Elvis got his first guitar in 1946, but the instrument wasn’t his first choice. Aged 11, Elvis Presley would have much preferred a bicycle from his father and beloved mother, but it would have cost them a lot more than the $7.90 they scraped together for the second-hand guitar they bought him.
As Elvis got older, he grew into an extremely contradictory but irresistibly charismatic young man.
As the TACHYDROMOS magazine of Sept. 10, 1981, put it: “He became the ‘rebel’ and the ‘saint’ at the same time, the ‘bad boy’ and the ‘good kid’.
“Like a lot of youngsters his age, he wanted to be James Dean and dressed in an edgy, flashy style. Still, he went to church regularly, too, and would pray for hours on end.
The first recording
“The Presley family moves to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1953. Elvis takes part in a talent contest at school and makes his first recording soon after—a demo record that includes the songs ‘My Happiness’ and ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’.
“The recording costs the young Elvis $4 and is cut in one of the dozens of stores where you could record your voice onto vinyl back then.
“When he finishes school, he gets a job driving trucks. In the summer of 1954, Sam Phillips of Sun Records is looking for a white American who can sing and move like a negro. There’s no one better suited to that brief than the 19-year-old Elvis Presley.
“So, in July 1954, Sun Records recorded ‘That’s All Right Mama’, a song he’d written for his mother. A few days later, with disk jockeys playing his song on the airwaves, Elvis makes his radio debut.”
Elvis fans gather to mark what would have been late singer Elvis Presley’s 90th birthday, at Hernando’s Hideaway in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. January 7, 2025. REUTERS/Karen Pulfer Focht.
Welcome to the revolution
Elvis sets about conquering America at top speed.
“Over and above his revolutionary singing style and startling new way of performing, beyond all the innovations the new star introduces, it’s the erotic, almost sexual connection he forms with his audience that turbocharges his fans’ hero worship with passion and turns a hit singer into a god.”
On Jan. 27, 1956, “Heartbreak Hotel” is released on the legendary RCA label. It will become Elvis’ first single to go platinum and sell over a million copies.
In September of the same year, he appears on “The Ed Sullivan Show”, America’s most popular TV program, and “invades” the homes of 54 million viewers. Elvis attracts radio audiences that not even President Dwight D. Eisenhower can match.
The Memphis Mafia
In 1957, he moves with his family into a 23-room mansion in Memphis. His behavior is already raising eyebrows, however. He never goes anywhere without his entourage, the group of 15 or so ‘friends’ “who serve as bodyguards, secretaries, drivers and who knows what else.”
“But the King is becoming ever more peculiar, and his entourage ever more provocative. The tiniest incident can drive Elvis into a rage that has him and his ‘bodyguards’ tearing down the set of the film he’s shooting.
“The gang is quickly dubbed the Memphis Mafia. Their base, of course, is still the King’s 23-room mansion. This house, “Graceland”, would eventually become a gilded prison for Presley. Visitors always came away saying it reminded them of a mental hospital more than a mansion.”
Drug use
Elvis stopped giving concerts between 1961 and 1967 in order to devote himself to his film career.
But for Elvis, the 1960s was a decade most associated with drugs.
“He started with Dexedrine and progressed to various stimulants, sleeping pills, sedatives, and the like. In the last years of his life, he literally lived off pills. He had serious health problems and was getting fatter by the day.”
Priscilla
In the late 1950s, Elvis Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army and served for several months during the “Cold War” era in West Germany. There, he met his future wife, Priscilla, who was just 14 years old at the time.
“For Elvis, this little girl became the personification of the ‘immaculate and unsullied’ woman he had always dreamed of. Her stepfather was a U.S. Air Force officer stationed in Germany.
“Elvis sought him out to ask for his permission to take Priscilla back with him and move her into Graceland. Permission was granted, and Priscilla duly found herself in Memphis, enrolled in a convent school completing her high school studies as Elvis Presley’s “official nymphet.”
Elvis and Priscilla were married in 1967, and she would give birth to their daughter Lisa-Marie about a year later, but Elvis’s sexual liaisons with other women continued unabated. His lovers included several stars, but also dozens of nameless everyday girls.
As if that wasn’t enough, the young couple also had to share Graceland with the Memphis Mafia, who continued to live in Elvis’s mansion.
By 1973, Priscilla has had enough and leaves Elvis. Other young women would arrive to take her place at his side, but Elvis never really got over her departure.
“Until then, he’d thought of Priscilla as part of Graceland’s furniture and fittings – it had never occurred to him that she could leave of her own volition, without him sending her away. It was a huge disappointment for him; in fact, many people think it was the final blow.”
The end
Elvis is hospitalized in Memphis with a serious prescription drug addiction. He returns to the hospital in early 1975 and then again in April 1977.
On June 26, 1977, Elvis appears in a major concert in Indianapolis. It will be his last. Just 51 nights later, he will drop dead in his bathroom of a heart attack “with at least ten different drugs in his bloodstream.”
“Thousands of female fans weep and beat their breasts and ‘make love to his ghost’— hearing his voice rising from his grave, some swear they cannot bear to live in a world without Elvis Presley.”
“The King is dead, long live the King!” is what they say when a monarch dies. And although the “long life” is wished for the deceased’s successor, let us grant it here to Elvis himself. Because, though many greats would follow in his footsteps, not one of them has ever knocked him off his throne.
