late October 2007
- Elvis is king of the dead
(Daily Herald / Associated Press, October 31, 2007)
Elvis Presley is still the King. Presley, who earned an estimated $49 million in the past 12 months, has reclaimed the No. 1 spot on Forbes.com's list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. He last topped the list in 2005. ... [as below]
- Elvis Is Forbes' Richest Dead Celebrity
(San Francisco Chronicle / Associated Press, October 30, 2007)
Elvis Presley is still the King. Presley, who earned an estimated $49 million in the past 12 months, has reclaimed the No. 1 spot on Forbes.com's list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. He last topped the list in 2005. ... [as below]
- Elvis Presley reclaims No. 1 spot on Forbes' list of top-earning dead celebrities
(Baltimore Sun / Associated Press, October 30, 2007)
Elvis Presley is still the King. Presley, who earned an estimated $49 million in the past 12 months, has reclaimed the No. 1 spot on Forbes.com's list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. He last topped the list in 2005. John Lennon ranks second with earnings of $44 million, followed by Charles M. Schulz ($35 million), George Harrison ($22 million), Albert Einstein ($18 million), Andy Warhol ($15 million), Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) ($13 million), Tupac Shakur ($9 million), Marilyn Monroe ($7 million), Steve McQueen ($6 million), James Brown ($5 million), Bob Marley ($4 million) and James Dean ($3.5 million).
Presley died in 1977. His estate continues to generate millions from music royalties, DVDs, licensing deals and tourism at Graceland, the rocker's mansion in Memphis, Tenn. Forbes said the celebrities on the list, posted Monday, earned a combined $232 million in the past 12 months.
- Singer Robert Goulet dead at 73
By Dennis McLellan - Los Angeles Times
(Chicago Tribune, October 30, 2007)
Robert Goulet, the strikingly handsome singer with the rich baritone who soared to stardom on the Broadway stage in 1960 playing Lancelot in the original production of "Camelot," died Tuesday morning. He was 73.
... The American-born Goulet, who moved to Canada as a teenager, was a popular singer on Canadian television when he auditioned for the role of the brave young knight in Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot," opposite Julie Andrews' Guenevere and Richard Burton's Arthur. ... Goulet, who won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1962, went on to win a Tony Award as best actor in a musical for his portrayal of Jacques Bonnard in Kander and Ebb's "The Happy Time" in 1968. ... During his heyday, Goulet also sang at the White House for Presidents Johnson and Nixon and headlined in Las Vegas. He even earned a footnote in the saga of Elvis Presley: Goulet was performing on television when Elvis famously blasted his TV screen with a handgun. ...
- Founder of World Press Institute dies
(Yahoo! News, October 30, 2007)
Romania - American journalist Harry W. Morgan, who interviewed Mother Teresa, John F. Kennedy and Indira Gandhi and taught generations of journalists, died Tuesday. He was 73. ... During a nearly 50-year journalism career working for Reader's Digest, Morgan went to more than 100 countries and interviewed many notables, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Elvis Presley and Ernest Hemingway. In 1961, he founded the World Press Institute, which provides fellowships to allow foreign journalists to live and work in the United States. He also founded the Friendship Ambassadors Foundation, which promotes cultural exchanges. ...
- Top-Earning Dead Celebrities
By Lea Goldman and Jake Paine
(wistv.com, October 29, 2007)
The 13 legends in our seventh annual list of the Top-Earning Dead Celebrities grossed a combined $232 million in the past 12 months. Many are instantly recognizable one-name wonders (Elvis, Marilyn, Warhol) who still command attention worldwide, making them a marketer's ideal pitchman.
Indeed, all the members of this year's club are the lynchpins of enormously profitable -- and growing - -merchandising empires. Albert Einstein's name is used to peddle Baby Einstein DVDs. Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel's books are a staple of every kiddie library on the planet. Hundreds of performances of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown pad the portfolio of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz each year--as well as comic strips that are still syndicated daily in thousands of newspapers worldwide.
