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How Peter Critchley Reinterprets Elvis History

May 6, 2026 at 12:43 pm · Filed under Books, Music ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

A thoughtful, deeply informed review of How the Web Was Woven: Essays on Elvis by Peter Critchley, in which Anthony C. Green explores the author’s scholarship, shared fandom, and the book’s challenge to long‑held myths about Elvis Presley.

Peter Critchley has been a Facebook acquaintance of mine for a number of years, and often comments on my posts, especially if they’re Elvis-related, such as my reviews of the two Baz Luhman films, the 2022 biopic, and this years Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert.

Book cover featuring a Elvis Presley in a black outfit with decorative details, holding an acoustic guitar, and waving, with the title 'How the Web Was Woven' and author's name 'Peter Critchley'.
Click on image to buy the book

Similarly, I’ve commented when something Peter has posted has come to my attention. This may not always be on matters Elvis, but I have long been aware via the wonders of social media that Peter is not only a very learned man in a whole number of fields, with a PHD in Philosophy, but also a fellow Elvis super-fan.

The book is a collection of essays written at various points over several years.

Its format is such that you could open it at any point and read any chapter that takes your fancy at any time. I’ve yet to read it all, but I chose to read the first twelve chapters in chronological order, and I will likely continue chapter by chapter until the end.

But that’s just me. If your interest is in a particular era or topic or album, then head straight for the relevant chapter, whatever takes your fancy. It’s a ‘dip into book’, and a very good one.

But I’m glad I personally decided to start at the beginning.  Already, in the very first two chapters, I discovered much in common between myself and the author as regards our relationship to Elvis.

The first Elvis album both of us remember is the little-regarded budget album (of which RCA have released far too many) Separate Ways. In Peter’s case, this album was bought for him by his mum. In mine, the album entered our household via my (now ex) brother-in-law, a big Elvis fan, when he married the youngest of my two older sisters, and the two of them shared our council house until they found a place of their own. He probably bought other Elvis albums with him too, but that’s the one I remember. Going through the track listing in the book, I found that I still remembered something about every track on that album, even though it must be over fifty years since I last heard it, until reading about it inevitably inspired me to check it out on YouTube.

So, both Peter and I discovered 1970s Elvis before we discovered the younger 1950s Elvis, and that freed us from the ‘Elvis died when he joined the army’ snobbery articulated by John Lennon, and which continues to be accepted and hegemonic amongst ‘serious’ rock critics.

I also discovered that the very favourite Elvis track for both of us is If I Can Dream, the raw, power-house ballad/address to the world with which he chose to conclude the 1968 ‘Comeback’ T..V Special, and interestingly, and rightly, chose to never perform again, despite the 1100 plus concerts he performed in Las Vegas and on the road throughout the United States between 1969 and his death in 1977.

I know my Elvis. I’ve read the books, even Albert Goldman’s hatchet job, listened to most, though not all of his tangled/mangled discography. I’ve seen all of the Elvis films at least once, all of the compiled concert footage films, starting with the first version of That’s The Way It Is, which I first saw on television in the mid-70s, up to Epic, the various biopics, from Elvis the Movie, which I watched at the Odeon cinema, Grimsby in 1979, soon after leaving school, to Luhman’s 2022 Elvis. I’ll check out any new documentaries that come to my attention, most recently, The Searcher and The Return of the King on whatever streaming service I can find them (both are excellent. I later bought a physical media version of the former). I even sometimes listen to the excellent TCB Elvis Podcast.

I probably don’t know as much about Elvis as I do the Beatles, though I might if I lived in Memphis or Tupelo, Mississippi rather than Liverpool, but I consider my knowledge to be well above that of the average or casual fan.

But Peter is in a different league, and I’ve learned a lot of stuff I either didn’t know or had forgotten I knew.

There are songs I’d heard once or twice and forgotten about, and have now been re-acquainted with, and many outtakes and alternative versions which I didn’t know existed. To give one example, the unadorned version of his much-maligned cover of Roger Whittaker’s The Last Farewell (a song my dad always liked – I skipped forward towards the end of the book to read this chapter), recorded by Elvis at almost the very end of his life, in comparison to the syrupy string-adorned officially released RCA version. This is one of many examples given of how unnecessary levels of post-production became a sad feature of much of Elvis’ recorded output from the 1960s onwards.

As these are essays written at various times, without necessarily having the end-point of a cohesive book in my mind at the time they were written, there is a certain amount of repetition, but this was no big problem for me.

