Confessions of an Accidental Elvis Presley Fan

There is a shop I often visit across the river in my hometown. It’s full of everything that a good American small town shop should have: tins of mints, postcards, socks, oversized mugs, leather jackets, whoopee cushions. These kinds of shops litter the main streets of the towns I grew up around—you can’t walk a block in either direction without passing an antique shop sandwiched between a diner and a mediocre art gallery. This shop is marginally different, though, because of its devotion to Elvis Presley.

I’ve wandered through the shop more times than I can count, but last year was the first time I noticed the abundance of Elvis memorabilia. I hadn’t encountered many Elvis fans growing up; he had no connection to the Delaware Valley. And yet, there are collectible Elvis plates, tiny pink Cadillacs, and cardboard cutouts cluttering the shop’s shelves. There is a photocopy of his and Priscilla’s marriage license next to a stack of old baseball cards. As it turns out, Elvis is all over the store, tucked into every corner. The shop started selling cheap T-shirts that said “Elvis For President” on them. The first batch sold out in a couple days, so they printed a whole bunch more.

A few towns over from New Hope, I was working at a Barnes and Noble when Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis movie was released. My boss was a massive Elvis fan. I spent quite a few shifts with her when the store was nearly empty, politely nodding as she talked my ear off about Elvis’s failed film career. Colonel Tom Parker manipulated the whole thing, spent all of Elvis’s money, she said. Apparently, she owns some original movie posters from his films. She would show me side-by-side comparisons of Austin Butler for Baz Luhrmann’s biopic and Elvis in real life, zooming in on their noses, their ears, their hairlines. “He could never be Elvis, nobody ever could,” she would say. I had no idea how to respond. Out of nowhere, Elvis had escaped the boundaries of the eccentric shop and infiltrated my work life, forcing me to think about him in circles that weren’t even explicitly trying to sell me something with his face on it.

I had never given Elvis much thought before I paused to consider how a local business could make a living today by selling his old merchandise. I had no reason to think about him; he had been largely renounced from pop culture in my generation as a racist, untalented fluke. Most artists leave behind legendary music, powerful speeches, or some kind of inspiring mission. Elvis did leave music behind, but none of it meant much. He didn’t write any of it. He left behind a catalog of thirty-one movies, but none of them were good. He was simply charismatic; he was one of the American first icons who wasn’t loved on the basis of talent.

If you’re judging him on the basis of morality, it’s even more difficult to understand why Elvis’s legacy refuses to fade—why he functions as a theme for small town gift shops, why he’s still a topic of conversation on a slow day at work. Up until recently, it seemed like Americans were ready to finally be done with him. All of the relevant records he broke in the music industry have been surpassed by newer, bigger artists. Young people accepted that he wasn’t worth valuing anymore with a career built on theft. His title as the “King of Rock n’ Roll” caused immense erasure of black history and culture. He used black music and style in a way that was derivative rather than inspired—quite literally recording the songs of black artists and taking credit for them as his own. In spite of this, he managed to weasel his way into American icon status, where he has comfortably remained ever since his death in 1977.

Seemingly overnight with the release of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, it became cool to like Elvis Presley again. I watched Elvis twice after friends of mine enjoyed it and convinced me to watch it. I found it overwhelming and tacky both times. I thought Austin Butler’s commitment to the character was admirable, but I found Elvis’s voice annoying and felt that the movie glazed over the problematic parts of his life too much. I was decidedly against getting swept up in a 21st century resurgence of Elvis mania. The unforeseen modern resurgence of Elvis in popular culture, which was driven by both Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla, was mostly about young people consuming a piece of media and fixating on a caricature of a personality. Where girls in the 50s and 60s had a real person to loiter around in hopes of an autograph, girls today have a mythical rockstar played by Hollywood’s biggest heartthrob. He’s been completely cartoon-ified, transformed into a fictional character by the movies even more than the Vegas impersonators and Halloween costumes already did.

After Elvis hit theaters, it hit social media. People were going to the movie theater nine times for the same movie, declaring it an “Elvis Summer.” Fan accounts were popping up on Instagram, and they weren’t just fan accounts for Austin Butler or the Elvis movie. They were new fan accounts for Elvis Presley, made by the teenage girls of today. Grainy black-and-white footage of him was posted to thirst trap music by Doja Cat. They were treating him like any other desirable male celebrity now, the only difference being that he’s dead.

