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.
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.
- 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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