CHAPTER 45
For the Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite television special, Elvis decided he wanted an unusual jumpsuit that both reflected his patriotism and set him apart as a symbol of America. Designer Bill Belew picked up his sketch pad and came back with a white suit emblazoned with an American eagle stenciled in gold and appointed with red-and-blue stones—one of the most handsome stage costumes of Elvis’s career.
The event marked the first time in the history of television that a one-man performance would be beamed all over the globe and seen by a quarter of the world’s population. Some time before, Elvis wrote down his Philosophy for a Happy Life for his friend, Pat Parry. The first requirement was someone to love. The second was something to look forward to. And the third was something to do.
The Aloha special was Elvis’s final appearance as a certified superstar and his last glorious moment.
MARTY LACKER: Right after New Year’s of ’73, we were sitting in the den when Colonel phoned. Elvis took the call in private. When he came back in, he had this big smile on his face. He said, “Colonel’s made the final arrangements for the satellite TV special in Hawaii. We leave next week.” That ended up being one of the best times we’d all had together in a long, long time.
LAMAR FIKE: We did it at the Honolulu International Center Arena. Even though it was a television show, the live audience was asked to donate what they could. Elvis wanted every cent—even from the merchandising—to go to the Kui Lee Cancer Fund. Kui Lee had written “I’ll Remember You,” which was one of Elvis’s favorite songs. They raised $75,000—three times what they expected.
The reason Colonel picked Hawaii was because of the time zone. Elvis went on at twelve-thirty A.M. Hawaiian time, so the show could air at prime time in Australia, Korea, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Today, the estate says he got 38 percent of the viewers in Japan, 70 to 80 percent of the viewers in Hong Kong and Korea, and 92 percent in the Philippines. We read in the Honolulu paper the next day—and Colonel also told Elvis—that they got 98 percent of the viewers in Japan. I don’t know.
But that was live, see. And then thirty European countries saw it on a delayed basis. That was the sixty-minute version. For the U.S. market, they added thirty minutes of Hawaiian scenery and some extra songs. It didn’t run over here until April, and he got 51 percent of the audience, which is pretty amazing. All in all, something like a billion and a half people saw it, by satellite, in forty countries. Shit, not that many people watched the moon landing.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis looked so great for that special. After he looked at a tape of the rehearsal, he said, “I don’t like the way my hair looks,” and he had somebody cut and style it a little different. Around ’72, Elvis started gaining a lot of weight. He’d tried all kinds of regular diets, but they worked too slow for him. So before the satellite show, he went on this kind of crazy diet, which was based on injections of the urine of a pregnant woman. A doctor in Vegas put him on it. Buddy Hackett popularized it, and his daughter worked for the doctor.
Elvis got Sonny and Lamar and Red on it with him. The doctor supplied the food, little-bitty pieces of meat that you’d either boil in the package or take out and eat dry. They’d be in the kitchen up in the suite in Vegas, boiling these bags. They started giving the shots to themselves. I remember sitting there one day in the kitchen, and Lamar popped himself in the fatty part of the leg—right behind the knee—with one of those needles.
LAMAR FIKE: We found out it was just vitamins. We only ate five hundred or six hundred calories a day. My God, anybody could lose weight on that. Elvis got down to 175 or 180 pounds.
MARTY LACKER: Musically, Elvis was back to doing not so great songs, the exception being “American Trilogy,” which he started doing in ’72. But his performance was so terrific that we were mesmerized by it. Almost at the end of the show, he did something completely unexpected. In one fluid movement, he removed that big jeweled cape from his shoulders and slung it into the audience. And the thing was worth $5,000. The amazing thing about the way he prepared for this show was that he stayed off the pills. He was straight for two weeks.
Most of us stayed over in Hawaii an extra day. And the night after the show, we all gathered in his suite. Elvis was so happy. He said, “Everybody was really a big help to me. I want to do something not just for the guys, but the wives, too. I want to buy them all a fur coat.” And he wanted me to go get them.
I said, “Elvis, you’re in Hawaii. I don’t even know if they have fur coats here, it’s so hot.” He said, “No, you can get ’em.” So I made some calls to the stores, and they sort of laughed at me.
I went back and said, “Elvis, there ain’t no fur coats available, but there’s a nice jewelry shop off the hotel lobby.” So Elvis gave all the wives beautiful diamond and emerald rings, and he gave each of the guys a check for $1,000.
The next morning, we were all supposed to go to the Arizona Memorial because Elvis had given that benefit concert in 1961 to help get it built. We banged on his door, and nobody answered. Finally, Linda came, and we said, “Are you all ready?” And she just made a face at us and shook her head. She said, “He can’t go.” We went in, and Elvis was sitting on the balcony, on the top floor of the hotel, stoned out of his gourd. He was sweating profusely, with a towel around his neck, and he could hardly talk. He’d gone right back into it.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis wasn’t as straight during that time as everybody thought. David Stanley went on the trip, and when Elvis couldn’t find Dr. Nick, he asked David to give him a shot of B12 mixed with amphetamines straight in the hip before he went onstage. David didn’t want to—he got Hamburger James to do it.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis did a promo for that show. I’ve seen a clip of it recently, and it’s obvious he was drugged. He was slurring his words—a dead giveaway of sleeping pills, and he just looked dazed. But on the show, he looked 100 percent. He hit all his high notes. And he was so pumped up he could have hit the ceiling.
The Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii album entered the Billboard chart at number 99, stayed for thirty-five weeks, and went all the way to number one. That was his first number one album in nine years. It was also his last.
A couple of days after the satellite show, after Elvis went back to taking pills again, he and Linda went to [actor] Jack Lord’s house for dinner there in Hawaii. Jack used to visit Elvis on the movie set.
You know who else used to come see Elvis? Muhammad Ali. There’s a picture of them together in Vegas, where Elvis is wearing a Hawaiian pendant around his neck from the Aloha from Hawaii show. Elvis liked to watch Ali’s fights, and he liked his sense of humor, too. Ali gave Elvis an autographed pair of boxing gloves that said, “Elvis, you are the greatest.” And Elvis had a special robe made up for Ali to wear in his fight with Ken Norton. Ali was real proud of it, and he wore it in the ring. But then he lost the fight, so he said he’d never wear it again.
BILLY SMITH: At the end of January, Elvis went back into Vegas. By now, especially after the satellite show, he was really tired of it. And it showed. In one of his reviews, they [Variety] called him “The Colonel’s mechanized doll, at least onstage.” I think Joe made sure he didn’t see that.
LAMAR FIKE: Sometimes he would pretend to get sick and not want to do a second show. But not until the end did he ever say to Colonel, “Look, I don’t want to do this shit. I hate this fuckin’ place, man.” He hated it worse than hell.
I think Vegas was the erosion of Colonel. The last two or three years of Elvis’s life, that relationship changed drastically.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis got to where he would conveniently develop Vegas throat. He didn’t really have it. But he’d say he had these symptoms and he wanted to see a throat doctor.
The first time Elvis saw one, in February of ’73, it was late at night. All of a sudden, he said, “I’ve got Vegas throat.” And he opened up the phone book and picked Dr. Sidney Boyers. The guy was Jewish, so Elvis figured he was good. And his office was in a nice area of Las Vegas, so Elvis liked that. We all piled in the car, and Elvis just walked up and knocked on the doctor’s door. Boyers happened to be there, and he opened the door and there stood Elvis Presley. He was completely overwhelmed. Elvis talked to him for two hours in his office. And he started telling the doctor all his symptoms and he came out with three prescriptions and a big smile on his face. Within a week, he and the doctor had developed a relationship, and Elvis kept going back.
About the fourth time he went up there, Elvis knocked on the door and said, “Doctor, are you through for the day?” Boyers said he was. And Elvis said, “Well, come outside. I want to show you something.” He’d bought the doctor a brand-new white Lincoln Continental so he’d feel indebted to him.
BILLY SMITH: There were more death threats in the later years. Like those guys who came up onstage in ’73.
MARTY LACKER: A group of foreign-looking men came in with some of the local hookers. The leader had on a cape, and a hat, and he carried a cane. And they all sat at this long table right by the stage.
Well, during the show, one of them jumped up on the stage. He had a jacket over his arm, like maybe he had a gun in his hand, and he was heading towards Elvis. Red rushed him, and a security guard grabbed him and searched him for weapons. Then one of his friends came up onstage to help him. And Jerry Schilling happened to be there, and he literally threw the guy off the stage so that he landed on his back on a table. And then the strange-looking leader came up, and Elvis started doing his karate moves. He didn’t hit him, though. He just sort of gave a demonstration. People just kept coming up, and Sonny and Jerry and Red took care of them. It was nuts. The stage was filled with people, most of ’em trying to help Elvis, I think. But Elvis was screaming, “Let me at him! Let me at him!” He was really out of control.
Sonny took a look at him and went over and gave him a bear hug to try to calm him down. But Elvis got so upset that Vernon had to come out and pull him offstage.
Finally, the security men got the guys and took them to the office and photographed them. Turned out they just wanted autographs. But one of them had tape on his knuckles, and Elvis thought he was a Hawaiian karate killer. He told the cops he wanted rap sheets on all of them. But they weren’t killers. They were South American porno dealers. And the guy with the tape on his hand had just injured himself in an altercation with a slot machine.
LAMAR FIKE: The first guy just wanted to give Elvis the jacket as a present. They were a little drunk, and they weren’t thinking. By the time Elvis got through telling the story, he was Mr. Bruce Lee—he whipped all three of ’em. But it wasn’t that serious.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t think it was all that innocent. I always believed that those guys had something else on their mind. After so many death threats, Elvis started saying that if he was shot onstage, the guys should put him in a wheelchair and bring him home. Dick Grob might have had a more detailed plan than that. At one time, Grob told me he had a plan about what to do if Elvis died on the road and about how they would get him back to Memphis.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis started getting angry about everything, including the fact that he was older, because he’d just turned thirty-eight. He felt like he was losing everything. Mostly, he couldn’t stop brooding about the incident with the South Americans. He was convinced they were really Hawaiian killers, and in his fury about Priscilla leaving him, he got it in his mind that Mike Stone was behind the guys coming up onstage.
