Elvis Presley
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Jerry Leiber And Mike Stoller: By Royal Appointment
Interview by Harvey Kubernik, MOJO, March 1995
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the greatest rock 'n' roll songwriting team of all time, have their songs celebrated in the musical Smokey Joe's Cafe ...
He Made Old Men's Blues Sound Young: Remembering Elvis
Comment by Michael Gray, Daily Telegraph, August 2002
WE REMEMBER his ignominious end, and the cavalcade of white Cadillacs driving through Memphis for his funeral 25 years ago this month, but mostly the ...
ARTICLES IN LIBRARY
Elvis Presley: Paradise Hawaiian Style
Film/DVD Review by Alan Smith, NME, July 1966
Presley's usual (Hawaiian) style ...
Elvis Presley: Paradise Hawaiian Style – NME Readers Reply
Readers' Letters by uncredited writer, NME, July 1966
B. UYDER, Sheffield: Why should Alan Smith (NME last week) have to apologise to Elvis fans for saying what he thinks of his new film ...
Elvis, Usually Surrounded By Girls, Is Now Encircled By Controversy
Report by Alan Smith, NME, July 1966
SOME Of Elvis' staunchest British fans want to boil me in oil again. Another suggests I lower myself into a spin-dryer and turn it on. ...
Elvis Presley to Make Personal Appearances
Report by Mike Jahn, New York Times, December 1968
ELVIS PRESLEY, with one eye to the increasing interest in old-style rock and the other to his decreasing income from movie roles, is making plans ...
Elvis Presley's Comeback Gets Off To Exciting Start
Report by Mike Jahn, New York Times, August 1969
ELVIS PRESLEY, the "old groaner" of the rock 'n' roll generation, still has his snarl. The acknowledged king of early rock opened a month's engagement ...
Elvis Presley: International Showroom, Las Vegas
Live Review by Ann Moses, NME, February 1970
KING ELVIS RULES VEGAS AGAIN. New songs and old in his act after his first night including 'Proud Mary', 'Walk A Mile In My Shoes', ...
Elvis Presley: Wagging His Tail In Las Vegas
Live Review by David Dalton, Rolling Stone, February 1970
ELVIS WAS SUPERNATURAL, his own resurrection, at the Showroom Internationale in Las Vegas last August. ...
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup: No Payment For My Elvis Songs Says Crudup
Interview by James Johnson, NME, February 1971
SIXTY-FIVE year old blues-man Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, whose songs 'That's Alright Mama' and 'My Baby Left Me' were hits for Elvis Presley back in ...
Elvis Presley: The Cobo Hall, Detroit, Michigan
Live Review by Greg Shaw, Phonograph Record, December 1972
I'M GETTING pretty sick of all this talk about what a gross Tom Jones imitation Elvis has become. Baby fat and other people’s songs, indeed. ...
Scotty Moore: The Man Who Launched A Thousand Licks
Interview by Norman Jopling, NME, January 1973
PEOPLE AROUND at the time Elvis first made it claim that guitarist Scotty Moore was the musician most responsible for "The Elvis Presley Sound". Moore ...
Elvis Presley: Revolt Into Style
Essay by Michael Gray, Melody Maker, March 1974
ELVIS PRESLEY. The giant among giants, and yet also that strange kind of comic-book hero, Mr Reverso Man. ...
Elvis Presley, the Sweet Inspirations: Inglewood Forum, Los Angeles CA
Live Review by Steven Rosen, Sounds, June 1974
PERHAPS AMERICA'S two most important musical artists took to the roads recently. Bob Dylan blazed a crosscountry tour which left followers and non-believers alike a ...
Elvis Presley: There Is No Truth In the Rumour that Elvis Is Losing His Marbles
Report by Mick Farren, NME, October 1974
ELVIS AARON PRESLEY, one time truck driver and supreme rock-and-roll superstar, has been taking some pains of late to allay a host of false rumours ...
Elvis Presley: The Promised Land
Review by Charles Shaar Murray, NME, February 1975
IT HAS ALWAYS been accepted as an article of faith by ladies and gentlemen in the critical profession that Elvis Presley is not dead. ...
Elvis Presley: Pictures Of Elvis
Review by Mick Farren, NME, December 1975
THERE CAN BE little doubt that the Elvis Presley Sun collection was a compilation of some of his finest work. ...
Okay, Kids... Which Twin is the Real Elvis?
Report by Mick Farren, NME, January 1976
"I'm gonna go infiltrate the International ELVIS PRESLEY Fan Club Convention", said MICK FARREN. ...
