Outback Elvis

by John Connell

  Usually joyful, such renewals could sometimes be tinged with sadness. A couple from Queensland who had lost a child recalled:

  We got dressed up like this when we renewed our wedding vows and we dedicated our reception, our second wedding reception, to all the people who lost their loved one or family member. So we’re hoping to have the celebration once a year for it.

  Some came for their 50th wedding anniversary – one couple came on the actual date – and another couple celebrated the 18th anniversary of their wedding in Parkes. Some waited only five years to renew their vows, but most took a little longer.

  Frank and Nelly, a sprightly Sydney couple, had driven up to mark their 67th wedding anniversary. Frank was 91, his bride 88. They had come the previous year but it had been rained off. Not the greatest Elvis fans, they were there because it was great fun, ‘better than Tamworth’, and they wanted to be part of something exciting and meaningful. Quietly they confided that in their day people had married properly, without hanky-panky.

  The previous year, an 81- and 79-year-old couple had renewed their vows: a birthday gift from their family. Another 91-year-old was moved to dance for the first time in decades. Many came as Elvis, some as Priscilla. All were there because it meant a lot to them: commitment tinged with nostalgia. Parkes offered a rare moment to rejoice in what their marriage had meant, amid family and friends.

  There were moments of pure corn in the vows themselves: ‘I promise that I will be your teddy bear. You have made my life complete, and I love you so. I am your good luck charm. I don’t need no rabbit’s foot on a string. I will always love you tender, I will never treat you like a fool’. The ceremony concludes ‘Elvises, you may now kiss your Priscillas’, so perfectly executed by couples who clearly value it that it works. Commitments and relationships are solidified. They have followed their dream. A cake is sliced and shared and Donny Edwards, the leading tribute artist, sings. No-one is much surprised that ‘Love Me Tender’ is one of the songs.

  As Saturday passes into Sunday the mood shifts somewhat from the exuberance of the parade – and of some late night scenes – to the greater solemnity of the gospel service, and the curious sincerity of the renewal of wedding vows. But in the festival boulevard, on the main stage in the park and in the clubs, not a great deal has changed. Buskers and Elvis impersonators, having taken up their places after the parade, maintain the mood, continue to create sound and colour, and the fans soak it up.

  Margie ‘with the legs’, Elvis Express 2015

  Jen Li

  Taste on Vacation in Parkes

  Suzie Pegler

  Rockabilly at the Coachman

  John Connell

  ‘I’ve been to Graceland. It was great. Parkes and Graceland are pretty similar with the heat. Wearing costumes and impersonating Elvis you can act out a bit more, you get to meet more people … It gives you a hit of adrenaline … you feel a bit like the King probably would have felt.’

  5

  TRIBUTE ARTISTS, IMPERSONATORS AND WANNABES

  Under the spotlights at night, the Parkes clubs have star-studded and sequinned headline acts, but the real appeal of the festival is its carnival atmosphere, offbeat folly and simple craziness, all in sizzling midsummer heat. The festival also relies as much on local tribute artists as on highly paid American superstars. Parkes’ own ‘official’ tribute artist, Barry Green, doubles as a wheat and sheep farmer, and we only managed to catch him once shearing had ended.

  From a farming family outside town, Barry played his first gig in a country hall in Bindogundra, as a 15-year-old. Fifty years later he was a regular headline act in Parkes, although losing three fingers down to the knuckle in a farming accident ensured that he focused on singing. By then he had become the council’s ‘entertaining Elvis’ for any local function, while playing around a circuit of clubs across the Central West.

  Barry consciously provides an Australian country Elvis, telling yarns, tall stories, having a laugh, sitting with punters in the break and sharing a beer or three. But Elvis tribute artists and buskers come in every form, in every gender, young and old, good, indifferent and quite incompetent, from California to nearby Nyngan. If most are Australian, they come from many directions and in many dimensions. They ensured the festival had diversity and unpredictability, and a distinct Australian flavour and spirit.