The very next night, he called Lamar and Red and Sonny in from the living room. He had worked himself up into a blind rage. This was about three o’clock in the morning.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was sweating like he had some kind of jungle fever. He was really out of it. He had this massive platform bed up in the suite, and he was propped up in it, in his pajamas. Linda looked plenty worried. Elvis called Sonny over, and he told him to look deep in his eyes, like he was going to hypnotize him. He was slurring his words, and he said, “Mike Stone has to die, Sonny. That son of a bitch has to go, and you know it. He’s caused me too much pain. Do it for me, Sonny. I know I can count on you.” He was saying this over and over, like a mantra.
Elvis was literally going to have Mike Stone killed. Sonny was pretty dumbfounded. He said, “Let’s forget that kind of talk, boss. I know he’s caused you a lot of pain, but that’s not right.” Sonny kept trying to calm him down, but Elvis jumped out of that bed and went over to the closet and pulled out an M16 [rifle]. Sonny started backing away, and Elvis went after him and put the gun in his hand. Sonny said something like “I don’t want to do this, Elvis.” And Elvis said, “Why doesn’t anybody understand this man has to die?”
Hell, we didn’t know what to do. We looked at each other like “What the shit now?” And then Elvis started climbing the fuckin’ wall. He really did. He jumped back on the bed and tried to dig his fingernails into the wall and tried to get a toehold. He was going up that mother if he could. He was saying, “He’s hurt me so much. He’s broken up my family and destroyed everything, and nobody cares.” It really got us. He was just a madman. Sonny left the room. I followed him out in the living room, and he had tears in his eyes. I said, “Delbert, it’s going to be an awful long night.” Linda called Elias Ghanem to come give Elvis a shot.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis started this same business with Red. At first, Red stalled him, but Elvis kept after him for several days. And Red loved Elvis so much that for a little while, he thought maybe it was right, that it would bring Elvis out of his depression. So he made some calls, and he set it up. I think the going rate was $25,000, but because it was for Elvis, some guy was going to take Mike Stone out for $10,000.
LAMAR FIKE: An intermediary in Hollywood was taking care of it. About a week after all this started, we told Elvis, “Hey, man, it’s getting ready to go down. Are you sure you want this to happen?” And Elvis chickened out. He said, “Well, let’s just leave it for now.” But Mike was within hours of getting his head blown off.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis would never have had anybody killed. He couldn’t fire somebody, so how in the hell could he have someone killed? And I don’t think Red would have done it, either.
BILLY SMITH: For Elvis? Maybe. Elvis would tell people, “Well, these hangers-on of mine . . .” But the things we did for him, he knew we wouldn’t do for nobody else.
LAMAR FIKE: I sat down with Elvis after that. We were back at Graceland. I said, “Elvis, you have to see that you’re not the same person.” He said, “Lamar, we all change.” I said, “Yes, but you aren’t Elvis anymore.”
He stewed on it overnight. And then he came down the next day and sat at the table and said, “Motherfucking Lamar sat up there last night and gave me a damn speech about who I’m not.” I was waiting for somebody to help me, and everybody just got real still because I had stepped over the line.
I guess he was getting heat from every direction. Because even though the Aloha from Hawaii album sold real well, in early ’73, Vernon told Elvis, “You’ve spent us in the ground. There’s no more money.”
I don’t know exactly how it came down, but I’m sure that Vernon went to Colonel and said, “We’re broke. Find some way to get some money.” So Colonel went to RCA and negotiated a buyout deal, effective March 1. He did it for Elvis, but he also did it for himself. That RCA buyout was not the best of deals, but Elvis needed the money.
MARTY LACKER: Between the percentage that Colonel took out of everything and the way Elvis spent money, there were times when Elvis was that far from being broke. And this was one of them. He needed money for a couple of things, one of which was for Graceland. They were going to have to mortgage it.
Colonel went to RCA and signed an agreement that allowed them to buy back the royalty rights on all the records Elvis made prior to ’73. That’s something like seven hundred recordings. In other words, they gave RCA the future royalties on his whole catalog, the best records he ever made. For $5.4 million and a seven-year guarantee of $500,000 a year. Against royalties. But All-Star Shows got 50 percent of the $5 million, and 25 percent of the $400,000. So Colonel got $2.6 million and Elvis got $2.8. That means that after taxes, Elvis only got $1.4 million. For probably the most valuable records in the history of popular music.
But listen to the rest of this deal. Parker argued later that the old songs weren’t selling that well in the seventies. But Elvis had to give RCA two albums and four singles a year—for seven years—for a royalty of ten cents a single and fifty cents an album. That might have been high for some recording artists—I think most artists got a 7 percent royalty, and Elvis would have gotten 8.4 percent—but that was low for an artist of Elvis’s stature. And, again, half of that went to Elvis, and half to Colonel, or All Star Shows, as he was incorporated. Then RCA agreed to give Elvis and All Star $100,000 each when the seven-year contract expired. But RCA also said it would give All Star $675,000 over those seven years, with a matching amount from RCA Records Tours! And Colonel would get 10 percent of the tours, for what they called “planning, promotion, and merchandising.” Colonel already had one-third commission on the profits of the tours as of February ’72. So add it up.
