Hound Dog Books & Media LLC
P.O. Box 352, Woodbridge NJ 07095
© 2016 L.E. McCullough, Harold F. Eggers, Jr. & Lamar Fike
First Printing: August, 2016
ISBN 978-0-9967889-0-8 (eBook)
ISBN 978-0-9967889-1-5 (softcover)
ISBN 978-0-9967889-2-2 (hardcover)
____________________________________
All Rights Reserved. This book may not be transmitted, reproduced or
stored in part or in whole by any means without the express written consent
of the publisher, except for brief quotations in articles and reviews.
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and obtain permissions
for the contents of this book. The publisher will make
any necessary changes at subsequent printings.
____________________________________
Front & back cover design by David Simpson Design LLC
www.davidsimpsondesignllc.com
400 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask about ELVIS …
NEARLY 40 YEARS after his death, Elvis Presley remains one of the most intriguing human beings of the last century.
Millions of people still want to know intimate details of Elvis’ life:
What did he think about his music?
What did he really do behind the gates of Graceland?
What were his final thoughts the day he died?
We have the answers here.
* * *
Does the world need yet another book about Elvis?
Perhaps not.
But it will want Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond.
Because it is Real.
* * *
Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond is not a gushy fan tribute.
It is not a dry recitation of facts.
It is not a pop-psych portrait by an envious outsider.
It is exactly what the title states: personal, direct statements concerning the truth and myth of Elvis Presley as told by the one friend Elvis never was able to turn away.
* * *
Until Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond, Lamar Fike never had the chance to tell the full story — one-on-one — of his remarkable friendship with the world’s greatest music star.
Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond — 400 questions, and as much truth about Elvis as you’re ready to handle.
Are you ready?
ELVIS: TRUTH, MYTH & BEYOND
An Intimate Conversation with Lamar Fike,
Elvis Presley’s Closest Friend and Confidant
______________________________________________________
~ Foreword by Marty Lacker ~
WHOEVER COINED the phrase “He was one of a kind” certainly had Lamar Fike in mind.
Lamar was so many things, and they were all good.
He was a good friend, intelligent, talented and one of the wittiest people you’d ever meet.
He was known for his Lamarisms and they were doozies, sharp and to the point; he could almost be crowned as the “comeback kid”.
He and Elvis were like brothers, and what brought him even closer to Elvis is the fact that Lamar knew and was close to Elvis’ mother, whereas only a couple of other of The Memphis Mafia knew her.
He was her favorite of all those around Elvis, and that connected him and Elvis forever.
Lamar had a good heart, and he lived up to the saying, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” If you were his friend, if he had something and you needed it, it was yours.
Lamar was like a brother to me, and it greatly saddened me when he left us after battling his illness for his last years.
My life is better because of my brother Lamar. May he Rest In Peace.
— Marty Lacker
* Marty Lacker is an original member of The Memphis Mafia and author with Patsy Lacker and Leslie B. Smith of Elvis, Portrait of a Friend
~ Introduction ~
“Before Elvis there was nothing.” — John Lennon
_____________________________________________
Elvis Aaron Presley, an American singer and actor born in the most humble and ordinary of socio-economic circumstances, spent the last 23 years of his relatively short life setting the world on fire.
His unique musical taste and performance style not only transformed the popular music of his day but sparked a massive revolution in popular culture that reached every part of the planet.
From July 7, 1954 — when his first record was played over local radio — to the moment you are reading this, someone somewhere has been thinking, talking or dreaming about Elvis every single day.
One snapshot in time, the Harris Poll® of August 12, 2002, discovered that 84% of adult Americans (176 million) claimed their lives were touched in some way by Elvis Presley — watching a movie starring Elvis (70%), dancing to an Elvis song (44%), viewing a movie or television program about Elvis (42%).
Nearly 40 years after his death, Elvis continues to exist in almost every segment of contemporary culture via thousands of visual images, literary references, jokes about Elvis sightings.
There are Elvis impersonators, Elvis postage stamps, uncountable millions of individual Elvis knick-knacks … a continuing stream of newly packaged Elvis recordings and videos are disseminated through every type of broadcast media every minute of every hour.
There are Elvis shrines, Elvis religious cults, Elvis museums, Elvis holograms.
And a seemingly endless parade of Elvis books, just like this one.
This Elvis book is different.
It contains 41,000 words about Elvis spoken by a man who knew Elvis before and after he became an icon, a commodity, a legend.
It is a book of intimate recollections from a 23-year friendship that attempts to answer a single question: what was it like to be Elvis?
