All Quotes

"Yes, I believe I am an Elvis, the Elvis of Vallenato"

"Wide raging voices̠ː Singers with extensions from B1 to A5. Elvis Presley's B1 may be heard on the song "Such a Night" and on "Mystery Train" an A5 is reached towards the end. Later in his career, he developed a rich baritone voice which still mastered the higher register with immense power, such as on "American Trilogy", "Unchained Melody" or the joking "Little Darlin""

"I asked him how he felt about Estes Kefauver and Adlai Stevenson from the Democratic National Convention, and about the Andrea Doria disaster, the Empire waistline in the world of fashion, and Pablo Casals, the world's greatest cellist. His answer was that he would rather keep his views to himself because he did not want to be labeled, so I left him alone. Later I found out that Elvis always enjoyed telling the story of how he managed to outsmart me and every other reporter by answering questions without really answering them."

"Long before the plans for an actual rock museum in Cleveland were hatched, a group headed by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner and Atlantic Records' Ahmet Ertegun started off the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with two induction ceremonies-cum-concerts, in 1986 and 1987, bringing in a total of 25 blues-and-rock groundbreakers primarily from the ‘50s, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley. Presley is in fact rock’s greatest presence, shaking a country with a single-handed nuclear reaction of country, gospel, and the blues. Along with the Beatles, he is the epitome of pop stardom as well."

"I've just worked with this guy ( in reference to Austin Butler) on stage and I've never seen a work ethic like it."

"Any young man who calls his mother “baby” and speaks baby-talk with her must love her tenderly. But Elvis Presley didn't just love his mother – he worshiped her. In return, she inspired him to create a sound that would change popular music forever. It was Gladys who gave her son his first guitar for his 11th birthday, even though Elvis had preferred a bicycle. And it was his love for Gladys that prompted him to record his first song, My Happiness as a special birthday gift for her. The spiritual bond between mother and son had existed from the minute Elvis was born. On 8 January 1935 the then 22-year-old Gladys suffered a hemorrhage and barely survived giving birth to a set of twins. The first one, Jesse Garon, was stillborn, which led Gladys to believe that the surviving twin, Elvis Aaron, had inherited Jesse's soul. Elvis, she believed, was “the One”. Throughout his childhood she instilled in him how special he was. So when the studio receptionist at Sun Records asked Elvis what kind of singer he was, the 18-year-old answered, “I don’t sound like nobody.” The belief in her only son's special calling, whatever that would turn out to be, made Gladys very protective of Elvis. Over the objections of her husband, Vernon, she made sure he never spent a night away from home until he was 17. Once Elvis's musical career took off in a big way in 1956 things went south for his muse. Then, in 1958, when Elvis was drafted into the Army, she succumbed to a heart attack. After her death Elvis remained an incredibly successful artist. In 1977, at the age of 42, he died from an overdose of medications at Graceland. The date was 16 August – the very same day he had buried his beloved mother 19 years earlier and inconsolably wept, “Oh, God, everything I have is gone.”"

"He is the Elvis of Sea ice Science"

"It was my mother's Elvis concerts from the 70's on VHS tapes that first drew me to the sheer thrill of an all-you-can-eat live performance. I just had this fascination for him. I was going to the Punters Club in Fitzroy but a lot of the bands I was watching were staring at their shoes, I mean shoe gaze was massive. Then I'd go home to my mother's Elvis' tapes and nobody was owning a spotlight like that, nobody. I wanted to start a band that was putting on show. I wanted to reward people for leaving their living rooms if they were going to come out to watch a band, let's give them something visual as well as a band that sounds good."

"I think about Elvis all the time."

"I loved everything about him.I grew up with singers, dancers and comics. At 15, I discovered Elvis Presley. A girl whom I wanted to take to the prom showed me a magazine clipping of her "boyfriend." It was Elvis. This guy looked like a Greek god, and then I saw him on television. I loved everything about him, so I became a fan. I always wanted to stand in the same place he stood the night he caused all the commotion at the Ed Sullivan Theatre. May I?"

