Robin Fry : Rock Historian

Would you buy a family bucket from this man?

It’s not just the musicians that bring life to the lumbering beast of rock, y’know. There are a whole bunch of people behind and in front of the scenes without whom the wheels of rock ‘n’ roll would stop turning, from the hairy-arsed roadies to the fans themselves.

Unsurprisingly, many of these other cogs in the rock machine (I’ll try to stop the awful metaphors now) are as bonkers as the ones with the instruments. A group that is particularly prone to eccentricities is managers. Some of the best loved bands of the last 50-odd years have the machinations of an utter fruit loop, or several fruit loops, to thank for their success. Others seem to have made it ginormous despite the bizarre decisions made by their crazy managers. Today we’re going to look at arguably one of the craziest, and certainly one of the most successful: Colonel Tom Parker.

It’s fair to say the Colonel was a bit of an odd man, but he was also smart enough to capitalise on the success of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll star on the planet while keeping himself as much out of the public eye as possible. This is understandable considering the rumours of dodgy behaviour and dubious immigrant status that hung around the Colonel like special sauce round a hot wing.

He was also had complete control of the life of rock ‘n’ roll’s first rebel, making himself a fortune from young Elvis Presley throughout his career and well after the King’s early shower. But it’s likely that Elvis might have raked in even more readies if it wasn’t for some spectacularly hatstand decisions made by Colonel Tom.

While the Colonel claimed for a long time to have been born in the USA, he was born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk in Breda in the Netherlands on June 26th 1909. He started working in carnivals as a young boy, picking up the skills in rinsing poor bleeders of their hard-earned cash that he would put to great use later in life. In his late teens he ran away to America to make a (different) name for himself. There are plenty of suggestions that he was getting the fuck out of Dodge due to his involvement in some criminal shenanigans, possibly even murder, which goes some way to explaining why he worked so hard to remain in the USA once he’d settled in for good.

He joined the US Army and pinched the name of an officer to make himself sound a bit less illegal-immigranty. He never reached the rank of Colonel though. In fact he was put into solitary confinement for going AWOL on his second stint in the army, a punishment that made him ill enough to require two months in a mental hospital, which can’t have helped matters much. The Colonel title was an honorary one, much like Colonel Sanders‘, given to him in 1948 by the governor of Louisiana for helping out on his election campaign.

After the army, Parker did odd bits of work here and there, including back at carnivals. He also made money as a con artist, often working with Marie, his wife from 1935 until her death in 1986. In the late ’30s, he was given the task of promoting crooner Gene Austin, who’d already made millions but pissed most of it up the wall and had hit a bad patch.

Parker had found a career that perfectly fit his talents as a shyster. He had a knack for flogging tickets and drawing in packed crowds and would go on to manage a number of successful performers. He was just as good at fleecing his acts as their audiences, often taking way over the 10% of earnings that was usual for a manager.

All work and no play make Colonel Tom a dull boy. All work and no play make Colonel Tom a dull boy. All work and no play make Colonel Tom a dull boy...

In 1955, the Colonel became aware of the rapidly-rising singing sensation that was Elvis Presley. At the time, Elvis was being managed by Bob Neal, who was having trouble coping with the huge demand for the young star. Neal agreed to let the Colonel help him out with promotion and booking gigs. Parker very quickly took more and more control of Presley’s career, getting him a contract with a bigger record label (RCA) by the end of the year. When Elvis’ contract with Bob Neal expired a few months later, he didn’t hesitate in signing up the Colonel as his sole representative (Parker had conned the singer Hank Snow into believing he was also representing Presley, but the poor sod’s name never appeared on any contract).

Elvis’ first single with RCA, Heartbreak Hotel, was a massive hit. The Colonel wasn’t slow in capitalising on this success, booking TV slots and merchandising deals. He’d signed Elvis up to another of his above-the-norm-25%-of-everything deals so was making a tidy profit off the King’s name. He even marketed “I Hate Elvis” badges to make money out of the people who weren’t buying records, the crafty git! Apart from a dodgy booking at Vegas (ironically, the Vegas crowd didn’t really take to Elvis first time round), everything the Colonel did around this time was turning Elvis to gold, a quarter of which went straight into Parker’s pocket.

Elvis, a big fan of Tony Curtis and other movie stars, had expressed an interest in acting. The Colonel managed to negotiate a seven-picture deal with Paramount. He persuaded them and Elvis that he should sing in his films, seeing the money that could be made from movie and record tie-ins. This didn’t really match up with Elvis’ plans of being taken seriously as an actor, but he almost always did what the Colonel told him. Presley’s first film, Love Me Tender, was actually pretty good and wasn’t saturated with songs (although the name of the film was changed from The Reno Brothers after advance sales of the single hot more than a million), but the Colonel saw films as just another way to make money and flog records, and ensured most of the King’s films were tacky musical capers. Who knows, without the Colonel’s influence, could Elvis have been the next Marlon Brando?