Though virtually every public moment of his life has been documented, Elvis himself left no memoir, no diary, no revealing personal correspondence. The essence of his true personality will always be glimpsed through the refracted insights of his associates, friends and family members.
Some of the most brilliant and tantalizing insights about Elvis have come to us through a man named Lamar Fike.
Lamar’s connection with Elvis dated from early 1954 (just before Elvis’ first history-making Sun records) until the day Elvis died in 1977. Lamar was there for the entire ride: Hollywood, the Army, Las Vegas and everything in-between.
He was a charter member of Presley’s famed “Memphis Mafia”, the tight-knit group of friends and personal assistants who protected and sustained Elvis as his career ebbed and flowed.
In fact, Lamar lived with Elvis and his family before Elvis became The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll; he was very much the “brother” figure Elvis sought throughout his life.
Until his death on January 21, 2011, Lamar Fike remained the close friend and confidant whose recollections offer the greatest genuine insight into the complex character of a man who irreversibly changed 20th-century musical and cultural history.
In September, 2001, Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond authors L.E. McCullough and Harold F. Eggers, Jr. were invited by Lamar Fike to conduct an intensive two-day interview at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. Lamar fielded hundreds of questions about Elvis with clarity and conciseness; the marathon Q. and A. yielded a plethora of never-before-told insights into what made Elvis tick.
In conversations with the authors over the ensuing years, Lamar made it emphatically clear that he wanted Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond to present and preserve as much “real truth” about Elvis as possible.
Turns out a lot of that Real Truth about Elvis can be found in the parallel life of Lamar Fike.
* * *
Lamar Rielly Fike was born November 11, 1935, the first child of James Lamar Fike (1910-54) and Margaret Rielly Fike (1911-94). Like Elvis, Lamar was a native of smalltown Mississippi — Cleveland, located a hundred miles south of Memphis on U.S. Route 61, a highway made famous in the lyrics of numerous Delta blues singers and folkrock balladeer Bob Dylan.
Lamar’s parents had both been born and raised in the small Central Texas town of Mart, 25 miles east of Waco. James Fike’s father, James Benjamin Fike, had migrated there from Alabama in 1901 and married Mary Magdelene Sansom from nearby Oletha, Texas, in 1905. Margaret Fike’s parents, Thomas Rielly and Margaret Jane Miller Rielly, had settled in Mart when Thomas was hired as a conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which counted Mart as one of its route hubs.
After years as a successful farm implement salesman throughout West Central Mississippi, James Fike started his own company selling army surplus in 1945. He moved the family, which now included Lamar’s younger sister Mary Jane born in 1940, to Memphis, three years before the Presley family arrived in the Bluff City from Tupelo.
As a boy, Lamar was intrigued by music and music business, singing in the choir at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Memphis and arranging bookings for local bands when he was only 14. “I would sell the bands all over, from colleges to car lots,” he recalled. “One summer I think I made more money than my dad.”
Lamar’s sister Mary Jane concurs. “Lamar was a born promoter,” she says. “From a young age, Lamar had the skills and personality required to live the life of celebrity.”
Lamar’s early show business stirrings often rendered the budding impresario restless. “I was the type of person who stared out the window in class, always thinking about something else. The teachers said I had the greatest intelligence they had ever seen, but I never used it on schoolwork. I saw myself doing something else, and I always liked the entertainment business. My dream at the time was to be a radio deejay.”
The life paths of Elvis and Lamar first conjoined in early 1954 at Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service/Sun Recording Studio. Lamar was learning the fine points of audio engineering, Elvis was struggling to express the innovative musical ideas jelling in his mind.
By 1957, their young lives would be linked forever when Elvis — now a national entertainment sensation — invited the freshly unemployed Lamar to drive to Los Angeles and hang out during a movie shoot.
Asked what he did during his years with Elvis, Lamar’s reply was simple and without the least degree of pretension: “Everything.”
Through two decades of daily business operations, Lamar came to play a primary role in every aspect of presenting Elvis Presley to the public.
But the most important role Lamar Fike played in the life of Elvis Presley was that of Friend. It was a friendship born not of happenstance but forged from a deeper destiny.
* * *
During 1957-58 Lamar lived with Elvis and his parents at Graceland and became intimately aware of the complex family history and psychological dynamics that would influence Elvis until his final hour.
“We knew what each other was thinking,” said Lamar of his longstanding mental affinity with Elvis. “Brothers are that way. Twins are that way. We were that way.”
Tommy McDonald, currently of Arlington, Texas, was Lamar’s first cousin and grew up in Mart. As children, the two developed a lifelong bond reinforced by frequent family visits during summer vacation and Christmas. Affirms Tommy, “Lamar never had a job that he liked until he got with Elvis.”