It doesn’t stop there, though. RCA also said they’d give Colonel a $50,000 consultant’s fee, payable over a five-year period. And then All Star got yet another $350,000 over seven years for “planning, promotion, and merchandising in connection with the operation of the tour agreement.”
That gives you some idea of Colonel’s side deals. And it probably explains why he didn’t insist on a better sliding royalty rate. At least there were periodic supplements to the ’73 agreement. In ’74, RCA gave Elvis sixty cents an album and twelve cents a single, and there were regular adjustments to keep Elvis’s royalty at about 8 percent. But Parker was mostly interested in front money for himself. In the end, he got $6,200,000. And Elvis got $4,650,000. Colonel made a million and a half more dollars off that deal than Elvis did.
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t know that what the Colonel did was so bad. As far as RCA is concerned, Colonel got a lot of money out of them. But RCA made a lot of money, too. It was one of those situations where one was scared, and the other one was glad of it.
MARTY LACKER: After both Elvis and Vernon died, and Lisa Marie inherited the estate, the court appointed an attorney named Blanchard E. Tual as a guardian-ad-litem to look after her interest. Among other things, Tual investigated Colonel’s deal with RCA. He delivered his original report in September of 1980 and an amended report in July of ’81. Tual wrote that “there is evidence that both Colonel Parker and RCA are guilty of collusion, conspiracy, fraud, misrepresentation, bad faith, and overreaching.” And he called for a full accounting.
I read both those reports. And when I got through, I realized just how ignorant Elvis and Vernon were about the entertainment business.
BILLY SMITH: I didn’t see Elvis during this time. I was taking care of my family. My daddy was real, real bad off, close to death. And he did die in August. But I’d talk to Elvis on the phone every once in a while, and he didn’t always seem himself.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis knew that a lot of people just looked at him as a dollar sign. Peggy Lipton, the actress, tried to get him into Scientology in ’73 or ’74. He dated her on and off for about a month. He sent his plane to bring her up to Tahoe one night when he was playing there. But she wanted to talk to him about Scientology more than anything else. And she stayed on him.
In Scientology, they do a process called “auditing.” They hook you up to a machine that’s kind of like a lie detector. And they ask you questions about your personal life, and this machine records the electrical changes that take place in your body as you answer. Then they analyze that and have you cleanse your soul to get all these negative thoughts and painful experiences—they call them “engrams”—behind you.
One day, in L.A., we got in the limousine and went down to the Scientology center on Sunset, and Elvis went in and talked to them. We waited in the car, but apparently, they started doing all these charts and crap for him.
Elvis came out and he said, “Fuck those people! There’s no way I’ll ever get involved with that son-of-a-bitchin’ group. All they want is my money.” Well, Peggy still kept on about it, so Elvis didn’t date her anymore. And he stayed away from Scientology like it was a cobra. He’d shit a brick to see how far Lisa’s gotten into it.
MARTY LACKER: In May of ’73, I went to Tahoe with Elvis. He was performing at the Sahara. We were up in the suite, and he was in perfectly good health. About an hour later, he came out of his room and said, “I’m sick, man. I can’t eat. We’ve got to leave and go to the hospital in Memphis. Tell Colonel to cancel.”
He wasn’t sick. He was just tired of all that shit. We flew home, and he was fine. Elvis was a very good actor.
LAMAR FIKE: In May, Priscilla pulled a good one. If brains were dynamite, Priscilla couldn’t blow up a goddamn gnat. But someone started telling her about the law out in California, telling her what she could have gotten in the divorce. So she filed a motion in Santa Monica Superior Court to set aside her original property settlement. She found her a sharp attorney who called the original settlement “extrinsic fraud.” He was out for blood.
MARTY LACKER: Priscilla’s new lawyer, Arthur Toll, claimed she needed $11,800 a month. I was there when Elvis found out. We were standing out in the back of Graceland, laughing about something. And Vernon came up cussing, just madder than hell. He was white as a sheet. Elvis said, “What’s wrong, Daddy?” He said, “It’s that damn Priscilla. Her lawyer just called. She’s suing you for more money.”
And Elvis’s words were, “That no-good, greedy fuckin’ bitch! Damnit, I gave her enough!” I remember in the early years, long before he was married, when Elvis would hear about divorces and women taking their husbands to the cleaners, he’d always say, “That’ll never happen to me. I’ll kill the bitch first.”
LAMAR FIKE: When she switched attorneys, that’s when it all changed. Boy, I mean, son! Vernon liked to blow a gasket. Elvis looked at his father and he said, “I thought you had the deal done, Daddy.”
Toll got her a lump sum of $2 million—$6,000 a month for ten years. Plus $4,200-a-month alimony for a year, and $4,000-a-month child support, and $250,000 from the sale of the Monovale house, although Elvis didn’t sell it right away. On top of it, she got 5 percent of two of Elvis’s music publishing companies.
