Elvis Has Left The Building - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dylan Jones is the Editor of GQ. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and St. Martin’s School of Art in London before becoming the Editor of i-D magazine. He has since been an editor at the Face, Arena, Observer and The Sunday Times. Jones has won the BSME Editor of the Year award seven times, and was awarded an OBE in 2013. He has written studies of David Bowie and Jim Morrison, in addition to two anthologies of journalism and more on technology, popular culture, the war in Afghanistan and even Prime Minister David Cameron.

Dylan Jones is the Editor of GQ. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and St. Martin’s School of Art in London before becoming the Editor ofi-D magazine. He has since been an editor at the Face, Arena,Observer and The Sunday Times. Jones has won the BSME Editor of the Year award seven times, and was awarded an OBE in 2013. He has written studies of David Bowie and Jim Morrison, in addition to two anthologies of journalism and more on technology, popular culture, the war in Afghanistan and even Prime Minister David Cameron.

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When Ziggy Played Guitar:

David Bowie And Four Minutes That Shook The World

The Biographical Dictionary Of Popular Music

British Heroes In Afghanistan (with David Bailey)

Cameron On Cameron: Conversations With Dylan Jones

Mr. Jones’ Rules For The Modern Man

iPod Therefore I Am: A Personal Journey Through Music

Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy

Sex, Power & Travel

Ultra Lounge

Paul Smith: True Brit

Jim Morrison: Dark Star

Haircults

Copyright

From the Roxy to eternity, and back again

John Updike, from “Jesus and Elvis”

INTRODUCTION

Exit Stage Left

“Elvis Presley is like the ‘Big Bang’ of Rock’n’Roll.

It all came from there” – Bono

The phrase “Elvis has left the building” was used for the first time on December 15th, 1956, by the promoter Horace Lee Logan, telling the crowd at his Louisiana Hayride, broadcast from the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium, that the young star had left the premises through the stage door. This night, like so many nights in future, Elvis was accompanied by his police escort. He had played the Hayride two years previously, but now he was a massive star, and needed all the protection he could get. What Logan actually said was: “All right, all right, Elvis has left the building. I’ve told you absolutely straight up to this point, you know that he has left the building; he left the stage and went out the back with the policeman and he is now gone from the building.”

Logan was not in fact trying to get the crowd to leave, but to persuade them to stay and see the rest of the acts on the bill. After Elvis had given his final encore and left the stage, the crowd rushed for the exits, even though many other Hayride acts were still waiting to perform. Logan didn’t want them traipsing round the back hoping to get a glimpse of the new boy.

“Please, young people,” he continued over the tannoy, in desperation. “Elvis has left the building. He has gotten in his car and driven away … Please take your seats.” Later, the phrase would be used as a way to clear a room, to encourage people to leave, but this first time that wasn’t the case at all.

Even back then Elvis Presley was trouble.

That December night turned out to be the last time Elvis would ever play the Hayride. His manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, had just bought out his contract, and Elvis’s show there was never broadcast on the KWKH radio station again.

“Elvis has left the building …”

Throughout Elvis’s Las Vegas years, indeed any time he played a concert, the words would be delivered, matter-of-factly, after the encore, in order to calm the crowd down, or to get them to pick up their bags and their drinks and their posters and go home. Sometimes it was the MC, sometimes a backing singer, and quite often the promoter. But it was always said. It became the punchline to a thousand different jokes, some verbal punctuation, while baseball announcers on radio and television used the phrase as a way to signal a home run. When singing the closing theme to the television series Frasier, Kelsey Grammer would sometimes follow the last line with his own version: “Frasier has left the building.”

As the Chicago Reader’s Straight Dope column once put it, the meaning is clear to all: “the show’s over, the curtain has fallen, the sun has set, that’s all she wrote, the fat lady has sung, our work here is done, move along, nothing more to see … so long, hasta la vista, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here … Scotty, beam me up.”

The fateful words were said for the last time at the end of Elvis’s final performance, in Indianapolis on June 26th, 1977. On August 16th that year, Elvis left the building forever.

Like the murders of JFK and RFK, or the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley’s death is etched in our collective memory. Whether we’re fans or not. Everyone over a certain age can remember exactly where they were when they found out that Elvis was dead. For over twenty years, since the birth of rock’n’roll in 1956, Elvis had been part of the very fabric of American life. He was an object of desire and worship the whole world over. A life without Elvis was unthinkable, unimaginable. Yet the news was incontrovertible: on August 16th, 1977 he was pronounced dead, having been rushed to the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis.

We still feel his death today. A 2004 Samaritans survey of Britain’s most emotional memories, for example, placed Elvis’s death at No.20, after events such as the fall of the Berlin wall, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and the 9/11 attacks.

One man, who was barely ten at the time, remembered the moment vividly. “I’d been playing in the garden and when I came inside I found my mother sitting on the stairs, crying. I’d never seen her cry before. I asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Elvis is dead.’”

“My parents sat me down with very serious looks on their faces,” recalled a similarly young fan. “My grandfather, who I didn’t know very well, was ill so I assumed they were going to tell me he had died. When they said it was Elvis who had died, I was completely distraught and wished it had been my grandfather …”

In the words of another, “I was working as a lifeguard at an outdoor swimming pool in British Columbia. I was on the deck and another lifeguard, who was [another] huge Elvis fan, came running out of the guard shack waving his arms, yelling, ‘Elvis is dead!’ I remember the pool, which was very busy, fell really quiet.”

According to a British devotee, “I was fixing a TV set and listening to Capital Radio late in the evening. I was just wondering why they’d played several Elvis songs in a row when the DJ announced, ‘The King is dead.’ All of the pop stations played nothing but Elvis for the rest of the evening.”

As for me, I heard the news sitting in the saloon bar of the Nag’s Head pub on London Road in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where most of the punk bands in the area played at the time. The Nag’s Head was owned by Ron Watts, who also ran the 100 Club in Oxford Street, and everyone who played there played here. I was just seventeen. As the news spread around the bar, a couple of people appeared to cheer half heartedly, although after some stern looks from the barmen, mostly there was hush. Without access to anything other than secondhand information, the rest of the evening was spent in speculation. If it really was true, how exactly had he died? Was he alone? Was he naked? Was it true that it was a drug overdose? Could it have been suicide? I had just finished a dry run of packing for an imminent move to London, to Chelsea, and was about to start a new life. I wasn’t an Elvis fan, but this was monumental news, and my friends and I spent most of the evening absorbing its impact. If I recall correctly, that largely involved repeating the fact that Elvis was actually dead, “Fucking dead,” over and over again.

“Fuck, Elvis is dead!”

“Fuck me, you’re right. Elvis is dead!”

Media speculation about Elvis’s wellbeing – his mental state and health – had...