{"id":67268,"date":"2025-08-13T19:59:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T19:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/67268\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T19:59:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T19:59:13","slug":"remembering-my-elvis-death-week-pilgrimage-35-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/67268\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering My Elvis Death Week Pilgrimage, 35 Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday marks 48 years since Elvis Presley was found dead inside a Graceland bathroom. And so, for the 48th time, his devoutest followers are gathering in Memphis for a week<\/a> of concerts and various other events commemorating the King\u2014who’d be 90 years old were he still alive. Cleary there\u2019s still some juice to squeeze out of the King\u2019s carcass: tickets for Monday\u2019s tour of Elvis\u2019s big house\u2014hosted by one of his last girlfriends, Linda Thompson\u2014sold out at $7,000 per set of four.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been among the memorializers. Of the many rock and roll pilgrimages I\u2019ve taken through the years, none combined irreverent and reverent quite like my 1990 trip to what was then commonly called \u201cDeath Week<\/a>\u201d before Elvis Presley Enterprises rebranded the tribute with the far less metal moniker, “Elvis Week.”<\/p>\n

I\u2019d grown up at a time when Elvis was mostly a punchline. My album-obsessed parents didn\u2019t own a single Elvis record, and since he only had one Top 10 hit in the 1970s while I was cutting my musical teeth\u2014\u201cBurning Love\u201d in \u201872\u2014I almost never heard him on the radio either. The reviews of his concerts in the D.C. area when I was a kid were brutal. Sally Quinn, the Washington Post\u2019<\/a>s haughty socialite columnist covered his show at the Capital Centre in June 1976 and included heinous observations that, according to her, have \u201cjust got to be said.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cElvis is fat,\u201d Quinn wrote. \u201cNot only is he fat, his stomach hangs over his belt, his jowls hang over his collar, and his hair hangs over his eyes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And there were plenty of jokes about his show in Baltimore in May of 1977\u2014the one where he reportedly paused to take a half-hour dump<\/a>. (Banana splits\u2014 plural\u2014were blamed for the King\u2019s colonic distress.) Talk about foreshadowing: the guy died on his dang toilet less than three months later.<\/p>\n

So it wasn\u2019t easy to be a young Elvis fan at that time. I was more into other sorts of rock and roll, and none of my friends gave a rip about him either. On August 16, 1977\u2014the day he tried to take his last poop\u2014I was at the Capital Centre with a bunch of neighborhood kids, watching the English prog gods Yes<\/a>. Same arena where Sally Quinn had called Elvis was fat and unkempt. Nobody onstage mentioned that the King had died.<\/p>\n

And yet, I still remember how happy Elvis made my Mr. Parks, a wonderful guy who lived next door to me growing up. He came of age in D.C. in the ’50s and had a lot of Fonzie<\/a> in him. He made sure everybody on the block knew of his love for the King. The first time I got it was when he played me \u201cAn American Trilogy<\/a>\u201d from the double-live Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite<\/a> album. Elvis turned cheese into gold\u2014right before my ears.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The older I got, the more sense Mr. Parks\u2019s deification made. I eventually wised up enough to recognize the obvious things: Yes, with all its art-rock bombast, was merely of its era. Elvis, on the other hand, is timeless. I started reading and listening to whatever Elvis material I could get my hands on. I hounded people whose lives were changed by early Elvis and got them to tell me their stories<\/a>. I found everything about young Elvis fascinating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But even the \u201870s King\u2014the physically bloated, commercially irrelevant guy in sequined jumpsuits, circling the drain\u2014rocked my world. Anyone who doubts that Vegas-era Elvis was still a genius only needs to hear \u201cThat\u2019s the Way It Is<\/a>,\u201d a box set from his 1970 Las Vegas Hilton residency. The recorded backroom rehearsals alone show how profoundly touched by God he was.<\/p>\n

