“How closely do you worry about the little technical details?” I ask Eric Evangelista, an Elvis Presley tribute artist for the past five years.
“Oh, I’m very hard on myself,” he replies from his home in Bolton. “All my jewelry that I have is all made from Elvis’ jeweler. Lowell Hayes is his name. He still has the molds….” As Evangelista describes the gold plating, I do a quick Google search. Lowell Hayes can be found at ElvisJeweler.com, where he is billed as “Jeweler to the King!”
Evangelista continues. “Before I became an Elvis tribute artist, I was just a fan, and I went to see these tribute artists. Now they’re my friends, but at first I said, ‘They’ve got to bring Elvis to me,’ because I never got to see Elvis in concert.”
“I live by that… If people close their eyes for one minute and feel they’re around Elvis, that’s phenomenal.”
According to legend, Elvis Presley once entered an Elvis Impersonators contest, and finished third. Legend is probably mistaken — the same story has been attributed to several celebrities, most commonly Charlie Chaplin — but one thing that is true is that impersonators have been around nearly as long as the man himself. As of today, there are apparently 35,000 tribute artists worldwide who are registered with the official network. Evangelista guesses there may be twice as many who aren’t.
From May 17-19, the 2013 Toronto Elvis Festival will host 35 aspiring Kings, who will compete to see who can get the most shook up at the Ramada Plaza Hotel. Elvis inspires a level of devotion that is unusual even for a celebrity, and while most of us are familiar with a certain image of his impersonators (say, at a Las Vegas wedding chapel), for the Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs) the discipline is something close to a calling.
“In a nutshell, when kids dress up for Halloween, they always pick up a costume of their favourite hero,” says Evangelista, who will be performing at the festival. “Well, every time I get to put on my jumpsuit, I get to become my favourite hero.”
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In the 36 years since his death — and, for a good number of years before — Elvis has been safely embalmed in layers of nostalgia and kitsch. His jumpsuit, his karate, his movies; his snarl, his hair, his “thankyouverymuch”… it’s hard sometimes to conceive of him as dangerous. And yet, in spite of Spinout and Fun in Acapulco and even Bubba Ho-Tep, pop culture lore reminds us of how women fainted at his concerts, and how his hip-thrusting scandalized TV viewers, and how his co-opting of black music raised so many eyebrows. Reportedly, Elvis’ FBI file ran 683 pages, consisting mostly of letters from parents and clergymen who found him unnervingly sexual.
“I do the whole career. I think my early years set me aside from other guys, though,” says Matt Cage, an ETA from Belleville. “He had a certain charisma that transcended all his eras, but when he was young he was just so raw — it was almost all charisma.
“He wasn’t as polished — he got more polished as he went along, and sort of became ‘the legendary’ Elvis. I like the raw enthusiasm and the iconic nature of the ‘50s.”
Like most ETAs, Cage (aka Matt Dowset) was a lifelong fan. “My mom had a few Elvis albums when I was a kid, and I was always really intrigued by the covers,” he says. “In particular there was the ’68 album where Elvis was wearing his white suit in front of these giant, red glowing letters saying ‘ELVIS’ in the background. I thought, man, that guy’s gotta be pretty special to have that.”
At 38, Cage is a late-bloomer. He spent the better part of a decade studying performances, belting out songs at karaoke, and hemming and hawing. After visiting the Collingwood Elvis Festival in 2009, he started practicing more seriously, and by next year’s festival was ready to make his debut. Now he performs around 60 shows a year in Canada and the United States.
“People can become a bit of a caricature of Elvis. There are a lot of negative stereotypes, unfortunately, when it comes to Elvis. I also see guys who try to do Elvis word-for-word, try to do everything that he did, make the moves as close as they can, and it doesn’t usually ring true. It has an air of falseness.
“I like to inject some of myself into the shows, but I keep it in the vein of Elvis. If I say a joke — and Elvis was always joking around onstage — I keep it in the same way that he would say it. I wouldn’t modernize jokes, or say anything inappropriate or something like that.”
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“I think that there’s a real trend towards people taking it more seriously,” says Marcus Wells, one of the festival adjudicators. “A lot of judges are really looking for the small, technical things — y’know, when Elvis moved his arm this way, did he do it to the right or to the left? I’m absolutely not like that. I’m looking for somebody that will remind me of Elvis.”
