Oh, I'm sure you are right about the press. FYI here is the piece I was on about - written by the author of 'Graceland'. The grubby truth about Elvis and his women A new film glosses over the King’s taste for girls who were devoted, underage virgins. Bethan Roberts reports Imagine it. The year is 1957. Just a few years ago, you were a poor boy from the wrong side of a small town in Mississippi – now you’re the world’s most famous rock ’n’ roll star. Millions of fans are keeling over with desire for you. You only have to stand still and wiggle one little finger for the audience to go wild, so much so that the police recently warned you not to move during your show. Last year, ending a concert in Jacksonville, you said: “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” What followed was a riot, in which your clothes were ripped from your back. In a moment of rare candour, you confess to your current “best girl” that being on stage is like making love, but better. But how do you forge a relationship with one woman, your best girl, rather than thousands? This was the problem Elvis Presley faced. It is also a problem largely sidestepped by Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic Elvis, in which Austin Butler gives the best impersonation of the musician to date. The film focuses instead on the singer’s ascent, meticulously crafted by his greedy, conniving manager, Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks, who encourages Elvis to appear single for marketing purposes. His wife, Priscilla Beaulieu, remains a peripheral character, loyal to her husband despite his constant infidelities. In fact, the film portrays a rather sanitised version of his relationship with Priscilla. The reality was that his behaviour was much more disturbing – as were most of his relationships with women. Even before he started school, Elvis was the man of his house. In 1938, when he was three years old, his father was sent to jail for forging a cheque. From that period on, Elvis, who was an only child, called his adoring mother, Gladys, “Baby” and was deeply solicitous to her needs. His Aunt Lillian remembered that, as a young teenager, Elvis would sing on the steps of his apartment block in Memphis. “He’d get out there at night with the girls [from the block] and he just sang his head off. He’d rather have a whole bunch of girls around him than the boys – he didn’t care a thing about the boys.” Elvis had discovered the rewards of paying close attention to the opposite sex, and his womanising began early in his career. Jimmy Snow, the country singer who roomed with him on tour in 1955, remembered Elvis bringing as many as three girls a night back to their hotel. While staying in the Beverly Wilshire for the filming of Jailhouse Rock in 1958, the agent Byron Raphael remembers Elvis complimenting him on his wife, Carolyn: “That’s the kind of girl I been looking for,” he said. “There must be a hundred girls outside the gate. Why don’t you see if you can find me another Carolyn? In fact, take care of business for me.” In other words, select a girl and bring her to his suite. Elvis’s entourage, popularly known as the Memphis Mafia, often had to “take care of business” in this way and all knew the singer’s preference for young brunettes with pretty eyes and round behinds. Between 1958 and 1968, when Elvis’s career was focused on Hollywood movies, they would bring a selection to his hotel most nights so he could take his pick. While all this was going on, Elvis always had one “best girl” – virginal, devoted and domesticated – waiting at home. The precedent was set by Dixie Locke, his steady girlfriend when he first became famous. When Elvis was on the road, Dixie often slept in his bed in the family home and would accompany Gladys shopping while waiting around for the King’s return. The pattern was repeated with his subsequent “steadies”: Barbara Hearn, Anita Wood, and then, of course, Priscilla. All were promised marriage on the condition they keep themselves “pure”, tolerate his behaviour with other women, fashion themselves to his ideal image, and basically obliterate any trace of their core selves. With Priscilla this bargain seems to have been particularly extreme in a way Luhrmann’s film overlooks. The Priscilla we see in Elvis is loved (in a limited way) for being herself. “I never met anyone like you,” Elvis says. But a little research into the story suggests a rather different picture. She was only 14 to his 24 when they met in the summer of 1959 in Germany, where Elvis was doing his national service and Priscilla was living with her step-father, a US army captain. Elvis had form with teenage girls: there had been, among others, the three 14-year-olds who used to visit his Audubon Drive house in Memphis for pyjama parties, where they would have their hair washed and dried and then be given kissing lessons by the 21-year-old King. One, Frances Forbes, remembers: “Elvis was always kissing, and it was a good kiss, a real good one.” Then there was the president of the Elvis Presley fan club, Kay Wheeler, who was 17 when she visited Elvis in his hotel after a show on the Louisiana Hayride. “He threw me against the wall and started grinding his pelvis, pushing on me… I wanted moonlight and roses. It was one of the biggest let-downs of my life,” she later reflected. Elvis’s abuse of his powerful position with these girls is disquieting, to say the least. Many aspects of the Priscilla-Elvis romance are similarly unsettling, and also glossed over in the movie – as is his predilection for dry humping and voyeurism rather than intercourse, and an apparent loathing of oral sex. Priscilla’s parents let her travel alone from Germany, aged 17, to spend two weeks with Elvis in his Los Angeles home in 1962. He took her on a road trip to Vegas to stay at the Sahara Hotel, and gave her uppers and downers so she could keep up with his up-all-night-sleep-all-day routine. That same year she came for Christmas at Graceland and ended up knocked out for two days when he gave her a couple of his sleeping tablets. The next year, though she hadn’t yet finished school, Priscilla moved into Graceland, where she spent most of her time waiting for Elvis to tire of messing around with the guys, or to come home from filming. He criticised her constantly: ‘Don’t slump; don’t wear chipped nail polish; don’t frown – you’ll get wrinkles; don’t eat tuna because I hate the way it smells.’ He also gave her a small pearl-handled derringer pistol to keep in her bra. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Elvis didn’t manage to have any meaningful relationships with women, aside from his mother whose early death in 1958 almost undid him. Girls were everywhere, but women – independent grown-ups with a sense of who they were, and who could have provided proper, emotional support – were absent from his life. And so the King’s womanising continued, right through his divorce from Priscilla and until his death. Luhrmann’s film lovingly recreates an extraordinary scene from the 1970 concert documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, in which he leaves the stage and walks through the audience, kissing as he goes. With no security presence, he neither hurries nor dawdles, but moves at a brisk pace through the aisles, oozing sweat and sex appeal. He must kiss at least 20 different women, yet with each kiss there is something tender: often, he cups a woman’s face in both hands and holds her gaze for a moment before moving on to the next fan. As Luhrmann suggests, it’s hard to spend your life making love to audiences and have anything left for individuals, perhaps even for yourself. ‘Graceland’ by Bethan Roberts is published by Vintage. ‘Elvis’ is in cinemas now Anyway, let's return to Waterloo.
I'm looking forward to that too. I've been through it all already, and I have my thoughts written and ready to post, but I'm not good with symbolism really, and I get the feeling there is quite a bit of that in here. So as we go through, I'm looking forward to reading the more movie minded folks interpretations of what's really going on here
A lot of actual punk music fit this description, and willingly. It may be one of several concurrent definitions of the term.
It reads like someone with an axe to grind to me.... The movie touches on everything just enough, and only imbeciles will miss the cues... to cram 42 extraordinary years into two and a half hours is no mean feat. I'm not sure there is an artist in the rock music world from 1954 up to this very day who hasn't taken advantage of the power their position gives them.... it's human nature.
Return to Waterloo: As mentioned earlier, I was waiting for the soundtrack to appear late summer of 1985, and this may have been the last time I felt that level of excitement anticipating new Kinks-related product. Let down? Not really. Puzzled. The title track was getting play on FM radio, and it sounded fantastic. I could see there was overlap with Word of Mouth, which felt weird to me. It's a strange album that doesn't feel like album - more like a bonus to Word of Mouth. In a perfect world, Ray would have combined the best of both worlds. But I gather the movie project more than likely preceded Word of Mouth, so Ray must have been busier than the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. I wouldn't see the movie until decades later, when I bought the DVD. I thought it was doggerel, in the same way projects like Magical Mystery Tour, Born to Boogie or Rock 'n' Roll High School were. You buy them solely because your band is involved. Visual Vehicles for a band to explore just how little they know about compelling storylines and a form of art they know little or nothing about, the stuff of midnight/cult movies. I found the DVD far more useful for the 80s videos added as bonus material, which seemed brilliant in comparison. As much as I love Ray's music, his interests in movies or expanding music projects in this direction, I've never understood. I would later find him much more engaging as an actor in Absolute Beginners, but even that one had problems!
And we are still waiting for a Beatles movie (or documentary for that matter) that shows them doing anything with girls before they made their girlfriends/wives public. There would have been plenty of Elvis-like happenings in the pre-fame Hamburg years and when all those girls threw themselves at the band when they were famous. Would knowing details of that change my view of a Beatle - nope. The same goes for many the big acts of the 70s that we love. Some people just want to sell books.
Return to Waterloo Luckily, I managed to bag both the vinyl and cd of this album and I'm going to stick my head above the parapet here and say I prefer RTW more than WOM. Having said that I think there could have been one very good Kinks album compiled from the various tracks on the two records. But, as usual, the decision-making process at the heart of Kinks PLC was woeful. I don't suppose Ray, the "frustrated film-maker", could easily resist making a film for Britain's trendiest and new TV channel. Disappointing film for me when I saw it and I remember my friend saying "WTF was that about"? I won't watch again but if anyone here can enlighten me then I'm all ears. Some really good songs though.
The punks in RtW can't help but put me in mind of this famed scene from the 1986 Star Trek franchise installment The Voyage Home, which to many people of my generation (born 1980) I'm afraid was their first encounter with the concept of punk in any form.