Based on what I’ve read so far, certain recurring themes emerge.

  1.  The standard decline and fall narrative is a myth. According to this narrative, the 1954 – 1958 Elvis was great (ultra-purists might draw the line at the point he left Sun records for RCA at the end of 1955), one of the most important artists of all time, without whom there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones or The Clash. After he left the army in 1960, he abdicated his throne as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll to churn out increasingly dire Hollywood movies at the rate of three a year, accompanied by a series of equally dire soundtrack albums. The magnificence of the ’68 Special is generally noted, especially the sit-down sessions (much of which weren’t in the original broadcast and only became available later), before he returned to live performance as an increasingly bloated and drug-addled nightclub MOR performer in ever more garish jumpsuits, until his inevitable early death.

Like all good myths, this narrative contains much truth; and the mismanagement of Elvis career by both ‘evil genius’ manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker and RCA is undeniable, and is a running sub-theme through How the Web Was Woven.

But as Peter shows, even in what are considered to be his weakest years, approximately between 1962 and 1967, good music was recorded by Elvis. The problem was that instead of waiting until there were enough great tracks in the can to make a great album, they tended to be buried in twos and threes as bonus material on the movie soundtrack albums.

And not all of the film soundtrack songs were bad (I’ve always had a guilty fondness for his version of Frankie and Johnny), and I’ve even been inspired to revisit two or three of the films themselves. Ironically, leaving aside the four pre-army 1950s films, Wild in the Country from 1961 and, possibly, Viva Las Vegas three years later, my favourite has long been his very last acting role, 1969’s barking-mad but brilliant Change of Habit. 

I’m glad that Peter writes quite extensively about the movie years, as this whole period tends to be glossed over.  This is understandable, but Elvis made twenty-five films between leaving the army and returning to live performance. Between 1962 and 1969, there were no Elvis albums that weren’t movie soundtracks, so that’s a considerable chunk of the man’s career. Peter Guralnik’s two-volume Elvis biography, Mystery Train and Careless Love is probably rightly considered the best. But I always thought it should have been three. He raced through the Hollywood period like a man in a very great hurry, and Peter does an excellent job of filling in many of the blanks.

  •  Another re-occurring theme is that Elvis was very much a Heart Singer, that he was a technically brilliant singer, with a huge two-and-a-half octave range, but that this was secondary to the fact that he put his heart, and his soul, into his performances, whether live or in the studio. Obviously, there were times when this wasn’t the case. After all, there’s only so much heart one can muster for a version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and we have several instances of Elvis off-handedly expressing his displeasure with some of the material he was given to work with.

But in general, Peter is of course right. Whatever the style of music, rock, country, blues, gospel, pop, as long as the song was worthy of him, Elvis would give it all he had, in some cases lifting material above the mediocre through the sheer power of his performance.

As wide as his natural range was, emotional depth was always more important to Elvis than technical accuracy. It had never occurred to me before that he is singing flat at times on my beloved If I Can Dream until Peter mentioned it. But once you are aware, if you listen hard, you can hear it. But it didn’t matter. Elvis knew he’d nailed it, singing alone in a darkened studio, and he wasn’t going to worry about being a semitone out here and there. I just hope that the song hasn’t had auto pitch correction applied to it, as seems to be a depressing trend nowadays (see the excellent Wings of Pegasus podcast).

Peter is also right to stress that it was with the 70s ballad material, recorded long after Elvis ceased to be considered cool, that his power as a heart singer is best revealed. Put simply, long after his days as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, were over, and as Peter says, cursory, truncated versions of his 1950s hits were always the low points of his 1970s performances, he revealed himself to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest ballad singers of all time.

I won’t say anymore on this. Peter explains the concept much better than I can.

  • The final point I’ll cover, although there is, of course, much else contained within the book, is the democratic nature of Elvis and Elvis fandom. His appeal spans the spectrum, across sex or sexuality, nationhood, race (the accusation that Elvis somehow stole the black man’s music is another myth the author demolished with ease) and class. Elvis really did provide something for everybody.

I remember becoming friendly with a middle-aged ex-striking Yorkshire miner and his wife on holiday in Egypt, 1998. They loved ‘big ballad Elvis.’ Others may like his early stuff, or his gospel material, or his more country or blues orientated songs. Some of us like some of all of it.