Wells is an old hand on the Elvis circuit. He has judged at festivals in Brantford, Windsor, Belleville, and Kitchener, and before that spent 13 years recreating Elvis’ 1977 concerts. To the layman, this is the ‘Fat Elvis’ era, but for some connoisseurs, it represents the pinnacle of his career.
“I think this is when it became more like, ‘Okay he’s like us — he has his struggles,’” says Wells. “He just looked brokenhearted, and that touches people a lot. And his voice was fantastic — the last year of his life, his voice was very powerful, and he loved singing the big power ballads.
“Now, some of the guys, especially in the U.S., I find are these perfect-looking Ken dolls, and then they get up there and they do stripper moves. A part of the crowd loves that, but the real Elvis fans really don’t. I think that’s not a fair portrayal at all, and the judges are getting a bit more rigorous about things like that now.”
When Wells began his act in 1998, he relied on fuzzy bootleg videos of the ’77 concerts. Since then, the explosion of new media has made practically everything accessible. If you want, you can hear 20, 30, 40, god knows how many different versions of “Hound Dog,” from albums, concerts, movies, TV, and scrapped tracks.
“Elvis fans are really fierce and really faithful, and I think maybe because of the distance in time, they feel that his image should be more accurate to what he really was, as opposed to that iconic image… Now there are all kinds of ways of getting accurate costumes. I think that the days of people making their own, or having their aunt bejewel stuff, I think those are gone. I’m seeing a lot more precision and a lot more faithfulness to the image.
“It’s really cool to see the young guys. The young guys, the guys in their twenties, they’re working really hard to portray him the right way. It’s funny, because I think they’re changing the whole image of the impersonator to make it more accurate to the real Elvis.”
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“When Elvis died, I was six. My mom says when she came home to tell me, I went crying to my room. I’m now going to be 42, and I have definitely been a lifelong fan,” says Eric Evangelista.
Evangelista was a regular patron of Elvis festivals for most of his life, but like Cage was late to enter the arena himself. “I wasn’t one of those people that loved the all-eyes-on-me concept. I think what did it for me was, I have a slogan on my online business cards: ‘Keeping the memory alive.’ That’s what it’s for. I think as long as someone’s listening to his music or buying a CD, he’ll never be forgotten.”
This seems like a curious thing to say about someone whose home receives nearly as many visitors each year as the White House, despite being a fairly unremarkable mansion in Memphis with ghastly carpeting. On Forbes’ 2012 list of the top earning dead celebrities, he came in at number three — behind Michael Jackson and ahead of Charles Schulz.
“Speaking to some of his immediate family and friends that I have met in the past, Elvis was very humble, and was always afraid he would die and leave nothing behind,” Evangelista says. “I would love to see him come back one day and look at what he’s actually left behind.
“His nurse said that to me he thought he would just be forgotten. I guess he is the most impersonated artist in the world.”
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There is a paradox in tribute artistry that I have never been able to reconcile. People who pay to see a tribute show are there because of a strong connection to the source. They want to hear certain songs in certain ways, as close to the original recording as possible. However, the tribute artist is not the source, and is, in fact, his own man, with his own perspective on the music and the persona. How is the artist able to negotiate this reality?
“It’s quite difficult, and I’m realizing that now much more because I’m no longer an Elvis, but I’m now an Elton John,” says Marcus Wells.
“What I’m finding is, if you’re Elvis, you can’t ever pretend that you’re Elvis. You can’t ever get onstage and say, ‘this is from my movie Girls! Girls! Girls!‘ That’s a big no-no, but it’s the complete opposite if you’re paying tribute to anybody else. If you’re paying tribute to anybody else you can never break character, but when you’re Elvis you can never be fully in character.’
Why do you think that is?
“I think it’s almost…” Wells pauses for a moment. I think the difference is this: when somebody goes to see a Cher tribute artist or an Elton John tribute artist, they’re expecting to be fooled into thinking, in the smallest way, that this is the actual person. When you go see Elvis, you’re going to see an Elvis tribute artist.”
He laughs. “I’m going to say it’s a God-like status. You don’t mess around with that.”
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Will Sloan is a writer from Toronto who can frequently be found in Kitchener. You can follow his shenanigans @WillSloanEsq.
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