Do you know where the money came from? Most of it came from the RCA buyout, in March.
MARTY LACKER: Somewhere around June or July of ’73, Dr. Nick told the guys, “I don’t think Elvis is just a medical addict anymore. I think he’s a hard addict.”
Hamburger James used to tell this story about being out in the kitchen on Monovale when Elvis first got up one day. James was about to drop a saccharine tablet in his coffee, and Elvis came in and saw it and thought it was something else, and snatched it right out of his hand. He said, “Give me that!” and grabbed it and popped it down his throat before James could say, “Hey, man, it’s just sweetener!” James left the room and fell over on the pool table laughing.
The sad part is, Elvis was already beginning to have trouble controlling his bladder and bowels. Not all the time, but a lot of the times. You get that way when you’re so far out of it, you’re half asleep most of the time. And you really have no control. On tour, James would have to check Elvis’s bed before they left the hotel. It would have been embarrassing if it had gotten out.
LAMAR FIKE: In June, another Elvis documentary came out. This one was Elvis on Tour. It was supposed to be a behind-the-scenes look, “as he really was,” you know. You read the reviews on that thing, and you see how well we fooled everybody for so long. The New York Times said, “The film strips away the storybook myth to find underneath a private person who is indistinguishable from the public one, except for the fact he dresses with somewhat less flamboyance.”
MARTY LACKER: Even though Elvis said he never wanted to talk to Gene [Smith] again after that incident over the jewelry in the early sixties, every once in a while, Gene would come up to Graceland. In July of ’73, I was up there one afternoon, and Elvis and Linda were out by the pool, and Sonny was in the water. It was just the three of them. And I had my swimsuit with me.
Elvis was laying on the chaise lounge, and he was pissed off about something. I knew it from his tone, and then he was gritting his teeth and pumping his cheekbone, the way he would when he was getting ready to blow. I said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” And then I remembered that when I drove up the driveway, there was this strangely painted motorcycle that I’d never seen before. I said, “Whose chopper is that? Did you buy it?”
Elvis said, “No, goddamnit. That fuckin’ Gene came up here with that motorcycle, and he was whining, ‘Oh, Elvis, would you buy it for me? I really would like to have it.’”
I think it not only angered Elvis, but it hurt him. Because he still cared about Gene. If Gene had come to him and said, “Hey, I’m sorry,” even after all those years, Elvis might have even asked him to come back to work.
I put on my swim trunks and jumped in the pool, and I started talking to Sonny. Well, anytime Elvis saw two people talking and he wasn’t included, he wanted to know what the hell was going on. So he yelled, “What are you guys talking about?” In this abrupt tone, see. I said, “Nothing.” He said, “No, damnit, what are you talking about?” And, in a flash, I decided to try to joke him out of his bad mood.
I said, “I was saying I really do like that motorcycle, and I wish you’d buy it for me.” Elvis looked at me, and then it dawned on him that I hate motorcycles because I refused the first one he tried to give me. He smiled and said, “You no-good son of a bitch.”
And then he said, “Well, now I’m going to have to buy you something.”
I’d gotten him out of thinking about Gene, but I inadvertently started him on a tremendous shopping binge. He started out buying a Pontiac Grand Prix for Patsy, my wife, and then another one for Billy’s wife, Jo. And within a week and a half, Elvis bought twenty-nine cars, and a motorcycle for Sonny. And just gave them all away. Vernon probably came close to having a heart attack. But that’s the way Elvis would get himself out of a funk.
And Gene Smith never did get his motorcycle.
LAMAR FIKE: That little spree cost over $200,000—Pontiacs, Cadillacs, and Lincolns. He was giving cars away like you wouldn’t believe. If somebody on the floor wanted one, he’d say, “You take that one.” He didn’t care. He would have given one to Hitler.
MARTY LACKER: After the American [Sound Studio] sessions with Chips, Colonel’s camp, which included Felton Jarvis, in addition to Joe and Charlie, started not telling me when the recording sessions were. I just happened to stumble into one of them in L.A., in ’72. “Burning Love” came out of that session. And I brought in a real left-field song by Paul Williams, “Where Do I Go from Here?”
I had my own company at the time, representing music publishers who wanted to get songs cut in Memphis. From time to time, I would come across songs that I thought were right for Elvis. I was really good friends with Alan Ryder, who handled a lot of songs and a lot of good writers. Peter Allen was one of them. I was out in L.A. on business and Alan said, “Listen, I got this song for you. I think it would be a hell of a good song for Elvis.”
We went in his office and he played the demo for me, and it was “I Honestly Love You.” I said, “Yeah, maybe Elvis could use that.” I knew he had a session coming up soon, but they purposely didn’t tell me when so I wouldn’t bring Elvis any songs. So Olivia Newton-John did “I Honestly Love You,” and it made her career. I also had “Moody Blue,” that Ira Jaffe gave me from Screen Gems. Felton happened to get “Moody Blue” from Mark James later on, and that’s how it ended up on Elvis’s session in ’76, but I got it first.