There may be a perception of Elvis being somehow low-brow. But plenty of artists who are considered to be much more critically credible are or were big fans. For Bob Dylan, Elvis’ version of his Tomorrow is a Long Time is the one cover out of the very many cover versions of his songs that he is most proud of. I did know this, but I wasn’t aware that Leaonard Coen was also a big fan. Unfortunately, Elvis didn’t cover any of his songs, though the book had me checking out the quite impressive fake 1970s cover of Hallelujah, a song he would surely have gotten around to recording had he lived longer. Springsteen is a fan, and numerous other artists are cited, including some from the worlds of opera and classical music.

This essential democratic nature of Elvis is reflected in the variety of writing styles Peter has employed in the writing of this book. He’s a very learned man, and that comes across where appropriate. But this is no book of dry academic essays. He’s also quite capable of writing like a fan-boy, as in the ‘Lost album’ chapters covering the years 1964 and 1967/8. Isn’t that something we’ve all done, compiled albums that never were but should have been? I don’t know how many ‘What songs would have made the next Beatles album if they hadn’t split up when they did’ videos I’ve watched on YouTube over the years, but it’s a fair few. Such things can only be done well if you have the knowledge to know what songs were recorded when, which Peter clearly does.

How the Web Was Woven will probably be enjoyed most by those with some prior knowledge of and liking for Elvis, but it’s an accessible collection even for those who have merely a passing interest in the subject.

So, a hugely entertaining and thought-provoking read so far, and I’m looking forward to completing the rest of the collection.

And there’s still more to look forward to. In the blurb at the end, Peter teases a major three-volume musical biography, covering the fifties, sixties and seventies that he’s been writing and researching on and off since the 90s. Like the completed set of Mark Lewisohn’s promised three-volume Beatles biography (thirteen years and counting since volume one), that’s something I hope to live long enough to read.

Anthony C Green, May 2026

You may also be interested in:
Baz Luhmnan’s Elvis reviewed & EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert


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Baz Luhmnan’s Elvis reviewed

November 6, 2022 at 7:11 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, Music ·Tagged , , , , ,

  • 2022
  • 12A
  • 2h 39m
  • Stars: Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge
  • Writers: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner

In the build up to the release of this year’s Elvis movie, and in the various reviews I’ve read, seen and listened to since first seeing it on the big screen in late June, much has been made of the movie being ‘Baz Luhman’s Elvis’. I wouldn’t know. Scanning through Mr. Luhman’s Filmography shortly after my first viewing, I realised that I had never actually seen a Baz Luhman film. Since then, I’ve rectified this by seeing his Australia; and based on this admittedly small sample of his work, I have recognised certain stylistic tricks in his Elvis that would appear to be typical of his modus operandi

The life of Elvis Presley, from his childhood to becoming a rock and movie star in the 1950s.

It is certainly a very much a stylized reading of the Elvis story, with much fast cutting from scene to scene, and much use of music as a means of illustrating the story, so that the film takes the form of a semi-musical, rather than a movie with music as might be expected in a film about a major musical icon. All in all, what we get with Luhman’s Elvis is an impressionistic rather than a literal telling of Presley’s life.

Elvis focuses heavily on the relationship between Presley and his legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker, played by another legendary Tom, Tom Hanks. Indeed, the film begins with Parker, at the end of his life, seeking to absolve himself of all blame for the sad decline of his protégé through addiction to prescription drug and junk food, problems which led to his tragically early death, aged forty-two, on August 16th, 1977.

Parker’s words are used as a means of giving narrative structure to the film, and this is perhaps the most important of Luhman’s stylistic tricks, the way that Parker’s narration, which seeks to dispel any notion of himself as the villain in the Elvis Presley story, are in sharp contrast to the action we see unfolding on the screen. We thus have at the core of the movie the cinematic version of the literary device of the Unreliable Narrator, and this works very well.

The same can’t be said, however, for Tom Hank’s accent. Anyone with a decent grounding in the Elvis Presley story will know that Parker was a native of Holland, was an illegal immigrant to the United States, and that his alien status played a huge, perhaps a defining part in preventing Presley from touring the world outside of America. For those who don’t know, the issue is dealt with in some detail in the movie in any case. It is therefore rather overdoing it to give Parker a vaguely Dutch, or perhaps generically European accent, especially as there is ample evidence to the fact that Parker didn’t speak anything at all like this. Why didn’t Hanks, skilled craftsman that he is, attempt to speak as Parker spoke, that is as the typical carnival huckster that he was? Apart from the issue of his voice, Hanks’ performance is very good, more or less capturing the charlatan essence of Parker, which was summed up by the assessment of one wag that he ‘was not a Colonel, not Parker, and not even a Tom.’ Hanks looks great too, largely due to the efforts of the film’s prosthetics department, who did a great job of aging the character as the film processed, and of adding considerable bulk to Hank’s frame.