But even in death, there can only be one King. Reclaiming his top spot on the list is Elvis Presley, whose estate generated $49 million in the past year. CKX Entertainment, the publicly traded firm which presides over the bulk of the Elvis empire (daughter Lisa Marie Presley retains a 15% stake) announced a massive overhaul of Graceland this summer, marking the 30th anniversary of the The King's death. Among the changes are a new hotel convention center, a state-of-the-art multimedia museum and a new, spiffier visitor's center.
... The plans are already paying off: Revenues from Graceland were up 15% this year, to $35 million. And that doesn't include royalties generated from Elvis music, DVDs and licensing deals like the one struck with Cirque du Soleil for an Elvis-themed revue in Las Vegas. ...
- Man looking for Elvis poster from 1955 show in Cape
By Bridget DiCosmo
(Southeast Missourian, October 29, 2007)
Andrew Hawley is looking for an Elvis Presley concert poster, similar to the one [below], from a 1955 Cape Girardeau performance.
(Photo courtesy Andrew Hawley)
In 1955, Elvis Presley, then a 20-year-old, relatively unknown singer, took the stage at the Arena Building in Cape Girardeau. Children younger than 12 were admitted for free, according to the poster advertising the event. Tickets cost $1 for adults. Five decades later, a Southern California man says he's willing to pay a lot more than that for just the poster.
Andrew Hawley of Santa Monica recently took out a classified advertisement in the Southeast Missourian offering $10,000 for an original Elvis 1955 Cape Gir-ardeau concert poster. "I'm on a quest for original Elvis and Buddy Holly concert posters," Hawley said. As he spoke on the phone, Hawley, an entrepreneur who dabbles in real estate and stocks, said he was admiring his Elvis concert poster from a show at Municipal Auditorium in Topeka, Kan.
"I have a collection of stuff. I trade them, buy them," he said. Because Elvis Presley toured nonstop, Hawley said he believes the odds of his collecting a majority of posters are in his favor, though he doubts he'll be able to track down all of them. ...
- Country singer Porter Wagoner dies at 80
(Yahoo! News / Reuters, October 29, 2007)
U.S. country singer Porter Wagoner, lanky Grand Ole Opry star whose flashy Nudie rhinestone suits dazzled fans when he sang with rising new performer Dolly Parton in the 60s, died on Sunday from lung cancer, said his publicity agent, Darlene Bieber. He was 80. ... Wagoner, an Opry star since 1957 and a Grammy winner, was a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and won three Country Music Association awards for songs with Parton in the Vocal Duo and Vocal Group categories. The two recorded 14 Top 10 hits including "Last Thing on My Mind" and "Please Don't Stop Loving Me." ... A high school dropout after his father's health failed, Wagoner began his career on a radio show in Springfield, Missouri, where he met Nudie Cohen, a Brooklyn-born tailor who advised him to don his trademark suits on stage. Cohen went on to design suits for Elvis Presley. ...
- TV Preview: Runnin' on Empty: Lots of Details, Little Meaning in Tom Petty Documentary
By J. Freedom du Lac
(Washington Post, October 28, 2007)
Nearly an hour into the interminable music documentary "Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," Petty himself recalls that rock-and-roll circa 1976 had become bloated. There were too many seven-minute songs, he says. Such a piggish display of excess and self-indulgence! ... Bogdanovich's documentary clocks in at just under four hours. All that time, and you're still left wondering what makes Petty tick. ... And Petty simply does not warrant that much viewing time. He's a terrific talent who has written some great songs, has a very good band and has been somewhat underrated throughout his career. But he's not culturally significant in the way that, say, Elvis Presley or the Beatles are. ...