Tommy first met Elvis in 1958 when Lamar called him to come to Fort Hood after the funeral of Elvis’ mother Gladys in Memphis. In addition to Elvis, Tommy met the singer’s grandmother Minnie Mae Presley, father Vernon Presley, then girlfriend Anita Wood and high school buddy Red West.
It was clear, says Tommy, that Lamar had been accepted by Elvis’ mother, Gladys, as a virtual Presley family member. “I personally think that Gladys looked on Lamar as an embodiment of her other son, Jesse Garon, Elvis’ twin who had died at birth,” he avers.
Following Elvis’ death, Lamar immersed himself in the commercial music industry, making full use of the organizational skills he had refined during two decades of collaboration with the world’s biggest music star.
Recalls Tommy McDonald, “Shortly after the funeral, Lamar called me where I was living in Arlington, Texas, and said, ‘I’m going to start a management company here in Nashville. Can you come and help me run things? You’re a lot better at details than I am.’ I said, ‘Well, allright, I will’, and for three years I helped him operate Lamar Fike Management.”
The company managed several country and pop music acts including Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Henson Cargill, Little David Wilkins, Sunday Sharpe, Billie Joe Spears, Ray Pillow and Bill Sparkman and also operated a booking agency and two music publishing companies, created radio and television programs featuring country music headliners and served as a consultant for music publishers and record producers.
Recording executive Kevin Eggers, whose music business career began as a co-producer with promoter Sid Bernstein of the first Beatles and Rolling Stones U.S. tours and went on to include his own groundbreaking Poppy and Tomato record labels, knew Lamar from the early 1960s and worked with him on numerous projects over a 30-year period.
“Lamar was regarded as a kingpin in Nashville,” says Eggers. “Lamar dealt with everybody on the highest level — the Who’s Who of songwriters from Johnny Cash and Doc Pomus to Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel. Everyone wanted to get their songs to Elvis, and Lamar was the gatekeeper.”
And he was uniquely suited for the responsibility.
“Lamar had a great ear,” Eggers states. “He was a very sophisticated music person and enjoyed all types of music, not just rock or country. He could hear a hit song a mile away.”
A selection of song demos would be prepared at the Hill & Range office in New York, says Eggers, and then delivered to Nashville for Lamar to give a first listen. Elvis would come to the Nashville office after hours, and he and Lamar would play and discuss the possibilities, eventually picking out what Elvis wanted to record for his upcoming album.
“That kind of creative relationship is so important,” notes Eggers. “Elvis trusted Lamar completely. Lamar had complete access to Elvis on the most intimate level. At one time Lamar had, I think, four or five songs on the charts at the same time.”
Besides his business acumen, Lamar exhibited an unflagging penchant for boosting the careers of others.
As 1977 rolled around, Lamar had come to believe strongly in the hit-making potential of songwriter/performer Little David Wilkins and chose a dozen Little David songs for Elvis to consider for his next album. Elvis selected five songs and invited Little David to come to the album recording session set for Graceland following Elvis’ return from his Fall tour. Tragically, this collaboration never came to pass.
Pat Rolfe, who retired in 2010 as Vice President of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), worked as Lamar’s secretary at Hill & Range from 1966-1972. “If it weren’t for Lamar,” she avows, “I wouldn’t have had my career in publishing.”
Lamar never failed to go the extra mile for his clients, says Rolfe. “If one of our writers had a song we knew was a good song but wasn’t going to be a big hit on the radio or sell a lot of records, Lamar would work to get it into one of Elvis’ movies and onto an Elvis soundtrack album. This would draw royalties from around the world for years. He would help his writers anyway he could, help them pay their bills and feed their family. That was important to Lamar.”
From 1989-95, Lamar worked as a collaborator to Capitol Records Nashville executive Jimmy Bowen, an award-winning producer who shaped the recording success of artists like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Reba McEntire, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Glen Campbell and more. Bowen says his transition to country music from rock and pop got a big boost from Lamar’s friendship and assistance.
“Lamar helped me get introduced to Nashville, get to know the lay of the land on Music Row, so to speak. The country music industry was a very small circle of movers and shakers back then; maybe a dozen people or so controlled what happened. Lamar was a great help knowing who was connected to who.”
Lamar operated Bowen’s publishing company and had, says Bowen, few equals in terms of working knowledge of the intricacies of the music publishing business. “He understood the entire process, and he was great working with writers. Lamar really knew songs. He instinctively knew what song would be good for what artist.”
Eddie Kilroy, past president of Playboy Records and producer of numerous hits by Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Marty Robbins, believes Lamar honed those instincts during his years with Elvis.