If Hanks’ performance is very good with reservations, then that of Austin Butler as the leading man is simply superb without any such qualifications. It’s actually relatively easy to do an Elvis impersonation, of both the man’s speaking and singing voice, which is no doubt is why so many people do it. But it’s not easy to do it without lapsing into parody. Kurt Russell made a fair fist of it in 1979’s Elvis the Movie. But he didn’t do his own singing, and his 1969 Elvis, the year at which this film concludes, looked and sounded more like mid-seventies Elvis to me. Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2005 CBS Miniseries Elvis the Early Years wasn’t bad either, but again he didn’t do his own singing, and as with Russel, the script didn’t call on him to go beyond the late sixties. Butler, by contrast, portrays the man all the way from 1953 to close to his bloated, drug addled death in Memphis twenty-three years later. And, Butler did do his own singing throughout the film. His vocal performance is spot on, so good in fact that when the voice of the real Elvis was intercut with his at some points on the later numbers, the change was so seamless that only keen students of Presley’s singing style would be able to tell the difference. If anything, Butler nails Presley’s spoken voice and mannerisms with even greater precision. At times, his ability to capture the essence of Presley in a word or look is simply breath-taking.

For me, the ‘very Baz’ fast cutting of the movie worked much better on the big screen than it did the small. In the cinema, the visual pyrotechnics have a mesmerizing, hallucinogenic quality. By contrast, re-watching the film more recently on television, the style became at times a little wearying. The problem with this style of editing is that the mind has no opportunity to properly settle on and take in individual scenes before it is scattered elsewhere, and major events pass by at such a rate that it is easy to miss them. As an example, it is generally accepted that Elvis’ mother Gladys was the real love of his life, a major influence on how he lived it, and that her death was a tragedy from which he never really recovered. But Luhman never really takes the time to develop her character into someone we really care about independent of our knowledge of her real-world importance. Though we do see the devastating emotional impact of Gladys’ death on Elvis, it is rather fleeting and to the extent that it is explored at all, it is done so more in relation to how Parker uses the event as a means of supplanting her as the central guiding influence in Presley’s life than for its long-lasting psychological impact on Elvis himself.

The frenetic pace is however fitting for the section of the movie that deals with Elvis meteoric rise to national and international stardom in 1956. There has been no better depiction of what it must have been like to be young, particularly a young woman, experiencing Elvis’ raw sexual power live on stage in this period, before Parker succeeded in taming him in order to win the acceptance of the mainstream Show Biz’ establishment.

The pace does slow when we reach the last decade of Presley’s life, a period that encompasses roughly one half of the two-hour, forty-minute movie. This was perhaps a conscious decision to reflect changes in Presley’s life, and it is a good one as characters, including the lead, are at last given the space to change and develop, and for the viewer to become emotionally invested in them.

I should say here say a few words about Priscilla, the girl Elvis married in 1967, an event that neatly signifies the end of part one and the beginning of part two of the film. The fact that she was a mere fourteen years’ old when they first met, whilst he was serving in the armed forces in Germany in 1959, is never explicitly stated. The age difference between the two is only revealed to us through the words of Elvis as he says, rather desperately in response to her ending of their relationship five years after their marriage, ‘you’ll see Cilla, when I’m fifty and you’re forty, we’ll be together.’ Her youth may not have been made explicit, but in that very first meeting she is depicted as a bubbly, chattering, and frankly adorable presence, in a way that was perhaps typical of well-bred, mid-teens all-American girls of the period. Taken through the whole movie, the role of Priscilla is relatively small, but important, the character revealed through perhaps four short two-hander scenes opposite Butler, and which are very, very well played by Olivia DeJonge.

