Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Weftsetts Podcast.

My guest today is Peter Garralman, who has a new book, The Colonel and the King, Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World.

Peter, why this book?

Why?

Now?

Well, it's been thirty years.

It's been it's almost exactly thirty years from the time I first got access to the Colonel's archives in nineteen ninety five.

And although I had known Colonel at that point for almost ten years, and I'd had engaged in a considerable amount of correspondence with him.

This and I had done a great deal of research for my Elvis biography, this opened up an entirely different picture of the Colonel than I had ever had before.

And really, from that moment I wanted to do a book that I mean, I just thought, we've got to do a collection of Colonel's letters.

Well, that didn't happen, and a lot of things intervened, and here we are thirty years later.

So what made it happen.

What made it happen was it was just I stayed at it.

You know, this is the same.

This is a good example of the little engine that could you know, the tiny engine that could not.

I mean, I just stayed with it.

It was something that I wanted to do.

But by the time I finally got around to it and I started working on it six or seven years ago by then.

Colonel's widow, lo Anne Parker, actually quite some time before that, and I had known her for a while.

I talked to her about the book I was doing, this book of letters that I wanted to do.

She said, can I help, well?

Who knows where that where?

A thing like that can lead?

But I said, sure, you know, I figured why not?

That led to so many revelations beyond the letters themselves, which for me were a window into a world that Colonel had never revealed in public.

He didn't reveal it in interviews, and reveal it in his letters, which were great playful things in which no matter what I put out in my letter, he taught me every time.

It was like I was playing checkers and he was playing.

He was a grand master at chess.

But in the letters themselves he revealed himself.

Then when I started talking to Loeanne, she began to tell me all the stories he had told her about growing up in Holland, and also about his vulnerabilities, his weaknesses, his sensitivities, things that I just never could have gotten.

So that at that point I realized I can't just do the book of letters.

I've got to do something which includes at least a biographical portrait.

And I started doing interviews for that, and you know, books take a long time, but that's where it began.

Okay, Historically, Colonel Tom Parker has not had a good image in the public.

Ay when you first started with Colonel Tom Parker, what was your perception of him?

And what is your perception of him now?

And what does the public get wrong or right?

Well, I mean there are a number of things about Colonel's image.

You've got to remember that, at least up until nineteen seventy, Colonel was considered the most brilliant manager in the business.

All of the things which have attached to him since Elvis's death were simply not applied to him.

And if Brian Epstein wanted to find out about the business, he went to Colonel Parker.

If Brian Epstein beatles manager, If George Hamilton, who's newly arrived in Hollywood and made home from the Hill, if he wanted advice about how to proceed with his career.

This is in nineteen sixty one or so.

He sought out Colonel Parker because Colonel was considered the canniest, the smartest, the funniest, the most animated.

It it's nothing like what the image is of now.

I'm well aware of what the image is of him now, But it wasn't the image that I started out with.

When I I mean, in other words, I did not have a negative image when I wrote Last Trained of Mephic and Careless Love back in ninety four ninety nine, my two volume biography of Elvis, I had an image, in a sense of somebody who, as Jack soon Ceo at Graceland, as Jack Soten said, a lovable rascal.

I thought of him if you look, if you read the portrait of him in Careless Love, he plays almost a Falstaffian role, sort of a comic role, a grand master role, but not a villainous role at all.

Now again, I recognize that through a combination of circumstances, particularly in the wake of Elvis' death, but really even more so recently, he has been cast in a role that he never occupied.

In this villainous role, but that's not the way I ever saw.

Okay, historically people believe that it was a fift fifty partnership.

In your book, you go through a lot of details that every deal was different in that live was one thing, recordings were another.

But also there was this concept of special projects.

What was really going on here because you make the point that he had a rationalization for all these different numbers, but in reality, was he self dealing?

He was.

You know, I would say everybody in the music business is self dealing up to a certain point, that's what the music business is based on.

But no, he wasn't.

And in fact, for the first ten years, the first nine years of his management of Elvis, he was operating on a twenty five percent managerial basis, straight twenty five percent, no special deals, no bonuses, no nothing like that.

And this is a person who was not just the manager.

He was also the pr man.

He did all the advertising, he did the promotion of all the shows, he did the promotion of all the records.

He even designed the record the record covers got nominated for Grammy.

I don't know why, but he did.

So.

He was not only a one artist manager, he was a one man operation.

He had virtually no overhead.

He paid all of his expenses out of his twenty five percent, out of his twenty five percent commission as manager, and he was providing a service and all purpose service.

It changed, as you say, as you've indicated in nineteen sixty seven, and there were a number of reasons that changed.

One was that Elvis by then had become a lot more difficult to manage.

Elvis was encountering problems of his own.

He had, but his biggest problem and it was one that stayed with him all his life.

And I'm not saying this is a criticism of just describing what happened.

He simply spent, not just more than what he made.

And he was making two million dollars a year, which is the equivalent of twenty million today.

He was making four million dollars a year, which is the equivalent of double that.

He If he made two million, he spent three million.

And this is born out in the letters that Elvis's father, Vernon Presley, the only other person in the world other than Colonel and Elvis who knew what the business in the room was.

Vernon was part of everything.

Vernon and Elvis Presley were part of every business conversation with colonel.

But Vernon wrote not letter after letter, only a few of which I have in the book, But he wrote letter after letter to colonel, You've got to help out.

We're on the verge of losing graceland.

We can't pay our taxes, we can't pay our IRS bill.

You've got to come up with more money.

That began, that became more and more of a problem as time went on.

And so Colonel's explanation, and you can call it a rationalization, you can call it an explanation, is he simply had to take or he felt he was entitled to take a greater piece of the pie.

And with the deal that he made with Elvis in nineteen sixty seven, he entered into a limited joint venture agreement.

Joint venture is like a partnership, as you know, and that the partnership, the twenty five percent commission remained on things like movies, on publishing royalties, on just about everything.

But they split everything that colonel, every bonus payment that Colonel got beyond the contracted amount fifty to fifty.

Now, anybody could understand that the temptation in that kind of a deal is to have less and less, less and less money in the actual contract, and more and more put into bonus situations.

And that basically is what happened to a degree, not completely, but to a degree, over the next five or six years.

Nineteen seventy three, Elvis and Colonel entered into what I think can fairly be called a partnership, except as you say, there were several things that were exempted.

Publishing was exempted, the personal appearances were on a two thirds one third basis.

But it was entered into so gladly on Elvis's part.

It basically comprised six different contracts, all of which Colonel and his assistant Tom Diskott went over in great detail with Elvis and Vernon at Elvis's Hollywood home, and when everything was signed, Elvis announced there were many things involved in this agreement.

But when everything was signed, Elvis announced to the guys around him, and he rarely told them about business.

As much as they put out the I mean it, as much as they had ideas about what his business was.

Was they honest, they really didn't know, and I'm not putting them down, but they didn't.

But Elvis announced to them what a great deal he had made with colonel, so you can say, well, Elvis was foolish, he hadn't made such a great deal.

On the other hand, I would say there was nobody else in the world who could have made the money for Elvis that Colonel Parker did.

There was no manager Moore Kenny, and there was no one more who was better at both manipulating the record company in particular and turning a chore into something which generated so much money it almost met Elvis's expenses.

Let's flip the story over, as I say, if you read the book, Parker looks pretty good.

He is someone you knew you subsequently interacted with the widow and the letters.

What are some negative feelings you feel towards Parker.

The simplest negative feeling and the biggest revelation to me in the book, and the place where I really was unhappy to end up with, was that his gambling predilection, which was something again I think I mentioned to you I saw him as this, let's call him a lovable rascal if in my view, and you can read what I wrote previously, and I'm not trying to disown it, It's just represented my best understanding of the situation.

But my understanding of him over the years was simply that if he lost a million dollars at the gaming table, which he didn't, I think eight hundred thousand may have been the most.

It was the most I could ever document.

But he did lose that much that he could walk away from that and just shrug his shoulders and not care at all.

Now I was write in one respect, he didn't care about the money.

He didn't care about the money anymore than Elvis did.

Neither one of them cared the least bit about money.

They weren't interested in accumulating money.

They weren't interested in accumulating in the state that meant nothing to them.

But from talking to lo Aanne, and from having her document from her journals and diary, something I want to say one thing about lo Anne.

No one could have been a more loving wife than Loe Anne was.

She adored Colonel She absolutely adored it.

And as much as she adored him, she admired him.

Maybe she admired him even more.

I mean, to him, she was the greatest person in the world.

And I'm not knocking that.

But and yet when we started, when I started on the book, and she started helping me out with it.

She was committed to telling the truth, and she said to me at one point after we've been tied, and I can only imagine how painful it was for her to say this.

Colonel was a gambling addict, and she could document that from her journals and her diaries, and you know, and say, no matter how difficult it was for her to say this, and say there were times when he would spend three days in the strait in the casino, not come back to the room until the fourth day, and then just collapse.

He was no good for anything.

And she said, there's no other word for Peter, He's a gambling addict.

So I ended up with a picture which I had not at all expected to end up with, in which you have two people addicted to two different things.

Elvis to his pharmaceuticals has prescribed medications, Colonel to gambling, and neither one of them able to address the matter with the other because if one said, hey, you're doing this, the other would say, hey, what about you?

And they literally they avoided it.

For the most part, Colonel did everything he could for Elvis.

There are many letters in here where he's trying to keep Elvis off the road, despite all the prevailing opinion.

There are many letters in which he shares his concerns about Elvis with others.

There are many letters in which he attempts to motivate Elvis to do better and to say that, you know, Elvis is the greatest entertainer he's ever known, and he Elvis alone can fix these problems.

But nonetheless, neither one of them could confront the other's problems.

And that was the revelation for me, and it's an unhappy revelation for me.

And it doesn't undercut Colonel's genius.

Is you know, Chuad de Vivra, his great sense of his embrace of life.

I mean, he was just a true He was one of the most vital people I've ever known.

And he exemplified that spirit of vitality and inventedness and sourcefulness all of his life.

But that still doesn't take you wanted to know what I saw is his greatest weakness.

Well, his other greatest weakness was a trauma that he carried with him from childhood.

He was so mistrustful that it took a great deal for him to give himself to other people, to demonstrate love, to show his you know, to show his concern.

But when he did, he gave it all out.

And that's another thing in the book which surprised me, because I found all these extended families which he formed in the absence of the family he had left behind in Holland, Okay.

Eldest dies in sevent According to the book, the recording rights were all sold to RCA before to help Elvis out financially.

Elvis dies in seventy seven.

From Elvis, does the colonel continue to make money after his death or is it pretty much stopped there?

No, No, he made a great deal of money for himself and for the estate.

He again generated more money I think than any other manager could have, and it was an enormous amount of money for the estate.

And he found ingenious ways of getting RCA to pay more money than they would have otherwise, to advance money.

And he made deals for the showings, basically with Colonel Parker, just as with you know, most good businessman.

Ownership was everything, and the television specials that Elvis did the estate came to all And so he made deals after Elvis died for the reshowings of the very lucrative deals for the reshowings of the television specials that Elvis had, so he made a great deal of money for the estate, and both Vernon Presley and Priscilla Presley were very at Priscilla Presley wasn't part of the estate, but she was involved as the mother of Elvis's heir, Lisa Marie, and they were very happy with it.