“Deep down, he was preparing himself for the day when Elvis was gone, whether Elvis would quit the music industry or die or whatever,” Kilroy says. “By learning other aspects of the business, Lamar was preparing for the future.”
Lamar also made conscientious efforts to chronicle and clarify the past. Shortly after Elvis’ death, Lamar signed on to serve as a consultant for what would, unfortunately, turn out to be a controversial and much-criticized biography — Elvis by Albert Goldman, published in 1981.
Before the book went to press, Lamar was not given the chance to review the final galleys and correct numerous factual errors. After publication, he was so repulsed by the book’s inaccuracies that he disassociated himself entirely from the project.
In 1994, Lamar contributed a foreword and extensive background for The Elvis Encyclopedia by David E. Stanley and Frank Coffey; the following year, he participated in interviews for Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia by Alanna Nash.
He also appeared in several film and television documentaries including Life with Elvis (1991), All the King’s Men (1997), Mr. Rock & Roll: Colonel Tom Parker (1999), The Elvis Mob (2004) and Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005).
During his final years Lamar was eagerly sought as an authoritative source of Elvis information, participating in a globe-spanning circuit of television shows, lectures, symposia, collector conventions and fan fairs.
In October, 2010, Lamar was admitted to Arlington Memorial Hospital. From the day he checked in to the day he passed away, his cousin Tommy McDonald was at his side.
“I was there at the end,” recalls Tommy. “Two days before his death, he told me, ‘Tommy you have to promise me faithfully that you will see to it that Harold and L.E.’s book will be published so that everyone will know the true story.’”
In his final moments, says Tommy, “he was smiling, really smiling. I asked him, ‘What or who do you see?’ He just closed his eyes, still smiling.’”
Lamar Fike died January 21, 2011. He was cremated and his headstone marker placed in the Fike family plot at Mart Cemetery. The authors of Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond are grateful for the guidance he gave during his final months as they finished this book.
Though Lamar would grow up to travel the world and move among the highest levels of celebrity, it was perhaps inevitable that Mart, Texas, would be his final earthly resting place.
“Mart was your typical small town,” he once said. “Just a sleepy, quiet little Texas town. When we would visit there as kids, everybody knew me and I knew them. I thought that when you died, you went to Mart instead of Heaven.”
* * *
What will you learn about Elvis from these 400 questions answered by Lamar Fike?
First, that it took guts to be Elvis.
As bizarre as today’s Elvis impersonators might appear to current audiences, imagine the mental pressure cooker the Real Elvis endured as he underwent the sometimes rapturous, sometimes strained metamorphosis of an average face-in-the-crowd Memphis teenager into The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Number Two, that being Elvis required the dedicated help and support of a close circle of friends and family who believed in him. As a performer. As a person.
Lamar Fike was one of those friends.
Sit down here a while, and he’ll tell you about the Elvis Presley you thought you already knew. At the peak of his popularity. At the depth of his despair.
You’ll also learn about that little bit of Elvis we carry around inside, each and every one of us. Elvis may have left the building, but his voice is still in our soul.
* * *
_______________________________________
For a gallery of fan and press photos depicting the friendship
of Elvis Presley and Lamar Fike through the years,
go to www.pinterest.com and search
“Elvis and Lamar”
~ Family Roots: The Boy in the Man ~
________________________________
Q. Did Elvis ever talk of his childhood?
A. Not a lot, but every once in a while, he would. He didn’t have a lot of fond memories of his childhood.
Q. Did he resent his father for going to jail?
A. He never talked about it. None of that came up. Elvis just didn’t talk about it that much. Just something he didn’t talk about.
Q. Did Gladys try to protect him from the world?
A. Absolutely. Always. She was a good, kind, generous person. Gladys would give you the blouse off her back. That’s just the way she was. Everybody in the family loved Gladys, because she took care of everybody. Gladys was the matriarch of that whole family. I mean, everybody leaned toward Gladys. Everybody did.
Q. What about Vernon?
A. Vernon was always distrustful of everybody. I think prison made it worse. Vernon didn’t like anybody. Vernon liked me. He marginally liked me. But Vernon, he always felt everybody was a threat to him. We got along real well. In fact, I was the only one in the group to call him Vernon. Never called him Mr. Presley. Everybody else called him Mr. Presley. I always called him Vernon. He was afraid people would try to separate him from Elvis. And he worried how the money was spent and stuff like that, you know.
