Disgraceland Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Double Elvis Media, LLC

  Cover design by Phil Pascuzzo. Cover illustrations by Matt Nelson. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: October 2019

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  Illustrations by Matt Nelson.

  “The Beast in Me.” Words and music by Nick Lowe. Copyright © 1994 by Big Deal Notes. All Rights Administered by Words & Music, a division of Big Deal Music, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  “Who Do You Love?” Words and music by Ellas McDaniel. Copyright © 1956 (Renewed) by Arc Music Corp. (BMI). All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3214-4 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-3213-7 (ebook)

  E3-20190606-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Fat Elvis

  Chapter 2: Jerry Lee Lewis

  Chapter 3: Dead, Euronymous, and Varg

  Chapter 4: Gram Parsons

  Chapter 5: Axl Rose

  Chapter 6: Chuck Berry

  Chapter 7: Sid Vicious

  Chapter 8: Sam Cooke

  Chapter 9: Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes

  Chapter 10: Phil Spector

  Chapter 11: Skinny Elvis

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  For Johnny Angel.

  Peace: I hope you found it, Brother.

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  Author’s Note

  Rock stars aren’t like you and me. They act insane and have insane things happen to them. They are more like feral, narcissistic animals than functioning members of society, and this is in part what makes them so damn entertaining.

  Journalists have dug deep into their pasts, their personal lives, and into the details surrounding not only their music but also their insane behavior, including the various crimes they’ve committed. Friends, lovers, and enemies have sold inside stories to the highest bidders, and some musicians have even penned their own autobiographies in order to ensure the telling of their own history. The stories told in this book rely on all these types of different accounts to piece together a read that is hopefully as wild as the musicians covered within. This book is a stylized interpretation of these stories, melding true crime and transgressive fiction and aligning the musicians, the music they made, and the crimes they committed with the mythology that surrounds them.

  I am indebted to the journalists, authors, and filmmakers who captured these stories first and got them down onto the record. I am also indebted to a small cast of co-conspirators who were more than generous with their time and offered me firsthand insight into some of the subjects covered herein. And I am indebted to the musicians who lived larger than life, proving themselves to be endlessly entertaining both on and off record.

  To all of these folks, I say thank you.

  Finally, a note about the victims: Each chapter of this book explores real people, not just human collateral damage strewn to the pay-no-mind list of history, products of the wild living done by the musicians; within these pages are dead spouses, relatives, bandmates, friends, and others who bear scars the likes of which we’ll hopefully never have to carry. It would be irresponsible if I did not acknowledge them and include a legitimate note of sympathy for both the victims and for those who survived them. It is impossible to research these stories without feeling, at times, intense dread and astonishment at what the worst among us are capable of. I can only imagine that this darkness is but a small portion of the real-life pain felt by those affected by the rock ’n’ roll animalism described herein.

  The beast in me

  Is caged by frail and fragile bars

  Restless by day

  And by night rants and rages at the stars

  God help the beast in me

  —Nick Lowe by way of Johnny Cash

  Chapter 1

  Fat Elvis

  Elvis couldn’t get the bullets into the chamber: His fingers—swollen along with the rest of his body from a steady diet of greasy, fried Southern food and shaking from his daily narcotics cocktail of antidepressants and pain relievers, morphine, codeine, diazepam, and several other barbiturates—made it near impossible to concentrate, never mind possess the physical dexterity required to properly thread the barrel of his small snub-nosed revolver with the tiny .38 Special bullets.

  Elvis could feel his temperature rising. He needed to get the gun loaded and get the shot off quick. Who knew how long it would be before the TV gods would deliver that handsome prick’s two-faced mug to his television screen again. The sweat on his forehead puddled above his brow and dripped down the side of his bloated face. The Valium wasn’t working and he needed another kind of release. He’d be up for hours unless he blew off some steam. Blasting Robert Goulet’s shit-eating grin off his face with his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson—the one with the TCB logo and lightning bolt on the pistol grip—was likely the only chance left to lower his blood pressure tonight.

  Goulet. Elvis hated him. Ever since Elvis shipped off to Germany and Goulet, back home, moved in on his girl. The bullet slid into the chamber just in time. THERE! Elvis’s heart practically burst through his sternum at the sight of Goulet onscreen, appearing in an oft-run commercial for the 1977 television show Police Story. Elvis took aim. He held his fire as the commercial moved through B-plot characters before returning to Goulet.

  Elvis didn’t want to blow it. The shot had to be perfect. He needed to blast Goulet’s face the very instant it filled the screen, otherwise his anxiety would remain pitched until morning. Sleep would never come, and he’d need to double down on amphetamines the next day to keep going. And besides, at this range, seated six feet away from the big RCA, there should only be one result: the kill shot.

