Elvis Faces His Final Curtain

THE ANNOUNCEMENT of Elvis Presley's shows at Madison Square Garden was startling. It was as though the media were reporting that aliens were about to land in midtown Manhattan. It was 1972, and although the King of Rock'n'Roll had performed in television studios in New York, he had never – not even at the peak of Elvis frenzy in the '50s – done a concert here. Naturally, the devoted fans, the ones who had been on board from the beginning, were eager to be, at last, in the same room as Elvis, breathe the same arena air, but there was also an unusual amount of curiosity from a younger audience that had only known him from the repetitive cycle of movies and adjoining soundtrack albums that he churned out since getting out of the Army.