Being Elvis is believing

When Radford Ellis was trying to make a name for himself in music in the 1970s, the record companies all told him the same thing: He sounded too much like Elvis.

Now, sounding like Elvis keeps Ellis in $1,200 jumpsuits.

On Saturdays and Sundays, he performs as the 1970s Elvis at the Legends Blues Club on Beale Street in Memphis. Another singer covers the early years. During the week, Ellis sings "My Way" and other favorites by the King at nightclubs, corporate shows and festivals.

The show, called "Thanks for the Memories," will be presented beginning at 9 tonight at Mudsucker's in downtown Cape Girardeau. There is no cover charge, but reservations are suggested.

Growing up in Memphis in the 1960s, Ellis had a pompadour like Elvis' because his dad didn't go for the Beatles haircuts popular with many boys. That started the you-look-like-Elvis reactions he has gotten most of his life, though he himself thinks the resemblance is slight.

He first met Elvis at 14 when he got a job mowing Vernon Presley's lawn. Though more interested in country music and gospel at the time, "I was flabbergasted," he admits.

Elvis for Elvis

Ellis claims to be the first person to do an impersonation of Elvis for Elvis, singing "Jailhouse Rock" at a New Year's Eve party at Graceland.

Elvis told him to keep working at his music, Ellis said in a phone interview from Memphis. He did, singing in band after band that didn't last. People often asked him to sing Elvis songs, and the last band he played in did an entire Elvis set.

Five years ago, tired of people telling him he looked and sounded like Elvis, Ellis decided to stop fighting his fate. He found a band to back him, but they quit after six months of playing Elvis music. Then he ordered accompaniment tapes from New York, but they sounded too much like a Karoake machine.

"It did not have the Memphis sound which Elvis' music did," he said.

Finally he contacted John Wilkinson, Elvis' old rhythm guitarist, who provided him with tapes based on Elvis' actual orchestrations and keys. Wilkinson now has a company called King Tracks that specializes in making tapes for Elvis impersonators.

"The music is as close to Elvis' as music is going to get," Ellis says.

Now he cultivates the pork chop sideburns and the rest of the late Elvis look, including jumpsuits made by a professional costumer in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. But he doesn't kid himself, as he says some impersonators do, that he is Elvis.

"There's already been an Elvis," he says.

One impersonator who looked nothing like Elvis and shrieked more than sang told Ellis, "When Elvis died his spirit entered my soul."

The world has an estimated 77,000 Elvis impersonators, but not one of them is Elvis, Ellis says.

Most are not even professionals.

Elvis impersonators in homemade costumes give impersonators a bad name, says Ellis, who doesn't like to refer to himself an impersonator.

"I am an illusion of Elvis," he says.

While getting dressed before a show, Ellis says he starts "a meditating thing. I look for that Elvis vibe. And when I get on it I ride it.

"On stage, in my heart I'm Elvis."

He compares the experience to getting on a roller coaster or grabbing a 110-volt wire. "It's a jolt."

Sometimes women and occasionally men in the audience cry, he says, perhaps because of what Elvis meant to them.

"Honest and truly it's weird ... When I go out and perform, there's no drug I could take ... that gives me that kind of high. It's absolutely unreal.

"I don't believe I'm him. I believe in him."

Want to go?

Who: Radford Ellis as Elvis

What: "Thanks for the Memories"

When: Sept. 21 from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Where: Rufus Mudsucker's, Main Street.

Admission: Free, but reservations are recommended; phone 335-7270.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182