done through many generations,” says Todd Morgan, its Graceland-based director of creative resources.
“It can be done forever. But there is a limited amount of time that it’s going to be possible to be done with his own, authentic band mates. It’s a precious opportunity.”
Elvis Presley Enterprises coordinates visits to the Graceland mansion, first opened to the public in 1982, and attends to aspects of a burgeoning enterprise including worldwide licensing of “Elvis-related products and ventures”.
In what is billed as “the first time an entertainer who is no longer living has headlined a live concert tour”, Presley struts the stage in a high-collared, white outfit; a smile curls up in a joyous smirk as though amused at the conceit of having his presence trumpeted once again.
The hair is swept back, dark triangles festoon the sides of that still florid face. A black guitar see-saws about his midriff.
“The easy part is our star doesn’t require a dressing-room,” says the show’s Los Angeles producer, Stig Edgren. “He doesn’t need expensive catering and Rolls-Royces to take him around. He’s very kind and he fits in my briefcase on the video tape.”
Edgren has designed arena shows for everyone from Barry Manilow to Cher and produced concerts including one at which Natalie Cole did a video duet with her late father, Nat King Cole.
“You know, I’m a fairly religious man,” he says, “and I do believe in Heaven and all those things. But I’ll tell you this, the goosebumps that I feel on every (Elvis) show and that I know the audience feels, it’s completely undescribable … Oh boy, it’s almost like a religious experience.”
The video/live concert, a co-production with Edgren’s SEG Events, may yet prove to be one of the biggest boons since the opening of Graceland.
“Elvis is not dead,” author Sean O’Neal has written in his 1996 book, Elvis Inc. The Fall And Rise Of The Presley Empire. “He lives on – as an image, a face, a symbol. And he will continue to do so as long as that image sells.”
O’Neal contends that half Elvis’s billions had gone to his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, in an extraordinary deal that far exceeded commonplace percentages; much of the rest was frittered away in ill-advised investments, counselled by ill-advised associates.
Since his death, Priscilla Presley and a team of business consultants have turned Elvis into a billion-dollar industry that shows little sign of slowing.
“Her idea was simple, yet brilliant,” O’Neal writes. “Since Elvis was no longer around to make records, appear in movies, or perform in concert, the estate would have to rely on his memory to generate revenue. Elvis would be transformed into a symbol, a character that could be licensed
to merchandisers. The estate would turn Elvis into its own version of Mickey Mouse.
“The problem with this idea was that, during the last years of his life, Elvis’s image was not very Disneyesque. His weight had ballooned and he had been addicted to prescription medication …
“Priscilla’s solution to this problem was also simple and brilliant: she would act as though the 1977 Elvis never existed. Only the young Elvis, the King in his prime, would be acknowledged.”
O’Neal claims that Elvis Presley Enterprises’ share of the Elvis market has been estimated to be as high as $50million a year.”
BUT MORGAN declines to comment on estimates on the worth of the Elvis enterprise. He laughs dismissively at the mention of the O’Neal book. “That book is hilarious,” he says. “It’s totally ridiculous. I just skimmed through it and there were so many inaccuracies that it was just ridiculous.
It’s just a silly book.”
Presley left three beneficiaries: his father, Vernon, who died in 1979; grandmother Minnie Mae Presley who died the following year, and daughter Lisa Marie, whose inheritance was held in trust until her 25th birthday in February 1993.
Vernon Presley had appointed three co-executors to succeed him in administering the estate: a Memphis bank, an accountant and Los Angeles-based Priscilla. Lisa Marie, who has created a new trust, works closely with the management team at Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Morgan says the video concert came about after shows in 1993 and 1997 in which first the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, then original band members, played with Elvis, performing along with his projected image.