"In fact, I first provided clothing for her during her first pregnancy in 1981, and continued to do so until her death in 1997. One such outfit, which Diana herself called her ‘Elvis Dress’, was worn by her both to the British Fashion Awards in October 1989 and then on an official visit to Hong Kong. The year of her passing away, the dress was bought for £81,203 at a benefit auction by The Franklin Mint, a company which produces memorabilia such as a portrait doll featuring her wearing this dress, thus making it one of the best-known of Diana's many outfits, and the second highest prized. The Mint returned the dress to the Diana Estate a few years later."

"I had a 45 rpm record player, one of those that accommodated little records with big holes in the middle and with the capacity to hold, what, 10 or so records, to drop down one at a time, until all 10 had played. But that's too general for what I've been thinking about. Specifically, it's one of the songs, really the only song I can say with certainty that I played, over and over and over again. “Lavender Blue” by Sammy Turner. And it, and others, made me know I loved music — most all kinds excusing jazz and opera. And then, it was Elvis. Controversial Elvis Presley. Would my folks let me listen to his music or watch him on our little black and white television? Then, before we knew it, Elvis was too big to be avoided or ignored. You had to watch him..."

"i) One day we are in a recording session, here at RCA B, and he was talking to one of the clean up guys. Then three RCA people from New York, with suits and they walked up to Elvis, but he paid no attention to them. The clean up guy stopped talking, but Elvis said "Go ahead, Sir". When he finished, the clean up guy shook his hand and thanked Elvis for talking to him. Then Elvis approached the guys from New York and said "Gentlemen, if you see me talking to somebody, don't interrupt me, don't even walk up to me, I know when it{s your turn and I will walk up to you. And that was the end of it. ii) The best I have ever seen him look was in 1967, at the Circle G Ranch. His hair was black to blonde like it was naturally, the colour of a fawn. Just as shiny as could be. He had a suit and shoes the same color of his hair, so he walked in and we were stunned. He had been out riding his horses, was tanned and his eyes shunned like diamonds. We couldn't believe it. We just stood there and looked at him. Finally, he said "Shall we dance?""

"In constructing his own public image during the early 1950s, Elvis unconsciously appropriated, synthesised and ultimately capitalised upon images from a series of contemporary cultural icons. These ranged from Captain Marvel and Dean Martin to Jackie Wilson. ‘Cultural production’, states Madow, ‘is always (and necessarily) a matter of reworking, recombining, and redeploying already existing symbolic forms, sounds, narratives, and images’. To this effect – on the current standing of US publicity rights law – one could actually begin to question Elvis's right to call the Elvis image his own in the first place; however, few would deny that the Elvis whole was definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The overall effect of his efforts was to create a unique image which had a fresh and vital meaning in post-war society. If there did not exist any rights of control over power of the creation of cultural symbols then there would be little financial incentive for individuals to spend the time, energy and resources to develop their ‘talents and produce works which ultimately benefit society as a whole Elvis signs and their multiple meanings are so strong that Elvis has, in effect, mediated his own celebrity culture beyond the grave."

"We have to still care about Elvis because if we don't, then we don't like music. He was the big bang, the sun around which all the other planets circled ever since and when he went down, we lost the first and the best."

"Basically, Elvis Presley was doing self-defense techniques because he couldn't spar, it was simply too dangerous. He had to preserve his voice, so contact to the face or neck was out. He also didn't want to risk breaking any bones, so he'd just train on and demonstrate self-defense moves like taking full-power shots to the stomach. He was a fine athlete, not a fighter, but that doesn't mean he wasn't able to fight, though. His technique —his side kick and his punches— looked as good as anybody else's. He wanted to do karate because he'd learned a bit of it in the Army and really liked it. The best part of working with him was beating up all of his people, like Red and Sonny West, Jerry Shilling and all the others. I just relegated them to pulp."

"Well, now wait. You say he has no talent and yet I think that you'll agree that he has been taken into the bosom of America in a certain sense and has been very well paid for it..."

"With the way he was marketed, he didn't even need to be able to sing the way he could. But Elvis had talent, plain and simple. The guy had a thousandth-octave range, and a variety in his vocal styles and approach, he could make more vocal tones, with just his voice, than a guitar player with 50 pedals and gadgets. If you never even saw the guy, you could plain feel, not just hear, the emotion and passion in his voice, and you are immediately taken in, one hundred percent. On the merit of vocals alone, he had more talent in the barbecue stuck in his teeth than the singers who sell millions of records do today."

