In the history of rock ’n’ roll, there may be no behind-the-scenes figure more vilified and less understood than Colonel Tom Parker.
As the longtime manager of Elvis Presley, Parker was the chief business force behind an artist who had a world-shaking impact. His deals generated millions of dollars for Presley and helped make him rock’s first global superstar.
Yet Parker — who was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Holland, and concealed his origins for decades — has long been portrayed as a crass huckster who boxed Presley into an unfulfilling career in Hollywood and Las Vegas. According to that critique, he exploited Presley with deals that benefited Parker as much as his client; by the 1970s, Parker was taking a 50 percent commission on most of Presley’s earnings.
If anyone could challenge that view, or at least put the story of Parker, who died in 1997, into proper context, it is the music historian Peter Guralnick. His latest book, “The Colonel and the King,” which comes out Aug. 5, attempts to demythologize Parker and his relationship with Presley. It draws from tens of thousands of private letters and other documentation Parker left behind; Elvis Presley Enterprises, which had acquired Parker’s files, gave Guralnick access to the documents.
In music circles, a new entry in Guralnick’s Presley chronicles is practically the equivalent of an update to Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson. Guralnick’s exhaustively researched two-volume biography of Presley in the 1990s — “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love” — revolutionized Presley scholarship and remain vital documents.
“Peter Guralnick not only is an extraordinary researcher, getting details that no one can imagine even existed,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton, said in an interview. “But he also writes as an historian, which is to say that you don’t know the ending when you begin. He chronicles how great artists evolve, come from one place and go to another.”
In a video interview from his home north of Boston, Guralnick, 81, discussed his new book and the complex relationship between Presley and Parker. And he stressed that his aim was not to write a polemic, but to document accurately an elusive history.
“I’m not trying to persuade the reader who has a fixed view,” Guralnick said. “I wanted to disregard the myth and tell the true story.”
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you decide to do this book, given how thoroughly you’ve covered the Elvis story in the two biographies?
When I first saw the letters 30 years ago, they just presented a very different picture than anything I had ever seen before. I’m not trying to disown what I wrote previously, but in “Careless Love,” Colonel was almost a Falstaffian character who could rise above the common herd, like a lovable rogue or something.
I saw my work as, in a sense, restoring Colonel to his rightful place in history. With the discovery of these letters, I felt I had to in some way get these out to the world so that people who write about Elvis, or were curious about Elvis, or were Elvis fans could see the actual facts. Every event in this book is familiar to readers, but there’s a completely different perspective here from behind the scenes.
At least in the early days, Parker was actually a visionary manager, who protected Elvis’s creative autonomy and got him extraordinary deals.
You can see that with Ed Sullivan. At first Sullivan vowed never to have that performer on his show. But after Elvis goes on Steve Allen’s show and it beats Sullivan in the ratings, he changes his mind. And Colonel says, that’s all well and good, but Elvis has to have total control of the selection of the songs that he sings, of the manner in which he performs them, of the musicians who back him. And without that, there’s no deal. We also see from the very beginning of Elvis’s signing with RCA that Colonel is operating in defense of Elvis as an artist.
There’s also the mystery of Parker himself: born in Holland, ran away to America as a young man, invented a story about having grown up in West Virginia. Why did he live the way he did?
He lived a life of self-invention. He lived a creative life, the life he always wanted to live, but that doesn’t answer the question. For example, why did the myth, the biography he created about himself — leading a life of adventure, joining the carnival and circus world — so exactly mirror his actual biography in Holland, but simply transposed to this country?
In the popular imagination, Parker is the villain of the Elvis Presley story, the exploiter.
For the first 10 years or so, until 1967 or ’68, he was never portrayed that way. He was portrayed as a character, but everyone took him seriously as a manager and admired the success he had achieved, which is why Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles, wanted to meet him.
But he’s almost always seen as a controlling Svengali type. We saw that as recently as Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic.
I think that’s become the main image of him since Elvis’s death. And Colonel obviously contributed to this. When Elvis and Colonel came to Hollywood, for example, each of them was taken as a rube, a hayseed. Very quickly it became apparent that Colonel, through his deals, and Elvis, through his talent, completely superseded anybody’s views of them in that manner. And I think it just amused them endlessly to see who in the end was the rube, who came out on top.
Do you see yourself as an apologist or defender of Colonel Parker?
No. No more than I’m an apologist or a defender of Elvis or Sam Cooke. My intention is to set aside the myths, set aside the received opinion, and to try to look at the person. With Colonel, I think you’ll find someone vulnerable, someone whose motivations are not always clear, for whom there continue to exist mysteries. But not somebody who is without fault, not somebody without blame. I want to portray the whole man.
Aside from the finances, Parker is usually seen as stunting Elvis creatively by having him make so many movies, and by preventing him from performing live for most of the ’60s. Is that view wrong?
It’s not wrong, but you have to look at the elements of the story. After Elvis got out of the army in 1960, he made two movies, “Wild in the Country” and “Flaming Star,” that were the kind of movies he wanted to make — straight dramatic roles. They were complete failures at the box office. In the immediate aftermath, he made “Blue Hawaii,” which was the biggest success of his Hollywood career, and set the template for all his subsequent movies. Starting in 1964, there was also a period when Elvis essentially devoted himself to spiritual studies, triggered by the death of his mother years earlier. He was consumed with the idea of what was I set on earth to do, what is this all for? His interest in making movies, performing — anything other than pursuing his spiritual studies — just disappeared completely.
In 1965, Colonel renegotiated Elvis’s contract with RCA. At that time Elvis was selling 40 percent fewer records than he had five years earlier. Still, Colonel improved the contract, guaranteeing Elvis $2.1 million over seven years, but Elvis was required to record three new singles and a spiritual album. Colonel calculated correctly that this would motivate Elvis to go back into the studio. Elvis began rehearsing what became “How Great Thou Art,” and that began the next renaissance of Elvis’s career, which ultimately led to the ’68 TV special, his Memphis sessions in 1969 and Vegas.
How did Colonel justify the 50 percent commission he took on most of Elvis’s later earnings?
From ’66 on, he articulated his reasons for why they should be a partnership or a joint venture. Everything had changed in their relationship. Elvis needed more and more money, and Colonel needed to make more and more deals to bail Elvis out. You could see this in the letters that Vernon, Elvis’s father, wrote to Colonel. They were desperate. In 1966, Elvis was making more than $3 million a year, yet he was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Whether it’s a rationalization or not, Colonel felt that he was putting so much work into creating opportunities for Elvis to make the kind of money that he needed to make, that it should be an equal partnership.
So why is he seen as the villain?
Colonel’s belief from the very beginning was that the artist always wears the white hat. And when Elvis began to get criticism in the late ’60s, and really in the ’70s, Colonel was never going to allow his artist to take the blame. I think that’s really where he became the villain. It’s like a cowboy movie — he wore the black hat.
He did feel wronged in the way that people interpreted what he had done. But I think he was never going to put the blame on his artist. There’s no question in my mind that this is the reason why Colonel never wrote the autobiography he promised from ’56 on, which he was going to call “How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?” Even after Elvis’s death, he was not going to betray that idea that the artist always wears the white hat.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
The post Was Elvis Presley’s Manager the Colonel a Villain? It’s Complicated. appeared first on New York Times.
