Elvis Presley

**Elvis Presley** was an article made on The Henry Stickmin Wiki, by LuckyGuy17, about the singer of the same name.

## The page

"Let's rock. Everybody, let's rock. Everybody in the whole cell block, was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock." - Elvis' famous song, "Jailhouse Rock

**Elvis Presley** (January 8, 1935 - August 16, 1977) is an unseen character in the Henry Stickmin series. While he doesn't make a physical appearance in the series, he is mentioned throughout Jonathan Bravo's bio, who, according to the bio, sounds exactly like Jonathan Bravo.

He was a popular American singer widely known as the “King of Rock and Roll”, and one of rock music’s dominant performers from the mid-1950s until his death.

### Early life

Presley grew up dirt-poor in Tupelo, moved to Memphis as a teenager, and, with his family, was off welfare only a few weeks when producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, a local blues label, responded to his audition tape with a phone call. Several weeks worth of recording sessions ensued with a band consisting of Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black. Their repertoire consisted of the kind of material for which Presley would become famous: blues and country songs, Tin Pan Alley ballads, and gospel hymns. Presley knew some of this music from the radio, some of it from his parents’ Pentecostal church and the group sings he attended at the Rev. H.W. Brewster’s Black Memphis church, and some of it from the Beale Street blues clubs he began frequenting as a teenager.

### Music career

Presley was already a flamboyant personality, with relatively long greased-back hair and wild-coloured clothing combinations, but his full musical personality did not emerge until he and the band began playing with blues singer Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup’s song “That’s All Right Mama” in July 1954. They arrived at a startling synthesis, eventually dubbed rockabilly, retaining many of the original’s blues inflections but with Presley’s high tenor voice adding a lighter touch and with the basic rhythm striking a much more supple groove. This sound was the hallmark of the five singles Presley released on Sun over the next year. Although none of them became a national hit, by August 1955, when he released the fifth, “Mystery Train,” arguably his greatest record ever, he had attracted a substantial Southern following for his recordings, his live appearances in regional roadhouses and clubs, and his radio performances on the nationally aired Louisiana Hayride. (A key musical change came when drummer D.J. Fontana was added, first for the Hayride shows but also on records beginning with “Mystery Train.”)

Presley’s management was then turned over to Colonel Tom Parker, a country music hustler who had made stars of Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. Parker arranged for Presley’s song catalog and recording contract to be sold to major New York City-based enterprises, Hill and Range and RCA Victor, respectively. Sun received a total of $35,000; Elvis got $5,000. He began recording at RCA’s studios in Nashville, Tennessee, with a somewhat larger group of musicians but still including Moore, Black, and Fontana and began to create a national sensation with a series of hits: “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me Tender” (all 1956), "All Shook Up" (1957), and more.

From 1956 through 1958 he completely dominated the best-seller charts and ushered in the age of rock and roll, opening doors for both white and Black rock artists. His television appearances, especially those on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, set records for the size of the audiences. Even his films, a few slight vehicles, were box office smashes.

Presley became the teen idol of his decade, greeted everywhere by screaming hordes of young women, and, when it was announced in early 1958 that he had been drafted and would enter the U.S. Army, there was that rarest of all pop culture events, a moment of true grief. More important, he served as the great cultural catalyst of his period. Elvis projected a mixed vision of humility and self-confidence, of intense commitment and comic disbelief in his ability to inspire frenzy. He inspired literally thousands of musicians—initially those more or less like-minded Southerners, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins on down, who were the first generation of rockabillies, and, later, people who had far different combinations of musical and cultural influences and ambitions. From John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan to Prince, it was impossible to think of a rock star of any importance who did not owe an explicit debt to Presley.

