The King and us

One of the most bizarre entries in the fairly weird collection of yarns I penned for the South China Morning Post's Postmagazine was joining the Hong Kong Elvis Presley Fan Club on its trip of a lifetime, a pilgrimage to Graceland for the Candlelight vigil and stations of the cross observed each year in Memphis, Tennessee by the true believers.

FOR three nights running now, the King has come to me in my dreams. Conjured by a combination of greasy junk food, Deep South humidity and serious sensory overload, he wafts into my subconscious as a giant, disembodied head. Not beefy, bloated Las Vegas Elvis, but the preternaturally beautiful young Hillbilly Cat. His airbrushed skin kissing the inky lustre of his soaring pompadour like a peach on black velvet; the perfect pink cupid's bow mouth curling up at one corner. And as I'm transfixed by those sad soft glazed eyes, an unshakeable conviction takes hold. Elvis is about to eat me. His lips part to reveal a graveyard of rotting teeth and a grotesquely swollen tongue, drooling hungrily. As the King moves in to chow down, I awake with a jolt and a stifled shriek, a sweaty wreck in a sodden bed.

In his pomp(adour): The Hillbilly Cat

Strange? Sure. But it would be stranger not to have such visions after a few days immersed in the madness that is Memphis in August. For when the going gets weird, it seems the seriously weird go to Graceland. The ante-bellum mansion has become Mecca, Calvary and Varanasi for the ever-swelling ranks of true believers coming to commemorate the death - and lucrative resurrection - of Elvis Aaron Presley.

In these sacred surrounds, the quirky quickly becomes the quotidian; the bizarre, banal. Where within a week, you can attend the Elvis for Everyone Convention, rival Elvis impersonator contests, the Heart of Elvis show, the Elvis Fan Club Festival, the Elvis: Legacy in Light Laser Show, Elvis Video Nights, the Elvis Reunion Concert, the University of Oxford International Conference on Elvis Presley (topics to include The Elvis Connection to Feminine Spirituality and Understanding Your Inner Elvis, along with a guest performance by San Francisco Lesbian impersonator Elvis Herselvis) and, bafflingly, even the Elvis Presley International five-kilometre Run. Where you can stuff yourself with fried peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches and empty your wallet on all manner of Kingly kitsch.

But that is to jump ahead of the story. We are here in the eye of Typhoon Elvis with six members of the International Elvis Presley Fan Club's Hong Kong chapter, who have travelled halfway around the world on a solemn pilgrimage to worship at the altar of the King. Meet club founder Regina Cheung, vice-president Katima Khan, and paid-up, card-carrying members Mabel Lee, Elsa Yuen, Tina Lam and, yes, Elvisina Tang.

Despite what might seem the excessive devotion denoted by the latter's choice of moniker, these ladies actually tend towards the saner end of the Elvis fandom spectrum, in that they boast not a single Elvis tattoo or white jumpsuit between them, nor do any profess to have fathered the King's love child or spotted him serving up slurpees in a 7-Eleven. What unites them - and tens of thousands of other pilgrims - is a forgiving and unquestioning love of their idol; a love that transcends the cheeseburgers and amphetamines, that rises above the weird obsessions and the snivelling sycophants. A love that draws them inexorably to Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee ...

Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee

IT IS August 13 - a sweaty Memphis morning some 18 years and 362 days since the King toppled from his porcelain throne. We are about to embark on the Graceland tour, which, along with a visit to Elvis' birthplace, Tupelo, and the Candlelight Vigil, has become one of the stations of the cross for the King's disciples.

Graceland perches on a hill to the southeast of Downtown Memphis, set back from the imaginatively named Elvis Presley Boulevard, a depressing street of strip clubs, fast food joints and pawn shops. We have assembled in the plaza across the road - an oasis of the odd and the otiose, encompassing the Elvis Presley Auto Museum, an enclosure where his two private jets are grounded, a movie theatre relentlessly repeating an Elvis documentary urging us to 'Walk A Mile In My Shoes', and store after store after store hawking anything to which Elvis' image can be affixed.