He concedes that some fans have accused the company of focusing too specifically on images of Elvis in the ’50s, but insists this is because the public responds more strongly to ’50s Elvis. “We don’t perpetuate the image of the last three years of his life just because that gets so much focus
in the tabloids and the sensational books and the parodies and the jokes and all of that …”
We see an idealised Elvis, before his decline. “We do lean towards his better years,” Edgren says. “That’s important. We don’t highlight anything negative when he was gaining weight and didn’t look as good on stage. This is the handsome guy that a lot of us would like to look like.”
Guercio was working with the actor and singer Ann-Margaret during a break in Presley shows on 16 August 1977, when he went to buy a bow-tie in a Los Angeles shopping mall and heard sales assistants lamenting that Presley had been found dead in his Memphis mansion, Graceland, at
just 42.
“And that just freaked me out. What a shock that was … I just came unglued.”
Guercio has his own thoughts on the reasons for so brief a life. “I’ve got a strange concept with all of that. There’ s some people that have to die. Like, he’s one. Marilyn Monroe’s another one. James Dean’s another one. John Kennedy’s another. You can’t see these guys being old. There’s too
much of an aura around them.”
Except for five shows in three Canadian cities in 1957, Presley never performed outside America.
Thirty years have passed since a TV Times poster announced efforts to lure him here: “$2 Million Bid for Elvis”, it said.
Now he’s finally on his way. Sort of. “I never did get to see Elvis perform live,” says veteran Australian performer Col Joye, who flew to New York to see the show at Radio City Music Hall last year. His family’s organisation, the Jacobsen Entertainment Group, is bringing the concert to Australia.
“We idolised him. We all grew up on Elvis. Everybody tried to look and sound like Elvis. Presley was the one that we all emulated with our hairstyle and our purple pants …”
So far, Elvis has sold more than a billion records worldwide, about 40per cent outside the US. Mark Rhodes, the Sydney-based strategic marketing manager at BMG records, estimates Australians will spend as much as $5million on Elvis CDs this year alone including a double-album from
the new “live” concert.
The concert features the female backing group The Sweet Inspirations, guitarist James Burton, Glen D. Hardin (piano), Jerry Scheff (bass guitar) and drummer Ronnie Tutt.
Guercio remembers a conversation with Tutt before the arrival of other musicians to prepare for the show at Graceland.
“I said to him, `You know it’s going to be very strange. I haven’t seen some of these people in 25 years’.
“Suddenly we get together for the first rehearsal and all these old people walk in.”
When the houselights go on at the virtual Presley’s request, the image on screen tells his fans, as he did at his performances, that he wants to see them. So convincing is the show, people in the audience invariably wave back, says Guercio, as if it’s really Elvis up there.
“You know, some smartarse radio guy in New York said to me, `What would Elvis say to you if he knew you were doing what you are doing?’ Like I was some kind of prostitute. `What do you think he’d say to you?’ I said, He’d probably, say, `Joe, slow it down’.”
PRODUCER Stig Edgren has coordinated special events from the Clinton inauguration to gatherings to mark visits by Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela.
“I do believe that Elvis could outlive those same gentlemen in terms of history,” he says.”A hundred years from now, all of the above – the Pope, the President, Nelson Mandela – will be in the history books. Elvis would be maybe in the minds and on the tongues of people … more than the
others.”
With plans afoot to screen a show with images of artists such as Jimi Hendrix, it is tempting to wonder if virtual performance might be the way of the future.
“We’ve been approached by Judy Garland’s estate, by Karen Carpenter’s estate,” says Edgren. “All of them don’t have the footage that it took to do this.”
Five years before his death, Presley said at a press conference that it was “very hard … to live up to an image”. “And yet he”, writes biographer Peter Guralnick, “as much as his public, appeared increasingly trapped by it.”
On video, Elvis is no longer an unpredictable marble bouncing down a concrete stairway. We can count on carefully choreographed order…
With a virtual Elvis mouthing perhaps the most pertinent lines of his life and death: “I’m caught in a trap/ I can’t get out …”
The Age, 30th of October 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 