Outback Elvis: The story of a festival, its fans & a town called Parkes

PROLOGUE

John Connell

Ten kilometres outside Parkes a huge roadside poster sits in the shade of the gum trees. Set up by a Christian evangelical group, it simply says ‘Wise Men Still Seek Him’. Once a year visitors to Parkes interpret it in a very different way.

On a hot January day in 2002 I casually scanned the Sydney newspaper. Deep in the small print, though it was a slow news day, an Elvis Revival Festival was mentioned in the central New South Wales town of Parkes. I’d never been to Parkes, and wasn’t at all sure where it was, but I’d vaguely heard of the festival. I should have done, since we were in the midst of writing a book about pop music and society. Better still, it seemed like a chance to get out of the city for the weekend. I called my colleague Chris: ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ After some non-committal muttering and complaints about the heat he was won over. Two days later we left at dawn on the Saturday, rolled into Parkes in time to find a motel room, watch the parade, and take in a cooling ale.

The parade ran through part of the main street but the festival took place on the edge of town. The lone stage sheltered under willow trees against the baking sun, with a few hundred visitors, and rather fewer Elvis and Priscilla impersonators, applauding, participating, fanning themselves and occasionally breaking into dance. Just a dozen stalls offered anything for sale. It wasn’t much different from a small-scale agricultural show. A few T-shirts, screenprinted on demand in a local resident’s garage, were the extent of Elvis memorabilia. The cake stall fared better. Indeed, by midday on Saturday, like any other country town, Parkes had closed down and returned to somnolence. On the fringe the music played on. It was great fun, but, even a decade old, the festival was still largely ignored by the locals. Dinner and various forms of Elvis entertainment took festival-goers to Gracelands, a fortuitously named local restaurant that offered a sort of credibility.

On the Sunday morning we took in the Elvis Gospel Service – just enough attended to fill the small Uniting Church – and later respectfully watched a plaque for one of the Australian rockers of yesteryear being unveiled by Lonnie Lee at the Elvis wall: a tiny suburban replica of the Presley mansion at Graceland in Memphis. It was all soon over. In the heat most of Parkes dozed on. The small crowd headed home. We followed, but we were hooked.

In subsequent years we returned and watched as the town took the festival to its heart, literally and metaphorically – stayed open into the night, even through the night, created Vegas shows in local clubs and welcomed visitors into a hundred homes. The Elvis Express rolled and rocked into town and motels were booked out a year in advance.

Sometimes we came back with wide-eyed university students to help the festival by conducting surveys of visitors, shopkeepers and local people: what did people like about the festival? Was it good for business? What kept visitors coming back? Sometimes we stayed in tiny rooms above the pub in the main street. On other occasions we were hosted by friendly local families, bunking down in spare bedrooms usually occupied by visiting grandkids. Always we were thrilled by the exuberance, the colour and spectacle, and the dozens and dozens of elegant and elaborate jumpsuits.

The festival centres on the weekend closest to Elvis’s birthday (8 January 1935) but over time it began earlier and lasted longer. Success has turned a short weekend into a week of carnival. Each year takes a theme for decorating and dressing up – cowboy, speedway, Hawaiiana or Fun in Acapulco – usually linked to Elvis movies that show on continuous loops in the town library. Saturday marks the epicentre, the street parade of vintage cars and motorbikes (and vintage Elvis impersonators), with market stalls (ranging from memorabilia to country handicrafts) in the town’s main park. Filling the park with music and dance are the sound-alike and look-alike competitions: Elvis, Priscilla, Lisa-Marie and Junior Elvis. At night, and almost every night for a week, the clubs feature performances by touring ‘professional’ Elvis impersonators. Highly professional tribute artists, some from the United States, these are not the street corner buskers who have closed down for the night as the fun moves indoors. The highlights of the Sunday are the Gospel Service, now too big for the church, and the renewal of wedding vows by an Elvis celebrant under the ‘Love Me Tender’ archway.