- 'Can't Buy Me Love'
By JONATHAN GOULD
(New York Times, October 28, 2007)
Now, you've got to keep in mind that Elvis Presley was probably, innately, the most introverted person that came into that studio. Because he didn't play with bands. He didn't go to this little club and pick and grin. All he did was sit with his guitar on the side of his bed at home. - Sam Phillips
Well since my baby left me ..." The voice, unaccompanied but for the tinny flourish of piano that anchors the end of each line, was somehow bigger and riper with feeling than any voice its young listeners had ever heard. "Well I found a new place to dwell ..." It projected an authority and an insolence that reached beyond the words themselves, and it came from a place beyond the realm of "entertainment" as they had ever conceived of the term. Now joined by a doomstruck bass line, the sound of that voice seemed only to grow larger and more menacing, yet closer and more confiding as well, as if - given the lurching slow-dance tempo of the music - the singer's lips were pressed tight against the ear of the girl he now began to address, his words expressing a vengeful wish to make her feel the same way he was feeling in his room at the Heartbreak Hotel: "So lonely I could die." Though such things had been said for time immemorial in the lives of ordinary people; and though similar expressions of such dire emotion could be found in a growing number of avowedly realistic novels, plays, and films; and though something very much like it had been available for years on the sorts of records that most people never heard (including earlier, more obscure records by this same singer) - the fact remained that no man had ever sounded this way, or spoken this way to a woman, in front of so many millions of listeners before.
Elvis Presley was the catalyst, not the originator, of the phenomenon called rock 'n' roll. Three years before he made his first recordings, the term was being promoted by a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed as a race-neutral pseudonym for the black rhythm and blues that Freed began beaming across a wide swath of the North American continent in 1951. In 1954, the year that Freed moved his radio show, "Moondog's Rock 'n' Roll Party," to New York City, a white band singer named Bill Haley (himself a former disc jockey) recorded a pair of songs on the Decca label, one a novelty tune with a snappy tick-tock rhythm called "Rock Around the Clock," the other a sanitized "cover" version of a current rhythm-and-blues hit by Joe Turner called "Shake, Rattle and Roll." "Rock Around the Clock" failed to catch on at first, but Haley's pallid rendition of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" became a hit record, rising into the Billboard Top Ten in the fall of 1954. The following year, "Rock Around the Clock" was featured on the soundtrack of a film called Blackboard Jungle - one of a spate of Hollywood movies designed to exploit the rising tide of public anxiety about juvenile delinquency in America. Placed in a suitably inflammatory context, the song caught fire, reaching number one on the pop charts in the summer of 1955, turning the chubby, thirtyish, tartan-jacketed Haley into the world's first rock-'n'-roll star.
In the meantime, legend has it, an eighteen-year-old delivery truck driver named Elvis Aron Presley sauntered into the storefront offices of Sam Phillips's Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1953 to make an acetate of a song called "My Happiness" as a birthday present for his mom. (That Gladys Presley was born in the spring only burnishes the myth.) Sam Phillips, who operated his studio in conjunction with a small independent record label called Sun, had concerned himself to date with recording such talented Memphis-area bluesmen as Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King. Elvis at first made little impression on him. But Elvis made enough of a pest of himself in the months ahead that Phillips eventually called up an aspiring guitarist he knew named Scotty Moore and asked him to work with the boy. In July of 1954, Presley, Moore, and a bassist named Bill Black came in for a recording test. Sam Phillips asked Elvis what he liked to sing. Elvis, it turned out, liked to sing most anything. He sang country songs in a keening tenor reminiscent of Bill Monroe, and pop ballads in a woozy baritone reminiscent of Dean Martin. Phillips started him out on a ballad, "I Love You Because." The performance, like that of nearly every ballad Presley would ever record, was cloying and overdrawn. Then, during a break in the session, Elvis began to fool around with a blues song he knew called "That's All Right"; Moore and Black fell in behind him, and Phillips rolled the tape. ...
- TV Preview: Runnin' on Empty: Lots of Details, Little Meaning in Tom Petty Documentary
By J. Freedom du Lac
(Washington Post, October 28, 2007)
Nearly an hour into the interminable music documentary "Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," Petty himself recalls that rock-and-roll circa 1976 had become bloated. There were too many seven-minute songs, he says. Such a piggish display of excess and self-indulgence! ... Bogdanovich's documentary clocks in at just under four hours. All that time, and you're still left wondering what makes Petty tick. ... And Petty simply does not warrant that much viewing time. He's a terrific talent who has written some great songs, has a very good band and has been somewhat underrated throughout his career. But he's not culturally significant in the way that, say, Elvis Presley or the Beatles are. ...
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