Music historian Peter Guralnick has written a third book about Elvis Presley, focusing on the King of Rock’ n’ Roll’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Ben Sisario of The New York Times interviewed Guralnick on the new release, and here’s some of their conversation:

Why did you decide to do this book, given how thoroughly you’ve covered the Elvis story in the two biographies?

When I first saw the letters 30 years ago, they just presented a very different picture than anything I had ever seen before. I’m not trying to disown what I wrote previously, but in “Careless Love,” Colonel was almost a Falstaffian character who could rise above the common herd, like a lovable rogue or something.

I saw my work as, in a sense, restoring Colonel to his rightful place in history. With the discovery of these letters, I felt I had to in some way get these out to the world so that people who write about Elvis, or were curious about Elvis, or were Elvis fans could see the actual facts. Every event in this book is familiar to readers, but there’s a completely different perspective here from behind the scenes.

At least in the early days, Parker was actually a visionary manager, who protected Elvis’s creative autonomy and got him extraordinary deals.

You can see that with Ed Sullivan. At first Sullivan vowed never to have that performer on his show. But after Elvis goes on Steve Allen’s show and it beats Sullivan in the ratings, he changes his mind. And Colonel says, that’s all well and good, but Elvis has to have total control of the selection of the songs that he sings, of the manner in which he performs them, of the musicians who back him. And without that, there’s no deal. We also see from the very beginning of Elvis’s signing with RCA that Colonel is operating in defense of Elvis as an artist.

There’s also the mystery of Parker himself: born in Holland, ran away to America as a young man, invented a story about having grown up in West Virginia. Why did he live the way he did?

He lived a life of self-invention. He lived a creative life, the life he always wanted to live, but that doesn’t answer the question. For example, why did the myth, the biography he created about himself — leading a life of adventure, joining the carnival and circus world — so exactly mirror his actual biography in Holland, but simply transposed to this country?

In the popular imagination, Parker is the villain of the Elvis Presley story, the exploiter.

For the first 10 years or so, until 1967 or ’68, he was never portrayed that way. He was portrayed as a character, but everyone took him seriously as a manager and admired the success he had achieved, which is why Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles, wanted to meet him.

But he’s almost always seen as a controlling Svengali type. We saw that as recently as Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic.

I think that’s become the main image of him since Elvis’s death. And Colonel obviously contributed to this. When Elvis and Colonel came to Hollywood, for example, each of them was taken as a rube, a hayseed. Very quickly it became apparent that Colonel, through his deals, and Elvis, through his talent, completely superseded anybody’s views of them in that manner. And I think it just amused them endlessly to see who in the end was the rube, who came out on top.

Read more here.