Video Review: "The Elvis Files" (documentary)

I smell of corpse here, or maybe a dead horse that's been whipped too long, or possibly a a headless chicken still running round the farmyard. What's that sound from inside the coffin? Maybe just the hair and nails growing. If Elvis ever was dead, they forgot to nail the lid down, and so his ghost stalks the land, while his body watches TV, and allows itself the odd nostalgic chuckle.

The evidence is overwhelming: Gail Brewer Giorgio, the star of this video documentary, and someone with a doughnut problem of her own, has made a career out of publicising the "truth" behind the official Graceland "farce."

Why were Elvis's stomach contents destroyed before the autopsy? Why did all the photos of the death scene disappear? Why was most of his jewellery (Elvis loved jewellery), several cars, a private plane, and his daughter's photos miss0ing from the Graceland Estate inventory published after his death? Why is his supposed grave not next to that of his beloved mother? And why is his middle name - Aron - here spelled differently than on his birth certificate?

We also have the testimony of Elvis's first cousin, Jean Smith, who states that the body on display in the open casket before the funeral was not Elvis:

"The right sideburn was sticking out about an inch. Must have been stuck on! And his hands were as soft as a baby's bottom. Everyone knows Elvis liked breaking bricks with his hands."

There are photos of Elvis watching visitors to his grave ("verified" by the Kodak company no less) and visiting Muhammad Ali in hospital in Kalamazoo. Even an eminent graphologist, after studying the handwriting, reveals that Elvis filled in his own death certificate!!!

Not letting sleeping hound dogs lie: Gail

Brewer Giorgio on the trail of the undead Elvis

All these suggestive loose ends are woven together by the theory that in 1977 Elvis, because of his involvement with the Drug Enforcement Agency and in order to protect himself and his family from assassination and extortion, took advantage of the FBI's witness protection plan, and swapped superstardom for backwoods anonymity. Elvis was always craftier than the "aw shucks," down home country boy he was made out to be.

I know the evidence Elvis lives is overwhelming - "Elvis" itself is just an anagram of "livEs" - but unfortunately I'm one of those poor, sad, pathetic people who can't help swimming against the tide of reason. Maybe I can make a career out of it...

Colin Liddell
Written 1991
Revenge of Riff Raff

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!