A trio of music films have been released in recent weeks: a biopic of Jeff Buckley, a film about Paul McCartney in the ‘70s, and now we have Elvis EPiC (Elvis Presley in Concert), the most enjoyable, if least probing of the three.
By Miles Salter
The new film captures Elvis in his ‘70s Las Vegas era. This era has been on celluloid before, but it’s worth revisiting because Baz Luhrmann, who directed the energetic 2022 Presley biopic, has unearthed old footage from concerts and rehearsals.
It’s easy to forget how brilliant Elvis was. These days, he’s often used a jokey shorthand for the excess of celebrity, overindulgence, and lack of discipline, but when you see the footage of the lean and handsome 34-year-old in 1969, at the start of the Vegas era, he is mesmeric.
Neither the audience at Vegas, or his backing band, or anybody watching this film, can take their eyes off him. Handsome, charismatic, sporting long dark hair (he’d had to keep it short for all the lousy movies), he looks and sounds phenomenal.
Luhrmann splices together different takes of the same song to create energy: the Polk Salad Annie sequence is irresistible. Suspicious Minds and Burning Love are also superb.
Elvis absolutely deserves his place in the spotlight, and commands attention. He’s backed by a huge array of musicians, including an orchestra and backing singers The Sweet Inspirations. Powering the band were superb drummer Ron Tutt, ace guitar player James Burton, and bassist Jerry Scheff – all, remarkably, still alive, nearly six decades later.
The shots of rapt female admirers, many of whom want to sneak a kiss or impress upon him their devotion, remind the modern audience how utterly compelling he was. Luhrmann likes colour, noise, and lots of jump cuts. His Elvis films are a kind of visual and audio sugar rush.
What the film doesn’t do, though, is go any deeper, which is emblematic of Elvis’s life. The film shows his ‘TCB’ trademark on the side of his sunglasses – it stood for ‘Taking Care of Business in a flash’ and was also used to name the band. It sounds good, but what does it mean?
For all his brilliance as a singer and performer, Elvis’ life suffered from a deficit of reflection and strength. The film briefly shows the Memphis Mafia, a gang of blokes who surrounded the singer, a macho crowd who would do anything to avoid growing up or confronting the truth, preferring the excesses of celebrity and a lot of joking around to introspection. On stage, Elvis liked to mess about – Colonel Parker even arranged an album of spoken word on stage banter called Having Fun With Elvis On Stage.
The film eschews the later, humiliating evidence of a life in free fall, but even Luhrmann can’t escape the signs that all is not well: mid-‘70s clips show the singer getting more obese and slurring his words. The classy white suit used in 1969 was replaced by sillier costumes that included capes. At times he looks like a Marvel superhero on a bad day.
His use of uppers and downers, which began when he joined the US army in 1958, destroyed him. In a rare moment of lucid introspection, Elvis once admitted his failings: ‘Well, I’m probably only going to say this once, but I think I’m a bit self-destructive.’
By the end he was bloated, hardly knew where he was, and wore diapers to combat incontinence. His good looks had crumbled so much that former friends cried when they saw him. Elvis’s legends abound: the time he had an impromptu meeting with President Nixon, shooting televisions, taking a plane ride so he could eat his favourite, unhealthy snack.
He keeled over on the Graceland toilet in 1977, aged just 42. The fallout from his death was long and awful. His grandson, Benjamin Keough, committed suicide in 2020, and Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, followed three years later. Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla, remained strong. She became an astute businesswoman, turning around the ailing fortunes of the estate in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
If you can forget all the sad details and immerse yourself in these performances, they are absolute magic. Elvis is rightly one of popular music’s heroes. ‘Before Elvis, there was nothing,’ said John Lennon.
In Luhrmann’s films we see a man who continues to be captivated by the music, conducting the huge band and orchestra with dramatic arm movements. On stage he cavorts to the rhythms, a shaking, rocking and rolling god. It wasn’t music that destroyed him.
The film ends with a moment of clarity. Luhrmann uses Bono’s poem, American David which nods towards the singer’s legend, both good and ugly: ‘Elvis ate America before America ate him.’
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is in cinemas now.
Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. His band is Miles and The Chain Gang.
