Elvis Presley In Concert - The New World Tour

Nearly 30 years after his death, the world is still crazy about Elvis Presley.

The house lights dim, a timpani sounds the dramatic opening bars of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a familiar figure in a bespangled white jumpsuit strides up to the microphone.

The audience gasps collectively, then erupts in applause -- Elvis Presley is truly back in the building!

Or so it seems. From this moment on, disbelief is suspended as Elvis Presley -- aka The King of Rock 'n' Roll and Elvis the Pelvis - - tanned, trim and apparently full of life on the huge screen, rocks the house as he runs through a concert jam-packed with his greatest hits.

There is even jovial interaction between Elvis and his on- stage band. But take a closer look at the stage: the band members are real, as is the orchestra and the male and female backing vocalists. It's just the on-screen Elvis who is only two- dimensional.

Elvis Presley: The New Concert Tour is, essentially, Elvis' only ever world tour, except that he is not here to enjoy it. Simply put, the live stage band is playing along with Elvis singing on screen.

The concert features carefully edited film footage of Elvis in concert, taken from material shot for MGM specials That's the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972), and from the 1973 global TV special, Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite.

Accompanying him on stage are the original members of his front- line band: James Burton on lead guitar, Glen D. Hardin on piano, bassist Jerry Scheff and Ronnie Tutt on drums; plus vocalists Myrna Smith, of the Sweet Inspirations, and Ed Enoch, of JD Sumner and the Stamps, and a 16- piece orchestra under the baton of musical director Joe Guercio, who worked with Elvis from 1970-77. Their live playing is shown on screens either side of the central Elvis screen.

Producers Todd Morgan, Randy Johnson and Stig Edgren pared back the historical film footage of Elvis to the vocals, and the musicians under the guidance of Guercio worked up the seamless concert, which has been staged in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the United States to exceptional audience and critical response since its premiere in 1998. The Christchurch concert is its only New Zealand date.

Joe Guercio, talking by phone from Las Vegas, says the concert brings the Elvis phenomenon back to earth, as it were, and shows the singer fully in his power.

"It gets to a point where after it goes five minutes they're with Elvis all the way. You can feel it with the crowd. They just lock into the screens, and then he'll say something and they'll stand up sometimes and give him a standing ovation.

"It works because the energy is right. It's the original energy. It's not new guys trying to capture Elvis Presley, it's the original cast. So it's very exciting."

From C1 The performer, who was larger than life when he was alive, has achieved legendary status since his ignominious overweight, drug- laden death in 1977, and still the crazy phenomenon rolls on in merchandise machinery, copycat performances, websites, fan clubs, tribute shows, prime- ministerial visits to Graceland, and a fan base that grows exponentially across cultures and generations. ("With the last European tour, more than half the crowd was under 35," Guercio says.)

It's almost easy to forget that what started it all was a man and his music. Joe Guercio, a lively character now in his 70s, credits the close ties between Elvis and his musicians.

"It was the group of people there -- it was a family. When we first put this show together, Ronnie Tutt put click tracks on everything, so that we would have a count-off. We purposely didn't just put clicks, we used percussion, cowbell, so that we could groove with the show.

"I said to Ronnie, I said, 'Man, this is going to be weird. I haven't seen some of these people in 20 years'. I said, 'you know what's going to happen, Ronnie -- all these old folks are going to walk in!' Then that door opened and damn! you know -- who had lost their hair, and all that stuff. It was like doing a guest show on Twilight Zone. Imagine going back 25 years and doing exactly what you did with the same people. Isn't that cool?" he says.

"So we started the first rehearsal and someone said at one point, `It was like we closed two days ago in Cleveland.' Everybody just got into the notch. We were coping along and then we got to Bridge Over Troubled Water and the girls lost it. I called a 15-minute break. The Sweets could not get through it. It's an emotional song and there he is on a screen, and here are all the original guys, so they just lost it. We took a break, we came back, and we've been laughing ever since. We've been having a ball."

Joe Guercio has worked as musical director for a myriad of acts, including Diana Ross, Diahann Carroll, Barbra Streisand, Jim Nabors, and Gladys Knight, and he was part of the show when BB King played the blues at Christmas in Rome for Pope John Paul II.

It was Guercio who was responsible for introducing the excerpt from Richard Strauss's symphonic tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra as Elvis' stage intro after he and his now- deceased first wife went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie. When the theme music started, she leaned over and whispered, "You'd think Elvis was about to enter".

Guercio -- who later worked with Natalie Cole and initiated her singing along in concert with audio of her late father -- had been working with big floor-show acts in Vegas when he was first approached to become Elvis Presley's musical director. Not a fan at the time, he soon succumbed to Elvis' personal charm and easy, respectful manner with musicians.

"I had just become musical director for the Hilton chain, and the Colonel wanted to check me out to see if I could do the (Elvis) show. I was never an Elvis fan -- he had a four-piece rock 'n' roll band; I came outa New York, had done two Broadway shows, you know, TV, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme; I'm into that acoustic world with a million strings and everything else. But part of the Hilton deal was that I would do Elvis," he says.

"We did the first hour rehearsal, he came back, we shook hands. And when I shook his hand -- I can understand why everybody freaked out. The charisma was fantastic. And I never realised he sang that good. He was a Mario Lanza fan. You listen to him go for some of those endings, I mean he's right on with them. His pitch is right on, that's him. I was amazed. I really was.

"He was very cool. Really good. He had tons of respect for people that were in his business. He respected the people on stage with him. I've been with a lot of acts and it's the most I've ever witnessed with respect to people that work with you, you know? He just absolutely loved that front line."

Elvis Presley: The New Concert Tour is staged sparingly ("We did Europe last year for a month and a couple of American dates," Guercio says), which keeps the music fresh. The rest of the year everybody returns to their own jobs.

"I've got a music production company in Nashville. Ronnie's working. He does a lot with Neil Diamond. He also does a lot of record dates. James Burton is always busy -- so we're all in steady work. They try to book it around when we have stall time."

From See See Rider, Steamroller Blues, Hound Dog, Don't Be Cruel, and Heartbreak Hotel through to Love Me Tender, The Wonder of You, In the Ghetto, Suspicious Minds and An American Trilogy, The King sings his way through more than 30 songs with full arrangements from the peak of his performance career in the two-set concert.

Posthumous duets and record releases might have seemed a tad ghoulish -- until we got used to them. Now, it seems, all we need is a holographic image of our dearly departed star to bring him or her back to performance life.

But until such time as someone invents a hugely powerful laser that is non- damaging to concert-goers' eyesight, it seems that watching a stadium show with live musicians playing along with a screen image is about as good as it is going to get.

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