Seattle rock journalist Gillian Gaar appeared at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, Washington, Sunday to talk about her new book, “Return of the King: Elvis Presley’s Great Comeback.” (Jawbone Press;2010)
Premise of the book: The book is about Elvis’s meteoric but brief return to the spotlight in 1968, after it appeared that his career had fizzled for good.
Elvis became a rock-n-roll icon in 1958, but his service in the Army put his career on hold. Upon his return, he got sidelined back into the musical-movie business with less than awesome accolades. His music was still popular,(he was still considered "The King",) but the move took him in a direction that castrated his creativity; and this kept him isolated from the true impact of the changes going on in popular music, i.e., the British invasion--headlined by the Beatles.
By 1967, society itself had been transformed. Long hair was in, greased-back pompadours were out. Experimenting with drugs was more fashionable than sipping martinis or chugging beers. Pot was more "in" than cigarettes.
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album demonstrated this societal shift as well as Jimi Hendrix's “Are You Experienced”. With this change in popular music as a backdrop, Elvis’s romantic Hawaiian beach ballads were passé.
So how did Elvis regain his popularity in 1968 with stunning brilliance, make all the girls scream again and fill venues in Las Vegas?
Gaar has fully researched and fleshed out the details behind Elvis’s rise from the ashes which included a riveting TV special, followed by a healthy long run in Las Vegas, and a spurt of new music that is now considered some of his greatest work. Besides at least twenty-seven interviews with people involved with Elvis, she has chronicled his live performances between 1968 – 1970 and included a selective discography between 1967-70. She includes the details behind the bizarre meeting with President Nixon, and of course his descent into drug addiction that ultimately killed him.
Here's an amazing twist of trivia: What do John Lennon, Elvis and President Nixon have in common?
Gaar reveals an interesting story about Elvis's ploy to gain access to the White House in 1970. According to Gaar, the initial reason for the trip to D.C. may have been to see a woman he was having an affair with. He instead wound up at the White House to meet President Nixon.
It has long been known that Elvis claimed to offer his services to the United States Government as a federal agent to help with the anti-drug efforts with America's youth. But, Gaar says in a comic twist, Elvis was actually a collector of police badges, and he was on a quest to obtain a particular badge; he didn't really care that it would designate him as a Federal Agent for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, (BNDD). (see our You Tube video below for an audio of Gillian answering our question about Elvis's trip to the White House.)
He saw this badge on a man named Paul Frees who was such an agent. Frees, it turns out, was also a voice-over actor, who did the voice of both John Lennon and George Harrison for the Beatles Cartoons. Yes--narcotics agent for the U.S. AND the voice of John Lennon!
Elvis criticized the Beatles in front of Nixon
Once in the President’s company, he announced that he could do a lot to fight drug use amongst America’s youth. He added without pausing that he felt the “Beatles were anti-American”, as they were “criticizing America from their British homes after being well-paid.”
After this, he asked Nixon point blank, who was now slack-jawed, if he could have a BNDD badge. Nixon, flummoxed, told his deputy counsel Bud Krogh to get the badge for Elvis.
Gillian noted, to audience laughter, the obvious fact that Elvis's criticism of the Beatles was perplexing, given the fact that “The Beatles had been broken up since April!”
Elvis got his badge and a whole lot of other Presidential goodies out of Nixon's goody drawer before ending his White House visit. (See "The Day Elvis Met Nixon" by Bud Krogh for the whole story of this visit and photos)
(Despite the seemingly benign comment by Elvis, the very next year the Nixon administration would begin working to get John deported from the country when he tried to settle in New York. (See the FBI files on Lennon)
I enjoyed “The Return of the King” overall because this is a period of Elvis’s career that hasn’t been covered in such depth before. The TV special, the Las Vegas shows, the problems with drug use and his extravagant spending habits are outlined, as well as his eventual demise. It is an interesting but sad look at the price Elvis paid for a level of fame that can hardly be described.
Ringo Starr once said that the reason the Beatles stayed sane during their incredible rise to fame, was that “We had each other if any of us went mad. There were four of us. I feel sorry for Elvis, he was all alone.”
Gillian G. Gaar is the author of Nirvana's in Utero, She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll, and Green Day: Rebels with a Cause. She is also the Seattle Pop Culture Examiner. During her research for "She's A Rebel" she had the opportunity to interview Yoko Ono at the Dakota in New York.