Elvis clocks and Elvis fridge magnets and Elvis pens and Elvis T-shirts and Elvis jeans and Elvis sunglasses and Elvis posters and Elvis jigsaws and Elvis black velvet portraits and Elvis wind-chimes and Elvis badges and Elvis keyrings and Elvis temporary tattoos and Elvis mouse pads and Elvisopoly and Elvis shake-up snowstorms and Elvis ashtrays and Elvis dolls and Elvis limited edition porcelain plates and Elvis teaspoons and Elvis notepads and Elvis sloppy-joes and Elvis toilet brushes and Elvis blow-up sex dolls.

Well, OK, I made up the last two. But you get the idea. Graceland Inc, which Priscilla Presley set up after the King croaked and which exercises a paranoid, litigious stranglehold over his legacy, rakes in more than US$300 million (HK$2.34 billion) a year from this kind of, er, crap.

In part of the plaza, near two immensely fat women signing up people for limited-edition Elvis Mastercards, we browse around the fruits of an Elvis art contest, tributes to the King in pencil, pastels and oils. Outside, under a tent, one of a promised all-day line-up of Elvis impersonators is belting through a slightly off-key Viva Las Vegas.

His reedy voice almost gets lost in the miasma of perspiration and cheap perfume swirling under the tent. Great sweat stains, their epicentres in his armpits and groin, work their way across the red jumpsuit straining over a ponderous gut. All about the plaza, impersonators ranging from the good, the bad to the mind-bogglingly awful - some in civvies, some in full regalia - are strutting about, posing for photographs, practising their moves, and saying, in their best baritone mumbles, things like 'thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen'. Some have a modicum of talent, and might even get to compete in one of the impersonator contests. Others are, without doubt, completely deranged.

Mabel is clutching a handcrafted plaque featuring a white-jumpsuited Elvis partly hidden by an unfolded Chinese fan that reads 'One World, One King', to place in the Meditation Garden behind Graceland where Elvis and his parents lie buried. 'Some people think we're crazy, but we all love Elvis in our own way,' says Katima as we wait. 'This is our tribute to Elvis from the 300 members of the club and all his Hong Kong fans.' Each is clad in matching fan club T-shirts designed by Mabel, a graphic artist with the Provisional Airport Authority, who is still buzzing from meeting DJ Fontana, Elvis' drummer, on the King Creole Riverboat Cruise last night.

Just say no: Special Agent Elvis strikes a blow against drugs

Regina, a sales manager for a sports bag exporter who founded the Hong Kong fan club in 1968, recounts how earlier in the morning the group was handed a thrashing in an impromptu trivia quiz challenge by a group of fans from Michigan. 'You had to identify which movie a piece of dialogue was from - they were too good,' she admits.

Each has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Elvis, however, and my puny attempts to test their Elvis knowledge meet with polite giggles and ready answers. They have all been fans since their teenage years or younger, turned on to Elvis by friends, siblings or a chance snatch of a song on the radio. Katima, a footwear merchandiser, says she has 20 of Elvis' 31 movies at home and will not be content until she has collected them all. Kid Galahad and King Creole are her favourites. 'I have been a fan since I was four,' she says. 'I remember when I was 10 and my brother told me he had died. Every time I watch him in concert I feel sad all over again.

'There is only one king - his charisma, he's unique. We all feel that by coming to visit Graceland we can really show Elvis how much we care.' Katima says the club has three large-scale get-togethers each year to celebrate the King's birth and death and the anniversary of the club's founding on May 1, plus numerous karaoke, film and quiz nights, and the occasional guest impersonator. A quarterly newsletter, Elvisland, keeps club members updated on Elvis happenings. Mabel is unanimously named best singer in the group, and says her favourite songs are Love Me Tender and Danny Boy.