In quieter moments – and there are now few of these – the local lawn bowling club urges visitors to ‘kick off your blue suede shoes’ and bowl with Elvis. Elvis cupcakes and Elvisburgers are available for the hungry. The private collection of memorabilia of local celebrity Elvis Lennox, an occasional Cadillac parked in the driveway, is open to visitors. A little further up the hill out of town, the King’s Castle is a glamorous new museum of everything Elvis. It houses the finest collection of Elvis artefacts in the southern hemisphere, mainly donated by the Yellow Wiggle, Greg Page. The queue to get in can be long.

Since Elvis has long been dead, or so most people believe, the festival has no apparent link with musical creativity. Indeed it is, on the surface, the complete reverse – characterised by hundreds of Elvis impersonators of diverse skills (and ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds) and some with no discernible skills at all. Musicians never play their own compositions. The best copies are what is wanted. In Parkes, creativity has taken a rather different form – ingenious local people pursuing a personal passion, fans as well as some ‘not-really-Elvis-fans’ dressing up in playful costumes, a town taking a risk on a seemingly tacky event, and finding an unusual means to survive drought and revive an economy against unlikely odds.

A country town has created a tourism resource, and subsequently captured national publicity, through a festival based around the commemoration of the birthday of Elvis Presley, a performer who never visited Australia, and certainly not Parkes. Indeed, Elvis barely left America. Yet the festival has invigorated the town, attracted loyal, repeat visitors and brought a community together on an otherwise hot and dusty weekend in the tourist off-season, because it is well organised, somewhat weird, in a friendly town and, above all, fun. The festival has made it, and has made a new Parkes. By chance and by design, the home of the Dish – the Parkes radio telescope that beamed the moon landing into Australian homes – became the home of Elvis. This book tells the story of how that happened.

Sir Henry contemplates the future of Parkes

Amanda Slater/Wikimedia

Elvis is on the way …

Robbie Begg

Robbie Begg

In the midst of rural stagnation a couple of people in Parkes had a crazy dream: to stage a festival in the middle of summer’s heat, celebrating the birthday of Elvis Presley. It made little sense. Elvis had never visited Australia and could never have heard of Parkes. But, against all the odds, local opposition and ridicule, the dream became reality.

1

ELVIS AND PARKES

The year is 1956. Grace Kelly marries her prince in Monaco. Melbourne hosts the Olympics. The Suez Crisis and the Cold War are in full swing. John Osborne writes Look Back in Anger and spawns the term ‘angry young men’. The 250 000th Holden motor car rolls off the assembly line. Washing machines are at last beginning to grace Australian homes, as Victa lawnmowers tend their lawns. It is also the last year that 21-year-old Memphis truck driver Elvis Aaron Presley (born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on 8 January 1935) lives a relatively normal life.

Elvis recorded his first RCA single on 10 January of that momentous year. From the opening seconds it is clearly something strikingly different. As Elvis famously said: ‘I don’t sound like nobody’. The song, recorded on a single-track machine, begins with just Elvis’s bluesy voice, suspended seemingly in thin air, and caught in a call-and-response pattern along with simple, staccato, two-note bursts from Scotty Moore and Chet Atkins on guitars. There are none of the schmaltzy strings and sappy backing singers that typified pop songs of the time. Just six simple, plaintive words – ‘Well since my baby left me’ – ignite ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, two minutes and ten seconds of bare, electrically charged rhythm and blues. It sounded like nothing else and it was about to unleash a cultural revolution that would span the globe and, half a century later, change the fortunes of a distant Australian country town forever.

The record label executives hated it. They wanted ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to sound like Elvis’s earlier Sun recordings. One said, ‘We certainly can’t release that one’. But release it they did, on 27 January, and the following day Elvis made his national debut on the newfangled medium of television. By April, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ had sold a million copies, and Elvis Presley was a household name.