In 1960 Presley returned from the army, where he had served as a soldier in Germany rather than joining the Special Services entertainment division. Those who regarded him as commercial hype without talent expected him to fade away. Instead, he continued to have hits from recordings stockpiled just before he entered the army. Upon his return to the States, he picked up pretty much where he had left off, churning out a series of more than 30 movies (from Blue Hawaii [1961] to Change of Habit [1969]) over the next eight years, almost none of which fit any genre other than “Elvis movie,” which meant a light comedic romance with musical interludes. Most had accompanying soundtrack albums, and together the movies and the records made him a rich man, although they nearly ruined him as any kind of artist. Presley did his best work in the 1960s on singles either unconnected to the films or only marginally stuck into them, recordings such as “It’s Now or Never (‘O Sole Mio’)" (1960), “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” “Little Sister” (both 1961), “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Return to Sender” (both 1962), and “Viva Las Vegas” (1964). Presley was no longer a controversial figure; he had become one more predictable mass entertainer, a personage of virtually no interest to the rock audience that had expanded so much with the advent of the new sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Dylan.

By 1968 the changes in the music world had overtaken Presley—both movie grosses and record sales had fallen. In December his one-man Christmas TV special aired; a tour de force of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, it restored much of his dissipated credibility. In 1969 he released a single having nothing to do with a film, “Suspicious Minds”; it went to number one. He also began doing concerts again and quickly won back a sizable following, although it was not nearly as universal as his audience in the 1950s—in the main, it was Southern and Midwestern, working-class and unsophisticated, and overwhelmingly female. For much of the next decade, he was again one of the top live attractions in the United States. (For a variety of reasons, he never performed outside North America.) Presley was now a mainstream American entertainer, an icon but not so much an idol. He had married in 1967 without much furor, became a parent with the birth of his daughter, Lisa Marie, in 1968, and got divorced in 1973. He made no more movies, although there was a good concert film, Elvis on Tour. His recordings were of uneven quality, but on each album he included a song or two that had focus and energy. Hits were harder to come by—“Suspicious Minds” was his last number one and “Burning Love” (1972) his final Top Ten entry. But, thanks to the concerts, spectaculars best described by critic Jon Landau as an apotheosis of American musical comedy, he remained a big money earner. He now lacked the ambition and power of his early work, but that may have been a good thing—he never seemed a dated relic of the 1950s trying to catch up to trends but was just a performer, unrelentingly himself.

### Death and legacy

However, Presley had also developed a lethal lifestyle. Spending almost all his time when not on the road in Graceland, his Memphis estate (actually just a big Southern colonial house decorated somewhere between banal modernity and garish faux-Vegas opulence), he lived nocturnally, surrounded by sycophants and stuffed with greasy foods and a variety of prescription drugs. His shows deteriorated in the final two years of his life, and his recording career came to a virtual standstill. Presley never seemed confident in his status, never entirely certain that he would not collapse back into sharecropper poverty, and, as a result, he seems to have become immobilized. Finally, in the summer of 1977, the night before he was to begin yet another concert tour, he died of a heart attack brought on largely by drug abuse. He was 42 years old.

Although Elvis Presley died in 1977, his name, music, and image have sustained the public's attention. The period after his death has been marked by controversy, acclaim, ridicule, and commercialism: Officials debated the role of drugs in his death, music organizations honored his accomplishments, the media ridiculed the fans, and profiteers made money from it all. From the pits of tabloid headlines to the peaks of awards and honors, Elvis continued to make news. Death was not the end of Elvis Presley's career, it simply marked another phase.

