Direct from Graceland: Inside Australia’s new Elvis Exhibition

This year, the spotlight shines once again on the King of Rock and Roll. With a biopic by Australian director Baz Luhrmann due to be released this summer, it seems only fitting the country is playing host to the biggest exhibition of Elvis Presley’s life outside of Graceland, whose team have joined forces exclusively with the Bendigo Art Gallery for Elvis: Direct from Graceland.

One of the most iconic public figures of the 20th century, Elvis’s influence on music, design, art, and pop culture is unquestionably profound. In a major coup for Bendigo, the gallery has been able to secure unprecedented access to the Graceland archives to present a comprehensive exhibition, which homes in on Presley’s audacious, radical style, and lesser-known aspects of his youth to the height of fame; featuring 300 artifacts owned by Presley, including costumes, vintage memorabilia, and treasured items from his beloved Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee.

We spoke to Bendigo curator Laurence Ellis about landing the exhibition and paying homage to the music legend.

Did the fact it was a musical figure change how you approached the exhibition?

Yes, totally. One of the biggest early decisions I had to make as a curator was working out the exhibition’s approach. We’ve never done a big music name before, and our museum wasn’t on the same level as the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ type venues either. I read a lot of material around Elvis – there is so much – but we had to make decisions about what we were going to include, and not include. Some satellite areas of his biography were easy to take out, like the Memphis Mafia or his girlfriend history for example, but the music was a hard one, we didn’t have the skills or capacity to understand what is in the archive to tell a thorough story of his accomplishments in music.

Did you include music?

We used video and sound throughout, but we’ve taken from things Graceland produced for their exhibitions and did a little bit of licencing from Hollywood archives too. We also did soundtracks, such as in the Vegas room, where we did a playlist with five songs from concert recordings drawn from albums. We didn’t try and do a ‘Bowiesque’ multi-media fully immersive thing at all, deciding instead that we would put our budget into the build to create really beautiful plinths for the items. The Hollywood Room was one of the most difficult to programme as there was less material, but that is how most Australians got to know him – through his films.

It was much more biographical than other exhibitions we have done. Being able to draw on so much personal material we were able to tell those stories and show Presley’s intimate side, like his book collection and personal items from his bedroom.

We looked at his stagecraft, his performance style and the whole sensory image he made and kept reinventing. I think his ability almost like an artist to borrow from all these sources in a time before stylists existed to construct this image based on creative instinct, and an incredibly quick study of what people responded to.

Did Bendigo select the items from the archive?

It was a joint affair with Graceland, although the pandemic made it tricky, so we relied on Angie Marchese and her team. They would often present items related to the chapters we came up with. I would then explode their categories and move items into different areas. Sometimes I presented them with specific requests. The centre point was the 1968 comeback to create a climax for the exhibition. I asked for the leather suit but was turned down!

We got the dream suit though and the outfit for his opening number when he sings ‘Trouble’. The black silky one. Each piece tells a great story through costume design, through the clothes you can see how he connected with his roots and was back in business. One of the main strands of the exhibition is actually design. However, because there was such a dearth in the Graceland archives of ‘50s material in terms of style, the theme of costume design and the construction of the image comes in much more strongly from the second half of the exhibition when the ‘70s starts. It’s possibly the part I struggled with the most, but we used images and clips from the Dorsey programme to get the most important points across.

The exhibition is pretty chronological. Peter King, the exhibition designer and I did a lot of conceptual sessions together, thinking about new categories and sections. We concluded that it was going to annoy fans too much to have a pretentious curatorial input, as people wanted the satisfaction of going through the story which is familiar to some degree. I felt conscious of the fans and what a big deal it would be for them.

Speaking of fans, did you get any to come in and collaborate with you? Are any materials found in the exhibition from outside the Graceland archive?

We did think about that, but in the end one of our technicians is a real expert and fan on Elvis himself, he advised us enormously and was really good at fact checking.

Only about 10 items from over 300 in the total exhibition. We borrowed from Paramount four costumes from leading ladies, such as Angela Lansbury’s dress from Blue Hawaii and a beautiful dress Jan Shepard wore from King Creole. Then a handful of costume drawings from Hollywood costume designer Edith Head, which is how we got our intro to Angie at Graceland. We also streamed soundtracks and paid licencing fees for that within the footprint of the gallery only.