  THERE!!!!

  Just then, Robert Goulet’s impossibly tan skin and sapphire eyes covered the twenty-five-inch screen. Elvis squeezed his fat sausage finger against the trigger.

  BOOM!

  The sound of the .38’s blast within the confines of Elvis’s Graceland den was deafening but definitely worth it. Smoke rose out of the hole in his television where the smug face of Robert Goulet had been just one second earlier. Elvis su
nk into himself with satisfaction. The feeling was almost postcoital, but despite the gratification, Elvis Presley, arguably the most popular entertainer in the world, had never felt more alone.

  And alone Elvis kept the wolves at bay. Beasts that roamed freely throughout his drug-addled psyche, but one beast raged loudest: the thought of his twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley. Dead at birth. And Elvis’s survivor’s guilt was strong. As was his grief. The twin emotions gnawed away, creating a hole in him that no amount of drugs, women, food, money, fame or Robert Goulet–kill shots would fill.

  Jesse Garon Presley, the brother was dead. God save Elvis Aaron Presley, the King.

  Fat Elvis shooting Robert Goulet.

  But if someone was going to save Elvis Presley, they’d better do it fast. It was August 1977, and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was king in name only. He’d been dethroned long ago by the Beatles, who’d descended like their cousins, the locusts, laying waste to everything before them. Then by sympathetic satanists posing as harmless rolling stones but who tumbled him like dice off the charts. And most recently by lean anarchists armed with only three chords and the truth.

  Gone were the heady and innocent days of newfound chart-topping success. His early triumph had been fueled by the accidental creation of a new type of earth-shattering music: rock ’n’ roll.

  Back then, Elvis’s grip on the nation was firm. The world had never seen the likes of him before. He was the vessel for a new sound. He naturally infused white Southern country music into gutbucket black blues, and in doing so gave rock ’n’ roll a level of relatability (and crossover commercial appeal) that was undeniable.

  The world shook. Parents rattled. And Elvis rolled.

  Rolled over the naysayers who miscast rock ’n’ roll as a fad.

  Rolled over the competition who misjudged him as a one-hit wonder.

  And rolled over Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and any and all traditional forms of music that got in his way. His first singles lit up the request lines of radio stations throughout the South, and Elvis quickly outgrew his little hometown record label. It was clear, almost from the jump, that Elvis Presley wasn’t just a recording artist. He was a culture-shaping phenom on the make.

  Back then in 1955, Elvis was lean himself. To most of America, with his long jet-black hair, acne-scarred cheeks, and slithering hips, he was just as alien looking as the punk rockers who now reviled him were in 1977.

  In the here and now, holed up in his Graceland mansion den, aka the Jungle Room, Elvis Presley’s kitschy, ostentatious, interior-designed man cave, with its animal prints, shag rug, and faux wood, he felt a million miles away from his humble beginnings despite the fact that he was only a fifteen-minute drive from 706 Union Avenue, the Memphis address of Sun Studio, where he’d gotten his start a couple decades earlier.

  Elvis, bored, hit the intercom on the wall and called for Diamond Joe Esposito, an original member of the Memphis Mafia, his entourage, who—among other things—kept him entertained when the need for distraction took hold.

  “Joe! Come on down to the den. I wanna shake it up tonight.”

  Within minutes Joe appeared.

  “Joe, let’s party, man. I’m bored. You see those girls outside the gates? Go bring ’em in the house.”

  “Elvis, there’s about three hundred people outside the gates right now.”

  “I’m not talking about all those people. Just the girls. The older girls. We don’t need none of that Jerry Lee nonsense. And tell the boys to get the bar stocked and I want some I-talian food. Call up Coletta’s and get a bunch of them BBQ pizzas. Let’s party, Joe.”

  Within no time there were roughly 150 women filling the walls of Graceland to accompany Elvis and the ten members of his Memphis Mafia entourage. Shooting fish in a barrel.

  But Elvis wasn’t interested in shooting fish. He sat in his chair and fingered his pistol. It gave Elvis a sense of security in these uncertain times. His career was at an all-time low. He wasn’t yet broke, but his massive overhead was threatening to bust his bank. He hadn’t had a top-ten hit since “Burnin’ Love” five years earlier and hadn’t had real critical acclaim since “Suspicious Minds” shot up the charts in 1969. But even then, nearly a decade before, he was still seen as past his prime. They wouldn’t have referred to his 1968 NBC special as the “Comeback Special” if he’d been reliably ruling his kingdom the whole time. And now, he was a lifetime away from the supernova-star status of his early No. 1 hits “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”

  Truth be told, Elvis had been creatively spent for the better part of a decade. And physically, he was in the worst shape of his life. To make matters worse, Elvis’s manager had him teed up to embark on a rigorous tour. It was a tour that he dreaded and was in no shape to do, physically or mentally.