Elvisina says she became a fan when she was 14, and fell so deeply in love with Elvis' music she decided to name herself after him. 'I remember it was early in the morning when I heard he died and I couldn't believe it. There was a black cloud over me for a long time after,' she says. Elsa, a lecturer at the Vocational Training Council, says she would give her life if it would bring Elvis back. She has been appointed to capture the pilgrimage on video, so the club's other members can share the experience upon their return to Hong Kong. Tina, a Jordan housewife, quickly shows herself to be the clown of the group, grabbing Elvis impersonators as they pass for photos and hamming it up for the video.

The Graceland tours leave every 15 minutes, and eventually it is our turn. We are each handed an outsized Walkman and headphones as we clamber onto a shiny, red-white-and-blue minibus and are whisked up the the drive to Graceland's front door. The home's gracious and stately exterior belies the orgy of bad taste about to be revealed within.

Down in the Jungle Room

A bored-looking man named Ray who speaks with a mouth full of gravel informs us he'll be our guide. Then we press our play buttons and are whisked into the holy of holies. A blizzard of facts and figures and Elvis information - some narrated by Priscilla herself - begins which will not let up until we stagger back on to the bus two hours later. 'Graceland is on 13.8 acres ... Elvis bought it for $100,000 in 1957 ... here's the music room where Elvis would jam with his buddies ... here's the hallway where Elvis used to show off his karate moves ... there are 14 TV sets in Graceland ... here's the dining room where he'd enjoy hearty, homecooked meals ... here's the chair where Lisa Marie would have a nap ...' Each new room revealed tops its predecessor for tackiness, culminating with the famous Jungle Room, in all its puke-green carpeted, faux zebra hide-upholstered, swingin' safari glory. Inside, Graceland seems surprisingly small, to the point of claustrophobia. Flash photography is strictly banned, and most of the rooms are poorly lit, but the ladies snap away with gusto.

We are led out through the backyard and into the Trophy Room, a separate building which is an Aladdin's Cave of thousands of gold records, movie posters, costumes, letters from presidents, life-size portraits and other priceless artefacts from the King's reign. The ladies are enthralled and blaze away with their cameras, causing a logjam as tour group after tour group backs up in the twisting corridors.

Graceland Inc is scrupulous about its public image and, as a journalist and therefore a potential threat, I am dogged every step of the way by a wide-eyed young minder named Tonya. As we wait outside the Trophy Room, she informs me in a mint-julep drawl of how corporate nights at Graceland are a 'growin' end a' the business', how Japan is a huge Elvis market and how (this with a totally straight face) 'we keep all aah merch-an-dass very tasteful'.

Half an hour and several dozen rolls of film later, we emerge from the Trophy Room and make our way to the Meditation Garden, where kitsch and pathos commingle in copious quantities. A statue of Christ, engraved with Presley's name, gazes heavenwards in tortured rapture, amid a bubbling fountain, coloured lights and Grecian columns. Around the graves and pathways, thousands of wreaths, plaques and floral tributes have been placed. Mabel reverently deposits the group's plaque close to Elvis' eternal flame. There is no weeping or gnashing of teeth, just the click of shutters.

As the bus bounces back to the plaza, Tina says: 'It was too much to take in at once. My heart is jumping!' Adds Katima: 'Personally, I don't feel so sad. I accept the reality of his death, and I look forward to a bright future in which new generations will come to know Elvis.'

WEDNESDAY dawns even steamier and by mid-morning, as we reassemble at the Graceland gates to sign the graffiti-laden wall, a nasty bout of heat rash from all this walking in Memphis has me itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree. About half-way along the vast stretch of stonework, we spot a small patch of unsigned masonry, and fat black markers are whipped out. 'Elvis, thanks for your music - Mabel'; 'Elvis, I think of You, Tina'; 'Elvis, Always on My Mind, Regina'; 'Elvis, TLC Always, Katima'; 'Elvis, I'll Remember You, Elvisina'.

Elsa simply signs her name in Chinese characters. My flippant inscription, 'The King kicks good rockin' butt' draws a mixture of giggles and reproving glares. Then it's on to the Holiday Inn, where the biggest of several conventions is in progress. Plenty of cash is changing hands for a mixture of junk and genuine rarities. One dealer has a wall lined with early Sun Records singles, selling for US$2,000 each. In one collection, Regina spots a special commemorative CD released by the Hong Kong club several years ago, which is now selling for US$80. 'We should have bought some more over with us,' she says, not completely in jest. They are in Elvis fan heaven, and will spend hours selecting new additions to their already extensive collections of Elvisabilia back in Hong Kong.