Elvis Presley: Long Beach Arena, Los Angeles
Live Review by Harvey Kubernik, Melody Maker, May 1976
DESPITE MEDICAL PROBLEMS Elvis Presley's show at the Long Beach Arena proved that he still has the voice and romantic quality that established him as ...
Elvis: Well, Bless-uh Muh Soul, What's-uh Wrong With Me?
Essay by Mick Farren, NME, May 1976
WHEN AN artist hasn't produced anything of note for something like 14 years, the world begins to judge him on just about anything but his ...
Retrospective by David Dalton, Lenny Kaye, Rock 100, 1977
"THAT'S FINE, MAN," CHORTLES SAM Phillips over the studio intercom at 760 Union Avenue, Memphis. "Hell, that's different. That's a pop song now." ...
Interview by Mick Farren, NME, February 1977
Otherwise known as an interview with FELTON JARVIS (Felton who???) ...
Elvis Presley: The King is Dead
Obituary by Philip Norman, Times, The, August 1977
ELVIS PRESLEY will be remembered as the first and the greatest exponent of Rock and Roll music, whose recordings of 'Blue Suede Shoes', 'Hound Dog' ...
Obituary by Mick Farren, NME, August 1977
IT WAS ONE OF THE worst storms to hit London since God knows when. The thunder rolled, lightning flashed and the rain hammered into the ...
Obituary by Martin Hawkins, Country Music Review, October 1977
WHILE NOT wishing to add to the enormous number of narratives, eulogies and gutter press 'exposes' which have appeared in print in recent weeks, it ...
Elvis Presley: Junk, junk food junk prose (pulpitations for all)
Book Review by Mick Farren, NME, October 1977
Red West, Sonny West, Dave Hebler, as told to Steve Dunleavy: Elvis – What Happened? ...
Report by John Mendelsohn, Rolling Stone, January 1978
OH, GOD, where did they find this poor soul, and what desperate circumstances could have resulted in his presence on stage before us? ...
Retrospective and Interview by Robert Palmer, Memphis, December 1978
BACK IN THE MID-'50s, the Sun Records studio at 706 Union Avenue was the epicenter of a sudden, wrenching shift in world consciousness. Tremors had ...
Essay by Dave Marsh, Musician, June 1981
WE USUALLY think of Elvis Presley simply stepping into Sun Studios in Memphis, in answer to Sam Phillips' call, and walking out a few days ...
Goldman Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog!
Book Review by Bill Holdship, Creem, February 1982
Elvis by Albert Goldman (McGraw-Hill) ...
Elvis: The New Deal Origins of Rock 'n' Roll
Essay by Dave Marsh, Musician, December 1982
EACH YEAR, on August 16, the anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, Memphis State University hosts a memorial service and seminar in his honor. ...
Book Excerpt by Stuart Grundy, John Tobler, 'The Guitar Greats' (BBC Books), 1983
ONE OF THE GREAT rock'n'roll guitarists of the 1950s, but a man who remained virtually unknown to all but the cognoscenti until comparatively recently, is ...
Book Excerpt by Stuart Grundy, John Tobler, 'The Guitar Greats' (BBC Books), 1983
THERE CAN BE few more graphic illustrations of the fact that rock'n'roll music is no longer some here-today-gone-tomorrow speck of lint in the wind than ...
Perkins, Presley et al: The Complete Million Dollar Session
Review by Bill Holdship, Creem, June 1988
TOTALLY UNEXPECTED, totally out of the blue, and just when you'd almost given up on hearing anything this exciting again... ...
Guide by Steve Turner, Independent, The, April 1991
Thousands of worshippers still flock to Memphis, birthplace of Elvis. They should bypass Graceland. Rock first rolled here. ...
Book Review by Andy Gill, Q, March 1992
AT THE CLOSE OF the Presliad, the most substantial part of his classic Mystery Train and still the most illuminating work on Elvis, Greil Marcus ...
Elvis Presley: The King Of Rock'n'Roll: The Complete '50s Masters
Review by Mat Snow, Q, August 1992
FROM US postage stamps to academic treatises like Greil Marcus's Dead Elvis which ponders how a rock singer ends up as apple-pie as Abe Lincoln, ...
Elvis Presley: Elvis - The 50s
Review by Mark Sinker, Wire, The, September 1992
PERHAPS THE most unexpected thing about RCA/BMG's Presley-project is how unexpected so much of it is. ...
Elvis Presley: From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential '60s Masters 1
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, October 1993
IT'S EASY TO DISMISS ELVIS PRESLEY'S post-army career – easy, that is, until one is forced to sit down and listen to a song like ...