The musical component of Elvis has been criticised, mostly by the type of Elvis fan who prefers even the dodgiest Elvis sixties movie soundtrack track to anything none-Elvis. Luhman must have known that he was on a hiding to nothing with this stratum when he decided to include in the movie not only Elvis’ songs, but also songs that blended Elvis into a ‘mash-up’ with modern artists, and illustrative music that didn’t include Elvis at all, such as the hit single Vegas by Doja Cat, and The King and I by Eminem and CeeLo Green. This eclectic use of music new and old is apparently an oft used device in the Luhman playbook, an example being his use of Hip Hop in his version of The Great Gatsby, as well as the Jazz which is more often associated with this story. Personally, although we could perhaps have done with a tad more Elvis, I think the musical choices in the movie were brave, and very, very effective, and could perhaps widen the appeal of the movie beyond the Presley fan-base towards a younger audience.  

As mentioned, the script opts for a much more impressionistic than factual interpretation of the Elvis story. As with Luhman’s choice of music, this deployment of poetic license in the depiction of real-life events is fraught with danger, opening him up to the criticism of often knowledgeable hard-core fans. But, again with some qualifications, think the approach generally worked well.

As an example, Elvis’ relationship with blues guitarist/singer BB King is presented as being much closer than it was in real life. But the deception works as an excellent shorthand for Presley’s relationship with black culture as a whole, particularly with the blues scene centered around Beale St in Memphis at the time of Presley’s rise to stardom. It also helps to dispel the oft’ repeated myth that Elvis was a racist.

All attempts at telling the Elvis Presley story, be they dramatisation, documentary, or even literary, tend to deal with the rightly derided Hollywood years, roughly 1961 – ’68, almost em passant, usually through the use of quickly moving and quickly gone montage. Luhman’s effort is no exception, except for the way he rather brilliant combines a cursory run through of this period with an introduction to Presley’s fabled Memphis Mafia gang.

The treatment of the iconic 1968 Comeback Special is even more outlandish. Elvis fans all know that Parker’s vision for the special, which was to air at Christmas 1968 in America, was for Elvis to come out into the lights of an empty studio wearing a Tuxedo, say ‘Good Evening Ladies and Gentleman,’ sing twenty or so Christmas songs and spirituals, say ‘Goodnight and Merry Christmas everybody,’ and fade the lights. Fortunately, the show’s producer Steve Binder, and even more thankfully Elvis himself, realised that such an approach would have spelled the final death knell to his already dying career, and chose instead to put Elvis together with members of his 1950’s band, dress him in black leather with an electric guitar strapped round his neck, and put him in a boxing ring style stage surrounded by adoring fans. What Luhman does is to use this real-life disconnect between the visions of Parker and Binder as the starting point for an onscreen farce which bore little relationship to actual events, during which Binder and Elvis attempt to convince Parker that they are indeed producing a Christmas-themed show, complete with Elvis wearing a horrendously cheesy Christmas jumper curtesy of Singer sowing-machines, the special’s sponsor, for the closing number, whilst in reality they are putting together a show much heavier on rock ‘n’ roll than on Christmas cliches. It’s funny and enjoyable, and I think works well as a means of revealing the existential choice that faced Elvis as he returned to public performance after more than seven year’s burial beneath layers of Hollywood schmaltz. My only criticism of this part of the movie is that we see none of the sit-down sections of the special, the heart of the show, when Elvis, for once, really played guitar and bantered informally with members of his band and crew. This will perhaps be addressed when we eventually get the four-hour cut that Luhman promises us is coming, and at least we do get a sizable chunk of If I Can Dream, the actual show closer, when Elvis donned the white suit that was so much cooler than the white jump suit that was soon to come, and produced perhaps his finest ever vocal performance.

 It was a brave but brilliant decision by Luhman to have Butler’s turn as Elvis effectively close with Presley’s incredibly poignant rendition of Unchained Melody, seated at the piano, only weeks before his death. The moment when Butler’s Elvis finally gives way to the real Elvis, bloated and defeated but still pouring his whole self into this operatic last-gasp performance will, I think, have left few dry eyes amongst cinema goers. From 1977, we then cut back, to the early years, to Elvis, the real Elvis, at his peak, ripping through the social fabric of America, and of much of the world, leaving it forever altered. Finally, his phenomenal achievements and lasting legacy as the most successful solo recording artist in history, are reminded to the audience by bare, simple, but revelatory screen-text. As brilliant as Austin Butler is in this movie, it is only right and proper that it is the real Elvis who closes it.

So, there we have it.  Baz Luhman’s Elvis, far from perfect, but a genuine cinematic experience that is way in advance of any other dramatisation of the life of the man they called The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It could even be a contender for the greatest ever rock biopic.

By Anthony C Green

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