Interview with Peter Guralnick | The Colonel and The King

Vallis: Did you ever dream you'd be able to go through Parker's correspondence and piece his story together?

Guralnick: It was so great! Not long after Last Train to Memphis came out, Jack Soden, who was CEO of EPE and is still at Graceland today, called me. He said he had read the book, he said a number of complimentary things – and he told me, If you were to ask the same question now that you've been asking me for the last five years, I think you would get a different answer. So I did. The question I had been asking (pleading might be the better word for it) was to get access to the Archives, which in terms of letters and documents consisted for the most part of Colonel's archives, which Graceland had acquired five years before. They were housed in a large, cavernous warehouse, in the very file cabinets and traveling trunks that Colonel had kept them in at his Madison home and office, and they were a revelation!

Vallis: Were all of Parker's deals and side deals covered in memoranda? Is it possible some documents were lost or destroyed? What about phone calls and handshake deals?

Guralnick: Colonel kept a very complete record. You can piece together just about every aspect of every deal from the letters and documents, including the replies he got from his various correspondents. There were elements of the RCA deals (all of which represented vast improvements on the previous RCA deal) that remained unwritten but were frequently referred to. So you could deduce what these were, too. Pretty much all of the RCA renewals and renegotiations were limited to no more than four-page letters.

The Colonel and the King Book by Peter Guralnick.

Vallis: How did reading Parker's correspondence alter your personal impression of him?

Guralnick: It deepened it in so many ways. It gave me glimpses into his interior life and ways of thinking that I could never have gotten from my (very limited) direct interviews or my more extensive personal correspondence. It wasn't just the business details, it wasn't just the humor (though both were present in abundance). It was the depth of the man – his emotional depth, the breadth of his vision, his vitality and engagement, above all the sensitivity, emotional openness and vulnerability that some (not many) of the letters revealed. Not to mention his spontaneous free-flowing, almost stream-of-consciousness writing style. How's that for a fifth-grade Dutch elementary school dropout?

Vallis: Some authors are critical of Parker's handling of Elvis' later career. By contrast, did you feel the need to be especially even handed?

Guralnick: I feel like my commitment – always - is to be even-handed. Not to let preconceptions, my own or anyone else's, get in the way. I want to paint a true portrait, and I want to do this for everyone I write about. So, it was no more of a challenge to write about Colonel Parker than it was to write about Elvis, or Sam Phillips, or Dick Curless, or Sam Cooke, or Charlie Rich. It's always a challenge – but you always want to set your account (whether it's an anecdote or a factual recital) within the context of the overall picture, the overall person. And that's what I tried to do.

Colonel at the typewriter (credit: Courtesy of the Graceland Archives).

Vallis: Were some subjects omitted (i.e. Scotty Moore & Bill Black, Leiber & Stoller) because they were previously covered in your two Elvis bios? How important is it for the reader to be familiar with your earlier works?

Guralnick: This was intended to be a biographical portrait of Colonel, not of Elvis or Sam Phillips, say, or anyone else. You tell the story, and when you tell any story, you have to choose the details that bring out the character best and move the narrative along. If you look at Last Train to Memphis, for example, you'll find lots of subjects omitted, I'm sure, either because they would be thematically repetitious or, in some cases because they are more revealing of the storyteller, or a metaphorical truth (I don't mean by that that they are untrue) than they are of the literal unfolding of events. Jerry Leiber plays less of a role in The Colonel and the King than he and Mike do in Last Train. Scotty and Bill are perceived here from a different angle, too. It has always been thought (Scotty certainly thought) that Colonel was against Scotty and Bill – I go into this a little bit in Last Train. But here we see Colonel and Tom Diskin essentially defending Scotty and Bill, while Hal Wallis and Steve Sholes were all for dropping them. But really, the whole point of telling Colonel's story is to tell Colonel's story – and to do the best you can to present in full the view you get from what amounts to the other side of the mirror.

Vallis: The Colonel and the King documents how hard Parker worked for Elvis' interests, but by limiting song selections to those he held publishing on, and putting him in more cheaply made movies, wasn't he actually undermining his client's potential at the same time?

Guralnick: To get full-fledged answers to this, I think you'd have to read the book. But you have only to take a look at some of the letters – Colonel writing to Elvis in 1957 ('The money is not as important right now to make a picture if the story is not right for you'); to William Morris head Abe Lastfogel ('I know he is not at all interested in doing a repeat of the type of pictures we have just made... I cant understand the thinking of any studio to want to keep on this same idea') – to understand that the picture is not as simple as it might at first appear. And consider Elvis' complete drop-out from doing any recording except movie soundtracks for almost 2 1/2 years – from 1964-1966 – while he chose to pursue his spiritual studies. I mean, this was someone for whom music had been the central element of his life from the time he was a young child – and look at the amazing recordings he made from 1960-1963 before dropping out to read his books. (See Elvis Day By Day (Book by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen 1999) for illustrations of some of his notations of those books.) During this time period, it seems, all he wanted to do was make as much money as he could in as short a time period as possible and return home to Graceland to pursue his studies. And in the end, it was a business deal by Colonel that motivated him to return to the studio and record How Great Thou Art, and to set out upon the second (well, third, really) great arc of his career. As for song publishing, anyone who has ever been in the music business knows that publishing is the very foundation of the business, that is where the money is made, and everyone from the beginning of time to the present moment has always sought to control it.

Peter Guralnick (2020) (credit: Photo by Mike Leahy).

Vallis: Did the Colonel ever truly get his gambling addiction under control?

Guralnick: To a degree. I don't think it ever consumed him in the same way after Elvis died. But it never left him altogether. What's so strange is that it was a compulsion that never manifested itself until Elvis' Vegas years. But, contrary to rampant rumor and speculation, it never affected his business dealings. Elvis always got top dollar. And Colonel always kept a million dollars in the bank against the rainy day that he and Elvis' father, Vernon, were so fearful might one day arrive, when Elvis' overspending created a financial crisis that couldn't be managed by yet another deal. But that never happened either – not quite anyway. (Again, there's much more in the book.)

Vallis: What do you think Parker would think of your final work?

Guralnick: I don't know. I hope he would like it! I hope Loranne would like it. I'd like to think that his overall view would be that here was a book that presented the facts and took his contributions – his complete dedication to, and love for, his artist, his defense of his artist, his business (and more than just business -- his visionary) brilliance seriously. But I know he would have his criticisms. I can just hear him say: 'Now, Peter, what you said was pretty good, but why did you have to –'. And then he would be off and running. I can hear my response, too: 'But, Colonel', I would say, 'I would have been able to answer some of the questions so much better if you had just --'. And his response: 'But I'm sure you understand. If I had done that, then I would have had to tell all my writer friends...' And so on, on and on. And I am well aware that Colonel would have won the argument, as he always did, and that we would both have had great fun. But I think in the end he would have liked the book.

Thanks to Peter Guralnick, the late Glen (Glenn) Troutman and Ken Burke.

The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World is available from bookshops worldwide.

Colonel Tom Parker / Interviews and Biography

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