Echoes of Elvis

It was February, 1964. I was 8 years old. And I had been tossed unceremoniously into the master bedroom in my grandmother’s house to watch Ed Sullivan. My family made sure the bedroom door was closed, because they knew I was going to start screaming at… The Beatles. When Paul smiled into the camera and wagged that mop of hair he had, I lost all control. At 8 years old. Imagine.

I was a few years too young to have been one of the fans screaming for Elvis on the Ed Sullivan or Milton Berle shows. And I’m truly sad about that. Had I been born 5 or 10 years earlier, I might have become a screaming Elvis fan when he first appeared on Ed Sullivan instead of a Beatles fan.

Elvis first appeared on The Louisiana Hayride in October of 1954, a year before I was born. His first appearance on Ed Sullivan happened 7 days after my first birthday. When Elvis was drafted and went off to serve his 2-year tour in Germany, I was 3 years old. By the time Elvis did what is now called his “Comeback Special” in 1968, I was a teenager listening to Motown (Jackson Five, Temptations, Four Tops), to “folk” music (Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Simon & Garfunkel) and to more serious Rock & Roll (Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix). Elvis wasn’t even in my rear view mirror.

I never got to see Elvis perform when he was alive, and I certainly could have. I was out of college and working in my first job in advertising the year he died, so I could have seen him perform in Vegas (or at Madison Square Garden). And I missed it. The Elvis train had passed me by.

So why am I here, you ask? Well, in June of 2022, a movie was released that absolutely captivated me and showed me, in no uncertain terms, what I’d missed. The Baz Luhrmann film “Elvis” showed me an Elvis Presley I’d never known — never even suspected had existed. And yet Elvis must have been lurking in my subconscious, because I was very excited about the film and went to see it the minute it was released.

And in some ways it’s overtaken my life. I admit it. I’m Elvis obsessed.

I’ve watched that movie over and over again. I’ve bought “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is” and “Elvis on Tour” and watched both of them many times. I’ve watched “Aloha from Hawaii” which I somehow never saw on television when it originally aired in 1973. And yet those films, while great to watch, can’t fully capture what it must have been like to see Elvis perform. That’s where Elvis Tribute Artists come in.

My first introduction to what I thought of as an Elvis “Impersonator” was meeting a guy in Las Vegas who was an ordained minister. He performed weddings at chapels around Las Vegas as Elvis. My best guess is that he was in his forties and had the clothes, the hair, the sideburns, the voice, the accent, and a karaoke-style setup that allowed him to perform a few songs as a part of the wedding “package” you could purchase if you wanted an Elvis wedding.

He was amazingly busy. The day I met him he told me he had performed 4 weddings the day before and was going to be performing 4 weddings that same day. My curiosity, and general compulsion to understand why people do what they do, was piqued. I wondered what would have convinced someone his age, who wasn’t even born when Elvis was alive, to put in the time, money and effort necessary to become what we now call an Elvis Tribute Artist, or ETA for short. Surely there was some easier, and less seemingly silly, way to make a living!

That curiosity prompted me to seek out an Elvis show in Las Vegas. I mistakenly assumed there would be plenty of those to choose from, but I discovered that Vegas was pretty much devoid of anything Elvis by 2023. There was one tribute show called “All Shook Up”, playing in a very small showroom well off the Vegas Strip, so I purchased a front row ticket and off I went, fully expecting to see a campy parody of Elvis. What I got surprised me.

While not the slickest production ever, the tribute artist performing that night was quite good, singing and shaking his heart out. He did everything in his power to put on a show that was a faithful recreation of performances representing three distinct periods of Elvis’s career, along with costumes and choreography appropriate to each era. The audience was not a group of escapees from a senior living center. It was a mix of ages from 20-somethings on up, and they were loving it.

Which brings us to my obsession. What sustains the continuing cultural impact of, and enthusiasm for, Elvis, more than 45 years after his death? Why are people who weren’t even born when Elvis was alive becoming serious, devoted fans? And what is the role of Elvis Tribute Artists, as the best of the Elvis entertainers are now called, in helping to sustain that fanatic devotion to Elvis?