But when Vernon died, the court came in and I think it was the Chancery Court of Memphis, and they ordered that there'd be an adlita attorney to take up the interests of the miner who was now the sole heir of Elvis' estate.

This was Lisa Marie and she was at this point, I think twelve years old.

And the court ordered that the estate sued the colonel.

The estate did not want to so the colonel and it ended up being a money drained for everybody, but they were ordered by the court to do it.

The ad Leadam attorney made a report which and you asked earlier what the source of Elvis's bad reputation is, it was primarily, I would say, the odd Leadam report, which involves involved a considerable misunderstanding by someone who really did not know much about show business or the entertainment world of many of the deals Colonel had made by for simple example, he upbraided Colonel.

Well, first of all, one thing was he saw Colonel is taking fifty percent of everything, which from the beginning, which wasn't true.

But the main thing that I think he misunderstood, he just misunderstood the terms of the deals.

And for example, he upbraided Colonel for having maintained for having let Elvis continue to collect a five percent royalty on his records at a time when other artists were making a great deal more.

That was not what the contract called for.

The contract was improved every year.

The first year, the first year of the contract RCA in fifty six, eleven months after the initial signing, it was improved by a million dollars.

It continued to be improved.

The royalties continued to be improved.

But because of and I don't know you want to hear all this, but because of the most Favored Nations agreements, which everybody knows.

You know, every any manager worth assault is going to get the most Favored Nations agreement for his artist if the artist is enough of a start.

That means that you know, if you get one hundred and ten dollars, I get one hundred and ten dollars even if I signed for ninety.

So the problem was that if Elvis got more than five percent, which was a top royalty rate that RCA was paying, that would mean a lot of other people would get more than five percent.

Well, Elvis got a lot more than five percent, but it wasn't written in the contract.

It was part of an unwritten agreement of the recon agreements which were attached to every contract that he went on from nineteen fifty six on.

Okay to put a bow on it.

Because Elvis dies in seventy seven, it's a very different circumstance.

And today with streaming, where all the music of the deceased artists at a fingertip, they have to produce albums, they get all the factories, et cetera.

The word at the time was that all of these rights had been sold to RCA and Elvis and Elvis's estate Elvis' is obviously deceased, did not get another penny from the sale of the records.

Is that true?

No?

I mean what was sold Elvis and Vernon's demand in nineteen seventy three were future royalties on recordings made before nineteen seventy three, that's royalties.

The RCA, the record company owned the masters, as every record company at the time, didn continue to get royalties on everything that he recorded.

After nineteen seventy three, Colonel continued to put in bonus points.

I don't know how best to describe it, but for example, one of the things that Colonel ensured was that if pre nineteen seventy three recordings were released, post nineteen seventy three recordings were included on the same album.

Therefore the Elvis Elvis estate would get royalties.

I mean, it's a very complicated thing, but he got concessions.

Having made one deal, he got concessions out of URCA, first for Elvis and then for the estate, so that Elvis would continue to make and the estate continued to make extraordinary amounts of money.

You know, I don't have all this my fingertips, But for example, let's say, in order for the Colonel owned all the photographs, and it was within in RCA's power to pay a great deal more for photographs to Colonel and into the estate than they would have otherwise.

But the income stream never stopped, and Elvis in the immediate aftermath of his death was the Elvis estate was making a great deal of money.

One of the ways they were making the money was it was the Colonel's greatest concern and I think people who are concerned with intellectual property today, which is you know, the word on the street, the word everywhere is IP intellectual property.

Colonel was concerned in the immediate from the day of Elvis's death on that what he called vultures would come in, swoop in and basically they would merchandise.

They would sell merchandise, making money off of Elvis's name and likeness.

There was no law at that time that prevented them from doing that.

There was no lot exactly the prevented them.

There was eventually an Elvis Law which people in Hollywood, stars in Hollywood were able to take advantage of.

It was the first law was in Tennessee, but that was in the future.

But Colonel set up a Then he made a deal with a company called Factors Incorporated, which had represented I think Faara Facet Majors and made a huge amount of money off of merchandise in her stuff.

And he made a deal which brought a great deal into the estate.

Factors actually ended up losing money, because what they guaranteed was to go after every malefactor who attempted to make money off of Elvis's name and likeness.

And so you know, again, I'm not saying this is a perfect thing.

I don't know what the perfect thing would have been.

But Colonel took an extremely proactive role.

And if you look at the I don't have this in front of me right now, but if you were to look at I have all the you know, all the information.

And if you were to look at the income there was general for the estate in the three years between Elvis's death and Vernon's death, the estate made a great deal of money.

If this lead deep if RCA, if a song is stream or a songness sould, does the eldest estique get any money?

One of the things Colonel insisted on.

And again, anybody in the music business would understand this.

Most people outside of music business wouldn't.

Where is the money situated in the music business.

It's in publishing.

It's all very well.

If let's say let's let's say I put out a record and I have a hit.

That's great.

I'll make a certain amount of money.

Maybe I make five percent royalty, maybe at this point, I'll make twelve percent.

I don't know what I'll make.

But when the record is done, it's done.

However you may go on.

You may cover that record.

There may be a polka band that covers it.

It may be come back as he hit twenty five years from now.

The person who owns the publisher is the person who makes the money.

The thing that Colonel set up from the beginning was a partnership with for Elvis, with Hill and Range, which is one of the pioneer and BMI, which was the you know, the rebel rights group.

I mean they set up against ASCAP back in I'm trying to think when I think, probably in the early forties, but they didn't come really come into their own.

BMI and Hill and Range is one of the leading publishers until the late forties, and they essentially represented those groups which had not BMI represented those groups which hadn't been represented before, which was primarily hillbilly and black music.

Elvis had a partnership with Hill and Range, so that virtually every song that he recorded, at least for the ten years, the songs that formed the basis for the Elvis Library, the Elvis Archive.

He was a fifty to fifty partner with Hill and Range in the publishing, so he continues to make to this day.

Elvis, by the way, would not participate in the more common practice of putting his name on a song.

He did that with three songs at the beginning.

One of them was Don't Be Cruel, one was Love Me Tender, and he said, I've never written a song.

I don't want to do this, and he dropped out.

Hill and Range wanted him to do it because it was a clearer it was a clearer right of property.

I think I read an argument about it, and I can't recapitulate it.

But Elvis wouldn't do it anyway.

But he did have the publishing, and he had the publishing it because Colonel.

There are several letters in the book in which Colonel tells him, you know you've got lots of friends.

Your friends may come to you and they'll say, Elvis, I have the most wonderful song for you.

It's going to make you more money, but I'm going to keep the publishing.

And Colonel said, those are not your friends.

You know.

If they are your friends, they'll want to see you make money too.

And it is that by owning the by calling the publishing on all of his songs.

As Colonel wrote to me, he says, you will have income coming to you long after you have ceased performing.

And to a degree that's true.

To another degree it may not be true because the problem I think with Elvis owning the publishing and not having the co writing is that once Elvis recorded a song on the hits anyway, he put such a stamp on the song that I'm not sure how many covers a lot of those songs got.

I mean, they continue to be recorded, but I don't know how many hits.

I don't know how many people have re recorded Jailhouse Rock and had a hit with it, or don't be cruel or that kind of thing.

Okay, So definitively, at this point in time, the estate still gets publishing income.

As far as I knows, unless they change the deal.

But yes, okay to the destory.

And although it is a smaller amount than publishing income, does the estate still get recording royalties?

No, they get recording recording royalties.

They tried to reverse the deal in more recent times, but the deal was pretty much irreversible.

They get recording.

They get royalties from the records that were cut after nineteen from nineteen seventy three on, and that's a considerable number of records, and they continue to be repackaged, so they do get those, and they will also get and I mean if albums still sell, and that's a big if they would continue to get income from albums which include not only songs recorded before seventy three, but signs recorded after nineteen seventy three, which was something that Colonel insisted on during his tenure.

Okay, back to the kernel.

Elvis was the first big rock star, organic rock star prior to the Beatles.

Conventional wisdom at this point in time is Brian Epstein was great in promoting the Beatles, not so great financially.

Brian Epstein dies in the late sixties.

A lot of things change in the music business in the seventies.

First and foremost, the record companies end up being owned by larger conglomerates, etc.

But you get this era of supermanagers.

You know, there're a lot from Jerry Weintraub who worked with Elvis, to David Geffen to Irving as Off, etc.

Was the Colonel just as good as them.

It was a different era, or was he superseded by a later generation of managers, a.

Lot of exempt Jerry Wintrop, I don't, I mean Jay, but leaving that outside, I think he was just as good.

I mean he The biggest thing was, as he said, he says, I'm not a polo lounge manager.

I don't just sit back and collect my money.

I don't have a stable of artists, each of whom pay me my money, and none of whom I fully support.

I am out there with my artist, and I am out there one hundred percent.

And I'm not just out I'm out there on tour with them.

I'm involved in every aspect of their business, of his business.

I mean, you're talking about one, one artist manager of so this is it's a very different kind of situation.

You would You wouldn't have this degree of dedication, devotion or just pure I would call love and admiration for the artist.

You you don't see that kind of thing to that extent.

The other thing is that Elvis's and Colonel's business was entirely separate.

When Elvis's money came to Elvis directly, there was no pass through, there wasn't anything.

I mean, Colonel got his twenty five percent in one check, Elvis got his seventy five percent in another check.

Whether it was from RCA or you know, the promoter or anybody else, but the biggest thing, and I honestly think that this is a huge difference, and it's what was revolutionary.

Well, Colonel did I I can't you know the name.

I know all the names that you mentioned, but the only name that I would say was comparable to colonel and I know a lot of people would dismiss this would be Alan Klein.

And the biggest difference between Colonel and Allen and Alan Klein.

I'll say I knew Alan Klein very well.

I would say, against what most people would want me to say, he was a very good friend, but perhaps the most difficult friend you could ever have.

But Alan Klein essentially did attempted to do the same thing.

I mean, if you were to look at the situation that the Rolling Stones were in through Andrew Andrew lou Goldham's management when Alan Klein took over.

I know that Mick Jagger hates him.

I know Jack Keith Richards likes I don't want to make it personal, and I know that Keith and that this is not the way MC Jagger sees it.

Keyth Richards was always close to Alan.

But the point is what Alan did in terms of allowing them to be in charge of their business well at the same time taking control of all the publishing, which will be a source of conflict to this day.

But that was what Colonel did for Alan.

By the way, the huge, biggest difference, a huge difference between Alan Klein and Colonel Parker was that Alan didn't have a sense of humor.

Colonel had a great sense of humor.

It was what kept him going.

But the thing that with Colonel, and I think that has to be taken into account, and the thing that sets him apart from virtually every other manager you can name.

He loved his artist.

He signed his artist, the greatest, the greatest entertainer, the greatest singer, the greatest visionary that he had ever known.

He believed in him one hundred percent, and he did everything from the very beginning.

And this is I mean, I call one of the early chapters about his association with Elvis, and there's a lot of story before Elvis and Colonel's career with Eddie Arnold mirrors what he did with Elvis almost exactly and made out Eddie Arnold into a superstar such as country music did never saw again until Garth Brooks.

But with Elvis, I call the chapter defending Elvis, and he defended Elvis at every turn, and most of all, he defended his artist artistic choices.