  Elvis couldn’t help but wonder why he was in this mess. How did it get to this point? Lonely, running out of bread, and out of shape. He was only forty-two years old. And only a couple decades removed from being the undisputed King of Rock ’n’ Roll. The more he thought about it, the more he came back to blaming the one person he could never confront head-on. His manager, the Colonel. Colonel Tom Parker.

  Colonel Tom Parker had been an outsized figure in Elvis Presley’s life ever since 1955, just as Elvis’s first singles started to crack the charts. The Colonel was a talent manager and not actually a colonel. He was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, was from Breda, Holland, and was in reality an illegal immigrant who’d hoodwinked Jimmie Davis, the Louisiana governor and a one-time country star himself, to bestow upon him the honorary title of Colonel because he thought it made him seem more American.

  A new identity was a necessity for the Colonel. His days in Holland have been shaded by time but one theory goes that young Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk left Holland for the United States to escape a murder rap. Once in the States, he’d grifted his way through the Depression, making ends meet through a series of short cons until eventually finding work on the carnival circuit as a carny barker. It was there, in the carnival, where the wannabe Colonel would form his business philosophy: Entertainers, be it an elephant in a ring, a monkey in a cage, a lady with a beard, or a singer with a song, they were all the same. They weren’t artists, they were attractions.

  Once the United States got off the skids and Americans started spending money on entertainment again, Andreas, in the spirit of most hardworking immigrants before him, assimilated and began climbing the social ladder through hard work. The carnival was out. There was money to be made in the devil’s workshop, aka the music industry. So he began hustling tickets and dates for country music singers Minnie Pearl and Eddy Arnold, and he eventually built up enough clout to con Governor Davis into giving him that new handle. Now that he was “officially” the Colonel, he could fully become the prototype of the big barrel-bellied, cigar-chomping American music businessman. Colonel Tom Parker was poised to deliver a star attraction to the masses. All he needed was to find that attraction.

  Elvis couldn’t remember exactly when he first met Colonel Tom Parker. When he thought back to those early days, the scene that always played out in his head was the day he signed his management contract with the Colonel. His mama’s kitchen was small to begin with but was made smaller by the presence of Parker and his business partner, the country singer Hank Snow, whom Elvis’s parents admired deeply.

  Everybody in the room had a different idea of what was happening.

  Elvis’s parents believed their son was signing a management contract with Hank Snow, one of the most respected names in the entertainment business at the time. And that Colonel Tom Parker, who they didn’t really care for personally but believed brought some business acumen to the table, was a necessary evil. He was Snow’s partner, so he couldn’t be all bad.

  Hank Snow believed that he was cosigning a personal management contract to manage the brightest young star in America.

  And young Elvis, ever the pleaser, believed he was making everybody happy, par
ticularly his mama, and that he was going to be a big star.

  But like most confidence men, Colonel Parker believed only in the card up his sleeve, which right now was the actual contract that everyone was signing. Grifter that he was, the Colonel knew where he was vulnerable. He could sense the Presleys’ distrust in him, and he knew that they trusted his partner, Hank. So Hank was in the room. But he wouldn’t be for long. The contract was drafted exclusively to be between the Colonel and Elvis. Soon after the signing, Hank Snow would ask the Colonel about the status of his contract and the Colonel would reply, “You don’t have any contract with Elvis Presley. Elvis is signed exclusively to the Colonel.” Hank Snow was out.

  Despite this messiness, Elvis was right about one thing—he was going to be a big star. But his mother’s happiness would not last. After the signing that day, after the room cleared out and Hank headed out to the front lawn to speak with Vernon, Elvis’s dad, Elvis saw the Colonel speaking to his mother in the kitchen, in private and in hushed tones. And there was no mistaking the look on his mother’s face: stone-cold fear.

  Colonel Tom Parker, carny-barking soul sucker.

  Colonel Tom Parker was evil. If, as the Good Book says, being creative brings you closer to God—who in his infinite artistry created all living things in his own image—then someone who crushes creativity in favor of profit can be seen as the opposite of God, or the opposite of good.

  And he has filled him with the Spirit of God—and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work.

  —Exodus 35:31

  The Colonel couldn’t give a shit about “artistic designs for work.” He didn’t care about blues or country music or Elvis’s favorite form of music, gospel.

  Elvis had that indefinable “it,” and the Colonel knew that people would travel far and wide and empty their pockets to see it. Elvis was an attraction: a step removed from a novelty.