At one stall stands the round and rubicund Al Dvorin, a man who turned five simple words into a career. He is the chap who would portentously proclaim at the end of each concert: 'Elvis has left the building'.

'I didn't want to make anything out of it for all these years, I was happy with my memories of Elvis. But this year I've decided to come out of the woodwork and meet all the fans,' he rasps. It is not clear whether he is joking when he says he is considering suing the makers of Independence Day for using his phrase in the alien blockbuster.


IF ALIENS really have kidnapped Elvis, as the likes of the National Enquirer would have us believe, they have chosen well. What other figure could provide such clues to the quirks and foibles of the most powerful nation on Earth? For that matter, who else this century has spawned a new religion spanning every country and culture? It is impossible to spend more than a day or two in Memphis without beginning to ponder the metaphysics of Elvis. He is everywhere - and perhaps he always was; some pop culture Platonic ideal made material in a tiny Tupelo shack. Is he truly one of William Carlos William's posited 'pure products of America (that) go crazy'? Or just a hick with a four-octave voice and a pornographic pelvis who blundered into the right spot at the right time, the unwitting spark for an incendiary new generation?

Music critic and author Greil Marcus, in his seminal book Dead Elvis sums it up thus: 'The enormity of his impact on culture, on millions of people, was never really clear when he was alive ... When he died, the event was a kind of explosion that went off silently, in minds and hearts; out of that explosion came many fragments, edging slowly into the light, taking shape, changing shape again and again as the years went on. No one, I think, could have predicted the ubiquity, the playfulness, the perversity, the terror, and the fun of this, of Elvis Presley's second life.' In the beginning, we are tempted to say, was the word, and the word was with Elvis and the word was Elvis. There are but two figures born to this world immediately and universally recognised by a single, singular name, whose births and deaths are remembered each year by festive ritual and solemn ceremony - although admittedly, Jesus didn't have the advantage of supermarket tabloids, long-playing records and televised comeback specials to spread his gospel. Presley's transmutation from mere mortal superstar to saint and, finally, saviour, has been pondered, analysed and dissected by a plethora of pundits.

King contrary man: the paradox of Elvis

Yet how a gluttonous, drug-addled hillbilly who didn't even write his own songs became such a figure of worship and redemption remains one of the great mysteries of our time. Certainly his death shared nothing of the tragic grace of Christ's crucifixion - Elvis keeled over on the crapper when his clogged and narcotised heart gave out, discovered face-first in his shag-pile carpet, wobbly bottom aimed inelegantly skyward.

Marcus argues that 'Elvis contained more of America - had swallowed whole more of its contradictions and paradoxes - than any other figure'. The irreverent might add that he also swallowed more burgers, but to mock would be to miss the point. Elvis worship exists, and the congregation swells each day. It has been estimated that by the year 2000, there will be more than 250,000 Elvis impersonators worldwide - which is surely a healthy priesthood in any religion's terms.


IT IS 7.15 pm and in a kleig-lit dressing room adjoining the Memphis Sheraton ballroom, the priests are donning their robes. This the third of five long nights of the Elvis Extravaganza '96 International Impersonator Contest; a sweaty fiesta of sideburns and sunglasses, jelly legs and jumpsuits, swinging hips and curling lips. There are fat Elvises and skinny Elvises, tall Elvises and short Elvises, young Elvises and elderly Elvises. They are divided pretty much equally into Elvis' three main incarnations: the slick-suited and bequiffed young Hillbilly Cat Elvis; the leather-clad, 1968 TV Comeback Special Elvis; and the puffy, karate-kicking, scarf-distributing, rhinestone-encrusted Las Vegas jumpsuit Elvis.

