Then there was the girl that got up and sang. She was an attractive young girl with long legs and a short skirt. She didn’t try to sing like Elvis and didn’t necessarily sing his biggest hits. She wasn’t that bad, but wasn’t the kind of performer for this crowd. They were polite but never really got into her songs. They are older women who like attractive young men who sing familiar Elvis songs, use his sexiest moves, and flirt with them. The more they move and flirt, the less they have to sing or look like Elvis. The performer that was the most successful at getting the audience involved was a guy that looked more like Adam Lambert from American Idol than Elvis. He spoke with an Italian accent. He also picked the best songs and got the audience more involved. He brought a group of girls on stage to help him sing and dance on “Love my Baby”, one of Elvis’ best songs that he sang with Ann Margaret in Viva Las Vegas. He was a good performer, but a cheap imitation of Elvis.
While the impersonators may have gotten cheap, the prices at the gift shops haven’t. The music shop was one of the places where the prices are still as high as the passion for Elvis but the feeling that the death of the phenomenon of Elvis fans is inevitable. The many of the CDs in this store can probably only be purchased in this store. If you ever saw Elvis perform live, you can find a CD with a performance from that time, that tour, that set of shows at a casino and maybe even the show you saw. At least you will be able to find the song set he performed from around the same time. The price on these CDs is $30. The expanded soundtracks of his films with alternate takes and unused songs are also $30. This when normal retailers price their CDs less than $10 and they have a hard time selling them. Yes, you can’t find this stuff anywhere else and it is specialty material so it should come at a premium. But if you expect to keep this phenomenon going, you have to do something to try to appeal to a younger group that will only listen to it if it’s easy to loan on to their iPod. While I was in this store, a sales lady brought a customer over to a shelf to show her where they had copies of Viva Las Vegas. The sales lady asked if she wanted the DVD or Blu-Ray. The lady wanted Blu-Ray. She took it but came back in a while to compare the price with the DVD. I asked her how much the Blu-Ray costs. She said it was $40 and the DVD was $7 less. I told her if she really wanted it, she should go to Best Buy. I had stopped by there on the way into town and found a set that had Viva Las Vegas, Jailhouse Rock and Elvis on Tour, all on Blu-Ray for $40. The lady replied “I never thought of that!” Many of the people that still come to Graceland to celebrate don’t think about this stuff. They are slow and weak and dying. The ones that aren’t are wising up and staying at home. Only the freaks are showing up at Graceland now. Freaks and people who come to see the freaks. I’ve used the term freak loosely in the past but this year it applies in the strictest sense of the term.
I was in one of the gift shops next to the Elvis performers tent. It looked like the performer was laying down on his belly on stage. It also looked like he was using a headset microphone. I thought this was just wrong. Elvis would have never done any of this. When I came out of the store, I saw a man with no legs performing. This is just ripe for jokes. The guy couldn’t shake his legs like Elvis, he didn’t have any. He couldn’t shake his hips, he didn’t have any. He had a belt, but it seemed like he was having problems keeping it on. He sang ok, but didn’t really sound like Elvis. He had sideburns but really didn’t look like Elvis. He was energetic and a good performer like a good sideshow freak. They’ve shut down most of those carnival sideshows because they are considered cruel. But they can still perform for Elvis fans. They aren’t exactly right either so you might as well have freaks perform for freaks.
There was a large group of young people with Down’s syndrome that I ran into several times. They were wearing matching grey “Property of the Spurs” shirts. I don’t know if they were from San Antonio or if they found these shirts cheap and thought it would be an easy way to keep up with the group in a sea of Elvis shirts. These people were much more normal than most of the people I met.