More than anything, I wanted to see Elvis have another hit record. And I knew Chips could do that for him, but Elvis wouldn’t go back to Chips. Colonel and them had fed him all those evil lies.
Elvis and I had an argument about Chips about a year after he did the session there. We were up in the suite in Vegas. He mentioned it to me because at the time I was running Chips’s studio. The whole group was around, and I looked Elvis straight in the face and said, “Elvis, let me tell you something. Whoever told you that stuff is nothing but a fucking liar. They’re trying to ruin it for you, and they’re trying to ruin it for Chips. Because they want your ass back in Nashville, doing the same old crap with the same old people, with the same old fucking songs.”
And he took it the wrong way. He said, “Oh, what do you think you’re going to do, whip my ass?” That really surprised me. And just as I predicted, for the most part, he went to cutting crappy songs again and recording them the same old way. Freddy Bienstock would come to every session, and the Colonel would still send him music. And they started cutting more out in L.A.
By the summer of ’73, Elvis was getting really lazy. He didn’t want to leave Memphis to record, and, in fact, he’d pretty much lost interest in recording. He had lost all enthusiasm, really. He looked at the records now like he looked at the movies. He was tired, but he didn’t want to fight about it.
I went up to Graceland one afternoon. We were out by the pool, and Elvis said, “I want to record in Memphis again, but I don’t want to record at American with Chips.” So he said, “Moon, find me a studio that I can use here in town.” Well, the only one that was secure at the time was Stax. And Stax was pretty famous because they’d had all kinds of hits out of there with Booker T. and the MGs, and Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. I said, “What about the musicians, Elvis?” He said, “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think?” I said, “Well, what about the guys from American?” He said, “Get Reggie Young, and see who else you come up with. But I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it.” Because he just wanted to fulfill the obligation. But I got Reggie, and Tommy Cogbill, and Bobby Wood and Bobby Emmons, and then I asked Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Al Jackson, who were half of Booker T. and the MGs. And he went into Stax for four days in late July, and he went back in for a week in December.
Well, RCA and the people from Nashville didn’t like this. Felton had a lot of buddies in Nashville because he lived there. Plus, recording in Memphis took money away from Nashville, too, especially with the musicians. To show you the politics, RCA pulled a remote truck out back, and they ran the soundboard through the truck. They said they wanted eighteen to twenty-four tracks, and Stax didn’t have that at the time.
Jim Stewart, one of the owners of Stax, let Elvis use his office. Elvis would go in there and sit at the desk and listen to demos. This first day, Red and I were sitting over by the bar, and on the couch were Vernon Presley, Tom Diskin, Freddy Bienstock, Lamar Fike, and a couple of other people. We kept everybody else out, except Isaac Hayes came by a couple of times.
Naturally, Bienstock was playing this crap for him. And Elvis didn’t like any of it, but he picked about two songs just to appease him.
When he finished, Elvis looked around and said, “Does anybody else have any songs?” He did that because he wanted Red and me to speak up. I said, “Yeah, I do.” And Red said, “Yeah, I do, too.” And Elvis said, “Well, let me hear what you’ve got.” So I played him a couple of songs, and one of them was “Raised on Rock,” a Mark James song. “Raised on Rock” was no earth-shattering record. But it was better than what Bienstock had.
So Elvis said, “I’m going to do this one now.” We got up, and we were walking towards the studio, and he said, “Bear with me, I’ve got to put up with this shit from them to make it look good.” I said, “No problem.” So he went in the studio, and Red went in with him. I went back to the office, and I sat in the chair in front of the desk.
Well, Diskin and crew thought they were going to be like the Colonel and use fear tactics. Bienstock walked over to me, and he said, “Say, Mr. Lacker.” And he used “Mr. Lacker” sarcastically. “I noticed that some of these songs you’re playing for Elvis are all from this same company.” They were from Screen Gems, which is no lightweight publishing company. He said, “Are you getting a little piece out of this, Marty?”
I said, “Yes, Freddy, as a matter of fact, I am making money—off of Screen Gems.” And he got this little smirk on his face, and he said, “Do you think maybe Elvis would be a little upset with you if he knew that?” I looked him square in the face and I said, “Freddy, I think you ought to go in the studio there and tell him, don’t you?” And he got this surprised look.
My relationship with Elvis was straight up. I had already told Elvis about this at the house. And he said, “Oh, I don’t have any problem with that. Don’t worry about it.” So I told Bienstock, and he got red in the face and said, “Well, I don’t want to bother him while he’s recording.”
I talked to Elvis about it later, and he said, “Man, just leave them alone. This fuckin’ session don’t mean nothin’ to me anyway.” And he really was at that point.
At the end of the year, when he cut again at Stax, the session was even more of a joke. After the first session, the musicians were really disappointed. Duck Dunn had asked me, “Man, what’s going on here?” And Elvis got upset. So he said, “I don’t want those guys again.” And he had Felton bring in James Burton on guitar, Norbert Putnam on bass, and David Briggs on keyboards. But Felton would use the same old guys that were entrenched in Nashville fifty years ago. Except for people like David Briggs, who was a hell of a piano player and songwriter and who eventually built a fantastic publishing company.