The fact of his death was precisely what stumped me about the (apparently alive and well) Elvis Presley fandom. There is no game to play, no chance at even tricking yourself into thinking that the work you put in as a fan will eventually pay off with the opportunity to go to a concert or speak to your chosen icon. At the end of the rainbow there is no smiling Elvis Presley waiting to shake your hand—there’s just some of his old cars. In some ways, it seemed a lot more wholesome, a lot less driven by a desire for attention and social status than other fandoms. But it was also more confusing. What was the appeal if you couldn’t see that artist perform live or listen to their new music?

Somewhere between the first time I watched Elvis and after I watched Austin Butler lose an Oscar, I decided to give the movie one last try. The third time was the charm. By the end of the movie, I was crying my eyes out to “Unchained Melody” and feeling absolutely devastated by the tragedy of Elvis’s life. I had never cared about his life or death before, but I let the movie work its magic on me that night, tugging on my heartstrings with glittering costumes, heavy southern accents, and a dramatic soundtrack until I was completely immersed in the world of Elvis. My desire to avoid it didn’t stand a chance against the movie’s design as a campy, enticing trap, or the internet algorithms constantly throwing promotional Elvis content in my face.

It must be said that I am perhaps uniquely susceptible to this kind of mass hysteria. What I’m trying to say is that I grew up as a Swiftie. I spent the larger part of my middle and high school years building an online following in the Taylor Swift fandom, going to Taylor Swift concerts, befriending Taylor Swift fans, and eventually meeting Taylor Swift. I’m familiar with that world—the world of fans. The thing about the Taylor Swift fandom, at least in the glory days, as I grimly refer to them now, is that it all felt like a game. It was a community, but it was also a game. If you played the game right, you’d get to meet Taylor. Go to enough concerts, post enough online, buy enough merch, and eventually she would notice. A lot of it was about the satisfaction of achieving a goal. And so a deeply committed, deeply intimate fanbase formed.

It’s hard to see the draw of Elvis to this kind of dynamic, though. I didn’t see satisfaction fitting into the equation of how I understood this fandom. I assumed that people wanted to be satisfied, that we become fans to satiate something—a desire for entertainment or nostalgia. A desire for community is a part of that, too, but community looks different in the Elvis fandom. Instead of going to concerts together, these fans plan yearly trips to Memphis to visit his house over and over again. They attend candlelight vigils on the anniversary of his death. It’s not like they grew up going to Elvis shows either; this new fandom wasn’t alive when he was touring. Perhaps the draw was the ability to project your own preferred narrative onto him. It’s easier to make a likable character out of someone who is already dead. And, sometimes, it’s just about making friends. I’m still close friends with some of the Taylor Swift fans I met online; I understand the value in those relationships. It’s nice to find people who relate to your niche level of passion.

I suppose I’ve found myself in these circles because it feels easy to put my unengaged passion towards the figurehead of a vague idea that I find attractive. There is something safe about being emotionally invested in the life of somebody who doesn’t know you, and who you don’t know either—especially someone who’s already dead. Why fall in love when you can memorize ten albums worth of songs about it? It’s still fun, and it won’t blow up in your face. Having carried around that mindset for at least a decade, I let myself jump off the deep end.

After I had fully resigned myself to my fate as an Elvis fan for the next few months (or however long it would take for the buzz to run through me), I tried to tell myself that it was just for research. I was historically curious. I was a journalist planning a major thinkpiece. When Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla was released, I saw it in theaters multiple times. Somewhere along the way, I watched every movie that Elvis starred in during his stint in Hollywood. I read Priscilla Presley’s memoir. All the while, I was trying to find a reason why my fascination with him was somehow different or more important than falling for his charisma, just like every other young girl in the 60s. But it wasn’t any different. I was listening to A.I. covers of Elvis singing Hozier songs. There is literally no excuse for that.

In March, I traveled to Las Vegas to see a U2 concert at the newest venue in town, The Sphere. I had never been to Vegas before, but I knew more than I should about Elvis’s career at that point, so I had a lot of curiosity and a few ulterior motives. I went to Vegas hoping to find a trace of Elvis, to figure out if anything there would explain why so many people, myself included, were still fans. My plane landed after midnight. I walked through the Venetian in hotel slippers and a robe after all of the shops had closed.

I always imagined Vegas as a mirage, and I wasn’t too far off. Elvis’s name lingers in everyone’s mouths but there is nowhere to go to find the essence of him. Advertisements talk about him a lot, but there is no real evidence of legacy. The chapel from Viva Las Vegas remains the same, but even that has been forklifted to a different part of town several times. The transience of the town comes with the territory, though; everyone knows that nothing stays in Vegas.