Q. Did Gladys protect you? When Elvis got ornery, would she step in and say, “Elvis—”
A. Yeah, she would. She’d say to him, “Calm down. Leave him alone.” He would do it. We’d get in an argument or something, and she saw that he started it, and she’d say, “Now, you need to stop that. That’s enough of that.” And Elvis would say, “Well, Momma…” “No, there’s no Momma to it. You need to stop that.” And later on, he’d say to me, “Listen, you son of a bitch…” And I said, “You know better than to start it in front of your mother. You know how she is.” Gladys really liked me, and I liked Gladys. I genuinely liked Gladys. I really, really liked her, and she knew it.
Q. What was it like when Elvis argued back to Gladys?
A. The biggest fights that Elvis had were with his mother. Vernon talked real low. Gladys screamed at the top of her lungs. You could hear her in the next county. They used to get in fights at the table. The big fights happened at the dinner table or the breakfast table. And boy, I mean, it scared the shit out of me. Elvis and her would start arguing, and God Almighty, you had to get out of the room. I mean, it got so loud. They’d throw food at each other and stuff like that. It got really bad, yeah.
Elvis had his mother’s temper. Elvis was exactly like his mother. They were like two peas in a pod. And the temper tantrums would just be horrendous. When I was living at the house in 1957, I mean, I was in the line of fire every day. It was just rough. You couldn’t get away.
Q. Was she ever angry outside the home?
A. When she was young, Gladys was out in the field one time working as a field hand. This guy that owned this place was on a horse, came up to her, got off the horse, started arguing with her. She picked up a plow share. You know what a plow share is? Plow share weighs 75-100 pounds. Picked it up, hit him right between the eyes with it and damn near killed him. She was strong as an ox. She was very strong. Big woman. That’s where Elvis got his wide shoulders, from her, not his father. Gladys had these big, wide shoulders. That’s where Elvis got it, from Gladys. Elvis’ looks were from Gladys. That dark hair and that skin and everything. The dark eyes also.
But Gladys’ anger came from fear. She was scared. Gladys was reacting out of fear. Fear that he would be hurt. She was always scared of that. She always said she could never stand to see Elvis or Vernon in the grave. Couldn’t stand to see it. That was her wish. So that’s the reason she died like she did.
Q. Was Gladys frightened by Elvis’ sudden fame?
A. The fame was moving real fast. They would get in a car, Gladys and Vernon, and drive around in that pink Cadillac or whatever. Gladys would dip snuff. Carried a little Maxwell House can to spit in. Everybody in town recognized them. That bothered her. It really bothered her.
Elvis’ fame, I think, had more to do with Gladys’ death than anything. It just worried her to death. She was a chronic worrier. She worried all the time. Her drinking caused a lot of it, too. You know, he was an only child. I mean, here’s a woman that would follow him to school, walk him to school. When he was in 10th-11th grade, she’d walk him to school. You’re talking serious shit here. You’re not talking lightweight stuff. Elvis was a momma’s boy. There was no if, ands, buts. He was a momma’s boy. I mean, he was. That was it. Elvis could do no wrong around Gladys — ever.
She never let him grow. She just suffocated Elvis. It’d drive Elvis crazy. Later on he toughened up. Everything Elvis did was for his mother. When he lost her, it was a void that was never filled. No. She was the matriarchal head of that house. It was a matriarchal family. Most families would be patriarchal, but she was the real and symbolic center of the house. When she died, Elvis became the center.
Q. Was Gladys a religious woman?
A. When Elvis was younger, yeah. Latter years, she never went to church. But she was a very religious woman. Had a lot of superstitions. That’s that odd thing growing up in the South, where you find superstitions right next to hard-core religious belief. She passed that superstitious attitude to her son. Elvis was superstitious as hell. Just little things would happen. She’d tell him to watch out for this. Gladys didn’t trust anybody. That’s where Elvis got it. He didn’t trust anybody, either.
Q. What role did Vernon play at the time?
A. Vernon never became the center of the house. Never, ever. I mean, Vernon worked for his son. So I mean, you know, you can imagine what kind of transitional situation that was. You couldn’t tell Elvis what to do. You’ve got a son making $10 million a year.
In fact, Elvis fired him one day. They called me. I was in the kitchen. Vernon said, “You need to come up here.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “Come on up here.” So I started coming up the steps, and Vernon came by me, and I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “Elvis just fired me.” I said, “Shit. I ain’t got a chance. I know that I’m next.”
I walked in the room. I said, “Am I next?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, you just fired your daddy. God Almighty, there ain’t nothing between you and me and him.”
He said, “No, I’m not gonna fire Daddy. I just told him that.”
But I mean, stuff like that went on. Those were fights. I mean, how often is it you fire your father? Guy’s 22 years old firing his father.
Q. Was it a huge shock for Vernon to see his son become an international music and film star?
A. It was unbelievable. It used to drive Vernon nuts