And no matter who came at him, whether RCA came at him, whether William Barris said, look, the way he's appearing on television is terrible, whether the movies or television or anybody else asked him to change his artist approach or change his approach to promoting his arts, he says, you know, my artist knows what he's doing.

He knows his business.

I stand behind him one hundred percent.

And that's something I don't think he's ever gotten credit for.

And yet I think it's incontrovertible if you look at the effects.

Okay, you have all these letters, and some of them are very lengthy.

Needless to say, we don't live in the same era now, we live in a text email world.

But certainly when Elvis is the star, there is the telephone.

Do you find that he would write letters when other people did not, or it was just a different era and everybody wrote letters.

I think it was a different era, you know.

And you mentioned the differences.

Short attention span might be the biggest difference of all.

I mean, try writing an email that people can will actually read.

I mean, I'm told by by kiss you've got to keep your email, show one one topic to the email.

But I'm not convinced that even that will work.

But no, I mean looking, I mean looking at the correspondence.

And I went through thousands and thousands of letters, and they weren't just those letters.

Everybody wrote letters.

The thing that was most entertaining was that everybody that Colonel liked, all of Colonel's pals in a sense, tried to top each other even in the midst of doing business with jokes with you know, just it was a kind of a generation.

It was a generation that prized kid in as much as anything else, and you get each of them that in the way.

Was one of the things that was so wonderful was to see the extent to which they engaged with each other, and engage with each other even in business on a kind of amicable basis, but definitely on a basis to try to get the best deal possible in the Colonel's case, for his.

Artists, when one reads the letters.

To use the vernacular, the Colonel's kissing a lot of butt.

You're so great, You're so great.

I may not be aware of what's going on, Okay, was his style in general.

I wouldn't call it kissing, but I think that he is having a He's having a laugh at their expensiveness.

He's recognizes that nobody is going to take them seriously when he says that, I mean, this is a very very canny person.

He's dealing with people, he's dealing with Ivy Lee.

I mean, one of one of the things.

This is a class revolution on both his part and Elvis's.

When they came to Hollywood, everybody looked at them and they said, oh, look at those roofs, look at those country bumpkins.

And he and Elvis proved, you know, all these sophisticated people may have gone to Cornell, might have gone to Kolgi, might have gone to Harvard, might have gone to well wherever, And they proved them wrong.

And within within two or three months.

And I think one of the great jokes that Elvis and Colonel shared was to look at each other to recognize that Elvis had overcome the doubters with his talent.

Colonel had overcome, you know, the doubters with his call it his brilliance, his sophistication while playing the part of the country roup.

And they could look He and Elvis could look at each other because they shared a sense of humor and they shared an appreciation, I think for the way the world was and for the way the world looked down upon people of a lower class, I mean, of a lower economic class, And they could look at each other and say, who's the room now.

But I know, I think that there is an engagement in the letters occasionally, and they were also there are so many letters in which Colonel just upbraids when he is not writing to a friend and says, how could you do this?

How could you release the movie follow That Dream as just another Elvis movie Following a Dream?

Actually, I think is one of them better movies that Elvis made after I'm not a big advocate of the movies, but but it was intended as a different kind of comedy, almost an Andy Griffith kind of comedy.

And when it was released, Colonel wrote to the record, to the movie company and studio and said, you know you've released this out this record this.

You've released this movie which has its own unique tone in which Elvis gives a good comic performance, and he released it as if it were just another Elvis movie and people are going to flock to it because it's another Elvis movie.

That's not the way this business works.

You have to sell what you're presented, and you had an opportunity here, or you maybe you still have an opportunity here to sell the product which you are putting out, but you're not doing your job.

So I would say he was pretty frank where he was really frank and where he was direct and where he was in his dealings with RCA.

And very soon after the Grand High Pubas at RCA, Bill Bullock and Steve Sholes and well variety people expressed their disapproval and displeasure with the direction that Elvis was taking and Colonel was taking and promoting him.

In early fifty six, very soon after that, Elvis's success and Colonel's belief in Elvis completely disproved what the people at RCA were, what the executives RCA were calling for, And he became great friends with someone like Bill Bullock and they exchanged all kinds of all kinds of joky letters, but also letters in which they were negotiating for high stakes.

And when Bill Bullock comes to Colonel, for example, I think around nineteen sixty and says, I've had a great idea, we should record Elvis with a symphony orchestra.

Colonel just says, look, that's a terrific idea, but it does a disservice both symphony orchestra into Elvis, and that's a terrible idea, and I don't think you should do it.

I mean, he wasn't hesitant about expressing his views, but always expressing his views after first after first consulting with Elvis and determining that these were Elvis's views.

Okay, Also talking about conventional wisdom, which is debunked in your book, A conventional wisdom is that Colonel was not a citizen in the United States, and therefore he didn't want Elvis playing outside the country.

You debunked that.

But parallel to that in the book is ultimately the family in the Netherlands find out who he is and that he's had success.

He keeps them at arm's length.

He does.

Do you believe how much was keeping arm's length because he was fear of being exposed.

How much was he wanted nothing to do with these people?

How much is he he hated the family?

How much he feel you know, what was really going on there?

Why was she really keeping the family at arms with?

All?

Right, I'm going to say yes to all of the above, because honestly, you've touched on I mean when you say I've debunked, I hope I haven't debunked.

I hope I've introduced issues that can continue to be discussed and debated and in which people can make up their own minds by both the facts that I'm presenting and sometimes the theories that I'm presenting.

But this was a very different world, and I want to be in terms of citizenship.

I want to put forward a few things, but I want to start out by saying something terrible must have happened to Andreas Cornelius one Kirk, the young Colonel Drees was how he was known when he was and I don't know what it was, And Colonel never spoke of what it was.

He spoke of his father to his widow.

He was a bad, bad man.

He said this several times.

He loved his mother dearly.

What happened and what should have caused such a sense of total dislocation and alienation.

I don't know, and Colonel would never address it, and I think that had to play in to the sense.

It was he adored his mother, his sisters seemed to adore him, so I can't really say what happened.

But to get back to the citizenship question, Colonel served in the Army for more than three years the US Army as Tom Parker, a Dutch national.

I mean, the name was made up, but he did not masquerade as an American.

He was.

He went in as he's listed as a Dutch national.

He married an American citizen, either one of which would have gotten him American citizenship had he applied.

Now, I think not everybody agrees with me that life is full of mysteries and that those mysteries cannot all be plumped.

I can't, for the life of me, understand why he didn't simply become become an American citizen.

There was even at one point around nineteen forty or forty one, amnesty was offered to everybody who would now be called an illegal or whatever, who could become American citizens.

He didn't, And when I spoke to LeeAnne about it.

She could offer no explanation either other than Colonel didn't ask for favors.

I mean, he was friendly, he was great friends with Lyndon Johnson.

He could have asked Lindon Johnson to intercede.

I do understand why he wouldn't do that, because, as you know, Colonel was the kind of person who might say Colonel Parker Grant's favors.

He doesn't ask favors.

But there's no good explanation for it.

But to go back again to the citizenship thing, the artist Will M d'cooney came to America in nineteen twenty six, same year as Colonel, as a stowaway, same as Colonel from Rotterdale.

Same as Colonel.

He did not get his citizenship until nineteen sixty two.

He went to Venice in nineteen he was worried about but he was worried about what this could mean.

But in nineteen fifty seven, as I understand it from reading his biography, he went to Venice for celebration of his work.

Obviously he had a passport.

You know, not everybody had a birth certificate in those days.

Prince, oh God, Prince Mike Romanov a prominent Hollywood restaurateur who claimed, you know, everything he claimed was false, but he claimed my other things to be an air.

I think he was a Lithuanian, but Lithuanian Jew, but he claimed to be heir to the Russian throne.

He entered this country before either Bill helmdacone nor a colonel.

He got his citizenship in the last years of the Eisenhower administration.

It didn't I got thrown out of this country several times, but he always came back.

It didn't affect his life in any way.

Colonel was planning a world tour for Elvis up until nineteen sixty.

You mentioned his brother coming over here in sixty one.

In some way way, I agree with you that that was a traumatic record realization in his part.

There's a letter in the book which is the most extraordinarily almost when I say schizophrenic, I don't mean it's mental illness.

But it's the most extraordinarily divided letter I've ever seen, in which Colonel writes back to his brother's son, his nephew, whom he didn't know, but writes back and starts out in the third person as if he was some obscure, obscure worker for this man, Colonel Parker, whom he rarely saw.

And by the end of the book, it's almost by the end of the letter, which is not that long a letter, it's a confessional and the first person, somehow or that that really spooked to him his brother coming over.

There was no more talk of a world tour after that.

But what's weird if you want to think about the differences in the world, and we talked about reduced attention span, There's all kinds of things we could talk about that are different the globe, well, you know, network whatever.

But everybody in Holland from nineteen sixty one on knew that Colonel Parker was Andreas van Kirk.

Nobody in this country.

Nobody, I mean, I'm not saying one or two knew.

The only person in this country who knew that Colonel was Dutch was Elvis Presley, because Colonel introduced him to his brother.

I find that virtually inexplicable, So I'm not going to try to explain it.

But in the end, at the time when it was most likely that Elvis would tour, in the seventies, when he had begun making personal appearances again, and when the opportunity seemed to the opportunity did come up, there were offers.

There were two things about this.

One was when I spoke to Brazilla Press when I was writing The Last Trained to Memphis and Caroless Love.

She said, you know, Elvis was great for working up enthusiasm when he was talking with the guys, the guys who worked for and they were they all wanted to go to Europe.

This is in the sixties, and they were so excited about it, and Elvis would be in there saying, man, that would be the greatest thing we could ever do.

Let's go to Europe.

And she said he would get back behind closed doors.

He said, I'm not going to Europe, but I've been to Germany.

Why don't I want to go back to Europe?

She said he had no win.

Now, maybe that's not just as Priscilla said, they didn't know what he said behind the closed does with me.

I didn't know what he said behind closed doors with them.

So maybe maybe that's not true, but that certainly appeared to be the case as far as touring either Europe or Japan in the in the seventies, and that was born out by Tom Hewlett.

You mentioned Jerry Weintraub.

The person who worked with with with Elvis was not Jerry Wintrub.

Who was Tom Hewlett, with whom Jerry Wintrub was partners And he was a person who had pioneered in rock in cross country rock tours with Jimmy Hendrix, with the Creedence clear Water, with Everybody in the sixties, with concerts West and he knew everything and he was the closest per to Colonel.

In the latter years he worked as much as a partner.

I mean, colonel had no partners.

Every people worked for him.

Tom Hulett was a virtual partner with him and they did the toys together.

Okay, everywhere the Colonel goes, he makes these friends and he maintains the relationships.

You're someone who actually knew the colonel.

Too many people write books about people they never met.

You knew the guy.

Is this just his personality?

He meets you, your best friend, he never forgets I realized kept you personally at arm's length at first, but it was a different situation.

But he's in the army in Hawaii, he meets his family, maintains the relationship for decades.

You know, no, that's I don't want to pretend.

I mean, you stated it correctly.

I'm not pretending to an intimate relationship with Colonel.

I would have liked to have had one.

I've been friendly with lots of people.

I could say, well, eventually, after many years, Sam Phillips and I became true friends.

I mean not just you know, but I would never boast about something that wasn't true.

And with Colonel I loved the relationship I had, but it was not a you know, intimate.