Memphis Blues Again: Elvis ’69
Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, Aspects of Elvis (Sidgwick & Jackson), 1994
ELVIS PRESLEY must have sensed that his credibility was on the line when he made the decision, in early January 1969, to cancel a Nashville ...
Essay by John Tobler, 'Aspects of Elvis', 1994
ELVIS PRESLEY WAS THE UNKNOWING centre of controversy in his quite short life: only being screened from the waist upwards on TV so that his ...
Book Excerpt by Simon Frith, Aspects of Elvis, 1994
"I DON'T THINK EL WILL EVER RATE WITH the more serious students of popular song – his syrupy crooning with vibrato went out with Rudy ...
Elvis Presley: Love Him Tender, Love Him True
Book Review by Jon Savage, MOJO, December 1994
Peter Guralnick: Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley ...
Elvis: Father, Son & Hillbilly Cat
Essay by Mick Farren, MOJO, February 1995
Boy-King/Fertility God brings wonder and prosperity to the land, is cut down but manages to transcend death... The ballooning Cult of Elvis is turning into ...
Elvis Presley: Long Live The King!
Overview by Johnny Black, Q, June 1995
Most insist that Elvis Presley died on August 16 1977. Yet some say that not only is The Memphis Flash alive, but that they've seen ...
Elvis Presley: Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential ‘70s Masters
Review by Geoffrey Himes, Washington Post, The, December 1995
ELVIS PRESLEY'S music in the 1970s is often dismissed as the bombastic, half-hearted hack work of an overweight, pill-addicted, badly dressed has-been. In the liner ...
Sweet Movements Of A Hillbilly Hellion
Essay by Robert Gordon, Cleveland Ballet Company (official program), 1996
THERE ARE CINDER block joints you can still go to in Memphis, wooden shacks in Mississippi, places that are out of the way and not ...
Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, Die Welt Woche, 1997
WHEN JERRY Leiber and Mike Stoller submitted the sickly ballad 'Love Me' to Elvis Presley in the late summer of 1956, they thought the boy ...
25% Of The King: Col. Tom Parker
Obituary by Michael Gray, Guardian, The, January 1997
COLONEL TOM PARKER, the flamboyant tent-show hustler who was Elvis Presley's Svengalian manager, has died in Las Vegas at the age of almost 90. He ...
Elvis, homoeroticism and 'Jailhouse Rock'
Essay by Peter Silverton, Observer, The, August 1997
'Oh yes,' said Stanley, a builder - though not a man known ever to have displayed his bum cleavage beyond the privacy of his own ...
Comment by Gary Pig Gold, purrmag.com, Spring 1999
IT WAS ELVIS' BIRTHDAY a few weeks ago. While this fact usually only piques the interest of a few misguided Teddy Boys overseas at this ...
Scotty Moore's Classic Axe Goes Under The Hammer
Report by Mark Pringle, Barney Hoskyns, Rock's Backpages, April 2000
Former Elvis Presley producer weeps after auctioning off "the most important guitar in rock and roll history" ...
Presley/Clinton: Bill Has Left The Building
Book Review by Charles Shaar Murray, Independent, The, November 2000
Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the land of no alternatives by Greil Marcus (Faber & Faber, £9.99, 248pp) ...
Hey Conductor You Must: Rock'n'Roll Iconoclasm In America
Essay by Richard Riegel, Loose Palace, Spring 2000
2006 Author's note: I wrote the following piece in the summer of 1993 on assignment for Rob O'Connor's Throat Culture magazine, after I had suggested ...
Elvis Presley and the Impulse Towards Transculturation
Essay by Rob Bowman, Crawdaddy!, Spring 2000
ELVIS WAS A hero to most but he never meant shit to me/You see straight out racist the sucker was simple and plain/Motherfuck him and ...
Elvis Presley: The Once And Future King
Film/DVD Review by Nick Hasted, Independent, The, March 2001
WE ALL KNOW the way it was in the Seventies, Elvis Presley's last eight years on earth. He spent them as a bloated, drug-glazed fraud, ...
Elvis Presley: Live In Las Vegas
Review by Mark Paytress, MOJO, August 2001
ELVIS PRESLEY wasn't always the Clown Prince of Las Vegas. Back in 1956, he secured a two-week booking at the Venus Room in the city's ...
Retrospective by Daryl Easlea, Record Collector, August 2001
"I've had intellectuals tell me that I've got to progress as an actor, explore new horizons, take on new challenges, all that routine. I'd like ...