Yeah, maybe not.

YOU BASTARDS

Anyway, a far worse decision was to come. Early in 1958, Elvis received his draft notice from the Army. It’s very likely that, what with him being such a profitable US export, the powers that be would have allowed him to avoid service (they probably would have helped the Colonel sort out his immigrant status once and for all and get a US passport, but he always avoided any opportunity to do this). But despite this and his own unpleasant experience, the Colonel decided the Army would do Elvis the world of good, and help to keep the young whippersnapper in line too. Elvis wanted to join the Special Services so that he could continue to perform, but the Colonel insisted that he should join the regular army and show the older generation what a fine upstanding young man he was. He even turned the induction into a media circus, with the press watching as the clippers were taken to Elvis’ amazing barnet. Elvis was given a crewcut and a uniform and shipped off to Germany.

This was a monumentally fucking crazy decision.

Elvis didn’t need to join the army! If he wanted to see the world, send him on a concert tour, not on a DC-10 to Friedberg for fuck’s sake. But of course the Colonel wasn’t keen on letting Elvis go abroad to perform as he wasn’t willing to risk going through customs himself. It’s also likely he didn’t want Elvis too far from his influence for long, in case someone let him in on just how much the Colonel was exploiting him. Having him stationed in a barracks surrounded by soldiers was nice and safe. The Colonel even prevented Elvis from recording any new songs while overseas. Elvis’ success would continue but he lost something special when he went into the army and he never really got it back. As young John Lennon said when he was told Elvis was dead, “Elvis died the day he joined the army”.

When he did finally return, the Colonel had him churning out cheesy records and even cheesier films for the best part of the next decade, and Elvis didn’t perform live at all between 1960 and ’68. The rise of The Beatles and other stars and bands in the ’60s threatened to overshadow Elvis completely, and the Colonel didn’t seem to give the slightest shit, as long as the money kept rolling in. One reason the Colonel needed to keep it rolling in was the massive debts he was racking up with his compulsive gambling habit. In ’67, he even managed to increase his share of Elvis’ earnings from 25% to 50%!

In 1968, Elvis stood up to the Colonel for once, making a bid to revive his floundering career with the Comeback Special. It was going out in December, and Elvis had the sense to ignore the Colonel’s ridiculous suggestion that he should wear a Santa outfit and only sing Christmas songs (the crazy old bastard was trying to turn the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll into Val fucking Doonican)! Elvis wisely ignored the old boy’s nonsense for once and the result put him firmly back on the rock ‘n’ roll map. That’s not to say the Parker-enforced wilderness years hadn’t done plenty of damage. Elvis had missed a generation, and was no longer the coolest kid on the block.

Gottle o

Elvis was now able to gig again, but the Colonel still didn’t want him straying too far. Elvis would never do a world tour. In fact, he was pretty much restricted to Hawaii and Vegas. One reason the Colonel booked him for so many Vegas shows is that it kept Parker’s creditors at the casinos sweet. His gambling habit was getting very expensive.

The Colonel had never done anything to discourage the King’s less healthy appetites either. A steady diet of uppers and downers allowed Elvis to do more shows and make more money, so the Colonel was never gonna complain about it. Elvis also had a tendency to overeat when not performing or making movies. The Colonel’s answer was to put him on a starvation diet just before filming or a tour was about to start. While it’s highly dubious that anyone would deliberately facilitate the death of such an abundant cash cow, none of this could have been doing young Elvis’ ticker much good.

As the ’70s rolled on, Elvis had to be too. His drug use and binge eating had got too much and he was no longer able to slim down for tours. He often appeared addled and incoherent on stage. His relationship with the Colonel was also becoming more and more strained, with Elvis even trying to sack him on at least one occasion (The Colonel claimed he was owed $2 million which would need to be paid to end the contract, which Elvis’ dad Vernon worked out they couldn’t afford to pay).

When the King finally cashed in his chips, the Colonel was quick to make sure it didn’t put him out of pocket, persuading Vernon to sign over control of Elvis’ posthumous career to him at the funeral. He also made sure the huge and sudden demand for merchandising was met. After Vernon’s death in 1979, someone finally cottoned on to the Colonel’s game. The Presley estate sued the Colonel, who immediately counter-sued! It was eventually settled out of court, with the estate paying the Colonel that magical figure of $2 million and the Colonel giving up all Elvis-related earnings for 5 years.

Colonel Tom Parker outlived Elvis by 20 years, dying from a stroke in 1997 at the ripe old age of 87, more than twice the King’s lifetime. He was a greedy conman with a million-dollar gambling habit, but some of his crazy schemes helped to make Elvis Presley one of the most iconic figures of recent history. It’s hard to say whether Elvis’ career would have been better off without him (he might have lived a lot longer), but it didn’t do too badly with him. You need to make a lot of money when you get through that many TVs.