I wish Return To Waterloo included as much band performance footage as any of those films did! (or indeed any!). Opinions on the end products quality aside, I don't think it's really comparable to any of those films as the story comes before the music with RtW, whereas MMT BtB and to a slightly lesser extent R n' R HS are all vehicles for the music first and foremost and the plots are either non existent or afterthoughts.
I don't think Return to Waterloo, the movie, can be compared to Magical Mystery Tour (I don't know the other 2). RTW is not a pretext to display the band (Ray is the only one you get to see, and fleetingly), not even a vehicle for the songs. It's not an extended video clip. It's an actual movie, with an actual script, and a real dramatic ambition. Whether Ray achieved what he aimed at is another story. But if he failed, it's an artistic failure, not a communicational embarrassment. Edit: I don't think it's an artistic failure at all, by the way. It's surprisingly interesting. Thanks to Avids @Fortuleo and @pantofis for their great reviews. My understanding is that the photographer is very good, and his presence answers in a large part the question "how come a movie from such a novice director can look so professional?" Of course, right from the start, the 58' format alone condemned the movie to the perennial status of glorious obscurity.
Yea, I think pondering this movie from a band perspective is fairly pointless.... It isn't a rock and roll movie, it's just a movie that uses musical themes to tell its story rather than dialogue.... and even then, it isn't like the Wall, where we have big bold songs, written in order to push the narrative. It sort of seems to me that this is a typically Ray kind of project. He is putting across an overall theme, and is typically ambiguous. The main thing I drew from the movie, that may be somewhat themes for folks to keep in mind..... 1 The Village Green Preservation Society is dead. 2 We have three generations represented on the train... the war generation, the current mum and dad generation (of the day), and the kids. There seems to be a theme of the decay of what Ray sees as being England, into something he doesn't recognize anymore. 3 a lot of the scenes seem to be imagined/dreamed, rather than actual events that happened.... there seems to be a scenario where scenes are used as representing emotions, rather than documenting actual events.... That's as best as I can do I think.... lol I think for the most part it will come together...
I don't think I can usefully review Return To Waterloo as a film, but I'll write a few comments that come to mind 1) The title (as alluded to by @Fortuleo ) can't help but bring to mind 'Waterloo Sunset', and I do wonder at what stage in the development of the concept the title came: was the title track written around the project title or the other way about? The reason I ask is that on the surface, the title seems to suggest a kind of 'lets go back to the good old days of the sixties, 'member 'Waterloo Sunset'?' kind of affair: (in that respect the idea reminds me a bit of McCartney's faintly desperate sounding 'Return To Pepperland' project from a few years later): the end product could hardly have been further from that kind of thing, and would have bitterly disappointed anyone going in expecting same, but still I can't help but wonder if the prominent flagging up of that word Waterloo was done intentionally to provide leverage at some point in the development of the film, maybe to make a Channel 4 exec go.. 'Waterloo? oh yeah, that guy from the Kinks, yeah lets make that'. 2) I have to admit I don't really understand why this film was such a passion project for Ray. I guess you could say they same about any of the RCA concept shows, ie did those stories really need to be told? But with those the whole group went all in and became the characters/stories, toured them etc and were able to sell them that way: with RtW Ray took a sidebar out the band to focus on making a film first and foremost, and one that would have been Kinks lite even if Dave had been involved. While well made and far from an embarrassment, I have to admit I don't find the story or setpieces very compelling, and the lead character being a somewhat unappealingly sketchy figure who may well have incestuous and ephebophlic tendencies is kind of offputting: not that I'm saying Ray shouldn't be able to go that dark, just that I think it's kind of a hard sell to properly explore in a film that also features cartoonish punks and Tin Soldier Man style business men dance routines. I think it definitely fits in with the other sort of experimental, disquietingly odd art stuff that was all over Channel 4 in it's early years, but it's also pretty much the definition of a curates egg in Kinks history and I admit I'm somewhat puzzled why it was such a do-or-die thing for Ray. Seen from my selfish fans pov, I'm not convinced it was the best use of his energies at this point. 3) I think it says a lot about how Dave had changed that whereas in the 70s he'd have gone along with a project like this, by the 80s he was able to say no: I just checked his autobio and he says that while he didn't feel he could contribute to the project, he loved the end product when he saw it, which seems fair enough and pretty far from the betrayal that Ray made his non-involvement out to be in a quote posted above. I did wonder before I checked Dave's book if he maybe objected to the dark themes of the film but it doesn't seem like that was the case. I mean what would Ray have wanted Dave to contribute to RtW anyway? an extra guitar solo or two? I doubt an onboard Dave would have been allowed much more, and I don't see how it's fundamentally lacking for his absence.