Tell me about the audience for the exhibition. How did you attract a younger demographic? Elvis would have been 85 this year.

I really wanted to ask the team at Graceland about that – what have they done in this area and what will they do about succession planning for future audiences at Graceland. We always knew at Bendigo that there would be a strong boomer audience for the exhibition. One decision was not to do a ‘for kids’ element at the exhibition, but we put a lot into positioning and media with younger publications – lots of editorials in street and style magazines. Our publicist Catrina Hall is brilliant, and she carved up certain products for different outlets. We did a lot of paid advertising and used younger images of Elvis, focusing more on the music than the movies. Baz’s film trailer and The Searcher being on Netflix also helped bring Elvis to that demographic, alongside our focus on how Elvis picked out the way he played with his appearance.

Being often highly personal, collections have biases. Do you feel you have managed to put the Bendigo stamp on the story of Elvis in any way?

Rather than fully reproducing Graceland’s explanation of why something is in the archive, as an outsider you have the ability to interpret things in a social and historical context with a fresh pair of critical eyes.

Within museum exhibitions, programming is a space often where you can pull at the edges of histories. We will have an event during the exhibition with three first nations black Australian aboriginal speakers, about the complicated place Elvis has in indigenous Australia’s heart. Elvis on the one hand, is a very beloved household figure in Aboriginal Australia, who also represents in some ways these ideas about class mobility and as a champion of socially oppressed peoples. But he’s also this complicated figure with a complicated relationship with black creatives. In the temporary and conversational space, it’s much easier to have these more challenging conversations than to bake that into the permanent exhibition itself.

Sometimes objects gave me a great opportunity to include some further dialogue, such as Elvis’s assigned library card which we got from Graceland. The book he borrowed was one of those Uncle Remus books which were later criticised for embedding racial stereotypes of Southern black communities by a white writer; these are the type of inherited ideas of black American culture that Elvis grew up in. I do explain that he did spend certain times of his life in these quite integrated surroundings, but in fact a lot of his high school photos or those with the Memphis mafia, it’s a sea of white faces. It is undeniable that he was the beneficiary of a predominantly white American recording industry that capitalised on black creative labour. Elvis is household name, but Roy Hamilton isn’t.

What Priscilla really responded to – which is something you can do in a gallery of this scale as opposed to somewhere like Graceland – is that you can build up a story where you foreshadow certain parts of his life as well as bookending sections. For example, in one of the first sections we have the hymnals from Tupelo, and then in the final section which is sort of ‘chapelesque’, I highlight his record player from his bedroom from the day he died and the record on it, which they have never played since he died; it is a fresh cut from the latest session of the Stamps recorded just before he died. You get this kind of story of religious music at the beginning and the end. The idea of being able to weave through the subtlety of the Presley’s influences throughout his life.

Below curator Lauren Ellis selects her highlights from the exhibition and explains why.

Priscilla’s wedding dress and tiara, 1967
Eight years after meeting in Germany, Elvis and Priscilla married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on May 1^st, 1967. Knowing the media would be scrutinising their every move with even a hint of wedding rumours, Elvis and Priscilla followed strict plans laid out by Colonel Parker. Elvis’s tuxedo was bought off the pack in LA and tailored as part of the costume production for Clambake, the film he was shooting at the time. Priscilla attempted shopping in exclusive boutiques disguised in dark glasses and a hat, but she couldn’t risk being discovered. She found this dress in a ‘little out-of-the-way’ shop in Los Angeles, accompanied by her and Elvis’s close friend Charlie Hodge posing as her fiancé.

I love this item because it has immense aura and excitement for visitors. It also represents Priscilla beautifully, almost a shroud of her, elegant and actually very modest and simple for a ‘celebrity wedding dress’. These feel like the wedding outfits of slightly fancy family friends – not high-powered Los Angeles celebrities!