"A Presley motion picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood.”"

"This is something I've always wanted to do: Take an evening, invite an audience and just be me. What you can expect is me playing music, answering almost all questions anyone would ask (except the ones that may incriminate me), a big screen power point presentation put together and narrated by me, guitar shop talk, slide guitar 101, true stories of road craziness, playing more music and I’m particularly excited to talk about my Elvis experiences —what he meant to me and what I meant to him. We’ll conclude with a Town Hall Meeting, including a strategy and platform discussion for my candidacy to run for President of the United States in 2020 and sing ‘God Bless America’ or something else (Elvis would want that).""

"Is it true Elvis took you often to tour the morgue? Why̞?"

"This era of biracial musical creation and consumption has been largely erased from popular memory. It lies buried beneath simplistic parables of white expropriation and exploitation of black culture in which Elvis Presley has become emblematic of centuries of uncompensated and unacknowledged white appropriation of black cultural ingenuity and labour. There is enormous moral power to this perspective and, to be sure, plenty of evidence of just such exploitation and theft. Nonetheless, it still makes for unpersuasive history and fails to help us to understand the significance of Elvis and the whole biracial rock-and-roll phenomenon that intersected with the dawn of the modern civil rights movement."

"Arguably the finest recording found in all the Sun sessions, "Trying To Get To You"(1955), is a song that Presley made his own due to his hugely committed vocal, and the simple carefree abandon with which he performs it; at first, it feels like a classic country song with simple, elegant lyrics; but it is at the bridge – where Elvis really lets fly –, that the song is transformed from a lovely country lament, into deep blues; although the 1955 version is magnificent, Elvis manages to better it on his "1968 Comeback Special", in which he sings the song with so much intensity, it prompted critic Greil Marcus to exclaim "this is probably the finest rock and roll ever recorded."

"i) I liked Dylan, the way he created a brilliant new style. I even gave him one of my silver "Double Elvis" paintings. Later on, though, I heard rumors that he had used it as a dart board up in the country. When I'd ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I'd invariably get hearsay answers like ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone — I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse, man.’. I didn't know exactly what they meant by that — I never listened much to the words of songs — but I got the tenor of what people were saying — that Dylan didn't like me ii) For forty-five minutes nonstop Ali raged on about prostitution on the steps of the White House, gravity, meteorites, jumping out of the window, Israel, Egypt, Zaire, South Africa, drugs, broken skulls, delusions, angel food cake, yellow hair, judgment day, Muslim morality, Jesus, boxing, Sweden, the Koran, friendship, and Elvis, relating it all to the central point that ‘man must obey the laws of God or perish!’”"

"Elvis Presley existed not only as a flesh-and-blood person but also as millions of pictures on album covers and movie screens, in newspapers and magazines. He was infinitely reproducible. Similarly, through use of the silkscreen printing process, Warhol could produce as many Elvis paintings as he pleased."

"When we first met, I was like, 'OK, Pam, don't act a fool, but I was trying to keep my composure, because this was fricking Prince. It's like Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson. It doesn't get any higher than that.""

"As a single woman, I could always spot a handsome man. Elvis Presley was one of the prettiest, yes, prettiest and nicest people I ever known. Pictures and videos of him really did not do him justice. In 1969, when I opened at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and he had opened at the International, I once went to see my aunt Cissy Houston (a member of Elvis' vocal backing group, the Sweet Inspirations), during one of their sound checks. Elvis was there and Cissy introduced me to him. He let me know he was a a fan of my recordings then had all the Vegas record stores place a photo of him inside of my albums. This he announced from the stage and added that anyone who bought any of my albums would find an autographed photo of him inside of it. That week I think I sold more albums in Las Vegas than I ever had. I will never forget this act of kindness. We lost an icon when he made his transition."

"There would be no current popular music without Elvis. He not only synthesized everything that had come before him in a really unique way, but he influenced everybody who came after — so you can have Blake Shelton and Adam Lambert influenced by the same cat."

"Elvis' range was about two and a quarter octaves, as measured by musical notation, but his voice had an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear. His voice can not be measured in octaves, but in decibels; even that misses the problem of how to measure delicate whispers that are hardly audible at all."