Comments
In fact, in the book, in a fresh and revealing interview with "Bud" Krogh, who seems to now realize that he'd been "had," Nixon didn't even KNOW who the Beatles were! "Musical group; very popular." I doubt Elvis's strange visit, ignored in the Halderman diaries and almost everywhere else, had anything to do with Lennon's search for his Green Card. In fact, what "Bud" didn't know {he couldn't account for such strange stuff about "brainwashing" and the like}, Spiro Agnew had had not only criticized the Beatles recently - yes, long after they'd broken up, which Elvis knew and the old folks apparently had no idea, but had, in his speech said some of the EXACT things Elvis put in "The Letter" as well as some things he said to Nixon. Apparently Prez and Veep did not speak. Elvis also found out that Agnew lived right near his hideout in Palm Springs, and he rang the doorbell. Apparently, he heard the same "speech," if you will. Thought it would really "go over" with the Prez. Instead, Nixon seemed a little nervous, and then, as Elvis went to the back of the President's drawer for the most expensive jewelry, shot "Bud" a look that the young aide now takes as "Bud, he's cleaning me out!" Elvis then mentioned that his "friends" - who Nixon took for bodyguards to Elvis's chagrin, "ha{ve} wives, you know!" Bud says Elvis "went for more Swag." The expensive stuff. At this point, he starts to sound angry at his younger self. A strangely dressed young man shows up at the gates, hands over a letter, and offers, as a "gift" a GUN. So Bud "briefs" him, notices bloodshot eyes, all kinds of iching and hopping about the seat . . . and he LETS HIM IN THE OVAL OFFICE! When Elvis got that badge, his magic tallisman that would protect him or something, since HIS involvement with "narcotics" was now serious, and he wanted to do a world tour, badly. Just GO. But he was clearly unnerved by how Customs had revved up in the years he was afraid to fly. What to do?
It shows you why Watergate happened! {Incidentally, Elvis's friend Larry Geller remembers a phone call from Elvis to John Lennon - stars have hotlines, or had them before the cellular age, when Lennon said on The Mike Douglas Show that he was "scared" of Nixon. Elvis was amused because he certainly did not find the Prez at all "scary." And he told Lennon to just do PSA or a record or something that said "Get High On Life." They LOVE that, there. He, Elvis, never actually did ANYTHING for Nixon, except to make him nervous, but Lennon recorded the PSA, which did make the air. Once, maybe. And the Nixon admin. - "Bud" was in charge of the "War on Drugs" - let it be known to Lennon that they no longer had any problem with Lennon. The INS kept at it, as is THEIR way, still, but finally, Lennon got his Green Card, and on his birthday, the same day Sean was born. It didn't hurt that he did that silly PSA. This is all well-documented, and Larry was probably closer to Elvis than any of "the guys": he did his hair and was into spiritualism, which Elvis loved.
The point of Gaar devoting so much space to this is to show the exact time and place where "The Great Comeback" ENDED. For good.
In beginning the end of the book, she says that Elvis simply lost faith in himself, and particularly his talent. And this is what destroyed him. She does not nit-pick about how or why he died in a physical sense.
Because you can see that he flamed out while the flames were still shooting through the air. But he couldn't see them, or feel it. He felt he had one dream that might actually come true: to tour the world. He had lost his acting career and said "I know this town is laughing at me," he lost his mother in the Army, which he knew was "payback" for upsetting the purity of American youth, as they saw it . . . he told "Bud": "I am just a poor boy from Tennesssee," and he meant it. He never forgot the poverty, the shame, the searching for bruised and damaged fruit at night as a 13-year-old in Memphis, fresh from the countryside. He remembered it all. The dreams of becoming "Rudoph Valentino" - or better yet, a serious actor along with Brando. He knew he had a talent. And he saw it yanked away. He could no longer make his mother happy. He became surrounded by more flunkies, who he knew were really "paid friends" which are no friends at all {listen to his censored, barely, version "Stranger In My Own Hometown" - recorded a few months before telling Nixon "they're not bodyguards; they're my friends." He knew the truth. And not one person who knew him EVER heard him say a bad word about the Beatles before or since. And you hear it for yourself when he plays with "Lady Madonna" with clear admiration. Those falsetto leaps eventually made their way into his own record of "Burning Love." In '64, he pointed out to the press that he knew and "dug" the Beatles a year before the press here knew about them. {His fave Brit band, though, was the Dave Clark Five: front by a drummer, they had a stronger rhythm section, he felt. He knew his music, and thus new that he was criticizing a group that no longer existed.}
But how do you lose faith in you own talent? Gaar wisely avoids psychobabble, but she does answer the question. In every triumph, until Vegas, there loomed a supportive authority figure who was in HIS corner. When he was finally on his own . . . when there was no one to lean on for this support, this "faith in himself" - that others had to build up, simply fizzled. He kept it going for a while, but not very long. And his bizarre display of "power" after what had to be a humiliating family argument, involving his father, and with his wife not on his side, was simply the end of it all.
He left to see the D.C., for whatever overt reason, 13 years to the day after he was drafted. In The Letter, he did tell them, and in the briefing, that he wanted to "pay back" for all that had been "given to him." Grinding poverty, ferocious criticism of his work, being "drafted and shafted and everything else," as he said in 1969, on tape, years of embarrassing, and finally "shame"ful movies - he said it . . . and the brief flicker that was his comeback, and truly great. And no one "gave that to him" but him. But he needed support because that was how he was raised: to fear and respect authority beyond all reason. It is what poverty breeds: exactly what Gaar says: the loss of faith in oneself.
He came to the Whitehouse not to praise "America" {look at his writing of the word on "The Letter"}, but to, temporarily, at least, LEAVE HER. If only he could see a London instrument shop in person . . .
Of course he he could. But he felt that he needed something special to get there . . . he knew all the old 19th century spirituals about "crossing over" to the new, or promised land. The sense that he must flee with "a plan."
If Ringo only knew what it must REALLY have been like to have been "Elvis" or just Elvis Presley . . .
Well, he'd sure be glad he's Ringo.
All the best,
rjm
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