But I would say, you can look at Colonel's life and again this runs all through the book.

There was something missing in his life.

He had left his family behind.

We don't know why he had left his family behind.

I mean, we don't know why he never went back to it.

You know, he stayed in touch with his mother until thirty two or I think thirty nineteen, thirty two or thirty three, and then he was no longer in touch, although he always spoke fondly and lovingly.

But I would say he created these families, these extended families which were too substitute for the family he didn't have.

And the Cuferrats in Hawaii, he met them, they took him in when he was in the army and in Hawaii station.

In Hawaii, he met a man walking a Russian wolf.

Found he colonel loved animals.

He was drawn to the animal he spoke to.

I can't remember what.

Carl Koufrath, Papa Koufrath took him home.

He became great friends with the youngest son in the family, and also with one of the guys who was married to one of the daughters.

Very close friends and with the whole family.

He's transferred to the mainland.

He's transferred to Fort Barancas.

I think in nineteen thirty two he leaves Hawaii.

The Kufirats, who saw him virtually every weekend spent he spent almost all of his weekend with him.

He couldn't have been closer.

And they all say, we don't know what's going to happen to our friend Tom, the smartest, one of the smartest young man we've ever met.

But he's going to do something wonderful.

They didn't here from him again until nineteen fifty seven.

He didn't have the wherewithal to be in touch.

He brings Elvis to Hawaii in nineteen fifty seven on a bet with one of his protegees, a promoter from Detroit who had taken up residents in Australia, brought rock and Roll to Australia.

He's a very interesting guy and another member of this extended family of Colonels.

The members of Alvin Colonel's extended families didn't necessarily know each other, but anyway, he supposedly he takes Elvis to Hawaii on a bet.

It takes him to Hawaiian a bet because he can't bring him to Australia because there wasn't time to fly there.

But the real reason they went to Hawaii, I'm convinced, is to make contact with the Cuparrats.

And the first call he makes when he gets there is to the Kupfarrass Old number.

He finds out that Papa Cufarrat has died.

He goes the next day and places a lay on his grave.

Got a picture of that in the book.

And he remains in contact with the family until he dies, and they were and they remain friends.

I mean, it's a very close relationship and one that means a great deal to him.

Okay.

In the book, there ends up being a tension between the Colonel and the so called Memphis Mafia.

Can you tell my listeners about that.

Well, this is a direct correlation between Colonel's reputation and that tension, and there's a real reason for the tension.

And I don't want to call the so called Memphis Mafi and I try to avoid the term.

I mean, but they are the people who the men who worked for Elvis, his closest associates in France.

They were all on the payroll.

They're all quite different.

Many of them were very creative.

Someone like Red West, who was a tough guy, was a wonderful songwriter and a very good actor.

Jerry Show is entirely different from others in the group.

I mean, they're all quite different.

But the one thing that and Joe Esposito, Jerry Shelling and Joe Esposito, Alan Fordyce nephew of Justice fortis they all were ultimately became great I don't want to say friends of Colonel's, but they came to admire Colonel a great deal.

But Colonel from the very beginning, from the time that Elvis, especially from the time that Elvis came back from Germany, saw these guys around Elvis much as they loved Elvis, much as they were devoted to him, has not fulfilling any function, as not carrying out their jobs.

And he wrote a number of very sharp tons letters to Elvis and to them saying, you know it's your business, Elvis, what you I wouldn't have these people working for me because they're not doing their jobs.

And if they are going to continue working for you, if I were you, it's up to you.

But if I were you, I would have them work for their money because they would then be they would think better of themselves if they did.

Vernon Pressley had a less shaded view of them.

He just viewed them really as people who were not worth hanging around.

He really did view them as leeches.

So you had these guys who worked for Elvius who were genuinely dedicated to Elvis in most cases in different ways.

I mean, George Klein was different from Lamar Fike would really be doing a disservice to them to act as if they all had the same motivations.

But Vernon just would just would just as soon have thrown them all out on their ear.

And he wrote letters also.

I got one letter in the in the book, but he wrote out of letters, so it would It's totally understandable that they should have had a certain resentment up to a point anyway, and sometimes that point was exceeded of Colonel Parker and of Vernon, who didn't think well of them.

And in the end, one of the reasons that I think Colonel's reputation has suffered is that so many of these guys, and maybe with the best of motives, have written about Colonel, and sometimes their portrait of Colonel is not a negative, but their portrait of the business dealings which they truly knew nothing about and yet could make observations as any of us can.

If we're standing outside the room, we can all guess what's going on inside the room.

But that is what has come to characterize Colonel's has come to characterize Colonel to a fire greater extent than one might have wished, and to a fire greater extent than is merited by any of their involvement in the actual business.

The Colonel breaks through in the carnival circus world then gets into music.

Did he care about music at all or he just liked the action?

No, I think he loved music.

I mean I think in different ways.

Instance, his first musical contact was roy A and I think struck What struck him there was the authenticity of the music.

I don't think he knew this is way back in nineteen thirty six or so.

I may have the date run, but thirty six thirty seven, somewhere in there, roy Acuff was the King of the Hillbillies, and roy Acuff asked Colonel to be his manager, to move to Nashville and be his manager, which shows the extent to which Colonel made an impression on him.

But I think I don't think Colonel was drawn as much to his music as to the authenticity of the music and the way it reached its audience.

What he was drawn to was I think when he started managing Eddie Arnold in nineteen forty four, and in the brief time before then that he knew Eddie Arnold, I think what he saw in Eddie Arnold was a different kind of music.

I want to back up one second.

Colonel was not on musical I mean, one of the things I have in the book is what the story that Loanne told me that he told her about his career as a prepubescent opera singer.

And this is the reason, because the reason is that Colonel's mother, who was a whose whole family were water peddlers.

They traversed Holland selling all kinds of things.

Well, colonel's mother's one of Colonel's mother's sisters was an opera singer who lived abroad, but she would come back to Holland and Colonel and his mother and maybe other members of the family would go to see the operas.

Colonel learned all the arias and as a very young kid eight nine, ten would go out on this lake where all the rich people lived outside of Breda and seeing the arias, and they would come out on as he told the table, they'd come out on their porches and bravo, bravo, and maybe they would flaming, you know, two coins at him.

And he loved operating the end of his life.

But with ed Arnold, I think he found an artist quite similar to Elvis, who reached people with what was then called heart music, reached them with a kind of music that truly touched them.

And I think Colonel was drawn to that music and saw it.

It wasn't It's not like you know, everybody would want Elvis's manager should be a rock and roll fan.

Well, not even Elvis.

Elvis was an everything music fan.

He loved every kind of music.

Colonel definitely, it wasn't like he was a rock and roll you know, impassioned rock and roll fan.

But first with Ddy Arnold, with Elvis, he saw artists who had a vision that carried them beyond the common heard, and also with a vision that enabled them even if they couldn't articulate it, and I don't think Elvis could at the beginning.

But even if they couldn't articulate, was going to carry them and allow them to grow almost day by day.

In Elvis's case, from the time Colonel first met him, when he was funny, just grow and develop and create something that had never been created before.

That's what I think he was drawn to.

He was drawn to the wonderful world of show business, and he to him, Elvis was the pinnacle of the wonderful world of show business.

Okay, this, of course is a theoretical question, but you set it up in the book that Elvis is on sun but he's on low rent tours.

He's not always performing in a way that's endearing himself to the local authorities in the audience.

What would have happened to Elvis if he never met Colonel Tom Parker.

Well, the story of Elvis is the story of the confluence of three of the most extraordinary people I ever.

I didn't know Elvias sciety, I don't want, but three of the most extraordinary people I've ever encountered or known about.

The idea that Elvis should first be taken up by Sam Phillips, and the Sam Phillips, who was a person of the most extraordinary vision, should have let's reverse it should have been taken up by Elvis sort of seen in Elvis someone a talent that he had never envisioned before.

And then for Colonel Parker, a person of a completely different type of personality and vision, but with an equal There were no true people in the world who believed in Elvis more than Sam Phillips and the Colonel Parker, however little they may have had in common, and however little they may have liked each other.

But I don't know what would have happened.

I mean, Sam Phillips as little as he liked Colonel until Colonel until they actually finally sat down at Colonel's eightieth birthday, which was just an amazing private event.

I mean, not the birthday party.

But the dialogue which I just happened to, I was trying to leave, and I happened to over here or listen to.

But but Sam Phillips always and all the time that I knew that nobody could have carried Elvis to the heights that Elvis wanted to achieve.

Elvis did not want it.

He wanted to be a movie star.

He wanted to be a movie star like James Dean and Marilon Brendo.

He wanted the world to know him, which is similar to the ambition of another person that I wrote about extensively, Sam Cook.

He wanted to be accepted and loved by everyone.

Sam Phillips, first of all, would have gone bankrupt if he hadn't sold Elvis' contract.

Second of all, was not equipped, as he himself said, to promote Elvis.

And even if he happened and equipped to hisself, that wasn't what he wanted to do.

And he saw in Colonel Parker someone who, as I say at the beginning, he loathed.

He saw one of the few people in the world who could have taken Elvis to the heights to which Elvis aspired, not the artistic heights, Colonel had nothing to do with Elvis's music, nothing to do with his artistry, and I think Sam Phillips was well of that.

But you know, again, Sam Phillips did not believe in coincidence.

I don't know what I believe in.

Colonel believes in the wonderful world of show business.

I'm not prepared to state my beliefs, but I've got to say it's an amazing thing that the three of them should have interacted in that way, and that it should have resulted in such extraordinary achievements by all three of them.

Okay, to get the contract to RCAA.

Actually it's the Colonel who makes the deal, and it seems like an incredibly small amount of money that RCAA balks at and ultimately pays.

What happened to Seam financially after that?

Did he blow the money or did he manage to live on that money for the rest of his life?

Neither one.

I mean, Sam had enormous ambitions of his own.

Again, I've never met anyone who's more of a musical visionary than Sam Phillips.

He did not want to be a one artist label.

Well, he couldn't have been.

He was literally on the verge of losing his company because his brother Judd owned something like fifty percent, was about to turn it over to the bank.

He was out of money.

He was out of luck.

With the thirty five thousand dollars that RCA paid for Elvis's contract, Sam was finally able to get his label, Son, this tiny little label.

He was like Colonel.

He was a one man operation.

I mean, the two of them, it's an amazing parallel story.

Is as unlike each other as they were.

But Sam was finally able to get his label, tiny little label.

Son was one man operation on point and with the first record that he made, the first record that he released after selling Elvis' contract was Kyle Bracon's Blue Sweede Shoes, which was a bigger hit at least from the start in Elvis's first record for Urica Heartbreak Hotel and which went to the up with the country R and B and pop charts.

That was the beginning and from that point on, Sam had the money to operate his to operate his label.

He had.

I think Johnny Cash was then next person to come in, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, h Kyle Prikins was the first person.

Johnny Cash and the others Charlie Rich and he operated one of the most extraordinary labels, one of the most extraordinary musical presentations that the world has ever seen.

And before Elvis, he had done the same thing with blues and rhythm and blues.

So, I mean, there's an amazing story there too, But that's not our story today.

Okay.

Vernon is writing letters and constantly telling the colonel that Elvis is spending more than he's making.

The press are portrayed a Hillbillies.

It's one thing to be the conveyor of the message, Hey, we're in the red.

