Author: P.F. Kluge
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9781590202586
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Part mystery, part love story, part mordant commentary on America's waning presence in the world, this hugely entertaining novel tells the story of a trio of Elvis impersonators working out of the Graceland club in Olongapo, Phillipines. In their act, Baby Elvis, Dude Elvis and Biggest Elvis incarnate the King's evolving life. Their popularity grows. In a tawdry town, this successful act becomes almost an obsession. But there are those that think Biggest Elvis has to go. Re-envisioning the life of America's greatest hero, this is an edgy and evocative novel.
Author: Richard Zoglin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501151207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
*The inspiration for the CNN original series Vegas: The Story of Sin City* “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts—and he’d been dismissed by most critics as over-the-hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews; “Suspicious Minds,” the song he introduced there, gave him his first number-one hit in seven years; and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed, too. By the end of the ‘60s, Vegas’ golden age—when the Rat Pack led a glittering array of stars who made it the nation’s premier live-entertainment center—was losing its luster. Elvis created a new kind of Vegas show: an over-the-top, rock-concert extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. He opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock artists and brought a new audience to Vegas—not the traditional well-heeled older gamblers, but a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. At once “a fascinating history of Vegas as gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, [and] entertainment Valhalla” (Rolling Stone) and the incredible “tale of how the King got his groove back” (Associated Press), Elvis in Vegas is a classic feel-good story for the ages.
Author: Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
Publisher: Little People, BIG DREAMS
ISBN: 0711270856
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
Part of the best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, Elvis tells the inspiring story of the iconic singer-songwriter who helped popularize rock and roll around the world.
Author: Jerry Hopkins
Publisher: Plexus Publishing
ISBN: 0859658996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Elvis Presley is the single biggest personality in American popular culture. Over three decades after his death in August 1977, he remains the undisputed king of rock'n'roll. Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews, Elvis combines Jerry Hopkins's two previous classic bestselling Elvis biographies - Elvis: A Biography and Elvis: The Final Years - with all-new material to give the definitive detailed account of Presley's fantastic life
Author: Peter Guralnick
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349144451
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 751
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Book Description
Written with grace, humour, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley 'Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe' BOB DYLAN 'Wonderful' RODDY DOYLE 'Soars above all other accounts of Elvis' Guardian 'A triumph of biographical art... profound and moving' New York Times Last Train to Memphis is arguably the first serious biography that refuses to dwell on the myth of Elvis. Aiming instead to portray in vivid, dramatic terms the life and career of this outstanding artistic and cultural phenomenon, it draws together a plethora of documentary and interview material to create a superbly coherent and plausible narrative. The first of two volumes, covering Presley's rise to prominence up to his departure for Germany in 1958, Last Train to Memphis is undoubtedly the benchmark by which other biographies of him are judged.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Author: Bonnie Christensen
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
ISBN: 1627795871
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
An only child, a mama's boy-Elvis was a shy kid who struggled to make friends and found comfort singing in church and learning guitar. While in high school, he continued his music but was often ridiculed by students. On a whim, he recorded a song for his mom's birthday at Sun Record Studios as part of a customer promotion. The studio loved it so much that they sent it to local record stations . . . and the rest is history. Here is the story of how a poor kid from Tupelo, Mississippi, became an American legend.
Author: George Klein
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307452751
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
The touching story of thirty years of friendship between George Klein and the King that “offers an insider’s view of Presley the man as opposed to Presley the singer, actor, and icon” (Associated Press). “You capture the essence of Elvis not only in dialogue, but also in giving the reader a sense of his personality, humor, and his spirit of play.”—Priscilla Presley When George Klein was an eighth grader at Humes High, he couldn’t have known how important the new kid with the guitar—the boy named Elvis—would later become in his life. But from the first time GK (as he was nicknamed by Elvis) heard this kid sing, he knew that Elvis Presley was someone extraordinary. During Elvis’s rise to fame and throughout the wild swirl of his remarkable life, Klein was a steady presence and one of Elvis’s closest and most loyal friends until his untimely death in 1977. In Elvis: My Best Man, a heartfelt, entertaining, and long-awaited contribution to our understanding of Elvis Presley and the early days of rock ’n’ roll, George Klein writes with great affection for the friend he knew about who the King of Rock ’n’ Roll really was and how he acted when the stage lights were off. This fascinating chronicle of boundary-breaking and music-making through one of the most intriguing and dynamic stretches of American history overflows with insights and anecdotes from someone who was in the middle of it all. From the good times at Graceland to hanging out with Hollywood stars to butting heads with Elvis’s iron-handed manager, Colonel Tom Parker, to making sure that Elvis’s legacy is fittingly honored, GK was a true friend of the King and a trailblazer in the music industry in his own right.
Author: Ray Connolly
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492810
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
A “sympathetic and exceptionally well-written account” (USA Today), Ray Connolly’s biography of the King soars with “spontaneity and electricity” (Preston Lauterbach). Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and traditionally black rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which simply blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America. In Being Elvis veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world’s most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way. Juxtaposing the music, the songs, and the incendiary live concerts with a personal life that would later careen wildly out of control, Connolly demonstrates that Elvis’s amphetamine use began as early as his touring days of hysteria in the late 1950s, and that the financial needs that drove him in the beginning would return to plague him at the very end. With a narrative informed by interviews over many years with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, B. B. King, Sam Phillips, and Roy Orbison, among many others, Connolly creates one of the most nuanced and mature portraits of this cultural phenomenon to date. What distinguishes Being Elvis beyond the narrative itself is Connolly’s more subtle examinations of white poverty, class aspirations, and the prison that is extreme fame. As we reach the end of this poignant account, Elvis’s death at forty-two takes on the hue of a profoundly American tragedy. The creator of an American sound that resonates today, Elvis remains frozen in time, an enduring American icon who could “seamlessly soar into a falsetto of pleading and yearning” and capture an inner emotion, perhaps of eternal yearning, to which all of us can still relate. Intimate and unsparing, Being Elvis explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, ultimately offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.
Author: Samuel Roy
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 9781558536937
Category : Rock musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"The Essential Elvis" is the story of the King of Rock 'n' Roll and his effect on music through an analysis of 112 essential performances that defined his career.