  If the biggest Festival drawcard is the parade, the flow of all that is decorative, distinctive and mildly decadent, it is followed by the idiosyncratic charms of the buskers who line the newly christened Festival Boulevard, the performers who spruik their talents on the main stage and, at night, the more subtle, elegant and stylish professionals. Music is background, foreground and everywhere in between, from boulevard loudspeakers to café soundtracks. Many visitors come to participate, and perhaps win, rather than passively observe, offering tribute with various degrees of skill, dedication and enthusiasm. The Festival may sometimes seem like an amateur venture, as poorly rehearsed impersonators forget their lines, delusional karaoke performers are way off key, rock ’n’ rollers slip and trip on damp and bumpy turf and ‘In the Ghetto’ is repeated tunelessly one time too many. So talentless are some that they can call into question any beauty and charisma to be found in Elvis’s music.

  Few were less talented than Crap Elvis, encountered by our indomitable assistant Jen Li in 2010. She surprised herself by enjoying the total opposite of a virtuoso performance:

  On Saturday, the second big day of the festival, I was walking past the Coachman Motel, and heard a few lines of the song from the busker out the front. He was singing about treating lice. I paused to listen, and was strangely hooked. I listened to three more songs and bought the CD. The busker singing about ‘treat your lice’, stalkers, inflatable dolls, terrorists and Nigerian banking scams was Crap Elvis. His standout number was ‘Hunka Hunka Burning Toast’; other highlights included ‘Let Me Be Your Terrorist’ and ‘Stalkin’ You’.

  It was not exactly what baby boomers, remembering their golden years, would have anticipated, or a performance to win awards, but Crap Elvis somehow epitomised the random nature of the festival. He had come to Elvis more accidentally than most. As Jen Li learned:

  It all began with a wig. In January 2007, Matt Hale was in Spotlight buying a wig for a costume party when he spotted an Elvis suit on sale for thirty dollars. He was not an Elvis fan, nor did he have any immediate use for the suit, but he bought it anyway. His girlfriend was unimpressed. It was three weeks before he was due to leave for an around-the-world trip, and he ended up taking the suit with him, running with bulls in Pamplona and posing with Christ the Redeemer in Rio. Crap Elvis was born.

  Someone told him about the Parkes Elvis Festival and, after a slight rearranging of flights, he made it to the 2008 festival and reached his goal of last place in every competition. Crap Elvis didn’t look like Elvis, sound like Elvis or act like Elvis, but he was still invited back to the 2009 festival, and by 2010 had graduated to having a CD for sale (entitled A Piece of Crap), fans who had Crap Elvis merchandise (and who affectionately called him ‘Crap’), and a busking spot. He performed 13 shows and a special CountryLink dinner, and was the tribute artist on the train heading back to Sydney on the Monday. In his words, it was ‘a joke that’s got out of hand … There was no chance that I could be the best Elvis in the world but I had a real chance of being the worst’. Bad he might have been, but the worst decidedly not.

  At night the less skilled, street-corner impersonators have gone. Well-paid word- and note-perfect tribute artists steal the show, some seemingly indistinguishable from Elvis himself, in music, style and looks. They earn five-figure fees, have sometimes abandoned day jobs and take the festival to a higher level. Here professional predictability is welcome, and a cult of perfection exists. Most had been spotted performing elsewhere in Australia by members of the always enthusiastic Elvis Revival Inc. Committee. They are at the other end of the scale from the buskers and the wannabes, those who have fewer songs
and more limited musical ability, but still have their own dreams of making their mark on show business. There is a hierarchy of credibility, authenticity and style, in music, dress sense, image and flair. As Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Matthew Russell, described the Parkes scene in 1996, when competition was scarcely lukewarm:

  There was a pecking order in the world of Elvis impersonators. The working-class Elvises ganged up against the middle-class Elvises and the professional impersonators don’t want to be seen with impersonators they thought were impersonating the real impersonators.