"I better watch out. I believe whitey's picking up on the things that I'm doing"

"In my seventeen years as doorman to the top hotel in Hollywood, the biggest star that ever stayed there was Elvis Presley. He was indeed one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life. If I introduced any person to him, he would show the utmost courtesy and respect that they ever encountered. Sometimes, over the long years I felt that God had put him on this earth for a very special reason. When you use the phrase "a very special person", that was Elvis Presley, in my opinion."

"Whereas Ottawa has the unique distinction of being just one of three cities outside of the United States where Elvis Presley had a live performance, April 3 shall henceforth be known as Elvis Presley day in the capital."

"Keith Richards taught me rock and roll. We’d have nothing to do all day and we’d play these records over and over again. I learned to love Muddy Waters. Keith turned me on to how good Elvis Presley was, and I’d always hated Elvis up ’til then."

"Elvis Presley. That lit the fuse for me."

"Everything is collectible, it seems, even human hair. Outbidding an international field of collectors, an unnamed Londoner paid $13,000 last week to purchase a lock of Napoleon's hair, reportedly snipped a day after the Emperor's death in 1821. For those in the know, that's a relative bargain, particularly in view of what collectors have spent on strands from another famous head, namely that of Elvis Presley, whose small jar of hair sold for $115,000 in 2002. (In fact), Presley's barber had reportedly saved his hair in a bread bag. "I have no idea what [the collector] intends to do with it," said a representative from the Chicago company, MastroNet, that held the internet auction."

"It was seeing Elvis Presley on The Milton Berle Show, before Ed Sullivan. I already was pretty musical and seeing Elvis and his band, particularly his drummer, D.J. Fontana, just kind of grabbed me. Then, of course, four or five months later, he was on The Ed Sullivan Show and everything just... well, that was the Big Bang."

"I went to see Col. Parker with the million dollars he'd asked me to put up, which I got in two days, from an investor since I didn't have a cent to my name, so that is when he introduced me to Elvis, as his promoter. And Elvis, who was actually two years older than me just said "Thank you very much, Sir". Anyways, by the time the two week tour wound up, in San Diego, I was a millionaire, too (LOL)."

"Is it 2018 and the subject is the Long Range Stand-Off Weapon (LRSO)? No, it's 1956 and the subject is the AGM-28 cruise missile. Choosing the same solution (for the same aircraft!) decades apart seems like eye-roll material, but modern drone makers can draw much inspiration from the older missile. By the mid 1950s Soviet air defenses could shoot down American bombers well before they got within bombing range of important targets, so in 1956 the Strategic Air Command (SAC) asked for a supersonic cruise missile big enough to carry an H-bomb several hundred miles, and small enough for a B-52 to carry along with its bomb load. The missile's onboard inertial navigation system let it place its 1.45-megaton W-28 warhead within two miles of its target at six-hundred-miles range. It ran like a scalded dog and took its name from the Elvis Presley tune—the "Hound Dog". Peak deployment spanned the 1960s into the middle 1970s, with up to 29 bomber wings carrying them on patrol. But as early as 1966 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sought to retire them, so they went to the kennels in 1975 for dead storage, and the last one (save for a few museum displays) was scrapped about a year after Elvis himself died. They lingered long enough for their whiz-bang terrain-matching guidance system to become perfected and miniaturized in America's modern cruise missile weapons as deployed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Future drone motherships are certain to adopt and adapt its close bond with its owner— the fuel, thrust, electrical and data hosted by the motherships will be essential to swarms. The Hound Dogs will shed their fleas, indeed."

"Elvis was probably the most important thing in music, maybe ever"

"No one had any expectations, he being was such a strange, quiet fellow — so completely foreign, but he sang and read a scene from The Rainmaker and answered questions asked from off-screen — and it was phenomenal. It was amazing to be there, one of those life-changing experiences.""

"When you picture past presidents of the United States, whom do you see? Perhaps you envision John F. Kennedy as a doting father playing with his children in the West Wing. Maybe you remember Richard Nixon as the smiling yet stiff leader who posed hand-in-hand with Elvis Presley in the Oval Office."

"I put Elvis Presley up there with Jolson and Sinatra, and I'll go one step further: Elvis was the greatest pop entertainer of the 20th century. Like Al Jolson, he gave his all when performing: He sang from his heart, his body, the very essence of his total being, when sharing what he felt.""

