E book Evaluation
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World
By Peter GuralnickLittle, Brown & Co.: 624 pages, $38If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist impartial bookstores.
The favored notion of Colonel Tom Parker is that he chiseled Elvis Presley out of some huge cash, compelled his participation in some actually dangerous Nineteen Sixties motion pictures and ensured Presley’s late-career servitude to Las Vegas with a playing dependancy to match the King’s personal drug behavior. However this isn’t the story Peter Guralnick appears to be like to inform in his mammoth new e-book, “The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World.”
The e-book is lengthy on the “Colonel,” a moniker Parker claimed as his first title after the governor of Louisiana gave him the honorary title in 1948, and quick on the King, who, in spite of everything, has been the topic of numerous earlier volumes. A number of the finest have been truly written by Guralnick, together with “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Whispers.” Few writers know extra about early rock ‘n’ roll and roots music, or have such ardour for the topic. In case you haven’t learn Guralnick, it’s best to make a degree to.
Does that imply it’s best to learn “The Colonel and the King?” Provided that you deeply search a complete examine of Elvis’ longtime supervisor, who, it should be mentioned, led an interesting life outlined by self-mythology and willful deception. Guralnick knew Parker from 1988 till his dying in 1997, and also you get the sensation the creator noticed his topic additionally as a pal. The e-book isn’t hagiography, as a result of Guralnick does a lot analysis and reporting for each e-book that he’s incapable of writing a one-sided account of any topic. That mentioned, “The Colonel and the King” usually reads like a Parker apologia, or at the least a concentrated effort to set some information straight.
As an example, there’s Parker’s oft-reported reluctance to let Elvis tour internationally close to the top of his profession, given that Parker wasn’t a U.S. citizen and subsequently didn’t have a passport. “The subject of much uninformed speculation,” Guralnick writes, suggesting different causes. “How could Elvis go to Japan, with its strict drug laws, how could he pass through all the customs stations he would have to clear in Europe if it were not to be a single small-country tour, without his prescribed medications? And who was going to carry those medications for him?”
Writer Peter Guralnick is a passionate knowledgeable on early rock ‘n’ roll and roots music.
(Mike Leahy)
Parker’s background as a carnival employee is commonly used to deride him. How might a mere carny know concerning the music enterprise, or qualify him to steward the king of rock ‘n’ roll? However the liveliest and most revealing components of “The Colonel and the King” truly come earlier than the Colonel meets the King, as Guralnick paints an image of a tireless hustler determined to reinvent himself.
Parker lengthy claimed that he was born Thomas Andrew Parker in West Virginia. In actual fact, he was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, Holland. As a boy, he glided by “Dries.” His father was a liveryman and retired soldier. When younger Dries fell in with a household circus and taught his father’s horses to do tips, his dad roared that the child “was no son of his, that he would never amount to anything, and, after beating him to within an inch of his life, announced that he would be banned from having anything to do with the stables.” As a teen, Parker smuggled himself to the U.S., acquired despatched again, then made the trek once more, this time efficiently.
He developed a behavior of being unofficially adopted by surrogate households after which disappearing with out a hint, a sample that continued when he joined the U.S. Military, went AWOL and finally acquired an honorable discharge in 1933, with a certificates of incapacity that cited causes of “Psychic Psychogenic Depression” (Parker claimed he was discharged for having a nasty leg). He finally ended up in Florida, the place he grew to become a jack-of-all-trades carny and developed a pointy intuition for advance publicity and promotion.
Elvis wasn’t Parker’s first music consumer; he developed his chops first with early pop celebrity Gene Austin, then nation star Hank Snow. However when Parker first witnessed Elvis and Elvis mania on the Louisiana Hayride in 1955, he was decided to handle him. Then it was on to promoting him, cunningly and ferociously, to RCA, twentieth Century Fox and whoever else would assist construct the mighty Elvis trade.
“The Colonel and the King” is a hunk of a e-book, weighing in at 624 pages. That features about 250 pages of annotated letters to and from the Colonel, which could have been higher used, in truncated type, unfold all through the narrative correct. You additionally get the sense that maybe the creator was quite fast to take Parker for his phrase, contemplating Parker himself as soon as joked that he was writing an autobiography referred to as “The Benevolent Con Man.”
One can admire Guralnick’s thoroughness and sense of mission whereas additionally wishing for tighter outcomes. I discovered the arc of Parker’s story fairly intriguing, at the same time as I acquired a bit of uninterested in it.
Vognar is a contract tradition author.