Elvis had the studio for a week, and the first day, we started listening to Bienstock’s crappy demos again, and Elvis hated every song.
Well, I had two new songs, and two others that had already been out before, but they were such great songs that I figured if he did either one, he might have a hit. One was “Loving Arms,” that Dobie Gray had out, and the other one was “We Had It All,” which was on a Dobie Gray album.
It so happened that David Briggs and Norbert Putnam had the publishing on “We Had It All,” along with Irving Almo [Music Publishing]. Elvis listened to both songs, and after he heard “Loving Arms,” he went in and did it. Then he came back out, and he said, “Let me hear ‘We Had It All’ again.” He loved the song. He listened to it over and over again. If he listened to it once, he listened to it forty times. All the musicians were sitting around, scratching their heads, and saying, “If he likes it that much, let’s cut it.” But then he came to me and he said, “Marty, I can’t cut that.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “If I do this, people will think I’m singing about me and Priscilla.”
He was really screwed up that night. The pills put you in so many different moods. Sometimes you get depressed and start feeling sorry for yourself.
David and Norbert both came to me and said, “Man, we thought he was going to cut it!” And I said, “No, he just decided he didn’t want to, for personal reasons.”
After the Stax sessions, Joe and the Colonel kept all the other sessions secret from me again.
LAMAR FIKE: In early August, Elvis went back into Vegas. The reviews were starting to get bad. I looked at the Variety notice the other day. It used words like “somnolent,” and “lackadaisical,” and “sleepwalking.” He just didn’t give a shit.
He had a fight with Colonel about a couple of things. For example, when he did the Stax sessions, he used this group called Voice. It was Donnie Sumner, J.D.’s stepson, and Tim Baty, and Sherrill Nielsen, the tenor, who’d been with [gospel groups] the Statesmen and the Imperials. And they liked to use Tony Brown, who’s now a big record producer and the president of MCA Records/Nashville, as their piano player. Tony’s on that session Elvis did at his house in Palm Springs [in September ’73].
Well, after Elvis used Voice on the sessions, he wanted to hire them to sing behind him in Vegas, and on the road, and on records, and give them $100,000. This was on top of the Stamps and the Sweet Inspirations, mind you. He introduced them in Vegas—brought ’em out and let ’em do one number one night when he was fucked up. And then he wrote out a contract for them on toilet paper. Now, there’s no way they were worth $100,000. Colonel told him $50,000 would be too much, and Elvis got pissed. He got ’em, though. Used ’em for two years or so.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis was just going to get them started. See, Elvis liked certain kinds of voices—real deep voices and real high voices. And Sherrill Nielsen—he calls himself “Shaun” instead of “Sherrill” now—had this real high voice, and Elvis really liked it. And Nielsen sang with some friends. Elvis always said he found them working in an upholstery shop in Nashville, that they were covering seat cushions in the daytime and singing at night. I don’t know. But Elvis made them a group, and he called them “Voice” because of Sherrill’s tenor and because of this spiritual book, The Voice of Silence, that Larry Geller got him into. And they talked Elvis into giving them money.
Nielsen and his friends said, “The only problem is we can’t get started. We don’t have the backing. Boy, if we just had this . . . ” So they ingratiated themselves into Elvis’s life simply by singing gospel music around him. So Elvis got the idea, “I’m going to help you.” And pretty soon, Elvis said, “I’m going to give you guys a break. I’m going to be your manager.”
All he really wanted was for them to sing gospel music with him, but he signed them to an impromptu agreement where he was going to guarantee them that $100,000 a year. And when Colonel and Vernon heard that, they fuckin’ blew the roof off. But in this instance, it didn’t stop Elvis. Elvis just said, “Fuck them. I want you guys around, and that’s what’s going to happen.”
It didn’t last very long, though. Because as a group, they weren’t that talented.
LAMAR FIKE: One night, Elvis had taken so many pills that he was out onstage and his throat just closed up. Dr. Boyers, the throat doctor, used some kind of special equipment and got up all manner of mucus and congestion. They thought Elvis might be getting pneumonia. But he went back out onstage and finished his show.
He was getting more erratic. One morning, he woke Red up and told him he had to go see Dr. Boyers and he wanted Red to take him. Red kind of grumbled about it, and when he got over to Elvis’s room, Elvis pulled out that M16 and told him he was going to shoot his head off. Red called his bluff, and Elvis winked at Sonny like it was all a big joke.
He was just so unpredictable. He pulled a gun on Jimmy Dean, the singer, one night. Jimmy came down to the dressing room after a show, and Elvis kept him waiting for an hour, and when he came out, Jimmy joked with him and said, “I ought to rip a yard out of your ass, making me wait like that.” And quick as a cat, Elvis pulled out a .357 magnum and jammed it under Jimmy’s chin and said, “And I ought to blow your head off, talking to me like that.” He did that at the Memphian one night, too, to some guy who wanted to get in the washroom.