The decaying Westgate hotel is technically not even on the strip. It’s so far removed from the hustle and bustle of why people come to Vegas that approaching it felt like I had accidentally wandered into the actual desert. Originally known as the International, the Westgate was where Elvis had his famous seven year Vegas residency, so long and exhausting that it is (at least partially) responsible for Vegas’s reputation as the place that musicians go once their careers have died. The big sign outside that once had displayed Elvis’s name in bold neon lights is broken, many of the letters falling down or missing entirely. It was windy and dusty, and it felt like I shouldn’t be there. A similar feeling to wandering through an unfamiliar cemetery. All you can find of Elvis at the Westgate now is one not-even-life-sized bronze statue and two pictures of him in the lobby.

Besides the Westgate, there’s not much else of Elvis to see in Vegas. Taxi cabs advertise Elvis impersonator shows, a couple of men walk around with exaggerated sunglasses and greasy hair. I’m not exactly sure why I thought there would be more to see, more attention paid to him. He is the “King of Las Vegas,” after all.

The only real scraps of Elvis that I came across in Vegas were at the U2 show itself. U2 sees Elvis as the physical embodiment of an American idea and how easily it can crumble under the uglier side of desire. The concert was riddled with Elvis iconography: Bono sang a brief “Love Me Tender” cover, visuals of Austin Butler as Elvis played on the screen, the drummer wore a shirt with Elvis’s face on it. Still, it was just U2’s way of paying homage to the concept of a Vegas residency. It was just their excuse to be Elvis fans.

I felt like a religious person making a pilgrimage, but this pilgrimage had the opposite effect of strengthening my faith. Everything became much less interesting. The Westgate was entirely devoid of meaning to me. Nothing hanging on the walls felt worth preserving. The expectation of meaning was in some ways the natural progression of falling so deep down a historical landslide. I experienced this disappointing feeling several times when I would run into Elvis memorabilia in my daily life. At the end of the day, seeing a pair of Elvis’s pajamas displayed in a Hard Rock casino in Florida didn’t do anything to me. I kept going to different places expecting the scope of Elvis to sweep me backwards, but it was all vaguely ridiculous. It made no sense for his pajamas to be eternally preserved in glass behind a sports bar. All we have are objects now. Dozens of scarves that he gave away to fans are up for sale on eBay for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Guitars and silk shirts are collecting dust in casinos around the country.

Vegas left me disillusioned, but that disappointment should’ve been enough to clear my head of Elvis; I had become the very person that I despised, back before the second wave of Elvis mania swept through America. My confusion at every scrap of Elvis memorabilia I stumbled across should have brought everything back into focus. But nothing was going to be enough until I had seen it all—until I had exhausted all of my options and become completely satisfied. I wanted to find some semblance of life in Elvis’s legacy, or rather, I wanted to know if it was possible to. I made plans to go to Graceland. 

Ultimately, Graceland is just a tourist spot that people go to see, the same way that stopping by the local art museum in any American city is. I planned to go for the “All-American Weekend” that Graceland was hosting on the Fourth of July, featuring plenty of Elvis-themed events. There would be fireworks, Elvis impersonators, and gospel brunches.

The morning of my scheduled tour of Graceland, I was so nervous that I hardly touched my breakfast. I felt simultaneously on the precipice of something huge and also deeply aware of how absurd it was that I was there. A shuttle bus drove me through the storied front gates, where fans used to gather and wait for Elvis to come home from tour. He usually paused to take a few photos.

The front steps are the very same ones that Elvis once sat on with his father after his mother Gladys died. The press took photos of them sobbing and published them on the front pages of newspapers. Tour groups piled onto the front steps one at a time as an employee held the front door open and winked at young girls, telling them not to cause any trouble. A security guard leaned down to tell me to pay attention to the mirrors on my way to the basement. “It’ll be the best picture you take today,” he said.

What struck me most was the smell. It was the first thing I noticed when I walked through the front door. It smelled like a house, a house that someone lived and died in. This makes sense, considering that the house has been used in recent years by the family. His great aunt continued to live at Graceland full-time until her death in 1993, often spotted by tourist groups wandering the grounds with her dog. I didn’t consider what it would smell like before I got there; I just assumed that it would feel pristine and clinical, like a museum. I expected everything to have been so thoroughly restored, so thoroughly cleaned, that it would all feel like an exhibit, or at least vacant, like the Westgate in Vegas. I thought it would be nearly impossible to comprehend that he had lived there, but it smelled like he still lived there. I guess you can clean for years and years, you can even welcome in millions of strangers, but you can’t get that kind of smell out of a home. It was the smell of 70s shag carpeting and decay and many years of loud Christmas dinners. It was distinctly human and distinctly old; there was an instinctual sense of private history. 