"We faced unique challenges filming during the pandemic, particularly recreating a performer whose signature move is to get down from the stage in the audience and kiss just about every member of the audience you can find. There was something about making a film in this kind of perfect isolation and perfect focus that I think produced an extraordinary result.."

"In essence, because at that time the backward mental capability that many people had of judging a person because of their skin color, and it does still exist, but back then it was even worse, BUT because he actually was a Caucasian brother, Elvis was able to do away with all that thinking towards music."

"He played the San Diego Arena in the spring, and my family lived in nearby La Jolla, so I went to the concert. "Heartbreak Hotel" was already a radio hit, and I couldn't get enough of it. Hearing that song was a real turning point for me as a teenager. When I saw him in action, he was mesmerizing, dressed as he was in a pair of loose trousers, loafers, a shirt and open jacket. When he moved, he was smoldering, his hair falling over his eyes, his tone sensual. His delivery on "Heartbreak Hotel" was also in a minor key, which always triggered a reaction in me. But it was when he slipped in those low-register Elvis-isms— you know, the huh-huh thing— it came from his body, not from his head. He had that emotional intensity that was impossible to resist."

"He a had a magic combination of looks and voice, and you can't discount how good looking he was as a young man and he was the guy who really brought black music into the vocabulary."

"He was almost at the point where he was being recognized as a national star, but not quite. I'll give you an example. Once, in a railroad station in Chattanooga, TN, we were waiting to change trains. Elvis went over to a magazine rack and picked up a movie magazine. He found a photo of himself inside and says to me 'Al, can I have a pen?' I gave him one and he scribbled his name inside the magazine. Then he goes over to the two girls working at the rack. He had the spread open to his picture, showing it to them. He's also looking back at me with a huge Cheshire Cat grin. Their reaction was 'That'll be 35 cents sir'. Then Elvis said to them 'No, this is for you. I'm Elvis Presley'. In the meantime, I'm capturing pictures of all of this, which is really what I wanted."

"Can I talk to Elvis? said the caller. “This is Jimmy Carter”. Indeed it was the then President-elect calling from Atlanta, where he'd seen him the day before, to ask Elvis to be a youth spokesman. A few hours later, with the temperature near zero and the wind gusting to 30 mph, Elvis rousted his entourage and ordered everyone to the airport for the flight home. They got on the Lisa Marie, but the pilot couldn't get it started right away, so they all huddled together in blankets waiting for the plane to start and heat up. And then they get word of a bomb threat, so they had to sign papers authorizing it to take off anyway. As the plane rolled down the runway at Pittsburgh airport, we all just sat there in silence looking at each other and wondering if this was going to be it. Had that been “it,” Elvis would have gone out on a high note."

"It's our responsibility as musicians to keep pushing each other, to keep competing with each other. It's a really great competition. I see here artists like Beyonce and Alicia Keys and Rihanna and Chris Brown and Chris Martin, all in the same room, and we're going to push this music to the point where it was like in the 1960s and '70s, when the talk was about Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles. We (all) will be the new Beatles. We (all) will be the new Hendrix; (in fact) in any other industry, they'll tell you that you're supposed to do better than those in the past, so when you say, 'I want to be Elvis,' they say, 'What's wrong with you?' Well, I wanna be Elvis."

"I once met a young man from Mexico who asked me why Elvis didn't like Mexican people because he'd heard the rumours that he had criticized his countrymen. I told him it was all lies and that Elvis loved Mexicans. He told me that Elvis was supposed to have said Mexicans were greasy haired people. I told him to remember that Elvis was the one who put stuff in his hair to make it greasy and he even died it black too. There were many reports about things Elvis was supposed to have said that he never did, in fact he was upset that he wasn't allowed to go into Mexico because of riots. On the set of Fun In Acapulco, Elvis got upset with the director,(Richard Thorpe, who had already directed him in "Jailhouse Rock") because he got onto a couple of the actors because they spoke broken English and even yelled, “Jesus Christ, can’t you get the lines right?”. Elvis took him aside and said, 'Sir, those people were hired by the producer and he knew how they spoke and also knew their language, but he wanted them and they're doing the best they can. Rehearse with them more or whatever but please don't be doing that. I don't like you doing that to them' and the director stopped it."