We're in the red.

Was Vernon Street smart to me, have any level of sophistication or was he just flipping out that Elvis was spending more than he was earning.

Well, you're really you're understating the case.

Elvis was making millions of dollars and he was spending millions of dollars more.

And Vernon was very similar, I think to his son.

He actually had a singing voice, very much like his sons, and he I think he had a dry sense of humor.

He didn't have the talent that Elvis had, But no, I wouldn't I wouldn't call them hillbillies.

They were people of limited education, like so many of the people I've written about, like virtually all of the people I've written about, but with you know, with extraordinary innate intelligence.

I mean, the thing with Vernon was he loved his son.

He did everything he could to protect his son.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes that I've ever or encountered, or ever had to write was Vernon's reaction on Elvis's death in nineteen seventy seven.

But nobody, absolutely nobody, I mean I could start up, but nobody could control Elvis's spend it.

And everybody knows the story about Elvis going to Washington to get his BMDD batch, you know, his narcotics batch, but not everybody knows what started that.

And what started it was Vernon and Priscilla trying to tell Elvis that he had this is in nineteen seventy that he had to limit his spending.

Elvis stormed out of the house.

Because nobody told Elvis that he had to limit his spending, he stormed out his house.

He flew first to La got the idea.

I think maybe he flew on the same plane with George Murphy I'm not sure about that.

But turned around, came back, had a girlfriend to see, Joyce Bovn in Washington, d C.

Someone he was very close to.

But he also was going to get that badge.

But it all started with someone telling him that he had to control the spend and nobody threw out Elvis's life was able to do that.

But it's not because Elvis was definitely not a hillbilly and neither one.

I mean, I just wouldn't talk.

I mean, that's not it was not limitations of common sense, it wasn't limitations of vision.

But Elvis's Elvis was a very generous person towards others, and he was very generous towards himself.

And he just and he had zero interest in saving money making money.

Look at how he had at the beginning of his career.

Colonel set up a savings account for Elvis in the bank in Madison where he lived, and the president of the bank of the vice president wrote Elvis about what a lucky young man he was to have such a wonderful manager, Colonel.

Colonel deposited twelve hundred dollars of what appears to have been his own money.

Although I wouldn't bet on that.

But that's that's that's what that's what it said Elvis.

Colonel also wrote letters to Vernon Elvis we're talking about back at the beginning in fifty six, about saving money, conserving money, conserving their assets.

Recognizing that as much money as Elvis made, the government was going to demand a huge share of it, they should buy savings bunds.

He set it up for Elvis, maybe for RCA to purchase savings bunds for Elvis.

In any case, there was this money in the bank, the twelve hundred dollars the Colonel set up in Madison, there were the savings buns.

Within weeks, maybe months, Elvis had cashed it all in.

There was no savings account, there were no you know, there were no there were no savings bonds.

That was all gone.

And this was at the very beginning.

And again it's not because Elvis was stupid.

It's not because it's that's Elvis did what he wanted to do, and he had the ultimate belief that whatever he did, his talent was going to be able to save the day.

And Colonel had the ultimate belief that whatever he did, his brains, his intelligence, resourcefulness, would be able to save the day.

And they were both right.

Okay when you met earlier.

But which is made repeatedly in the book is that the Colonel left absolutely everything creative musically to Elvis.

Subsequent to the Elvis generation, we have the Beatles and the people who come after them, who write all their own songs and seem to be very in control of their musical careers.

That is not the image of the Elvis.

So what was really going on?

You know, the Colonel was hands off, and he would defend Elvis, but it was Elvis really good at picking material, getting the songs right, et cetera.

He was great at it was fantastic.

I mean, he was an autodidact who probably knew more about music and more about different kinds of music than any PhD in ethno musicology you could run into.

I mean, you have only to look at the hound Dog Don't be Cruel session on July second, I think nineteen fifty six, where Elvis for the first time becomes his own producer and for the rest of his life, with one exception, will be his own producer.

And you look at him.

He still had Steve Sholz, the RCA executive as the an R man.

What Steve Sholz was reduced to.

And I'm not knocking Steve Shulz.

I mean Steve Sholz had been a great an R man for Eddie Arnold and for Hank Snow and was a friend of Colonel's prior to this.

But Steve Sholz was reduced from this point on to essentially being a timekeeper, announcing the takes, keeping the records of what was going on.

But what Elvis did, for example, with hound Dog, which was a song initially he didn't want to record it was the showstopper on his live show, and he wasn't convinced they could get that same energy or just explosive in the studio.

And one of the people who encouraged him to do it was Colonel and other I mean not to tell him you should do this, but to encourage him to believe that it was something possible.

Scotty Moore was another.

But Elvis went to and I'm not going to remember thirty two takes thirty five takes way past the point that Steve Schulz was ready to call it a day.

Early on, Steve Schulz was ready to call it a day because he didn't say, then get it.

Let's say after the eighth take or something.

But on the twenty eighth take, Steve Shows is saying Okay, we've got it, and Elvis saying, no, we're going to do more.

Then he goes on to a court.

Don't be cruel.

This is one of the great greatest sessions just in terms of the share, success and output of it.

But this was true of all of Elvis's sessions.

The sense of perfectionism, the sense of everybody I'm speaking now against myself as a kid, I mean myself as a kid, would just be horrified by what I'm about to say.

But the recordings that Elvis made after he got out of the army, starting with the Elvis' Back Sessions, which is just such a great album, but the recordings he made in sixty sixty one, sixty two, sixty three are some of the most extraordinary recordings he ever made.

And they're all the product of his vision of himself as something entirely different from what the world sees.

And it includes Sure, it includes some great rock I mean Little Sister or all kinds of you know, songs that rock, but it includes some of the most beautiful ballads you'll ever hear, because Elvis saw himself as that too.

And also, and maybe this is another parallel with Colonel.

He was drawn to Italian Aria or something like Italian area, and so he's recording, you know, it's now or never songs like that because they were his ambition.

So yeah, I mean Elvis was the thing that if you want to compare him with the Beatles, say or Bob Dylan for that matter, I mean what they brought to it was they wrote all their own songs.

Elvis wrote one song in his life about about his mother, It's a Beautiful Sign.

But and he may have only contributed the title, but he took credit for that.

But but but but as far as the business hand of it, the Beatles were and like the Rolling Stones, we're in a complete fountain.

What do we what do you call it?

They were completely lost in terms of the business, Brian Epstein, as you said, you know, it was not somebody who was in command of the business.

And Elvis, through Colonel, was far far more in control of his business and of his ability to force the record company to do whatever he wanted, whatever he wanted to do then than any than any artists for many years.

Okay, it becomes clearer that Elvis is going in the wrong direction with drugs, food, et cetera.

But a tour is booked and the Colonel is in the northeast promoting that advance to the dates and Elvis dies.

If one reads the book and the letters, it appears relatively cold that I'm talking about.

On one hand, you have the colonel saying, I'm the manager, this is my job.

We put one foot in front of another.

On another level, it's very dispassionate.

So I have two questions.

What were Colonel Tom Parker's real emotions at that point?

And did he really foresee this was going to happen or was he shocked?

I got so many yes and no answers.

You know, so this will be another one.

But no, he was devastated.

He was absolutely devastated.

And the picture that I've drawn, and I hope it comes across, but I try to state things not in extreme ways, not in over the top ways, but you know, in flat description he was in shock when he was in Portland and got the news from Joe Esposito and then from Vernon, and the shot carried through.

I would say for I don't think he was ever the same, ever the same after that.

I mean, Elvis was the person that he apart from his wife, I don't know who, you know, Elvis was the person that he loved the most.

Elvis was you could say he was like a son, he was like a brother.

It doesn't matter he was, he was.

He was absolutely from the time he first met Elvis, immediately it was it was like he was just totally captured by Elvis as well as a person.

He was Elvis was a kid, but as a person, as an as an artist.

But once the new he got the news, he was behaved almost as an automaton.

And he held a meeting of all the people who were in Portland.

He said, we must uh.

Nobody wanted to be this dinner.

They had this dinner that he called.

But he said, we have to carry on.

We're still working for Elvis.

We are you know, we can't shed a tear.

We have to carry out the business because we're still carrying out the business for Elvis.

We want him to be proud of us.

But it carried through, I mean to the point where as they flew to Memphis and Colonel's wife, Leanne was horrified by this.

Everybody who's crying, and Colonel says, stop your tears.

We're representing Elvis.

And when they got to Memphis, he told them, we will dress as we dressed when we were working for Elvis.

Nobody will wear a suit and type because we never He never saw us like this, and we're going to do now.

This can be vastly misunderstood and you and it's easy to take a negative view of it.

But I don't think he went Colonel went from from Memphis too directly to Tampa.

Uh.

He hold up with another one of these families that you mentioned, the Renaldy family who had the Reality printing.

The father the it's the grandfather by now, who started in Aldi printing, had been the first person to sort of take give him advice in business.

He gave him when he could.

He had no business of that.

When he met them in thirty five thirty six.

He gave them all the business, all the Elvis business forever after.

But he holed up with them.

He could speak with virtually no one, and he did everything he could to protect Elvis in the sense that he set up the deal with Factors Factors, Inc.

I think that he felt would protect Elvis's name and image and the ability to merchandise, which would be the only thing or the principal thing that would bring income to Lisa Marie.

So no, I think that he was He was absolutely devastating, but he did not behave like other people.

Okay, you came up when Elvis was the star.

Did you always have a fascination and want to write about Elvis?

Or it's like, well I wrote about this person, I go, well, next we have eld this.

No, No, not at all, neither one.

It's just no.

I what you know, as I always wanted to be a writer.

I mean that has been my motivation from the beginning.

I've written ten novels.

I've got a collection of short stories coming out next a year from now, which is that's what I started out with when I was twenty.

The first book I published when I was twenty was a collection of short stories, and I published the second when I was twenty three.

Fell I fell into the blues when I was fifteen or sixteen.

I had never heard anything like this.

I can't describe what it was that captivated me, but it just totally, it just totally turned me around.

And aside from baseball.

That was the only thing that I was, you know, that I was drawn to, and it was just what happened though, and when I had the opportunity.

This is when I'm fifteen or sixteen.

A few years later, the underground press started up.

I knew this kid who started a magazine called Crawdaddy, which preceded Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone started up after that, the Boston Phoenix and Boston after Dark.

They were essentially the same thing.

And I knew some people in different ways, and I got an opportunity.

A couple of people said to me, well, how would you like to write about it?

Maybe they might have said, how would you like to write about Cream?

I said no, but I'd like to write about Skip James.

I'd like to write about Muddy Waters.

I'd like to write about Lightning Hopkins.

I'd like to write about Howland Wolf.

There was no money in it, there was no This was not a career.

This was nothing other than pure love.

And it was the opportunity to put those names down in print.

You just didn't see those names in print at that time.

And to put those names down on paper, see them in print, and tell people about this music.

I thought it was so great.

It was absolutely thrilling to me now to get back to Elvis when he was in the Army in nineteen sixty because Colonel had limited the number of things, the number of songs that could be kept in not the catalog, but I mean, there was no overage and Konnel was not going to have ourcas issue record after record.

They and they put out an album called A Date with Elvis in nineteen six I think in fifteen nine or sixty, maybe it was fifty nine.

This is after I had discovered the blues.

