Elvisolatry

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 10

Elvisolatry

Elvis. By Jerry Hopkins. Open Gate Books. 448 pp. Illustrations. Like Mao Tse-tung, Joan of Arc, and Richard Nixon, Elvis Presley was bom under Capricorn, and leisurely readers of this biography may like to go through the astrological appendix substituting any of these names for that of Elvis; the results may be guaranteed to be much more sensational and thought-provoking than anything in the book. However, flippancy aside, it is rather disconcerting to find, in these days when criticism of pop music is a very fashionable, high-brow matter, a book which indulges in personal trivia to such an extent, especially when the subject is no longer the idol of mass hysteria. Details such as the astrological analysis give this book a curiously dated appearance, and arouse in the reader an embarrassed nostalgia, though it is reassuring to know that even Clifford Odets was prepared to do the screen-play for an Elvis movie, a relatively unpopular melodrama.

If the actual personality of Elvis has long ceased to interest all but a small band of devotees, the promotion and management techniques which kept him at the top from 1956 to 1963 are a phenomenon which is still with us and should make a good story. Unfortunately, the secret seems to be still in the possession of RCA and Colonel Tom Parker, and Hopkins’s account of Elvis’s rise seems the thinnest part of the book, though he does quote a Sun Record Company promoter as saying “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars. This is what I found in Elvis. . . .’’ This is an opinion which deserves a good deal of elaboration, and which, one imagines, might explain the screen image of the mean, miserable, misunderstood young man which Elvis never quite managed to shake off, except perhaps in musicals like “G.L Blues” and “Blue Hawaii.” The tone of this book is similar to that of those ephemeral fan-club magazines which used to be an integral part of promotion campaigns: in 1962, the Derbyshire “Elvis Monthly” claimed a readership of 200,000, and fought with several rivals to glean every shred of information, speculation, and myth that could be discovered. In view of this, one imagines that the new biographer would find much of his basic spade-work already done in the files of the “Elvis Monthly,” the “Elvis Times,” “Strictly Elvis,” and a host of American publications. Mr Hopkins is known for several other books, including “The Rock Story,” but in this book he has failed to find either a new perspective to Elvis the man or a fresh explanation of the Elvis phenomenon: in fact, he seems to have made little attempt Jo distance himself from the time-worn ritual of Elvisolatry. ft