  The bigger Parkes clubs have theatres and organised performances by the professionals: slickly organised city concerts, with elaborate lighting and sound systems. Tickets have become increasingly expensive – in 2015 the Parkes Leagues Club put on a note-perfect reproduction of Elvis’s legendary ’68 Comeback Special concert, starring Justin Shandor, at $65 a head – and sell-out audiences (usually older, and as conservative as Elvis fans ever are) sit politely, listen intently, clap enthusiastically on hearing the first few bars of Elvis’s hit tunes. But then Justin Shandor and other international stars draw in from $30 000 to $40 000 a visit. Parkes provides an annual outlet, and an enthusiastic audience for the very best.

  Elvis has inspired a global legion of tribute artists, some adopting names like Mark Anthony and Dean Vegas, some male and a few female, some with their own fan clubs and their own CDs and DVDs. In different years Parkes has heard the Spirit of Elvis and the Ghost of Elvis, ShElvis and She Is The King. Yet everywhere in the hierarchy, as in America, most tribute artists are white, working-class men who reject the idea that they are mere impersonators; being close enough to the real thing is their own tribute. So many Elvis tribute artists now exist, especially in the United States, that they have acquired their own acronym: ETAs. A famous mathematical model, much loved in elementary statistics classes, claims that in 1977, the year that Elvis died, there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. In 1993 there were 48 000. At that rate, by the year 2010 one out of every three people in the world would have been an Elvis impersonator. Fortunately the mathematics has so far proved flawed, but Parkes is certainly determined to demonstrate that at one festival at least the model seems perfectly valid.

  It Feels So Right: being Elvis

  Elvis tribute artists have been around for a long time. Carl ‘Cheesie’ Nelson had built up a local following around Arkansas as early as 1954 with his performances of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, but tributes really took off after Elvis’s death. Eddie Youngblood and the late El Gamble – a popular performer at Parkes in the late 2000s – both claimed to be the original Australian ETA, and both were performing in 1977. They were the first jumpsuited Elvises in Australia, though El Gamble may have tired of jumpsuits: the year after Elvis’s death he claimed to have performed nearly 300 ‘sold-out’ shows of ‘The Life and Times of Elvis Presley’. Eddie Youngblood stayed true, but El Gamble abandoned Elvis to front The Cadillacs before eventually making an Elvis comeback in Parkes in 2008. By then the number of tribute artists had boomed, alongside nostalgia.

  The best tribute artists may make a living from Elvis. By the late 1970s El Gamble was doing well, picking up $1000 for a show. In Australia in the 1970s that was a substantial income for a former fitter and turner, however many jumpsuits he got through in a year. ‘Out of the Elvis show I got a new car, I got a deposit on a house and that was great’. He was invited to perform in Memphis, and recorded various CDs, such as Echoes of the King:

  I listen to a lot of albums by other tribute artists and there’s always ‘Suspicious Minds’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Hound Dog’ – you know what I mean? So I wanted to make sure I included some songs that were fresh, songs people hadn’t heard for a while, something different.

  For many ETAs in Australia, Parkes is the pinnacle of the year, a mark of success, the distinctive high spot in the yearly cycle and a useful pay cheque. Mark Andrew, performing several highlight shows with his own eight-piece band and ‘show girls in bikinis’, was earning thousands of dollars a show by the late 2000s, but the rest of the year posed problems.

  No Australian ETAs can claim to make a living from performing alone, but several come close. Singing had to be combined with other careers, to ensure there was something to fall back on. In a remarkable twist Paul Fenech took over the Elvis Pizza restaurant in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney and became an entrepreneur. Two decades earlier Paul had been visiting the restaurant when the owner invited him to sing. ‘My life changed in a single night. There were 50 people there and they loved it. The manager asked “What’s your name? Have you got a jumpsuit? Can you grow your sideburns? Have you got a business card?”’. He got his wife to make him a gold lamé suit and he was on his way. Within a year he was performing Elvis in Singapore, New Zealand and Perth.

  Scott Crawford, the first Elvis Express tribute artist, had a security business and a horse-breeding farm in the Hunter Valley; after ‘22 years of Elvising’ he needed diversity. ShElvis, one of two female ETAs, is a part-time registered nurse. Nick Comino, after fleeting visits to Parkes, changed the name of his fruit and vegetable shop in Woodford, Queensland, to Grapelands, decked it out with Elvis memorabilia, sold ‘suspicious limes’ and occasionally serenaded customers with modified Elvis songs such as ‘Viva Las Vegies’ and ‘Oh Baby, Lemon Be Your Lovin’ Kiwifruit’. It provided a more secure livelihood.

