Rock & Roll

Who Killed Elvis??

The lifeless corpse of Elvis Presley has been discovered! Police are certain of foul play!

Someone has  killed Elvis!!

So far there are four prime suspects for the murder:

1. His manager Tom Parker
2. The Memphis Mafia
3. His Young Girl Fans
4. The Army

Police are investigating the trail seeking to establish the last time that Elvis was seen alive. They have studied all the evidence in depth.

The Hillbilly Cat was certainly seen present in all his majesty as he bumped, shook and grinded his way through the Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan shows. He was far from dead. From 1955 to 1958 the Memphis Flash shook up the hormones of young girls with his dynamite act, rockin’ up R&B, shakin’ his greased back hair so it hung over his eyes, flaunting his ducktail, pompadour and long sideburns like the greased up peacock he was, with his flash contrasting jackets, shirts and ties, in vivid pink, white and black, his baggy trousers, gyrating hips, rising up on the balls of his feet like a wild animal on heat, with smouldering eyes and trembling lip. The King of Western Bop was rockin’ up a storm, creating Rockabilly, unleashing a teen revolution and outraging the staid bastions of society.

Back then Elvis stalked the stage like an untamed and highly dangerous beast straight out of the darkest jungle. The sex oozed off him, hung in the air like a funky smog and drove the girls crazy. The look of the feral cat was right out of the black bordellos of New Orleans. The sound the trio made was equally wild. Elvis was alive like no other. The original King of Rockabilly was a phenomenon. The energy poured out of him like an exploding volcano.

But society wanted him dead. He’d been murdered. So who killed him?

1958 was the last time that primal force was seen alive.

It was over. Elvis had left the building. The Hillbilly Cat had been murdered. In his place a glitzy, rhinestone clad Pop Star had replaced that primitive smouldering feral feline. The imposter was tidied up, spangled and neutered. Elvis was dead.

So when had this murder taken place?

The obvious culprit was the Army. Detectives sieved through the full documentary of his induction. They watched closely as the bright glad- rags were peeled off the lithe torso to be replaced with drab khaki as the strutting cock was transformed into a dowdy hen. They studied the footage carefully to see if the barber’s electric shears that snipped off his long greasy locks and docked that ducktail had not slipped to his groin to intentionally relieve him of the source of his sexuality. But there were no balls left among the piles of hair on that floor. Elvis was diminished but still intact. As they led him away for two years of regimentation perhaps it was the routine and drabness that killed the spirit in him? Robbed him of his unique animalism? Had the army killed Elvis?

But no, studying the footage carefully the detectives identified that the murder had started before. There had been a slow poisoning that had already begun to erode the beast before those shears had begun to do their work. This was no sudden act of passion. This was a gradual process. Someone had deliberately dosed that cat, put arsenic in the cream.

Attention turned to the Colonel – Tom Parker – the carnival clown, the spiv who thought only in dollars. With his short-term thinking, film contracts and ‘grab the money and run’ attitude, he wanted the Hillbilly Cat dead. He wasn’t interested in Rockabilly or the uniqueness of the Memphis Flash. He wasn’t interested in any Southern Bop. He knew that controversy restricted the audience. He wanted something tame and mainstream. Elvis was the cash cow. He could settle for the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll done up in a showbiz gold lame suit and barber shop square crooners augmenting the backing with pseudo doo-wop – as if the Jordinaires were ever hip? Was he the murderer? Had he tamed that beast?

But on second viewing of those early shows they could see that the seeds were there before the Colonel had even begun to do his worst. Those first shows were instinctive and natural and the reaction was hysterical and took Elvis by surprise. But then he began reacting to it. He’d play for the screams, orchestrating the moves and exaggerating them for effect. What had been instinctive was now conscious and a parody of what had gone before. He’d become an act. Had those young girls killed Elvis? Had those screams made him self-conscious and divorced him from his primitive inner core? Had it become too easy to excite? Had they made him a parody of himself?

Or was it the Memphis Mafia? That group of his Memphis friends that he had grown up with, who’d know him before he’d made it? The only ones he could trust now everybody wanted a bit of him? He knew they were genuine because they’d liked him for who he was and not for who he’d become? Not for his money. They knew Elvis and did not see dollar signs when they looked at him. They saw the man they had known before the machine took him over. Or did they? Everything had changed. Elvis was now rich beyond belief. Perhaps they did only see dollar signs? Perhaps they were now out for what they could get? Perhaps they, like the Colonel, were busy milking the cash cow that was Elvis? Did they really understand? Did they steer him to safer waters and way from the white-water rapids that had spawned him? Regardless of anything they isolated him. He was locked into a small closed circle, separate from the world. They walled him off. No longer was he free to head off to the black part of town, to sneak in to watch those dynamic black acts that had lit his fire and inspired him. Now he was a prisoner divorced from the seminal energy that had fanned his flames. The Memphis Mafia were all that he had now and they weren’t the brightest stars in the heavens. Had they starved him of oxygen? Had they killed Elvis?

Elvis was dead in 1958. What was seen from then was nothing more than a puppet, a zombie going through the motions. The original spark of creative genius, atavistic energy and primitive sexuality had been doused.

The detectives studied the later footage; the crass films, the trite pop, the lurid showbiz costumes, big ballads and orchestrated extravaganzas, even the staged and highly rated come back,

and saw that Elvis had been murdered. This puppet masquerading, larger than life, with the massive spectacle of performance was an empty shell, a caricature, a comic book construction. Elvis was dead long before.

By the time 1977 found him slumped in the toilet he’d been rotting for nearly twenty years. They buried the corpse but the killing had taken place many years before and the killers were never brought to justice.