One by one they take to the stage, each allotted - in a nicely Warholian touch - 15 minutes in the spotlight. The audience is dotted with Elvises come to check out the competition. At the back of the ballroom, tables groan under the weight of merchandise being hawked by rival fan clubs - that's Elvis impersonator fan clubs - as big-haired matrons extol the virtues of their hometown Elvises. The Hong Kong ladies are having the time of their lives, clapping, shrieking, singing along and then clinically dissecting the efforts of each Elvis. During the better performances, assorted females cluster around the foot of the stage in the hope of a tenderly bestowed scarf or an eyeful of swivelling crotch.

The judges award marks on three main criteria - the look, the voice and the moves. Most of the impersonators have one, or perhaps two in their favour. Tonight, only Chicago newcomer Travis Morris has it all happening, and as he rips through five early period numbers, the screams could hardly be louder if the King himself was onstage. Veteran Elvises in the audience exchange worried glances and mutter grimly about this pelvic parvenu.

Back in the dressing room, dripping with sweat and gasping for breath, Elvis/Travis is holding court: 'Oh boy, I was really getting the facial thing across. And the moves! I really felt like the King.' 'You were right on, my man,' avers a leather Elvis, on his way out to the stage. Back at our table, Mabel and Elvisina have waylaid 10-year-old Dean from Lancaster, California, already a veteran of five years performing as a jumpsuit Elvis.

'Lang dzai, lang dzai,' they giggle. Then I am waylaid by Frank Iannaggi, one of the saddest, skinniest Elvises I have seen all week, with a stained, homemade jumpsuit and King-sized halitosis, who has spotted my notepad and wants to tell me how his best songs are CC Rider and Burning Love.


By 2am, the last Elvis has left the building, and so do we. 'When you're watching a good impersonator, you can almost believe that Elvis is still alive and it's really him up there,' says Mabel whistfully on the way out.


AT 6 PM on Thursday, we join some 20 diehard fans at the gates of Graceland for a three-hour wait until the Candlelight Vigil officially begins. For those at the front of the queue sporting 'Gates of Graceland Entourage' T-shirts, the vigil began 12 hours earlier, in their quest to be first to pay homage at the King's gravesite. By 7 pm, the queue is stretching for several hundred metres and growing by the minute. Television crews and photographers are thick on the ground, drawing in Elvis impersonators like flies to a honeypot.

Burly red-necked guards are strutting about self-importantly. Speakers set up on the wall blare Elvis tunes, drowning out the impersonators still giving their all in the tent across the road. The Hong Kong fans, in their matching T-shirts, prove a hit with the TV crews, and explain smilingly to a succession of earnest, immaculately coiffed and white-toothed reporters that, no, they are not from Japan. Behind us are dozens of members of the Great Britain Elvis Fan Club - the world's biggest - which is planning a Normandy-sized invasion of Memphis next year for the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death. In front stands LaVera Chapel, of White Lake, Michigan, who has Elvis' name, the gates of Graceland and the three incarnations of Elvis tattooed on her bared arms. She explains: 'I wanna show mah lurve.' An impersonator is wandering up and down collecting signatures for a petition to President Clinton demanding a permanent day of recognition for Elvis.

At 9 pm, a reverent hush falls over the crowd, which has now swelled to at least 8,000 and will not completely disperse until the sun comes up. A member of the Graceland staff steps up to a microphone and explains that a torch is about to be brought down from Elvis' eternal flame, from which everyone will light their candles as they file, one by one, through the gates and up the winding drive to the Meditation Garden. 'Most people are here out of love and respect for Elvis. So if anyone wants to get up to any tricky business, let me just say that we may not get to you before the fans take care of you. The Elvis police are on duty tonight,' he warns.

Then a fan-priestess steps up to the microphone and intones: 'As this day draws to a close, we stand here in darkness, pledging our love and respect to Elvis, a man that gave his love, his generosity, his compassion and his music ... With love, we light our candles in remembrance of this extraordinary man. The radiance reflects the fire in our souls that will forever burn.'