Across the Atlantic, the BBC wouldn’t go anywhere near ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, but a youthful John Lennon heard it for the first time on Radio Luxembourg. ‘I could hardly make out what was being said,’ he recalled. ‘It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand out on end’. Robert Plant, then eight years old, was also listening; later, he would credit it as having ‘changed his life’ and sowed the seeds of Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards said similar things about its influence on the genesis of the Rolling Stones. George Harrison, aged 13, overheard it at a friend’s house. It was, in his pithy words, ‘a rock ’n’ roll epiphany’. In Australia Johnny O’Keefe was impressed with how Elvis sang ‘black’, ditched his first musical love, Bill Haley, and began dressing like Elvis.

The new music of Elvis, more so than that of his predecessor, Bill Haley, sounded very African-American – even ‘savage’ – to conservative white families, and harboured abundant sexual connotations. The words ‘rock ’n’ roll’ were a synonym for sex. In the early years of the civil rights movement, this dangerously cross-over style shook America. Moral panic quickly spread as more Elvis hit singles flowed (‘Don’t be Cruel’, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ were huge hits in quick succession), followed by provocative television appearances, and no fewer than four movies in two years. The San Francisco Chronicle called Elvis ‘morally insane’ and the Tacoma News Tribune dismissed him as ‘untalented and vulgar’. J. Edgar Hoover opened an FBI file on him after the Army Intelligence Service claimed that he was a ‘definite danger to the security of the United States’ through his ability ‘to rouse the passions of teenaged youth’.

A superstar was born. In his first year with RCA, Elvis accounted for half the company’s singles sales. Rock ’n’ roll could no longer be ignored, even by those who detested it. While Frank Sinatra spoke of a ‘rancid-smelling aphrodisiac, sung, played and written by cretinous goons’, and the New York Times described music as having ‘reached its lowest depths in the grunt and groin antics of one Elvis Presley’, rock ’n’ roll fans were hearing something quite different. Not only could Elvis sing but he was astonishingly handsome – an olive complexion, set between dark sideburns and under the famous quiff, styled with Vaseline and rose oil. Swivelling hips brought criticism in New York’s Daily News that ‘Elvis rotates his pelvis’, while he was banned from the Ed Sullivan show as ‘unfit for family viewing’. Ratings wars meant that Sullivan was soon forced to reconsider. Elvis’s September 1956 appearance on that show was viewed by a record 60 million viewers – over 80 per cent of the total US national audience. More than a frisson of danger proved a highly effective career move. A year later Elvis was able to buy the 18-room Graceland mansion in Memphis.

A Pacific Ocean away, Australia in 1956 was somewhat detached from most global trends and popular music was yet to be transformed. Johnnie Ray’s syrupy ballad ‘Just Walking in the Rain’, Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’ and Mitch Miller’s ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ were the biggest number-one hits of the year. Television was even more an infant technology than in America, only arriving in the largest cities in September. Most content was local, and broadcast live-to-air for a few short hours. Given that Elvis’s heart and mind were both very much in the American South, there were no incendiary live performances on Australian television. Nevertheless, his influence quickly spread. Local New South Wales performer Lonnie Lee sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on a radio amateur hour in 1956, spawning a slew of imitators. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ became a number-one hit and, within little more than a year, Elvis had ten Australian Top 20 singles. Early in 1957, his first film, Love Me Tender, arrived from US shores, and crowds of Australian teenagers flocked to see him at the movies, even in the country, just as they did in America and Europe. Meanwhile, Lonnie Lee won MGM’s contest for Australia’s own Elvis Presley, as the film company sought to gain an Australian Elvis market.

The effects on Australian popular culture were delayed but revolutionary. For young Australians, the product of the post-war baby boom, growing up and hitting puberty in the capital cities’ newly minted suburbs, going to drive-ins and eating hamburgers (another American import, though usually served by Greeks in another new phenomenon, the milk bar), Elvis quickly became an icon for a generation. These ‘teenagers’ – still a new and somewhat threatening word – made their allegiance to Elvis clear: the boys began growing their sideburns, slicking their hair back in ‘ducktails’, and wearing colourful, even garish, clothes; the girls preened flouncy ponytails and beehive hairdos, donning bobby socks, felt poodle skirts, fishnet stockings and increasingly figure-hugging, short-skirted halter-neck dresses. Decades later, many of the teenagers who had danced to Elvis in the 1950s, worn outlandish clothes, stayed up past midnight and challenged authority and the sanctity of family life became – in their seventies – stalwarts of the Parkes Elvis Festival.

