Ill Health and Death, 1973-77

Presley's divorce took effect on October 9, 1973, Elvis and Priscilla agreeing to share custody of their daughter.    After the divorce, Presley became increasingly unwell.    He twice overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident.    He was later admitted to hospital and was, according to his main physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, "near death" in November, the result of side effects of Demerol addiction. Nichopoulos says that Presley "felt that by getting [pills] from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street.    He ... thought that as far as medications and drugs went, there was something for everything."

Since his comeback in 1968, Presley had staged more and more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, the busiest schedule of his professional life.    Despite his failing health, in 1974 he undertook another intensive touring schedule.    In April, rumors that he would at last play overseas were fueled by a million-dollar bid for an Australian tour, but Parker was uncharacteristically reluctant, prompting those closest to Presley to speculate about the manger's past and the reasons for his apparent unwillingness to apply for a passport.    Parker ultimately squelched any notions Presley had of working abroad, claiming that foreign security was poor and venues unsuitable for a star of his status.

Soon thereafter, Presley's condition seems to have declined precipitously.    Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers the singer's arrival at a University of Maryland concert in September: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees.    People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.'    He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?" Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "The lights go down, and Elvis comes up the stairs.    He was all gut. He was slurring.    He was so fucked up. ... It was obvious he was drugged.    It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body.    It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible.    You couldn't hear him hardly. ... We were in a state of shock.    [Conductor] Joe Guercio said, 'He's finished...'. I remember crying.    He could barely get through the introductions on the stage."    Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move.    So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year off...?'    I mentioned something once in a guarded moment.    He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be all right.    Don't you worry about it.'" Presley continued to play to sellout crowds.    Cultural critic Marjorie Garber has described the significance of Presley's physical transformation, particularly in the context of his Vegas appearances of the period: "heavier, in pancake makeup wearing a jumpsuit with an elaborate jeweled belt and cape, crooning pop songs to a microphone: in effect he had become Liberace.    Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers".

On July 13, 1976, Presley's father fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards Red West, Sonny West, and David Hebler.    The dismissal took all three by surprise, especially Red West, who had been friends with Presley for two decades.    Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the singer was too cowardly to face the three himself.    Vernon Presley cited the need to "cut back on expenses"; another associate of Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans frequently gave rise to lawsuits and lawyers' fees. Presley historians David E. Stanley and Frank Coffey, however, have claimed that the bodyguards were really fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency.

RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the studio waned.    After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio in 1974.    Parker sold RCA on another concert record, Elvis: As Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis.    Exemplifying the label's demand for new product, it was recorded on March 20, the very day that the Good Times studio album was issued, and came out just three-and-a-half months later.    It included a version of "How Great Thou Art" that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award.     (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of a total of fourteen nominations—were for gospel recordings.)    Presley returned to the studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful.    In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home.    Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a struggle for him.

Between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977). The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits, but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight of the singles he recorded in the studio during this period and released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy" was a number one AC hit in 1975; "Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976; and "Way Down", released in June 1977, would top both the country and UK pop charts just days after his death. Three other studio tracks from these years issued posthumously as singles also rose to the country top ten. Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came in 1976 with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on the soul classic "Hurt". "If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long."