Elvis is a total package — not just his gorgeous voice and passionate musical stylings, but also his physicality, his movement, his charisma, the way he connected directly with his audience. There is something about Elvis that, as cultural scholar Vernon Chadwick has said, has to be “embodied” before a person can fully experience his raw power and the emotions he must have evoked when seeing him perform.

Which brings me to Elvis Tribute Artists.

Long before Elvis “left the building”, men were paying tribute to him by trying to recreate his performances for audiences large and, far more often back then, small. Elvis is reported to have said nice things about some “Elvis impersonators” (as they were called back then), including Andy Kaufman, who Elvis apparently thought was hilarious.

Contemporary Elvis Tribute Artists are not “imitating” Elvis, nor are they pretending they are Elvis. They are not lip-syncing his songs. They are not (for the most part) old, fat karaoke singers fantasizing about being Elvis Presley. They are Elvis “superfans” whose goal is to deliver a performance, and a presence, as one fan put it, “as close to a living Elvis Presley as you can get”.

Most know every detail that can be known about Elvis’s music, his performances, and his life. And most are astoundingly talented performers with beautiful, powerful voices, many of whom also play multiple instruments at least proficiently.

For those who were lucky enough to see Elvis perform live, the ETA strives to evoke the memory of what it was like to actually be there. The best ETAs recreate in almost excruciating detail every bit of an Elvis live performance, including his charisma and electric energy.

For those (like me) who never had the opportunity to see him live and in person, ETAs strive to provide an experience that mirrors, as closely as possible, what it would have been like to actually be there.

And that’s not easy. To succeed, an ETA needs to invest enormous amounts of time and energy studying all the footage they can find of Elvis performing. They need to memorize and recreate every tiny nuance of his performance — from the way Elvis held his hand or moved his head or smiled to the rings on his fingers and the energetic movements that got the lower half of his body banned from broadcast TV.

An ETA can tell you how Elvis parted his hair during each stage of his career. When he first sang or recorded many of the more than 500 songs in the Elvis catalog. What finger he wore which ring on, what the name is of each of the jumpsuits he wore (and when he wore them). And they can do that not because they’re trivia nerds, but because they need to know those things in order to achieve their performance goals.

ETAs perform in venues ranging from the common room at a nursing home or a backyard birthday party to a 5,000+ seat ballroom or concert hall. They put on or participate in shows ranging from 1–2 hour concerts to multi-day, multi-show, multi-ETA festivals.

Before developing my obsession with Elvis Tribute Artists, I had absolutely no idea there was an entire ETA-focused community and fandom. Having discovered the existence of ETA music festivals consisting of multi-day, 2 show/day events, I knew I had to see one for myself. So off to Scottsdale, Arizona I went.

I expected to see an audience full of blue-haired, 70 or 80+ year old ladies. And there were certainly many of them. But the 65+ crowd constituted roughly 30% of the total audience in attendance. I would estimate another 50% were men and women ranging in age from 30–65, some of whom brought (or were brought by) their children and even grandchildren. A final 20% were (to me) youngsters under the age of 30, including a surprisingly large group of women in their teens and early twenties.

And the truly astounding thing is that, when the ETAs were on stage, these women, young and old, were SCREAMING. They were waving their arms in the air. And they were rushing the stage for the chance to get a kiss and/or a scarf, preferably both, from these very handsome men who were not Elvis Presley. The performers knew it, the audience members knew it, and yet in the moment when the ETA looked into those ladies’ eyes or held their face lovingly while they bestowed a platonic kiss on the cheek, they were transformed. For just a moment, the women, regardless of age, were 25 and beautiful, and the performer really was Elvis. For just one magical moment.

After three days and six 2-hour shows I was hooked. Transformed from a puzzled outsider into a full-fledged member of the Elvis and ETA fan community, and a writer compelled to dig deeper into the entire phenomenon. There is a book in here somewhere, and I’m going to bring it to life.

Stay tuned!

If you’re an Elvis fan, or an Elvis Tribute Artist, and you’d like to share your story, please visit Echoes-of-Elvis.com. I’d love to “meet” you!