On that record, On that album Date with Elvis, there were a number of the Sun sides.

I'd never heard the blues sides, Mystery Train, that's all right, maybe good Rocket tonight.

I had heard the originals of all these at that time I hear Elvis's versions, I said, oh my god, he's a blues singer.

He's a great blue singer.

Not a great blue singer who was going to take the place for me of little Junior Parker who originated a Mystery Train, or after Crudup originated.

It wasn't that Elvis was taking their place.

He was taking the place, taking a place beside them.

For me, that's what motivated me to write about Elvis, and it was the first I wrote about Elvis in nineteen sixty seven was when he put out three essentially blues singles in a row, and I wrote the thing, he's coming back, He's coming back to his first love.

You know, he's rediscovering his love of the blues, his roots music, and that's what I wrote with I then reviewed the sixty eight specials sort of along the same lines.

I was very myopic.

I told you that my younger self would really reject some of the things I'm saying today.

You know, for me at that early stage, you know, I would think every time Elvis sigen as On that wasn't a blues I would think, always selling out.

I didn't recognize the full scope of his ambition or his talents.

But what drew me to Elvis was the blues.

And then Elvis educated me to a lot more.

Okay, so you grow up where.

Grew up in Brookline, Mass.

Brookline, Mass.

What did your appearance do for a living?

There was an oral and Maxillo facial surgeon.

Okay, so how many kids in the family?

My family three?

Okay, what happened to your two siblings.

What did their lives turn out to be?

They turned out to be great people, you know they I mean my family.

I wrote quite a bit about my family in my last book, Looking to Get Lost.

It's as close I had my father, my two grandfathers, something about other members of the family in a book that was primarily a book of profiles of Johnny cash Merle Haggard, Howland Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, it also includes profiles of people in my family.

And all of them, you know, just each of them went his or her own way.

My mother went back to school, got her master's and social work, went to work and Grove Hall in Roxbury and found them as satisfying, you know, work of her life in that.

My father just you have to read about it, but he was just a very very admirable person.

And my brother and sister.

My brother became an out an outside an outside solo jazz saxophonist, traveled around quite a bit, now runs a performance space in Albuquerque which has been an incredible service to the community.

My sister was a teacher and a counselor who you know, was equally notable.

So I mean, I mean, none of us are perfect.

But they were all great.

They are.

Okay, there's a couple of things.

I'll get there.

So you go to Boston University.

I went to, I went, I went to I went to Columbia first.

Then maybe I'm wrong.

You went to Columbia undergrad.

I hated Columbia.

You went to Columbia undergrad and then you went to be You for graduate school.

No, no, you, you weren't wrong.

I went to Columbia for a year and a half, hated it, dropped out for two years.

Then I went to Boston University.

Okay, I'm sure you're right.

What did you hate about Columbia and what did you do for those two years?

This was an era when people didn't take time off from college.

I felt that it was Columbia was a very closed off, prejudiced kind of self granddas, you know, I'm talking about the students there, and also the whole thing about you're going to learn enough so you can go to the cocktail of life and you can talk about any subject on a superficial level.

This was a great books program.

So I but you know, I was you know, I tell I tell my granddaughters, I say, you know, I was just a little asshole.

I mean, yeah, I so don't take me seriously.

I but I but I believed myself so but I I it was a very the community that I saw there was a very I felt, a very self serving self whatever you call proud.

Of itself, self satisfy.

Yeah, self satisfied community.

I mean.

And I had some friends there, but it just wasn't where I wanted to be.

But I'd say that says more about me than it does about any than it does about the school.

So what did you do for those two years?

And then how did you decide to go to be you?

I went to bu because it was convenient and because I finally I realized the advantage there would be to get in a degree staying out of the draft.

You know, there were there were many aspects to it.

But for the two years I worked for the Paperback Booksmith, mainly bookstore which was modeled on the Eighth Street Bookstore in New York, run by a guy named Marshall Smith who had been something like a stockbroker and then had a vision of paperbacks were the wave of the future and started a chain of stores in the Boston near He called the Paperback booksmith, and I worked most of them, and eventually I ended up driving as a kind of delivery driving the delivery trucked around to the various and I loved it.

It was just great.

And I love the people who worked there.

And everybody was a dropout in one way or another, and everybody had a dream, and everybody, you know, had imagination, and they were not self satisfied.

And how'd you get out of the draft?

Well, I never I actually never got classified.

I went back to school.

I was two s I was married, so that was the second thing.

And then just as they were started drafting married people, Alexander got pregnant, and so then I was a father.

So all in all, I was just lucky.

I don't know what I would my grandfather.

My grandfather taught English at the Boston Latin School.

He was prepared, I mean spoke seriously.

I don't know if whatever would have happened.

He was going to buy land in Canada and we could all go up there.

So he was very approving of me.

I mean, he was just he was a great grandfather, and both grandfathers were but he and he but what was best of all, even the only thing he disapproved of was my arm.

He was a great athlete himself.

He was a three sport athlete in college and a terrific baseball player.

And you know, he thought I was a good hitter.

I was a good fielder, you know, but I just didn't have much of an arm.

I played the outfield, he said.

I said to him.

I said, well, I've got a quick release.

He says, yeah, you got to work on the iron though.

Other than that, though, he approved of everything I did, and he was talking about buying land in Canada so we could all go up there if I got drafted.

But it never came to that.

Of the three kids, where are you in the hierarchy.

You should be able to guess you're the.

Old obviously, right, Well I could tell that, but whatever, Okay, so you go back to college.

Where in this story do you want to be a writer.

From the time I was probably you know, eight or ten years old, I always wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to be a writer and a baseball player.

Those were my two ambitions.

And I wrote and I'll tell you that when I was fifteen, that you know, seminal year.

Maybe I don't know if that happened at exactly the same time I discovered The Blues.

But I also read the interview with Ernest Hemingway in the Paris Review where he talked about his I think George Plumpton nos.

Was it Terry Southern?

No.

George Plumpton conducted the interview and Hemingway spoke about his writing habits, and the thing was, no matter what you do the night before, and no matter what you plan to do with the rest of your day, you write every day, and you try to write a certain number of and not a specific number, but you and you don't stop until you you're If you're not satisfied with what you produced, at least you're satisfied you put in the effort.

And I started that when I was fifteen, and I continued to this day.

I mean to a degree.

I mean, my life, life has gotten more complicated, but it's in essence, it's the same thing.

And so all the time that I was in school, all the time that I was working at the book smith, you know, if work started at if classes started at eight o'clock, if work started at nine o'clock, I'd get up at five and I would write for an hour and a half before I went to work before and you know, it wasn't that I was.

What I was writing was so great, And in many cases it was really painful because I would say, Okay, if he mary Way can do it.

I'm not saying I've got the talent of him anyway, but at least I can put in the effort.

And I would, so I would just force myself to I remember being at Columbia, just force myself to write five hundred words, some seven hundred words, and it just words that I might hate.

Sometimes it was good.

Then I'd go out to Tom's, which is the place where they filmed so much of Seinfelder.

If they didn't film it, they they recreated it.

And I would have French tows at times and go to class.

But I mean, to me, it didn't matter if I came in at two in the morning, I was going to get up to write.

And you know this sounds talk about self satisfied.

You know this sounds like, oh man, I was so great.

I mean, I'm not saying that I just but but I was determined to be a writer.

And that's why, you know, when this guy in Cambridge, Larry Stark, decided that Cambridge in the sixties was just like Paris in the twenties, and said, I'm going to start my own press, and you called it the Larry Stark Press.

Not surprisingly, the first book he published was a book of my short stories, and I think it was if it didn't come out the day I turned twenty, It came out just ye.

It was supposed to come up before that, but came on when I it was just twenty, and you know it was cool.

Okay, So you wanted to write fiction.

Okay, you're writing these reviews and stories about blues musicians because you have a passion.

You get out of school, what is the direction you take and how do you pay the bills?

Everything I did was for the writing, to support the writing.

You know that sounds like a an idealistic or maybe it sounds like a really selfish thing.

I mean, you have to support your family, and you have to and the secondary thing is you had to support the writing.

So everything I did as it happened.

I fell into a job teaching classics at Boston University for seven years because it was a great guy named Charlie buy who ran the classics department, which is probably the most creative department at Boston University, and a woman who was to teach first year of Greek pregnant, I don't remember.

She didn't show up, and he asked me if I would do it, and then I talked of for the next seven years, or I talked for the next seven years, a couple of years full time, but all of it was designed to support the writing, support the family, and support the writing.

And he almost he almost.

At the same time, my grandfather, who taught English Boston Latin School and to whom I was so close, ran a summer camp on Lake Winnipesaki, and he was kind of guy.

He was like Colonel Parker.

He didn't ask anybody's help.

He did everything himself.

And he was still running the camp himself, about two hundred and fifty campers in nineteen seventy when he was seventy eight years old, and it's still very vigorous, and still took his cuts once in a while to play.

The council would throw to him.

Was just be scared to death that he was going to hit him.

But he would call.

He would call his fields, you know, he would still call his fields right fields, centerfield where he was.

Going to hit.

But in seventy he asked me in the middle of camp if I would help him out the next year.

This was not what I wanted to do.

It's not what I intended to do.

It was not in my thoughts.

But I would never turn him down, and so I said yes.

Within I think within a few days, he had what appeared to be a stroke.

It turned out to be a brain tumor.

But he and I ended up finishing out the year at camp having no idea.

Nobody knew how camp ran.

I learned quickly and I was like working a forty eight hour day.

And then I kept camp going over the winter because it looked like he was going to get better, he was improving from what appeared to be the stroke.

And then he didn't get better, he got worse.

And I carried on and I ran the camp the twenty two years, and again it was a wonderful thing, an incredibly rewarding experience, but also something that was very very it was it was no selling.

It was all word of mouth.

I mean, I wasn't going to go out and you know, go out and sell the camp.

I was.

I was going to write and but the camp sustained itself.

It remained a wonderful experience.

It was a very rewarding experience.

It was probably the best thing in the world I could ever have done in terms of writing, because it took me out of myself.

It took me out of my If I had an ivory it wasn't so much an ivory tower.

It's my own head, you know.

And I had to deal with all these different people, all these different problems, all these different you know, and it was so it was great.

And I ran it for twenty two years, and you know, so it was it was.

It was a terrific experience.

So what happened after twenty two.

Years we sort of reached the end of the line.

I mean, the last few years I think were the best years of camp.

But I've felt like I was just repeating myself that I didn't want to do that I didn't.

I mean, I think that's unfair both to yourself.

It's unfair of the job, it's unfair of the people who are dependent on you.

And I reached a point where I and also I was working on the Elvis biography, the writing was becoming more and more demanding, involving you know, it, and so I tried to find someone to take it over.

I mean I tried and and and didn't and so we so we ended up I ended up closing camp.

And two years later we were able to sell it.

Is it still a camp or just you sold as a piece of property.

I didn't sell it as a piece of property.

I sold it to a nature conservancy thing that said they would never let it be sold as a piece of property, and then sold it as a piece of property.

Okay, you know, you do you do the best you can.

And as Sam Phillips said and Colonel said, you never looked back, because what's the point.

You did the best you could.

You looked into every aspect and you know, and that was it.

Okay, subsequent to your twenty two years of camp?

Did you ever have a so called day job after that?

Well, you know, my life has been a series of somewhat of a series of fortuitous events.

