Las Vegas, where musicians go to die. Or at least, to hide, while still making exorbitant amounts of money in a world that is safe, predictable and airless – the rockstar equivalent of hiding under a duvet. Adele, who always struggled with her fame, chose Las Vegas for two years. Mariah Carey – who used to sleep so badly that her driver would spend the nights circling the streets of whatever city she was in while she lay in the back of the limo – was getting 15 hours a night by the time of her first residency at Caesar’s Palace, in a room surrounded by 20 humidifiers.
In the story of Elvis Presley, Vegas is the beginning of the end, and you approach Baz Luhrmann’s new film, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, voyeuristically, looking for a montage of growing fatness, dislocation and drug-addled eyes. But that is not how Las Vegas began for Elvis at all. When he started his residency in the Westgate Resort and Casino in July 1969, it was shortly after his NBC Comeback Special, and he hit the stage tall and beautiful, determined to reconnect with his music after acting in the Hollywood films he hated so much. He was not being put out to grass, he was getting right in the heat of the action – and there was a positive re-engagement with his fans.
Too positive, some might say. It was the audience in Luhrmann’s film – which recreates a concert experience by piecing together archive footage that has been remastered into lurid technicolour – who fascinated me most: females from 12 to 50, men patient at their sides, in states of ecstasy. One pulls Presley off the stage and sticks her tongue in his mouth. It is not behaviour you expect from twinsets and bouffants and the middle aged, but Elvis obliges the constant demand for physical contact politely, never leaving a woman un-kissed. Then he picks up his guitar and sits down, saying “I’m not going back out there for anything.”
Elvis was one of the first celebrities to be killed by fame. In his late daughter Lisa Marie’s astonishing unfinished memoir, published last year, she describes the people who used to live in the churchyard next to his home because they’d figured out they could not be moved on from sacred land. “I get so lonesome right in the middle of a crowd,” Elvis says at one point in the film, like it’s a new idea – which it kind of was. “It’s very hard to live up to an image, I’ll put it that way,” he adds.
Reading old Sixties music papers, I was struck, not for the first time, by the unregulated nature of the relationship between idols and fans in the first boom of rock ’n’ roll, the lack of understanding. You must kiss that girl, you must answer that fan mail, you must show up night after night, even if you’re so wasted you don’t know where you are. People threw themselves at fame as they did at psychedelic drugs – without knowing the danger – and there were casualties along the way.
Elvis had actually done an initial, forgotten Vegas residency back in 1956 at the New Frontier Hotel, when he was just 21, and it was a major flop. A first attempt by his cane-carrying Svengali manager Colonel Tom Parker to bring him out of the South and into the world, the gigs went down “like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party”, according to Newsweek – he was too modern and unrefined for crapshooters and Sinatra fans. He would eventually play 600 shows in Las Vegas, the last in December 1976, and in the popular imagination he was lost there – he stopped “becoming”. But given the energy of the once-healthy Presley and his crowd at the Westgate resort, you have to wonder why the period turned so many people off. And I don’t think you can discount the power of what young people call “the ick”.
The first, and biggest, ick comes from the clothes. The role of the jumpsuit cannot be underestimated in shaping the legacy of Elvis Presley. The work of the Virginia designer Bill Belew was supposed to evoke Napoleon: world domination was the plan for Elvis, even if it turned out to be the miniature, model world of Las Vegas. He opened his shows with Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, the music at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wanted something monumental, but the reality is heartbreaking: he never played outside North America, and in Luhrmann’s film can be heard talking, starry-eyed like a teenager, about how much he wants to see Europe, play in Britain (he loved the Beatles). He never did.
The second “ick”, of Seventies Elvis, is a wider problem of mainstream crossover pop in that decade: namely, the over-production. The decision, for example, to put a heavenly choir and a luxuriant string section in a Southern spiritual, or a song from the civil war. Songs with their roots in folk, country and blues appeared on the albums of Presley or Glen Campbell or Mickey Newbury in this new garb, often with a slick baseline: a kind of folk-funk, a shiny version of what was once dirt-poor. Along with the dreaded “medley” – also very popular by the late Sixties – these things can inhibit a natural communion with the heart of a song, and you have to drill underneath them to get the kind of emotional impact you find in a simpler version.
My two favourite Elvis songs are from this period in his life: “Burning Love” (originally written for the country-soul singer Arthur Alexander) and “Suspicious Minds” (written, and first performed, by Mark James). Yet I have always listened to them with one foot out the door, because something is putting me off. I’ve yearned for computer software with which I could strip out Elvis’s voice, slow it down and put an acoustic guitar behind it, to get at the soul of him (that software probably exists now). Yet if you watch live footage of Elvis in this period, you do see him fully engaged with the songs and untouched by the kitsch, making pure bodily responses to lyrics about God and America and human behaviour. Luhrmann’s film – his second tribute to Presley, after the 2022 biopic – is a reminder of that.
For Elvis Presley, there is really no story but the sad story. Yet it’s important to know that his Vegas years came from an attempt at a more authentic life than he had been living before. By the mid-Seventies, the public beyond the casinos cared so little about him that he was quite free to record the songs he liked, on albums such as Moody Blue, from Graceland, his Memphis home – an early pioneer of remote working. When you watch him in his final years as a live act, it is perhaps the backstage footage that tells you most about what Presley was up against. Neither after a gig, nor in the recording studio, does Elvis really get an ordinary response from anyone. Everybody who stands in his circle of light, be it Sammy Davis Jr or his own drummer, greets what he says with a gormless smile. The social aspects of his life offer no kind of unwinding – so he retreats from social life. “Meet Colonel Tom Parker,” he says backstage, holding out a walking stick. Even his many jokes, increasingly surreal, seem to be made for himself alone.
“EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” is out in cinemas now
[Further reading: Love in the time of AI]
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This article appears in the 18 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Class warrior
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