That day at Graceland, I absorbed about as much of Elvis’s life as it is possible to absorb in one day. I was a sponge to the objects. I saw his birth certificate, a teddy bear he gifted to Lisa Marie, a television that he shot a bullet through in a fit of rage. I saw his Grammy Awards, his mother’s bedroom, his first bicycle. I saw the coffee-stained tablecloth that Colonel Tom Parker scribbled the Vegas residency contract onto. I saw his pink Cadillac. I saw the suit he wore when he met President Nixon. I stood in front of his grave. I had finally made it to the epicenter; it was impossible to be closer to Elvis.

Seeing these objects felt different than my experience in Vegas or my brief encounter with Elvis’s pajamas in Florida. There was a sense of inherent value, of life perhaps, lingering in the air. Maybe the people who hung all of the artifacts on the walls at Graceland just cared more about it than the people in Vegas did, and maybe that feeling was palpable. I’m not sure how to make sense of the difference without acknowledging the smell. Vegas didn’t have a smell, at least not one that was potent or memorable.

The next day, I explored Beale Street and toured Sun Studio, the historic studio that claims the status of “the birthplace of rock n’ roll,” where Elvis first recorded. Today, the studio isn’t in use besides running daily tours. Occasionally, they’ll make exceptions for big name artists looking to tap into some magic. Beside me, a teenage girl accompanied by her father absorbed every inch of the small studio in awe, posing for photos in front of Elvis’s piano and microphone.

Sun Studio had its own distinct smell, a holier one. The smell of aged paper and glue from thousands of record jackets. The smell of a place that housed so many legends—B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Bettye LaVette, Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis—was light. It was still old, but also nostalgic and hopeful. It’s true that our sense of smell is closely connected with memory, more so than any other sense. This smell, heavy with tobacco and plastic, left me with the overwhelming sensation that the walls were bursting with the weight of the history they carried. 

The emotional weight of these smells jarred me. It totally disproved what I felt in Vegas, that with the death of the person the only things left behind are devoid of soul. Vegas might have been devoid of soul, but Memphis was anything but. It seemed like I had finally found what I was looking for, that hint of life, enough to entice but not enough to satisfy, that made it possible to get hooked on a dead rockstar.

I decided to finish my trip with an Elvis impersonator show. The grand finale of the holiday weekend was a concert from the country’s leading Elvis tribute artist—a title that is hard-won during “Elvis Week” (Graceland’s annual week-long festival to commemorate his death). Elvis Presley Enterprises awards $20,000 and a year-long performance contract at Graceland to the winner. 

My expectations for the tribute concert were a bit higher than they should have been because of my experiences at Graceland and Sun Studio. I’ve never been a fan of impersonators as a concept. The journalist in me knew that it would be awful, but the fan in me wanted to believe it would be fun. I was ready to genuinely enjoy myself with all of the older women in the crowd; after all, this was Graceland’s official Elvis tribute artist.

I definitely didn’t expect to be seated in a half-empty conference room on fold-out chairs as a projector blurrily displayed “ELVIS” on a small screen. I also didn’t expect myself to fully burst into tears in distress. The band was six people total, including the impersonator. This looked pitiful next to Elvis’s stage productions that boasted a full orchestra, band, and multiple choirs. The tribute artist himself had a good singing voice, but I found it quite difficult to appreciate anything about a show that was essentially a striptease for retired women. I watched in horror as young and old people alike jumped to their feet and screamed with their hands in the air for a half-baked cover of Elvis’s cover of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” With weak strobe lights and smoke machines, I had unwelcome flashbacks to my days growing up in an evangelical church.

After the tribute concert, I saw the girl that was taking pictures at Sun Studio sitting a few rows in front of us with her father. When I went to introduce myself, she told me her name was Marisa and that this was the second time she had traveled to Graceland for “All-American Weekend.” I asked Marisa if she enjoyed the concert. She nodded with tears in her eyes. “This is the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Elvis in person for the younger generation, so hearing him sing ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Suspicious Minds,’” she paused. “I’m gonna start crying! It can’t get more American than Graceland on the Fourth of July,” she told me. An incoming freshman in college, when she spoke about Elvis she had the sort of glimmer in her eye that appears when someone new gives you a chance to talk about the thing you love most in the world. This was her thing.