Elvis, Elvis let me be, keep that pelvis far from me

She leads a kind of psalmic response, as a chorus of reverent voices promise 'I'll forever love you ... the rest of my days ... I'll never part from you ... And your loving ways.' Elvisina is dabbing at her eyes with a tissue as thousands of voices swell to the strains of Can't Help Falling in Love. And suddenly we are lighting our candles and filing up the drive, part of a spectral and strangely moving procession. As we pause at the garden, a single fat tear seeps out of nowhere and rolls down my cheek, convincing me that I am suffering total Elvis overload and should leave Memphis very, very soon. 'It was so beautiful, so emotional,' says Katima, as we make our way back down to the gates. Elvisina throws her candle away: 'I couldn't bear to keep it. Otherwise every time I saw it I would start to cry.' '

AND the black rain came down. Water water everywhere. Where no bird can fly no fish can swim. No fish can swim Until the King is born! Until the King is born! In Tupelo! In Tupelo! Til the King is born in Tupelo!'. Nick Cave's eerie anthem is buzzing around my head as we hum through the monotonous Mississippi landscape and past the blurry dots of hick towns no different from Tupelo, except that the King wasn't born in them.

There seems to be a fitting irony in driving to Elvis' birthplace on the anniversary of his death. Two hours out of Memphis we pull up to a freshly painted, neat white cottage. A woman swinging on the porch seat collects $5 each and shows us through. The tour is somewhat quicker than at Graceland, given that the whole house could fit into the Jungle Room with space to spare.

The ladies seem suitably impressed when shown where Gladys Presley gave birth to Elvis and his stillborn elder twin, Jesse Garon. Another souvenir frenzy, and then we are scouring Tupelo for a record store so we can listen to Elvis in the car on the way back to Memphis. I pick up the first tape I see from the dusty shelves of a dusty store with a dust-covered sign proclaiming 'Album Alley'. It turns out to be Elvis In Concert: 1977 CBS TV Special, one of his last recordings before he died.

Katima, Mabel and Elvisina sing along at the top of their voices. And as the King mumbles and slurs his way through his Las Vegas opus on the tinny hire-car stereo, we take big greasy bites of cheeseburgers, and ponder the weirdness and the wonder of Elvis.

However strange Graceland might seem, it pales by comparison to the surreality of Paul MacLeod and Graceland Too, a rambling, crumbling home in Holly Springs, halfway between Memphis and Tupelo. MacLeod claims it contains the world's biggest collection of information on Elvis.

MacLeod, the self-proclaimed biggest Elvis fan in 'the universe, the galaxy, the planets and the world', and his son, Elvis Aaron Presley MacLeod, work in shifts to monitor press, radio and television around the US and the world for any references to the King. He talks like he is on speed through ill-fitting dentures and is clearly stark staring bonkers.

'I started collecting anything to do with Elvis 42 years ago, and I've given up everything in the world to do this. My wife was with me 22 years. Three years ago, she told me to choose between her and Elvis. So I told her goodbye.

Las Vegas jumpsuit Elvis

'By the time I'm done, this house will look just like Graceland. I've got Elvis stuff in warehouses in Detroit and California. Lisa Marie's chauffeur was here just last week. I've got the original carpet from the Jungle Room, I've got one of his diamond rings, I've got the last home movie footage of him ever taken. I managed to get myself locked in his mausoleum when he died. I've got mint condition TV Guides from 1956 that mention Elvis.

'Hey, we're open 24 hours a day. Mostly, I only sleep for four hours a night. I've had a gold suit made just like one Elvis wore, and that's what I'll be buried in.' If MacLeod can be believed, Graceland Too's collection of genuine Elvis costumes, records, movie posters and other memorabilia must be priceless. There are rooms bulging with boxes full of clippings, videos and tapes, which he says are now being painstakingly transferred on to CD-ROM. 'I'm going to take over the whole neighbourhood and turn it into Elvisland. It'll be the ninth wonder of the world.'

The gatekeeper Bill Rowe, a paper mill supervisor from Dayton, Ohio, has been first in line at the gates of Graceland for the Candlelight Vigil for the past 10 years. This year, he took up his position at 3am, 18 hours before the start of the vigil. Other years, he has camped out all night.