Back in the 1950s Australian parents grew anxious. Elvis posed an insidious danger to morality and order, and in the more British Australia of the 1950s represented one more element of a harmful, and growing, American influence. The media worked themselves up into a panic. Juvenile delinquency, crime, rock ’n’ roll ‘dancing’ and Elvis Presley seemed inextricably linked. Illegitimacy provoked additional concerns. Greased hair, a leather jacket and pelvic gyrations proved anathema. The Australian Women’s Weekly, in a December 1956 article entitled ‘Presley squirms as he sings – And so do his fans’ parents’, claimed that ‘All over Australia the Presley craze has inserted a new wedge between teenagers and parents. Not only wowsers are against him, but almost every responsible organ of opinion’. For the first time teenagers were acquiring some disposable income, and music and the movies often had first call on surplus money. Transistor radio sales soared from an estimated 100 000 in 1955 to 5 million in 1958. The outcomes shocked parents and decent, responsible people.

In September 1956, just as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ reached the top of global hit parades, Sydney’s first rock ’n’ roll riot erupted following the screening of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. The ‘riot’ involved dancing in the street outside the Victory Theatre on George Street and, even more provocatively, outside police headquarters. The perpetrators of such ugly incidents were charged with offensive and indecent behaviour. Violence did briefly break out at a Brisbane concert at the end of 1956, with eight people arrested after bodgies and widgies partied, threw pennies at the police and broke a bottle on a police car. Such spontaneity and freedom were unprecedented, and needed to be repressed.

In that same ground-breaking year, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘cleaned up version of a Negro sex-song’, but within a year Bill Haley arrived in Australia a megastar. Johnny O’Keefe, a middle-class boy from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, was doing his best to rival the Americans, but the Wild One’s time was still to come. A federal Labor MP complained in parliament that mothers of young children who had seen rock ’n’ roll dancing on television reported that ‘in their opinion the act was immoral, disgusting, offensive and entirely unsuitable for presentation on any television programme’. A year later a writer in The Nation described teenagers at a Sydney concert as not spectators but participants ‘in an orgy of communal hysteria’. Clearly Elvis, Bill Haley and local sycophants had much to answer for. Nevertheless, Bandstand, a musical show that supported local rock singers, started on television in 1958, beginning the domestication and sanitisation of rock ’n’ roll. In due course Elvis joined the army and paler imitations such as Ricky Nelson and Bobby Darin toned down the beat. Rock ’n’ roll, however, was here to stay.

Peace in the country

Rural Australia took a little longer to catch the Elvis fever. There, the mood and the music were quite different. One contemporary observer concluded that Australian versions of American hillbilly music were especially popular in rural districts:

The lyrics romanticise the cowboy, the cattleman; his isolation and confusion in cities; his triumph over city slickers and the sorrow of his one true love; his good friend the horse and his faithful dog … they are socially acceptable symbolic expressions of the sorrow that’s too deep for tears and too self-consciously Australian to cause actual weeping.

Country songs, classical music and insipid soft pop ballads ruled the rural airwaves, and local entertainments remained unchanged – barn dances, Saturday matinees at the picture theatre, a travelling circus or carnival. In the centre of New South Wales, 360 kilometres from Sydney, that was the world of the people of Parkes.

Parkes, in 1956, was still a small country town of less than 8000 people, with not even a hint of a future rock ’n’ roll identity. The town’s skyline was dominated by grain silos, two picture theatres, wool stores and its five churches (Anglican, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian), all monuments to the cultural and economic mainstays of rural Australia – wheat, wool, religion, a community of shared entertainment and weekly rituals where people knew their place. Butler Air Transport could fly you to Sydney – once daily – for £4 (about $125 in today’s money), or one could travel by steam train (‘The rail is the safe way’) on the Central West Express. Television was still six years away.

Steve Lennox, winner of the inaugural Elvis