  While incomes are earned from performing Elvis, no impersonators ever claimed this was the motivation. Immediately after Elvis’s death, Eddie Youngblood had ‘just one thing in mind – to ensure that Elvis’s music stayed alive’. Four decades later, for regular Parkes performers like Terry Leonard, ‘I love Elvis music and I wanted to keep it alive’, while Norm Bakker was ‘just keeping his music alive’. It was as recurrent a refrain as ‘Love Me Tender’. Being in show business was its own reward for many. Providing pleasure and happiness was crucial: Scott Crawford ‘got the warm and fuzzies inside by bringing him back for others … You know you’re not Elvis, and the audience knows you’re not, but if you’ve got the audience to the point where they’re playing along you feel like you’ve kicked a goal’. Tribute artists were well equipped to do that since most professed a childhood love of Elvis and were often pushed in that direction because they sounded or looked like him.

  Being able to establish an early connection with Elvis could prove a useful career move. The website of Silas Paisley, a popular performer at Parkes in 2008, suggests that as an infant he heard his mother’s old 45s of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and ‘not too long after he could walk he was very keen on imitating these Icons of the past’. David Cazalet, the third real ETA to grace the festival in 1996, first heard Elvis while he was still in ‘short pants’. Terry Leonard’s interest in Elvis was more comprehensive:

  I saw my first Elvis movie, Kissin’ Cousins, as an eight year old at the Roxy Picture Theatre in Hillston. I thought he was a good-looking dude, and he could sing and get the chicks. I thought I wouldn’t mind doing that.

  She Is The King (Jacqueline Feilich) was an ‘obsessed fan. I loved him since I was three years old ... but when I saw what he looked like, oh wow’. Paul Fenech’s dad loved Elvis, and adopted his hairstyle, and Paul recalled his enthusiasm for ‘Burning Love’ when he was only four years old. Later he took him to see Eddie Youngblood, and bought him his first guitar. The Ghost of Elvis, the first ETA to play in the Gospel Service, had also absorbed Elvis at an early age:

  I grew up with him from yea high, when I first heard ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ in Dad’s old ’34 Dodge. That was mid-50s, I suppose … I would have been about twelve, thirteen at the time and I went, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ and my dad said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s rubbish’. I said, ‘Oh, it’s great, Dad’. I said to my friend, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t mind doing that just once’ and she said, ‘Well, why don’t you get an outfit?’ So, a couple of friends made a bit of an outfit and she made the belt and bought the buckle and inscribe
d ‘The Ghost of Elvis’ on it.

  Some saw their own personal struggles as matched and mirrored by those of Elvis. Canberra burlesque performer Rebecca Gale, otherwise known as Miss Kitka, performing an Elvis burlesque show at the 2008 Festival, believed: ‘He struggled a lot in his life and that’s reflected in his music – people can relate to him’. Performers were honouring both man and music, alongside playing and profiting.

  ETAs dress elegantly, from ‘proper’ jumpsuits to sparkling jackets; Terry Leonard claimed to have ‘far more clothes’ than his wife. As Scott Crawford put it: ‘We never have fun at his expense … There is a very, very strong sense of love or loyalty towards Elvis; it is very respectful’. For Norm Bakker: ‘In our lifetime there’ll be no-one like Elvis; he had such a big voice and could do anything from rock to country’. She Is The King says, ‘The great thing about Elvis was that he did every genre, and his own interpretations were brilliant’; and from Terry Leonard: ‘He was loaded with charisma, he had it all. We’re all trying our best, and maybe sometimes getting close, but he did it all effortlessly. There’ll never be another one’. She Is The King had one room of her house ‘converted into a shrine, with serious memorabilia. I’m addicted. I have original photos, signatures and three neckties. I often sniff them – wishful thinking or not, I think he is still there … it gives me a bit of inspiration’.