The King and I: A Visit to Graceland
Report by Michael Gray, Daily Telegraph, August 2001
KREATURE COMFORTS – "the Lowlife Guide to Memphis" – claims that Memphis can offer visitors "the best or worst of vacations: you could hit a ...
Obituary by Tony Russell, Guardian, The, May 2002
Prolific writer behind some of Elvis’s greatest hits ...
Elvis Presley: Today Tomorrow & Forever
Review by Mark Paytress, MOJO, July 2002
LET'S BE honest: this, once again, is Elvis Presley '56-'77 squeezed into five exhilarating, and at times exasperating hours. There are two major differences this ...
Memphis: Visions of a Bluff City
Special Feature by Joss Hutton, Rock's Backpages, August 2002
Click here to see Joss Hutton's evocative images of Memphis, 25 years after Elvis's death ...
Report by Michael Gray, Daily Telegraph, August 2002
MEMPHIS IS ONLY technically in Tennessee. In psychic reality, it's the capital of Mississippi. Everyone who lives there knows it. What this 50 per cent ...
Elvis Presley: Elvis 30 # 1 Hits (RCA)
Review by Barney Hoskyns, Blender, Fall 2002
The King is gone, but he's not forgotten: Thirty classics from the best singer who ever lived. Period. ...
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup: Rock Me Mama: 22 Original Hits By The Godfather Of Rock & Roll
Sleevenotes by Colin Escott, Bluebird/RCA, 2003
"DOWN IN TUPELO," Elvis Presley famously remarked in June 1956, "I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, ...
Sam Phillips: Rock'n'Roll Evangelist
Obituary by Andria Lisle, MOJO, September 2003
For Sam Phillips rock'n'roll was a religion And, boy, did he spread the gospel. ...
Retrospective and Interview by Phil Sutcliffe, Q, January 2004
IT WAS A QUIET WEEK in Memphis. Monday, January 4, 1954. Everyone easing into the new year. Nobody paid any attention when, around lunchtime, a ...
Review by Gillian G. Gaar, Goldmine, January 2004
THE UNDERLYING theme of 2nd To None, the 'sequel' to 2002's wildly successful 30 #1 Hits, is a bit hard to pin down. #1 Hits ...
Elvis Presley: How 1968 Bought Elvis a King Sized Comeback
Retrospective and Interview by Gillian G. Gaar, Goldmine, January 2004
AS 1968 BEGAN, Elvis Presley's career was in trouble, the result of too many formulaic films and equally uninspired soundtracks. But by the year's end, ...
Essay by Adam Blake, Cosmik Debris (cosmik.com), April 2004
IN THE LIBRARY today I put on the Sun Sessions to cheer me up while I was working. When it came around to the bridge ...
Elvis Presley: He Touched Me – The Gospel Music Of Elvis Presley
Review by Terry Staunton, Record Collector, October 2005
THE ONLY Grammys Presley won in his lifetime were for gospel records, and for a long spell in the '60s his songs of praise were ...
Retrospective by Barney Hoskyns, Uncut Legends, Spring 2005
CLYDE OTIS and Ivory Joe Hunter had just returned from a day's duck-hunting when the phone rang. It was the song publishers Hill and Range ...
Rediscovering the joy in the sad story of Elvis
Retrospective by Philip Norman, Daily Telegraph, May 2006
NO POP ICON ever came to a sadder or less regal end than the once gorgeous, gaudy "King" of rock 'n' roll, Elvis Presley. When ...
Comment by Jonh Ingham, mog.com, August 2007
EVERY YEAR a bunch of new noisy kids will tell you rock and roll is a young man's game. At 72 and still The King, ...
The Return of the King: Elvis and the Making Of The '68 Comeback Special
Retrospective by Harvey Kubernik, Rock's Backpages, August 2008
When Elvis Presley donned a black leather suit and stepped in front of NBC's cameras for his 1968 TV special, he changed the historical perception ...
Sympathy for the Devil – A Kind Word for Albert Goldman
Essay by Tom Graves, Rock's Backpages, April 2009
ALBERT HARRY GOLDMAN is inarguably the most controversial music biographer of the last generation. His biographies of first Elvis, then John Lennon, have been spit ...
Elvis Presley: Elvis' Christmas Album Vinyl Icon
Retrospective by Johnny Black, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, December 2009
IN 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America revealed that, having notched up 12m sales, Elvis Presley's Christmas Album had become the top-selling holiday release ...
Retrospective by Gary Pig Gold, Rock's Backpages, August 2012
FIRST, THERE WAS you-know-who. Or at least up until thirty-five years ago there was. ...
see also Jordanaires, The
see also Leiber and Stoller
see also Scotty Moore
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