The bizarre failure of ‘Having Fun with Elvis on Stage’
Even 70 years after his prime and 49 years after his death, there’s still a decent chance that no one has ever matched the galactic level of fame that Elvis Presley had in his heyday.
Sure, we’ve had megastars, your Michael Jacksons, your Eminems, your Taylor Swifts, but The King did it first. By “it”, I mean being a world-conquering pop star with an army of record label backing behind him rather than playing rock ‘n’ roll, you understand. Loads of people who weren’t white had done that before Presley, but wouldn’t get anything resembling the levels of success he did for it. I can’t imagine why that would be.
No, Elvis got this galactic level of fame from making music for teenagers first, and in the 1950s, there was something called the monoculture. While there might be more media outlets for the superstars of today, all that really means is that you can hide from the biggest stars of today in a way that you really couldn’t before. Can you hum a Taylor Swift song from the past six years if you’re not a die-hard Swiftie? Precisely.
Elvis, on the other hand, was ever-present. The King was a God to many, and thus any old tat that could have his slightly gormless mug and ever-present quiff stamped on it could be priced at ten times its manufacturing price and placed on a shelf next to the mountains of Elvis merchandise colonising drug stores across the world. Things with Elvis on it sold like gangbusters, how else do you think they kept selling tickets to those godawful movies?
Yet still, there was one piece of merchandise that really did push the envelope on what Elvis fans considered a ripoff. A large, glorified coaster that I suppose I have to call a record a since it was pressed vinyl that, if you ran a needle through its grooves, sound would come out of.
A record called Having Fun with Elvis On Stage.
How did this rip-off Elvis Presley record come to be?
Surprise, surprise, this act of brazen dead cow milking was the brainchild of one Colonel Tom Parker, a man who probably never saw Elvis Presley as anything more than a walking dollar sign in the 22 years they worked together.
In 1974, when Presley was no longer the single most famous musician in the world but instead a mildly embarrassing nostalgia act that could still fill an arena in a pinch, Parker decided to try and wring even more lucre out of his charge by starting a record label of his own.
There was just one problem: Presley was an RCA Records mainstay and had been for nearly two decades. With Presley’s dwindling influence, Parker didn’t have the negotiating power to put any of his actual music on the records, so Parker had an incredibly stupid idea. The King had been playing his Vegas shows for five years, and every one of them had been recorded. While Parker couldn’t use any of the songs, he had more than an album’s worth of Presley’s between-song banter that he could do whatever he wanted with.
Thus, Having Fun with Elvis on Stage was (regrettably) born. Nearly 40 minutes of Elvis’ bizarre between-song banter, stripped of any context and thrown onto vinyl to make Colonel Tom a quick buck. Because God knows he needed it. He’d only been managing Elvis Presley for 20 years; where else was the man’s next meal going to come from?! Joking aside, if what happened next was a sign of his business acumen, then he really did need all the help he could get.
You see, while no Elvis songs were featured on the so-called “record”, it was still a record featuring (for lack of a better way of putting it) noises being made by Elvis Presley. The King had been RCA’s star attraction for years, and the contracts had been signed, making it very clear that even if it wasn’t music, they very much owned the rights to any kind of album that Presley put out. So after a few weeks of the record only being available at Presley’s Vegas residency, RCA got wind of the ruse, then snapped up the album. Packaging and distributing it themselves.
Never, ever forget that no matter how phenomenally successful Elvis Presley was, that was despite, not because of, the feeble business mind of Colonel Tom Parker.