And in two thousand and five I was offered a one year appointment at Vanderbilt teaching teaching creative writing at Vanderbilt as a I can't think what the title was, and so I thought this would be interesting, this to be great.

I would never do it for more than one semester.

We camp took about three months of the year, maybe four months of the year, but that left me free to write eight months of the year.

And with Vanderbilt think it was a one semester thing.

And so I did it.

And I wound up staying there teaching one semester a year until twenty sixteen.

So I got twelve years out of it out of a one year appointment.

Was pretty good.

And that was also very rewarding.

And you know, and for the most part, during the time that I was teaching, it was very difficult to write, but I recognized that I was being given the opportunity to support the writing through my commitment to this teaching for a period of time that was three and a half months, and the rest of the year I had free So that worked out great.

It wouldn't have worked out great if I hadn't found it, but you know, so rewarding, and I hadn't enjoyed the teaching and enjoy it.

I'd say I enjoyed the kids I taught, both undergraduates and MFAs.

I'm not sure that I enjoyed the faculty aspect.

I didn't have any faculty aspect.

I wasn't interested in it, but that would not have been something I would have enjoyed.

It as a lifelong writer, someone wanted to be a writer as a young age.

How do you feel that you're mostly known for your non fiction as opposed to your fiction.

That's a question I ask myself all the time.

But you know, I've never been asked that on Zoom.

I know we're not on Zoom.

We're whatever we're on.

But I, you know, I sometimes I think that, you know, maybe it just turned out that I was better at the non fiction and the fiction.

But say, I've never stopped writing the fiction.

I'm working on a novel that I broke off at one point while I was writing the Elvis biography because it became so all consuming.

The biographies are just a matter of total immersion.

But I've worked on it off and on since then, and I'm working on that again now.

I've worked on these short stories which are coming up next year.

If the world doesn't come to an end, you know, or I don't come to an end, but some work.

I've been working on these short stories over the year, so I never gave up the fiction, but it has occurred to me that maybe I was just better.

But the other thing, and this was really the great revelation to me, was when I was working on the Elvis, it suddenly occurred to me, this really is a novel.

This is a novel on a grand scale.

I mean, it's not that everything is nothing is made up, everything is factual, everything is based on research.

But it's developing.

It's a great story with great characters on a landscape that maybe I couldn't imagine in terms of fiction.

I probably couldn't.

And so that was all of this was satisfied.

Writting about Solomon Burke, watting about Dick Curlis, writing about Muddy Waters, all of those were satisfying, particularly when I started working writing Profiles, which was my first couple of books from books of Profiles, and they were like short stories in a sense, but not in quite the way that the Elvis biography and then the Sam Cook and the Sam Phillips were.

These they were they were like novels to me, and to me, the whole thing it was all about telling the story, developing the characters, and always making sure that you moved forward and that you didn't introduce either anecdotes or you didn't repeat the same thing over and over again.

You tried to have a sense of development of the How did the characters, each character, whether it was Dewey Phillips or it was you know, Sam Phillips, or it was Sam Cook or J.

W.

Alexander, how did they develop over the course of the time of writing about them, and how does the story proceed.

So in a way, it became very much like writing novels.

So I don't know.

I mean, that's not a very good answer.

That's the best I've.

Got, Okay, In terms of other than assemblage of previously written pieces.

Prior to the Elvis books, you did one on Robert Johnson, and what else was a book from scratch prior to Elvis.

Well, the first book Feel Like Going Home.

Those were not previously published pieces.

The most recent book, Looking to Get Lost, although it's a collection of profiles, two thirds of it is new to you know in its form, Lost Highway probably comes closest to being previously published pieces.

But given that every single piece I've written has come out of my personal commitment, I've never written anything on assignment, which is not a good way to make a living.

I should say if we have any you know, kids listening out there, any writing students don't do what I did, but because you know, it's probably smart to take the assignments you've give them, But I didn't.

I never did.

Every single story I've ever done has come out of personal commitment, So even Lost Highway, which in some ways is as personal as any of the books, although I think in that case each of the stories had been published elsewhere.

It's written as a book with interpolated passages and with you know, with the profiles rewritten to fit a format and not to include and chosen.

I guess that's the thing most of all, chosen to represent a progression within this book, rather than this be random pieces.

So I none of them were collections per se.

Okay, And you had these ideas you started writing before you had a publishing deal on these books.

No, the well, yeah, I mean I feel like going Home came about.

This is a sad story, Is that?

Okay?

With you?

I can see you've got a tissue there, so you know you're ready for No.

I knew this editor who was sort of the enfantiable of publishing at the time, and he had turned down two or three of my novels, and he told me the next novel you write, which I think was called improvised people.

He says, I'm positive I'll publishing.

He was, he was doing pretty well in publishing, and he was the good guy and everything.

So I sent it to him, and you know, he couldn't.

He rejected it.

He just and maybe he was right.

You know, I'm not going to argue with him, but I think he felt badly about it because he had promised me that he was going to take the next one.

So and this is this is a whether this is a sad story or cynical story.

Somebody had come to him, let's call it an agent with the idea of doing a history of the Blues.

Now I know editors never do this, publishers never do this.

Agents never do this.

But he came to me and he said, look, somebody wants to write a history of the Blues.

Why don't you write a history of the Blues?

And I said, I don't want to write a history of the books.

And then I proposed I did the book that I wrote, Feel Like Going Home, which was a progression of profiles telling a story that I wanted to tell.

So that was how I got How I got that, and I brought the Last Highway I put together.

I wrote it, and I brought it to David Godean, who's the head of Godean in seventy nine started publishing house, and who are going to publish.

David Godean is no longer at Godean, but Godan is going to publish the Short Stories, my collection Short Stories next fall.

Just to be clear, Lost Highway, you wrote it before you made the publishing deal, or you made a deal and then wrote it.

I had feel like going home, I wrote after I made the publishing deal, but it basically was you know.

For instance, I did a story on Muddy Waters, first time I ever got on an airplane.

I never thought I'd get in an airplane in my life, only for Muddy Waters, you know, to write that story.

So I was very excited.

But the Last Highway I had in my mind to do a book that sort of covered the range of American music, country or roots music, the music that I loved.

And so I was writing stories for various periodicals, stories which I initiated.

In many cases I had to figure out ingenious ways of financing them because nobody was going to pay me to go to Memphis to write a story on Rufus Thomas or Charlie Feathers, let's say.

And so I put together on my own, I put together a sequence, a kind of itinerary in which one publication might put up a certain amount of money another and another.

But it was all to do the work that I wanted to do.

And it was all with this aim of what else wanted to do in Las Vegas, bring all the various strands of his music together and present them in one thing.

And that's what I wanted to do with Last Highway.

So having written these stories, all of which, as I say, were self initiated, whether it was Charlie rich Or as Charlie Feathers or howld Wolf or it was, and I put them together to otis span Big Joe Turner.

And so I put them together, rewrote them, wrote them so that they would they could be presented both in a sequence and in a way that sort of made them into what I thought of as a book.

And that's what I brought to God in So it's somewhere in between what you said.

The Robert Johnson book.

There was the double CD set around the turn of the decade from the eighties to the nineties.

Your Robert Johnson book comes out in eighty nine.

Certainly people are aware of Robert Johnson, certainly all the English blues musicians.

I'm not sophisticated enough to know.

Was it your book that really broke it wide open?

Were you really pushing the envelope further?

Was there something before?

What was the experience there?

I would never claim that kind of credit.

I mean I was fortunate in the sense the book came out, as you said, in eighty nine, the box set came out in ninety.

The book achieved a certain amount of success and reached a niche audience, as we say.

But then when the box set came out, although Columbia, I mean nobody was aware, the publisher was not aware of the box set.

In the box that may not have been aware of the book, but they got placed together in tower.

But you know, I wouldn't call it a great popular success, but I think it reached a lot of people.

And the point about the book was that one of the things I write about in the book, which is more like a biographical essay, a personal biographical essay, is that there were all these people around the world.

I mean, who discovered Robert Johnson at the same time, But they weren't that many, so that Mick Jagger or Keith Richards or Eric Clapton and I were all discovering the music and equally moved by it and equally passionate about it, let's say, in nineteen sixty one, all discovered at the same time, and yet Robert Johnson did not certainly become a household name in any way.

And much like the early writing that I had done about Howland Wolfer Muddy Waters, the opportunity to write about Robert Johnson was a thrill for me.

But what it came out of was entirely out of going to Texas, going to Houston, going to Otaga Street.

That's one of the things I can remember a few things still to talk to interview Mack McCormick, who had done all this incredible research about Robert Johnson.

This was back in Oh God, I'm gonna I'm thinking it was.

Could it have been seventy two.

I'm not getting the right date on this.

I just can't.

No, it's seventy six, I'm sorry, right, it was around Jimmy Carter's inauguration.

But so I went there because he was in a dispute with Columbia about who owned the photographs of Robert Johnson.

Columbia was going to put out that Blox cent it would have been a series of three LPs at the time, and Mack McCormick was disputing their right to use the photographs.

And in the end the Block Center the collection got held up for fourteen years.

But so I interview mac McCormick, who had written a book called Biography of Phantom.

He'd finished it at that time.

It didn't come out until two years ago, I guess.

But and he was very generous in the time he spent with me, and he told me a great deal, and he shared some of his research.

And I wrote an article in Rolling Stone about this great work Mike McCormick had done and how his book, Biography of a Phantom would be coming out any day.

Well, it didn't come out, and it didn't come out, and I think after five or six years I wrote to him and I said, would you mind if I wrote about Robert Johnson using some of them beyond the Rolling Stone article, using some of the material that you spoke to me about crediting you for your research, and he said, no, no, I wouldn't mind at all, go right ahead.

I mean his book, like I say, he had a lot of problems with completion.

I think he was a really great guy, but parts of them maybe weren't that great or whatever.

He had problems and he didn't and so so I wrote, I wrote this essay and it came out and Living Blues I think in eighty two, which again talking about making money.

There's no money in that.

It was it was a great opportunity to get the word out about something I was passionate about.

And then a guy named Toby Byron came along and had the idea of packaging it and you know, as the book that stood alone, and and I did it with Susan myershes designed all my books, and it came out in eighty nine.

So how did the Elvis Journey begin?

Which which which party were you end up writing the first book of the trilogy?

How did that come to be?

It was, well, I'll tell you exactly how.

I mean, I had retained I'd written about Elvis considerably over the years, but always from the outside.

I mean, I wrote the chapter on Elvis and the Rolling Stone Illustrated History, which is the same as the chapter on Elvis in Last Highway.

It's the longest chapter in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History.

And that had been after I had reviewed from Elvis in Memphis, which was such a revolutionary album in Rolling Stone, and I had written about him in The Phoenix and whatever.

So at a certain point a filmmaker, to a pair of filmmakers came to me about writing the script for a documentary called Elvis fifty six, which is going to be based on al Werthheimer's just incredible photographs.

And they have formed a partnership or made a deal without work time whom I met at that time and saw six thousand whatever you come up negative six thousand contacts, you know, contact sheats with six represented six thousand negatives, something like that.

But in the course of writing the script, and I dropped out of this after a while because our visions, our visions clashed.

But I mean I wrote a couple I wrote a draft of the script, or maybe a couple of drafts.

But in the course of doing it, I got access.