The title is actually referenced in the film when one of the characters buys a "return to Waterloo" at the ticket office. You hear some odd place names mentioned by the station or train announcers during the film - these are all actual places.
Weirdest bit in the film: the old lady with pupiless white eyes. Reminded me of something from the last episode of 'The Prisoner'. No idea what it was intended to signify!
I first got the soundtrack album to Return to Waterloo at the Record Exchange when it first came out. I did hear about the movie itself, but it was a few years before I found a VHS copy, which was an ex rental from Leachmere’s. A few years after that, I got the DVD w/the 80s Kinks videos, which is now apparently OOP. All that I’m going to say about the movie is that to me, it’s an interesting failure that encompasses many of the themes that Ray has written about over the years, chief among them the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. I’m surprised that Avid Ajsmith didn’t point out that Ken Colley (sic?) was previously in Slade in Flame. Finally, Ray actually wrote a short story based on this movie which appeared in the US edition of his short story collection Waterloo Sunset.
It was shown earlier that the particular old lady was blind. Maybe it was result of some disease. One of her fellow pepperpots was actually in Help! as one of the old ladies who waved to the Beatles in the beginning and ended up in Eastenders.
Nice post. You guys have really got me researching words lol... for anyone else as ignorant as me Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19. The term was originally used in the late 19th to mid-20th century. It is one of a number of sexual preferences across age groups subsumed under the technical term chronophilia. I think a large amount of the film is based on exploring the problems associated with Repetition/Do It Again/Predictable etc ... and that seems to be a major theme that has been tormenting Ray in recent years. I think the movie itself is a sort of visual representation of Art Lover, in the sense that it baits you into thinking it is about something it very likely isn't.... though I'll wait for everyone's thoughts before coming to any conclusions
That’s surprising, Avid Ajsmith. Slade in Fame is a rather surprising film in that it didn’t play up to Slade’s image at all, but was a straight forward and realistic story of a band’s rise and fall, kinda like an English version of That Thing You Do made 20 years earlier. Shout Factory put it out on DVD and I got my copy for $3.99 at my local Newbury Comics.
The station announcement sounds as if it is an actual recording and sounds much more human than the rubbish they inflict on us nowadays. My journey on the train is about 30 min into London and by the time I get there my blood is at boiling point. I just wish they would shut up and stop bossing me about.
I should get around to it, I've heard it's pretty good. Your mention of 'rise and fall' also reminds me that I've also never seen Madness's film 'Take It Or Leave It'. I do wish there was a comparable Kinks movie: the Kinks DVD shelf is a disappointingly bare: of official, non grey market releases, you pretty much just have the Come Dancing/RtW two fer, One For The Road, and the Kinks at the BBC DVD which was only available within the BBC boxset.All long out of print anyway. I really hope the 70 concert film that Ray and Dave mentioned they were working on earlier this year comes to fruition...
I always wished that the Kinks had their own version of The Who’s The Kids Are All Right. I would have called it Four More Respected Gentlemen. There was also talk over the years of Preservation being made into a movie, which also didn’t happen. The Kinks’ history has been littered by proposed projects (mostly by Ray) in various media that never went to fruition, except for Return to Waterloo and the Sunny Afternoon jukebox musical.
Return to Waterloo I found this soundtrack, on cassette, in a cut-out bin (where else) in the summer of ‘89. A few months later I bought a VHS version of Return to Waterloo, a bootleg copy. The soundtrack songs are quite strong. If you put ‘Lonely Hearts’, ‘Not Far Away’, and ‘Expectations’ on Word of Mouth, you’d have a Side Two that can compete with Side One. Return to Waterloo, regardless of its execution, faced two obstacles right up front that would seemingly limit any commercial aspirations. It was commissioned for television, and to be shot on 16mm, not 35mm; not ideal for screening in theaters. It also clocks in at under an hour. The film unfurls like a dream, an uneven one; there are moments of brilliance, and close on their heels, cringeworthy turns (ie. the elderly commuter knifing the punk). But Ray and company had some horse sense, hiring Tim Roth and Roger Deakins in the early days of their brilliant careers. Martin Scorsese professed to being a fan of the film and had his eye on Ray for a film of his own. In ‘83, Scorsese wanted to cast Ray as Judas Iscariot in The Last Temptation of Christ. Funding fell through and the project was shelved for years; when it was revisited in ‘88 the role of Judas went to Harvey Keitel. Fun train-spotting: the set of keys The Traveller hands to his younger self are labeled ‘Abbey Road’. Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street premiered around this time, and in my mind they are inextricably linked. Paul’s power ballad, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, was very successful, reaching US #6. Of course, Ray didn’t trouble the charts, but ‘Lonely Hearts’ was every bit as good.
