Tag: elvis

Presley’s divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973.  By then, his health was in major and serious decline.  Twice during the year, he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident.  Towards the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semi-comatose from the effects of a pethidine addiction.  According to his primary care physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley “felt that by getting drugs from a doctor, he wasn’t the common everyday junkie getting something off the street”.  Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever.  Despite his failing health, in 1974, he undertook another intensive touring schedule.

Presley’s condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembered Presley’s arrival at a University of Maryland concert: “He fell out of the limousine, to his knees.  People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, ‘Don’t help me.’  He walked on stage and held onto the mic for the first thirty minutes like it was a post.  Everybody’s looking at each other like, ‘Is the tour gonna happen?” Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, “He was all gut.  He was slurring.  He was so fucked up… It was obvious he was drugged.  It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body.  It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible… I remember crying.  He could barely get through the introductions.”  Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, “I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move.  So often I thought, ‘Boss, why don’t you just cancel this tour and take a year off …?’ I mentioned something once in a guarded moment.  He patted me on the back and said, ‘It’ll be all right.  Don’t you worry about it.'” Presley continued to play to sell-out crowds.  Cultural critic Marjorie Garber wrote that he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: “In effect, he had become Liberace.  Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers.”

On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son’s financial affairs—fired “Memphis Mafia” bodyguards Red West (Presley’s friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to “cut back on expenses”.  Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggested that he was too cowardly to face the three himself.  Another associate of Presley’s, John O’Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits.  However, Presley’s stepbrother, David Stanley, claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley’s drug dependency.

RCA, which had always enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley, began to grow anxious as his interest in the recording studio waned.  After a session in December 1973 that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, Presley made no official studio recordings in 1974.  Parker delivered RCA yet another concert record, Elvis Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis.  Recorded on March 20, it included a version of “How Great Thou Art” that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award.  (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total nominations—were for gospel recordings.)  Presley returned to the recording studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker’s attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful.  In 1976, RCA sent a mobile recording unit to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley’s home.  Even in that comfortable context, the recording process had become a struggle for him.

Despite concerns from RCA and Parker, between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums.  Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977).  Similarly, his singles in this era did not prove to be major pop hits, but Presley remained a significant force in the country and adult contemporary markets.  Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone.  “My Boy” was a number-one adult contemporary hit in 1975, and “Moody Blue” topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the adult contemporary chart in 1976.  Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his “apocalyptic attack” on the soul classic “Hurt”.  “If he felt the way he sounded”, Dave Marsh wrote of Presley’s performance, “the wonder isn’t that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long.”

Read more about 1973 – 1977: Health Deterioration And Death and more about Elvis Presley here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.