And you remember this is in the days before the internet.

You remember those days before the internet, yea and so, and I got access to all the interviews that Elvis had done prior in fifty five fifty six, actually a coupled from sixteen sixty two, but mainly, I think mainly fifty five fifty six.

And I listened to them.

I'd never heard them before.

They weren't available, and I said, oh my god, he can speak for himself.

And that was when I sort of had his vision, which was reinforced.

I was driving around Memphis with a friend of mine named Rose Clayton while I was writing Sweet Soul Music, which was another book that was from inception to I mean it just it was self generated entirely.

But I was driving around Memphis with Rose Clayton, who was a native of South Memphis, and we drove by the drug store where Elvis's cousin Jean had worked.

It was all boarded up, and she described how Elvis would come in to wait for Jean and sit at the counter and his face was sort of all pimply, and he was just all he was beautiful, but pimply, but he and he was just you know, he would tap his fingers on the countertop and stuff.

And she said, Rose said, poor baby, and that was really that was the thing that crystallized everything for me.

It was just like Elvis poor maybe.

And it was right after that that I wrote a proposal for the Elvis, which I didn't think anybody would take because nobody took Elvis seriously.

And it turned out I was wrong, and I'm glad.

I was.

Okay, you've written books previously, you write about Elvis, it becomes a phenomenon, it makes your name.

What was it like for you?

I don't know.

I don't think you know.

It was an opportunity.

I mean, the point is the next book I wrote was Sam Cook, and I didn't have an agent at that point.

I don't have an agent.

I've been agenting myself for twenty five years now, but I was looking for an agent at that time, and so I I wanted to do this book on Sam Cook because I had interviewed Sam Cook's business partner J.

W.

Alexander and eighty two and from that moment I knew I wanted to do book on Sam Cook.

So I go around and I met a lot of agents I think it was seventeen or eighteen, and they all said they wanted to work with me.

I mean I didn't test the proposition, so maybe they didn't, but they said they did.

And many of them said, hey, listen, I can get you a seven figure advance if you do a book on the Rolling Stones, on Bob Dylan, on whatever, Eric Clapton, and I said no, no, I'm doing a book on Sam Cook.

And they all made a face and walked away, until finally I ran into someone, David Gurnett, who said, what a great idea to do a book on Sam Cook.

Well, the book on Sam Cook I got a third of the advance that I've gotten for Elvis, as opposed to the seven figure advance that these guys.

So that's not what I'm in it for.

I mean, it means as much to me to write about Dick Curlis, who's the centerpiece of Looking to Get Lost, my last book, as it does to write about Elvis.

Not to denigrate Elvis in any way, but just because it's Stony Edwards.

You know, these are people that I care about.

Charlie Rich, I mean, what did I I met Charlie and Margaret an Rich at the Vapors in nineteen seventy out by the airport, where they had a tea dance that went on.

They had three acts and they all did about five or six sets, and I talked to Charlie and his wife Margaret in between sets, and I've never I just fell in love with him.

I've never liked anybody more.

And the music was great and it was something.

And I wrote about him and feel like going home, and I thought he'll never talk to me again, because he had spoken about the guilt that he felt over being from a fundamentalist background and also being an alcoholic.

And he was also a what do you call it, somebody who hates crowds.

It's a great it's a Latin word.

Anyway, didn't like to be out among people, which is a difficult situation for entertainer.

But I write about him like this because it was honest.

And I wrote about how much I loved his music and how much admired him.

But I thought I'll never see him again.

I liked him so much.

Then he ordered thirty I got a call from the secretary at the publisher who said, well, Charlie Riches called and ordered thirty books.

And afterwards he said to me, he said, well, it was painful, but it was honest, and that's what's important.

And I was very close to him till till the end of his life.

But these are the things that matter.

It doesn't matter what people think of you.

So who deserves a book?

Who doesn't have one?

So many people, so many people.

I mean I always said that after I'd finished Sam Cooke Sam Phillips biography in twenty fifteen, and that began with first meeting Sam seventy nine.

But after I finished that, I said, I'm never going to do another biography because it just it takes too much out of you.

I mean, I've done it, I've been doing it.

This is twenty fifteen.

I'd started the Elvis in eighty eight, so this is now in twenty seven years.

You know, I figured I've done my time, I said, but I will.

The only thing that would change that.

There were two things that would change it.

One was I would have loved to have done a book with Solomon Burke, and he would have loved to have done a book with me.

But you know, he wasn't the kind of guy.

If he said I'll fly you out to la well, that would be the first stumbling book.

Never accept an airline ticket from Solomon, because you just don't know where that airline ticket has come from.

But more than that, you don't wait wait, what does that mean?

You don't know where the airline ticket has come from?

Actually, it doesn't mean.

What it means is how much the cost if it's free?

Oh okay, just want to make sure.

But I don't know whether you were speaking of his financial situation.

Okay, No, no, no, no, not at all.

No, It's just Solomon was a man.

He was a great fabulous to a great dreamer.

But I never felt that I could count on the fact that if I would fly, if I was going to fly out to LA, would I would fly out under my own I mean, on my own money.

But but I couldn't be certain that you would be in LA.

So it's just as much as we talked about it, and we talked about it a lot.

But the other thing was, I said, the only thing that would cause me to write another biography would be if Merle Haggart called, and if he said, you know, Pete, i've been reading some of the stuff you've written, and it's not too bad.

You know, I think maybe we could do something together.

And I know that I knew that this would have been not a disaster would have been very, very difficult to do, and yet I would have felt compelled to do it.

So that's the kind of person that I mean.

There's so many people that that that you know, deserve a real biography or just telling that story, just you know, giving it.

It's not so much that it has to be defined into something.

I mean, you know, biography is a biography, but it could just it could be a book, it could be a voice.

It couldn't.

Solomon's book would have been in his voice and it would have been incredible, but I couldn't get him to commit to it enough to make me believe that it was going to happen.

Can you name a couple of music biographies that you feel strongly positive about that you didn't write, If there are any.

I tell you I don't read much nonfiction, so it's I don't.

I just read a wonderful book by Paul Birch, a musician named Paul Birch, called Ridy and Rising, which is a fictional biography of Jimmy Rodgers, and it's it's really uh uh in rapturing or it's just it's just a wonderful book.

I know there are books I'm not thinking very We've been talking a long time, and I don't want to do an injustice to books.

Well, let me shift the gears here.

We only had a couple of minutes left.

But since you're a reader of fiction, what are two of your favorite fiction books?

Were two of my favorite writers?

My favorite writer of alved I guess Chekhov would be up near the top, But of contemporary writers, Aliceman Rowe was for years and years my absolute favorite.

And I would tell all the classes of the writing classes at Vanderbilt that she would never win a Nobel Prize, first because she was a woman, and second because she was a Canadian.

But of course I was wrong.

I have not gone back to her, to reading her since all these you know, the writing about her has come out, and that's not a fair thing.

None of us are perfect, none of us.

But it's just it's such an awful story, and it's my own failing.

Perhaps I haven't gone, but she Another writer that I've read my enormously is Grace Paley, and she's somebody whom I knew very slightly, very slightly, but the voice that she achieves and the surprises that come from that voice and she wrote a fair amount of nonfiction towards the end of her life, and also very politically socially committed writing.

And those were as good as but the little diservances a man enormous changes at the last minute.

It's just fantastic books.

There are so many.

I really feel terrible and I'm not thinking of all these great books.

No, no, no, no, that's good.

There's a lot of great stuff.

Let's wrap it up here.

Elvis, Okay, Elvis dies in seventy seven.

Certainly, for at least the first decade, all the tabloids are He's still alive, He's you know, somewhere whatever.

They have the eldest character in Honeymoon in Vegas.

Still have Elvis impersonators in Vegas.

However, the audience that remembers the heyday of Elvis is dying off.

And my understanding is that actually Elvis business is off.

Memorabilia prices have dropped.

What is the future of Elvis in Tom Parker in the national consciousness, will be a moment in time or is it forever?

I don't know about merchandising.

You'd have to talk to Colonel about that.

That just doesn't enter into my into my consciousness.

But you know, I would say that Elvis, Colonel Parker, Sam Phillips, Sam Cook there there, they're they're in eternity.

I mean, they're as long as people care about music and or aren't.

It doesn't you know, it's like talking about writers.

I mean they you can go in or out of fashion.

That really is not Robert Johnson took he died in thirty eight.

He became an international icon in ninety.

Look at John Donne, it took him three hundred years.

Look at her in Melville.

It just doesn't matter what the state of acceptance of somebody is at any given moment.

I think that the impact of Elvis's voice, let's just talk about Elvis, is the same today in his best work as it was when he first arrived on the scene in nineteen fifty four, nineteen fifty five.

It just there's no way to describe it exactly.

Somebody like Jake Hess, the great lead singer for The Statesman, one of Elvis's idols, whom Elvis News from the time he was a little kid said about, and he's a much technically, he's a virtuosic singer, and he's a better singer in many ways than Elvis.

But he said Elvis had something.

It just reached people in a way that you simply can't define.

And I would say that's what you know, Elvis fans today are going to have very different tastes.

I mean, individuals always are going to have different tastes.

If I tell you that one of my favorite songs is I need Somebody to lean on that, it's a sign that just kills me.

Every time we're trying to get to you.

That might not be what you know.

Maybe somebody else is going to tell you it's burning love.

But there is that direct impact, emotional conveyance that existed in Elvis's voice from the start, long before he developed his voice.

I mean just from the start, and say, I think Sam Cook there are very few people who have that.

I mean Sam Cook had it, whereas somebody like Johnny Taylor, who sounded just like Sam Cook didn't.

And I think that's what continues to make the impact.

And I just think art exists, you know, whether it's music or writing or theater or film, it exists in a realm outside of time if it's good enough, and the sales just don't anything to do whether it's continuing relevance.

We've been talking to Peter Geroalnick his new book about Colonel Tom Parker.

I have to say, generally speaking, to be a little bit extreme, but not much.

I have no interest in Elvis because if you're a person of the Beatles of my age Boomer, Elvis was the enemy.

Elvis was already you know in Hollywood, the Beatles come along, etc.

Then of course we do get suspicious minds in the ghetto, which are good Top forty tracks.

Then we have Elvis in Vegas.

So ay, I went to Memphis, which is so different from Nashville, and I went to Graceland blew my mind.

And without making a whole speech about that, I got your book, and I have to say two things.

I am trying to read this very well reviewed biography of Robert Crumb.

The information is there, but it's not an easy book to read.

You are a good writer because the book is easy to read on the subject and it calls out you want to read it more certainly for those of us interested in music business.

Just the managerial style of Colonel Tom Parker was amazing.

And I had not read the first two books, and needless to say they're on my list because you go so deep and you make these characters come alive.

In in addition, as a student of the game, you know you're peeling back the layers, revealing truth that were previously unknown because you've done this level of research.

So this is not blowing smoke.

I mean really, I was stunned, how interested and how fascinating the book was.

I really have to give you credit, and I want to thank you Peter for taking this time to speak with my audi.

Well.

Thanks, I've really enjoyed it, and we certainly ranged Firefield to areas that I have rarely spoken about in an interview, although in real life I may have.

But it's been fun.

It's really been fun.

Well, you know, you want to know where somebody is coming from informs what they do.

Any event, till next time.

This is Bob left Sex