Marisa told me that she became an Elvis fan after watching Baz Luhrmann’s movie, too. She is part of the online Elvis fandom, the same way I was for Taylor Swift. She posts regularly on an Instagram fan account, and she shared with me that the online community of Elvis fans has had an extremely positive effect on her life. “I’ve met so many incredible people, it’s truly the best community you can be in. Everyone can just fangirl together, obsess together, and nobody judges you. And we live through each other every time one of us goes to Memphis,” she said. My conversation with Marisa was interrupted by a group of her internet friends tapping her on the shoulder to take a group picture before they left. I watched their tearful hugs goodbye, and I listened to their promises of staying in touch and tagging each other in upcoming Instagram posts.

Marisa said she loved Elvis because of how well he treated his fans and how charitable he was. Not that I’m an expert, but in the ranks of charitable celebrities, I would not put Elvis at the top. Elvis’s generosity was often frantic—he gave cars away to people he barely knew like they were candy, eager to see the shock on everyone’s faces when he handed them a pair of keys. He was generous because he liked knowing that he could provide for people, knowing that he was wealthy enough to do so. And Elvis is still the person that got famous by stealing his biggest hits from black people. We have plenty of charismatic, pseudo-generous celebrities around today. So why is a young woman drawn to Elvis Presley? Is an Elvis impersonator really the closest thing to experiencing an Elvis concert for a younger generation, or might it just be a Harry Styles show?

Before I became an Elvis fan, I assumed that fans wanted to be satisfied, to feel like their devotion amounted to something—be that social recognition, the chance to meet their idol, or just finding a community of people. Eventually I realized that some people like the chase, the eternal research. Obsessing over a dead celebrity is alluring because of its unfinished nature. If you are never fully satisfied, you have no incentive to stop. Unrequited love feels good in small doses. Yearning and pining feel good in small doses. So does nostalgia. Elvis Presley Enterprises seems to know this too. Almost every year, they announce some new version of a slightly more V.I.P. tour of Graceland, offering fans the chance to get just one small step closer to Elvis and his stuff. For the small price of a few thousand dollars, they have commandeered your yearning.

In this never-ending, self-enforced cycle of pining, it’s easy to lose track of who Elvis actually was. So easy that it’s almost impossible not to lose track. Seven hours into my drive home from Memphis, I was still thinking about something Marisa said to me: “When you dig deep into the research and learn about him, you truly do love him—not just as an image, but Elvis as a person.” In all of my research on the man, I’ve only grown more confused about how he ended up where he remains in our American zeitgeist. I went to Graceland, I went to Las Vegas, I read biographies and memoirs, I watched movies he made. But as much as I was deeply drawn to it all—the romanticized biopics, the new focus on old industry records—I could only fall so deep before I remembered that Elvis Presley was just some guy from Tupelo. Somewhere along the way, my interest in Elvis turned into an interest in everyone else’s fascination with Elvis. I returned to where I started. But now I better understand what drives a person to become immersed in the life of a dead celebrity, because it happened to me. Even though his legacy collapses so easily under scrutiny, death creates enough space for someone to yearn a new reality into existence.

Bizarre as this dynamic may seem, it is par for the course in the world of American celebrity. The idealizing, the obsessing, the blind adoration, and the inability to look away are all trademarks of fan culture. We expect a strong American ethos to exist successfully in the people that we place on a pedestal, and this is how we tend to kill our idols. The things that we value most as Americans are things that no singular person can sustain, and they are often directly contradicting each other, like rugged individuality and a united community. Elvis aimed to straddle these contradictions, to fulfill all of them at once. But it’s impossible to do, so individuality became an illusion and loneliness became a part of the job. All of our favorite celebrities today have started to realize this the second they get famous—they have past examples to learn from. Elvis never realized it. We are still obsessed with Elvis because American culture killed him and he never resented America for it.

Culturally, Elvis embodies the rapid value shift that America went through after World War II. He was early evidence of what was to come in the decline of both American politics and pop culture—everything became about drama and entertainment. Suddenly it was a game of attention: who could catch it first, and who could hold it longest. The Nashville musician and producer Norbert Putnam, who worked closely with Elvis on 120 songs, described his reaction to Presley’s death in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “I sat there in my car and bawled like a child who had a toy taken away from him.”

Elvis captured our attention and he held it. He understood the power of being famous, but he didn’t know how to use it. Publicly, he rarely spoke of himself as an artist or a musician. He was something interesting for people to watch for a while, existing carefully within the boundaries of surface-level fun that allowed for maximum entertainment and minimal self reflection. He only ever referred to himself as “an entertainer.” He knew he was famous because people liked to look at him. They still do. Every morning when I emerge from the 6 train at Astor Place in a cloud of subway steam and sweat, he is there. His portrait is staring at me in the window of Raising Canes, a burlesque Doctor T.J. Eckleberg. I stare back. I am still looking at him.