“Hi! This is Art Wheeler. I will be out of the office on August 15th and 16th in observance of the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. Thank you very much.”
This is the message I left on my voice mail at work. My office email had a similar message. This would be the 6th time I had been to Memphis for the Candlelight Vigil. The first year was 2002 for the 25th anniversary. The last three years I have continued to go to talk to people and take pictures. While I don’t really consider myself a big Elvis fan, I am fascinated by the phenomenon of the celebrity of Elvis. I am interested in what brings people back each year. I observed several things this year that I wanted to document. Some of them have pictures and some are just memories. This is an attempt to capture some of those memories.
I usually purchase the official t-shirt and cap for Elvis week every year. Some years, I have shopped around before I have bought anything because I wanted a particular color shirt or was looking for a different style shirt or cap. I have learned a couple of things over the years. First, the quickest and easiest place to find the official shirts and caps is in the gift shop right off the ticket center at the visitor’s center. Any of the other official stores have the same shirts and usually in the same designs and colors. The only other shirts can be found at Boulevard Souvenirs which is one of the last non-Elvis Presley Enterprise gift shops close to Graceland. They have cheaper stuff, less air conditioning and they usually have a celebrity signing pictures or books around the store. Their unofficial t-shirts are less expensive but also very thin and cheap. The other thing that I learned is that you should buy early to make sure you get what you want. Last year, I didn’t like the style of the shirts and decided to shop around. When I went back to the first store at the visitor’s center, they didn’t have any more shirts as big as what I usually get. Because of this, I almost went down the weekend before just to shop for shirts and caps. I decided not to do this because this is just part of the trip for me.
They had two designs this year as they seem to have each year. One shirt notes that it is the 30th anniversary. The other shirt was specific for Elvis Week. I liked the Elvis Week shirt and quickly found one in my size. When I looked for caps, I couldn’t find any for Elvis week. They had two designs for the 30th anniversary. One was more of a trucker cap than what I like to wear. The other had flames and looked like a Harley/NASCAR type cap. I bought the t-shirt and went on the hunt for a different cap. I had no luck at the official stores but ran across a couple of Elvis and Nixon t-shirts that I considered getting if I didn’t find a cap. I finally went to Boulevard Souvenirs and found a 30th anniversary cap that looked more like me. Later in the night, I saw some people with Elvis week caps but I figured they had purchased them earlier in the week.
While I was at Boulevard Souvenirs, Joe Esposito was signing books and pictures. A pickup truck was parked outside of the store that had a custom Elvis paint job. I also heard a couple of statements that were almost exclusive to the Elvis shopping experience. The first was at Boulevard Souvenirs when I overheard a sales lady asking someone, “Do you want the one with our without the rhinestones?” The other was two young girls considering a purchase when one said to the other, “Well, we don’t have an Elvis umbrella!”
The visitor’s center is set up so the exit for each attraction sends you through a gift shop with a different theme. The plane exhibit exits through a store that specializes in CDs and videos. They have recordings there that I don’t think you can get anywhere else. Some of these are compilations with alternate takes, others are live performances focusing on the later years and still others are re-releases of the standard Elvis albums in oversized packaging. There is a new DVD set release about a week before Elvis week this year. They had a special Graceland Edition that probably has some extra stuff you can’t get anywhere else. Everything in the stores is overpriced. The only reason I might consider buying something here is if I wanted some of the things you just can’t find anywhere else. I thought that the film “Elvis on Tour” was released with this group of films and went in to check. It was not one of the films released but while I was looking, an older lady with teased black hair asked me if I knew anything about the release of a video of the final Elvis concert on DVD. She said she had received an email from a reliable source that mentioned it would be released on July 31 and was only available at Graceland. She said she had talked to all of the employees and no one knew anything about it. A man came up and got involved in the conversation and he said that they probably wouldn’t release it. He said the estate didn’t like it because Elvis looked so bad in it. He said he agreed with the estate. The lady said she had a copy of the video that she had made when NBC had broadcast it in 1978. Someone asked her how she managed to tape it in 1978 because home video was unheard of then. She said her mother had bought her a Quasar video unit that used huge tapes. If I understood her correctly, her mother bought it for her just for this special. When I told her about my aunt taking me to see “It Happened at the Worlds Fair” and “Live a Little, Love a Little” at a small town theatre when I was a kid, she said, “Weren’t you lucky?”
There are two main areas to hang out at Graceland. The visitors’ center usually has the best gift shops so it has a lot of activity. It is also the starting and stopping point for the Graceland tours and has the better restaurants. The other place is the strip mall in front of the Heartbreak Hotel. When I started coming, this strip mall was not owned by the estate but they have purchased it in the last couple of years. They have put official attractions in, given some space to Harley Davidson, and have generally tried to upgrade the place. There are still a few things left over from the old days that you can only get there. The Elvis bowling ball is an example. This strip mall is an attraction because they have a beer cart set up outside of the restaurant and a tent that has non-stop Elvis impersonators. The impersonators are only part of the attraction of this area. This is a great area to observe the fans. This area is where I get some of the best pictures and have some of the most interesting conversations. One of the reasons that I enjoy going to the Candlelight Vigil is that it makes me feel good about myself. I have gained more weight this year that I care to acknowledge but the people that you encounter during this week are bigger and more bizarre than you might imagine. The other reason they made me feel good is that I thought that I am not as crazy as these people. I am sure there are many intelligent people that are extremely devoted Elvis fans. There were several people at Graceland that should not have been there. The temperature was over 100 F and the humidity was the worst I have ever encountered there. Earlier in the week, the heat was identified as the cause of the death of at least six people in Memphis. I tried to prepare myself by wearing light colors and I brought two water jugs that I kept in my jeep. I made frequent trips back to the jeep to make sure I kept plenty of water in my system. I didn’t want to wait to feel bad before doing something about it. I made frequent trips into the different gift shops, mainly just to cool off. I ate when I did because it was during the hottest part of the day and I was committed to eating somewhere with air conditioning. Still there were times when it was just hot and I needed to rest or cool off.
One of these times was while watching the impersonators. They brought up this one guy that was wearing too tight white slacks, boots, and a red shirt opened to reveal an unimpressive chest with spotty chest hair and a big belt. His hair was big and black like you would expect and he had the sideburns. His singing left much to be desired. He was in tune most of the time but he didn’t have the range to sing these songs. The worst performance was Suspicious Minds when he couldn’t hit the high notes on the chorus. He had problems with his pants slipping down and made a comment that he hoped they didn’t split. At the end of the song he was doing the move that Elvis did on this song when he performed it live. He really got into it and it was probably the best thing in the performance. He knew he could do it ok and used it to make up for things like forgetting the words and the lackluster karate moves. He made a few comments about getting too hot during the song and I was convinced that I was going to get to see an Elvis impersonator pass out in the middle of a performance. He was drinking some kind of fruit punch between songs, by-passing the bottle of water he should have been drinking. He did a song a cappella that wasn’t written to be sung that way. As you might expect, he wasn’t able to stay on pitch and no music allowed you to hear how much the crowd wasn’t paying attention to him. He wrapped up with another song and a gimmick. He toweled off with stuffed teddy bears and threw them into the crowd. While doing this, he completely lost his place in the music and wasn’t anywhere close to being with the music. If the applause from the crowd had good intentions, it was a courtesy or because they liked the song selection but not the performance. If they had bad intentions, the applause was because he was finally off the stage.