'I'm not an impersonator,' he says, despite sporting impressive sideburns. 'I'm just a big-time fan. Elvis really brightened a very dark part of my childhood, man, through his movies, his music. So I feel it's my responsibility to keep the memory alive and pay my respects by saying a silent, heartfelt thank you to him.

'You'd think after 19 years, it wouldn't hit you so hard,' he says, tears beginning to well in his eyes. 'But, man, when you walk up that path and see the lights going into the Meditation Garden, well, the emotions I've kept locked down all year just come bubbling up to the surface.

'I'm getting older so it gets harder every year to wait around for so long. But there's a bunch of us, the Gates of Graceland Entourage, who are near the front of the line every year. We've even got our own t-shirts. Hey, you wanna buy one?' The Blasphemer Three years ago, Memphian Tommy Foster transformed his coffee shop into the First Church of the Elvis Impersonator (motto: E Pluribus Elvi), complete with a Viva Memphis! Wedding Chapel where couples can tie the knot to the strains of a portly Japanese Elvis impersonator, and walls lined with Elvis art installations.

Foster says he is a fan, but tries to season some of the Elvis madness with liberal doses of irony and humour. In his front window is a shrine, which, for a quarter in a slot, will blare Elvis songs through crackly speakers and an Elvis doll spins and wobbles wildly on an old LP amid blinking lights.

'We've done more than 300 weddings here,' Foster says. 'Some of the fans come here and find it all a bit offensive. But that's OK, because I find some of the stuff Graceland does offensive. I had one couple who came all the way down from Ohio, had booked the wedding and everything, but they took one look around and found it too sacrilegous. I had another real redneck couple who said they didn't want no Japanese Elvis at their wedding, so I had to get another impersonator.

'Next year I'm putting together a show featuring only Japanese impersonators. The headliner will be Mori Yasamasa, who's a real great Elvis.' The Elvis-spotter Charles Gauthier is a Boston photographer who has spent the past four years tracking down Elvis impersonators the length and breadth of America. He plans to release his as-yet-untitled book, which he hopes will be the definitive photographic study of this phenomenon, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death next year.

'I've lost track, really, of how many impersonators I've met,' says Gauthier. 'I can't even remember now how I got so interested in the first place. It's certainly been a pretty weird and wonderful few years.

'I would say it is very rare to find an Elvis who looks the part and sounds like Elvis. When you get guys like that, they are usually the ones with very profitable, full-time shows in places like Las Vegas.' Gauthier, who is not daunted by having to compete with the more than 3,000 tomes on Elvis already penned and at least a dozen more due out in the next 12 months, says he believes interest in Elvis, and in Elvis impersonation, is growing each year.

Melvis, scourge of Lan Kwai Fong, was not on the trip

'One of the most bizarre things I have seen in the past four years is definitely Graceland Too [see above],' he says. Good Truckin' Tonight Jack Howard of West Virginia has just finished his Elvis act and is dripping with sweat. A forest of hair protrudes from his bright red jumpsuit, which is struggling to circumnavigate his expansive waist. Jack cannot sing to save himself and looks nothing like Elvis, but he wins hands down for the most energetic performance and the best kung fu kicks.

'I love it, man. I live for this,' he pants. 'I mainly do my performance for tribute shows, and occasionally I'll enter a contest. I've got two shows booked at the Italian Heritage Festival when I get back home. 'I only started four years ago, and I'm 41 now, so I guess I'm a bit of a late starter. I wish I'd started when I was younger - it's jumpsuits or nothing at my age.

'I put a lot into my act. I had to go to the chiropractor three times last year. I kept putting my back out with the kung fu moves. This year I got my black belt in karate. I think the moves are the best part of my act.

'I drive a truck and sometimes I'm not even sure if I'm going to make it to a show. Tonight, I had to call ahead while I was on the road to let them know I was coming.

'It's cut-throat out there, man. It's not until you blow away some of the guys who have been doing Elvis for years that you start to get some respect.'