To commemorate Elvis on the 25th anniversary of his death, RCA released a compilation of his No.1 records titled *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits.* The marketing campaign was designed around the tag line: "Before anyone did anything, Elvis did everything." A clever bit of phrasing, the line succinctly summarized Elvis' contribution to pop culture history while evoking the dynamism of his sound and the danger of his original image. The world needed to be reminded of this -- and it was. *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits* rocketed to No. 1 when it debuted, selling 500,000 copies in its first week of release. Debuting an album in the top spot on the U.S. charts was an accomplishment Elvis had not managed while he was alive. In addition to America, *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits* opened at No. 1 in 16 other countries, including Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates. Marketing strategy aside, it was the music that accounted for the CD's success. Arranged in chronological order, the compilation of hits covered Elvis' entire career at RCA -- from "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1956 to "Way Down" in 1977. All the songs reached No. 1 on the charts at the time of their original release, either in the United States or the United Kingdom. This fact softens the accusation by rock music historians who claim that Elvis' music went into severe decline during the last few years of his life. His health and career may have suffered, and his sound was no longer rock 'n' roll, but his music was still vital to large portions of the audience.

This could also be said for today's audiences. As a last-minute addition to *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits,* the producers included a remix of "A Little Less Conversation," a song Elvis originally recorded for the soundtrack of *Live a Little, Love a Little.* Its reworking had been done in early 2002 by Dutch deejay act Junkie XL, but when it was released as a dance-mix single, it became Elvis' first Top Ten single in decades. "A Little Less Conversation" was billed as a bonus track, keeping it separate in concept from the rest of the cuts on the CD. The team of Ernst Jorgensen and Roger Semon compiled and researched the tracks on *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits.* Jorgensen and Semon of BMG (which now owns RCA) have researched the Presley song catalog for several years, working hard to restore and repackage his music to its former glory. A group of expert engineers and mixers was hired to optimize the sound in ways that remained true to the original recordings, a difficult assignment considering the condition of the original tapes. Stashed away at RCA's storage facilities in Iron Mountain, Pennsylvania, some of the original tapes had not been played in more than 40 years. Most were deteriorated to some degree, and the first goal was to transfer them onto a digital format for remixing or remastering. Some, including the tape for "Way Down," were in such bad condition they had to be baked in an oven to prevent the oxide from falling off the tape.

The songs from 1956 to 1961 had been recorded on a monaural (mono) system and could not be remixed, only remastered. The ones from 1961 to 1966 had been recorded on a three-track recording system and required an antique three-track machine to help in the remixing process. Only a few of these machines still exist, and the one the remixing team used tended to overheat, further aggravating the process. Later tunes had been recorded on eight tracks, 16 tracks, and even 24 tracks, which were considerably easier to remix. However, the goal was to produce a uniform quality in all the tracks and to ensure that the quality remained whether the CD was played on a home stereo, a computer, or a car stereo. The efforts of these engineers and remixers resulted in a modernization that restores the songs' vitality yet does not detract from Elvis' renditions of the songs.

The energy in Elvis' recordings comes in part from the way he worked in the studio. When Elvis entered the studio, he took down the partitions between performer and musician, so he was in the same room as the band. They warmed up by singing a few gospel songs or other tunes, then got down to selecting whatever songs had been brought in by the band, the Memphis Mafia, the Colonel, or anyone who had a suggestion. Elvis sang each take of a song completely through, as if it was a performance before an audience. Each take was enlivened or ruined by interaction between Elvis and the band, a kind of trial-and-error approach that thrived on instinct and spontaneity. Sometimes he moved along with the music in a way that inspired the band to do something a bit different on some takes or hone in on what had worked well in previous takes. All decisions regarding a song were made in the studio during the session, not beforehand. In this way, Elvis was the producer of his work, relying on the immediacy of perfor­mance to dictate the recording. He did not generally overdub, nor did he splice together various takes of a song to get a perfect "studio version." The expert remixing and remastering of the songs on *ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits* captures the vitality of Elvis' unique approach to recording, one he never abandoned for easier, more technically driven methods.

### Completing the Mission

In the Triple Threat route, Henry and Ellie get in the rocket’s cafeteria but soon find themselves facing a massive contingent of Toppat clan members. One of these members is Jonathan Bravo, who, according to his bio, "sounds a lot like Elvis Presley". The character Jonathan Bravo is a reference to both Elvis Presley and Johnny Bravo, another character inspired by Presley.