Photo by Leon Schoots
White suit from the ’68 Special, 1968
Designed by costumier Bill Belew in the first chapter of his long collaboration with Elvis, this suit was created for the powerful closing number of the legendary 1968 NBC television special. The decision over the closing number was a point of disagreement between the Colonel and the ’68 Special producers. Colonel Parker wanted a wholesome Christmas song, Elvis and the producers wanted something creatively edgy and emotionally-charged. In the final days of production If I Can Dream was composed in one night by Walter Earl Brown, a musician working on the show. The song was based heavily on the words of Martin Luther King Jr, who had been assassinated a few months earlier in Memphis.

Belew’s costumes for the special mine Elvis’s cultural and musical roots, presumably deliberately signalling to the audience that he’s reconnecting with his authentic self. This suit appears to reference the tailoring of Southern colonial plantation owners, which sits in ironic tension with the message of social equality in the song. But, his gospel-infused performance and the growing physical passion in his movements – he is whipping his arms back and forth – more closely invokes the image of a preacher in front of the congregation.

Photo by Leon Schoots
Road case with scarves, 1977
Years after Elvis’s sudden death in 1977, as Graceland archivists worked through his personal effects to catalogue and preserve them (work that is ongoing today), this tour road case was found packed and stowed on Elvis’s private plane. The top of the case has been labelled with black marker on white gaffa tape, “!! NEXT SHOW !! NEXT SHOW”. The case is packed with white and purple scarves, hung on coat hangers and wrapped in plastic to protect them. These scarves were worn on stage and handed out to the audience during his shows. The scarves were packed for the tour Elvis was due to commence the day after he died, beginning in Maine on August 17, 1977. I love this item because it beautifully summarises a key theme in our exhibition – Elvis’s appreciation and love for his fans. Adjacent to this object we have printed on the wall his quote: “My fans want my shirt. They can have my shirt. They put it on my back.”

I also love this item because it also alludes to the toll of fame and a life lived for others in many ways, so many people hitched their wagon to Elvis and wanted their piece of the action. It made me reflect on my own place in that continuum of people, as a curator telling his story nearly 50 years after his death.

Photo by Leon Schoots
Record player and record, 1977
The record player from Elvis’s bedroom is preserved today exactly as it was on 16 August 1977, the day he passed away. The last record he listened to is still on the deck, a fresh cut from the studio by his longtime friends and collaborators, gospel quartet J.D. Sumner and the Stamps. I love this item because it’s so personal as his were the last ears to hear the record – the Graceland Archivists don’t even know what tracks are on it. Gospel music was Elvis’s first and greatest musical love. As a teenager he idolised a gospel quartet called the Blackwood Brothers, attending all night performances with his church and social group. He auditioned to join an offshoot group, The Songfellows, in 1954 but his voice wasn’t suited to the tight harmonic style. As an adult, he spent countless long nights at the piano in the Graceland music room playing gospel standards, sometimes quietly alone, sometimes surrounded by family and old friends enlisted to sing harmony. On the road, he would cajole his bandmates into sessions back in his suite for hours after their nightly shows. Elvis won three Grammy Awards during his lifetime, all for gospel recordings.

Photo by Leon Schoots
‘King Midas’ gold Rolex, 1970
In early 1970, riding high on the new chapter of creative and commercial success he had unlocked in Las Vegas, Elvis performed a series of concerts at the Houston Astrodome in Texas. The venue, built in 1965 for huge sporting events and rodeos, was not designed for music concerts and much less for the emotionally intimate performance style Elvis was honing in Vegas. Elvis explained: “I knew it would be hard work at the Dome. There is no personal contact. I decided I just had to work as hard as I could…” The concerts were nevertheless a huge success, with over 200,000 people attending six shows. This limited edition ‘King Midas’ gold Rolex watch was given to Elvis by the Houston Livestock Association to mark the record-breaking attendances; it is inscribed to Elvis on the rear of the face. According to Rolex, it has been carved from a single gold ingot – it’s beautifully heavy and a fabulous piece of 1970s design.

Photo by Leon Schoots

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Direct from Graceland: Inside Australia’s new Elvis Exhibition

Priscilla’s wedding dress and tiara, 1967

White suit from the ’68 Special, 1968

Road case with scarves, 1977

Record player and record, 1977

‘King Midas’ gold Rolex, 1970

Barbican Music Library exhibition celebrates seven decades of Status Quo

Concert Archives: the digital archive for all your favourite gigs

Pinball wizardry : Finding music history in the archives of an English regional museum