So I made that trip to Memphis in 1990 with massive amounts of awe for Elvis’s talent and world-changing impact. But I still embraced all the kitsch. I used a hardshell guitar case as my suitcase, and requested and received the discounted \u201crecording rate\u201d at a downtown hotel, a bygone perk of the city\u2019s past as a recording mecca. Death Week observances had started as small candlelight vigils on the one-year anniversary of his passing, but by the time I went the event was drawing 40,000 visitors annually. The city was packed during our stay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was no downtime. I toured Sun Studio where, in the summer of 1953, Elvis and producer Sam Phillips began recording the songs that would change music history. I spent a night at Bad Bob\u2019s Vapors, a legendary Memphis honky tonk, catching a portion of the almost-endless Elvis impersonator contest. The whole time I was at the jaw-dropping extravaganza\u2014which featured one professional imitator after another, night after night for a whole week\u2014I kept hoping that Jerry Lee Lewis, a local known to patronize the club, would crash the party the way he crashed through the front gates of Graceland in his Cadillac, drunk and jealous, waving a gun and demanding an audience with Elvis back in \u201876<\/a>. But no such luck. No sighting of the Killer during this Death Week.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I did, however, catch a set from El Vez at Vapors. He\u2019s the Mexican Elvis<\/a>\u2014a Southern California performer named Robert Lopez\u2014whose Spanglish and PG-13-rated parodies of the King\u2019s classics disgusted all the blue-haired ladies who made up the bulk of the Death Week demographic that year. (Mr. Parks wouldn’t have approved either.) Small wonder El Vez didn\u2019t win the contest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I made the mandatory visit to Graceland but didn\u2019t brave the hours-long line for the official tour. My review of the King\u2019s house, having never been inside the Jungle Room: Way less ostentatious than I woulda guessed! Instead, I shopped at Graceland Plaza, a strip mall owned by Elvis Presley Enterprises, located just across the street from Graceland. Every store was dedicated to only Elvis-related merchandise. I left with a suitably glittery Elvis Christmas ornament.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I went to an Elvis symposium at Humes High School, his alma mater, where he graduated with the Class of \u201853. The most memorable panelist was Pauline Nicholson, the cook at Graceland. During the Q&A, I asked what the King’s daily breakfast menu consisted of. I remembered her response was nauseating. I just rewatched video footage that Rick Morris, a guy in our Death Week entourage, made of the trip to check if my memory was accurate. The actual calorie count was more horrific. Nicholson said he would have \u201ceight or 10 biscuits\u201d plus \u201ca pound of bacon or a pound of sausage with about six eggs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d try to cut it down,\u201d she insisted, \u201cbut we better take him six eggs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the opposite end of the health spectrum, I ran in the Elvis Memorial 5K<\/a> (28 minutes and change!), an official Death Week event to this day. I was only in it for the T-shirt\u2014which I still have somewhere in the basement.<\/p>\n

I also did plenty of non-Elvis stuff. On the subject of Kings, I visited the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. At the time, the building was then rotting away. There, I met Jacqueline Smith<\/a>, a former tenant who had just begun what would become a one-woman, around the clock protest<\/a> lasting over 30 years, demanding that the planned memorial onsite properly honored MLK’s legacy. (There\u2019s no record Elvis and MLK ever met, but Elvis did perform a tribute to the civil rights leader\u2014\u201cIf I Can Dream<\/a>\u201d\u2014to close his 1968 comeback special, recorded a few months after the assassination.) <\/p>\n

I also went to the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, founded in 1976 by another Memphis legend: R&B singer Al Green. I\u2019m not a godly man, but\u2014like so much of the trip\u2014the memory of that service still drops my jaw. Al Green himself led it, the only time I\u2019ve ever seen a church band guitarist plug into a full Marshall stack. On Death Week Sunday, the only non-Black parishioners in the building were me, my buddies, and El Vez.\u00a0<\/p>\n

El Vez won\u2019t be in Memphis for this year\u2019s tribute, but he\u2019s still honoring Elvis in his way. He told me via email that he was excited about the show he did in San Diego over the weekend with Lenny Kaye<\/a>\u2014the guitarist best known for his work in the Patti Smith Band when the King was still among us. I gotta say, that sounds like the makings of a promising collaboration. As Patti almost put it<\/a>, \u201cElvis died for somebody\u2019s sins, but not mine\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Recommended\"Albert<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saturday marks 48 years since Elvis Presley was found dead inside a Graceland bathroom. And so, for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-67268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}