He would go on these tangents. He was always wanting to kill somebody, and he was getting so paranoid it was unbelievable. One time in Vegas, he got real mad at some guy, a stranger, and got up in his face. He thought the guy had said something, and the guy hadn’t said a word. It was just Elvis’s paranoia. He went up to him and threatened to kill him. Things like that would never get out, though, because he was so well protected.
Hell, he threatened all of us all the time. And he became increasingly maniacal and insane, really. It would have been easy to leave, but we stayed out of love and loyalty. Those are pretty priceless commodities. But I guess we were also masochistic. It was kind of like being in love with a woman you know you’ve got to get away from. You put up with all the bad shit for one hour of good. We built our whole lives around that one hour. That became our whole focal point, to get that glimpse every once in a while that he could be normal and straight.
It was really a love/hate relationship. We used to walk off just shaking our heads, saying, “What the fuck are we doing?” And we’d go, “Well, we’ll see how he is tomorrow.” We pushed it one more day. And it became so difficult. So difficult. We were addicted to it, but God, it was rough. It was intolerable.
BILLY SMITH: After my daddy died in August of ’73, Elvis tried again to get me to come back to work for him. And I wouldn’t do it. He said, “A lot of these guys don’t understand me. I need you here.” I said, “I can’t, Elvis, not now.” We were living in this little house on St. Margaret’s Place. And I said, “I’ve got my mama livin’ with me, and Daddy just passed away.” I said, “When you’re at home, I’ll be there. But right now, I can’t find my way clear to come back with you.”
We talked about a lot of things, including Priscilla. I said, “I heard you were going to have Mike Stone done in.” He kind of laughed. I said, “You don’t have to stoop to their level. I know it hurts. But you’re a lot stronger than that. Don’t even think about something along that line.”
MARTY LACKER: You know, this supercop shit of his never let up. Sometime around July or August, before he went to Vegas, he was out in California. And he was driving down the street and he saw these two guys fighting. One was a gas station attendant. And one was bigger than the other. Elvis stopped the car, which was a limousine, so you can imagine what these guys thought. And he got out and told the bigger one to leave the other one alone. Well, the guy mouthed off to him and took a stance like he was going to hit Elvis.
Elvis had these guns on him, and he was reaching behind his back to get one of them. Elvis wouldn’t have shot the guy, I don’t think. But Hamburger James, of all people, stepped behind Elvis’s back and said, “Let me have that pistol,” and took it out of Elvis’s hand.
On the whole, see, James was a real dimwit. In ’73, after Elvis closed in Vegas, James was going home to Memphis on vacation to see his parents. His dad was a retired cop, so Elvis liked that. Elvis had given James a $500 bonus at the end of the engagement, and I think he gambled it away. But he said somebody stole it. So Elvis gave him another $500.
At the same time, Elvis also suspected that James had taken a couple of rings from him. He couldn’t find his big thirty-karat sapphire that the Sahara Tahoe had given him for breaking the attendance record. And James came up with it—said he’d put it in his briefcase for safekeeping and forgotten about it. But Elvis still couldn’t find his karate ring, and he was really pissed about that. He bitched and moaned about it, and the next day, it showed up lying inside a bunch of pipes next to the laundry chute.
Then, worst of all, two or three of those Polaroids of Priscilla in a compromising position with that girl were missing. Elvis figured James fingered ’em.
Sure enough, James had gone to the airport with at least one of them, and fortunately Elvis had discovered they were missing in time to do something. James’s plane was leaving at, like, eleven in the morning, and at ten Elvis and the guys raced out to the airport there in Vegas. The airport is pretty close to the Hilton, and Hamburger was already on the plane, but it hadn’t left yet.
So Elvis, in this big, dramatic move, ran out on the tarmac and flashed his narcotics badge that Nixon got him and stopped the damn plane. They pushed the steps back up to it and opened the door, and Elvis marched into the cockpit and told the pilot he couldn’t take off until he surrendered the suspect. And Elvis dragged James off that plane by the back of the neck.
He got him out to the car, and he started reading him his rights. He said, “James, you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney . . . ” And then he couldn’t remember any more of the Miranda, so he just said, “And you have the right to all the rest of that shit. Get the fuck in the car.”
They took James back to the hotel and slapped the shit out of him—really slapped him around some. Red and I were laughing about that just the other day. Because that was such an incredible scene. James was almost bald, and he usually combed his few remaining strands over. And when they slapped him on top of his head, his hair flew up in the air.
He was a pathetic bastard, really. A couple of the guys had their guns drawn, and James thought they might really shoot him. First he smarted off that his father, being a cop, would hunt Elvis down and kill him. And then he pleaded for mercy.
Elvis said, “Okay, James, go on back to Memphis. I won’t bother you anymore, as long as you keep your mouth shut.” Elvis felt bad about it later.
I don’t know what happened to James after that. I heard he was pumping gas for a while.
LAMAR FIKE: What Elvis really wanted was the picture of Priscilla and that girl. That’s why we chased him out to the airport. Hamburger was basically a loyal guy. But I think he felt that he was mistreated about something, and that’s why he took the photograph.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t think James was the only one that stole the pictures. There was more than one missing. Elvis confiscated the one from him, but I don’t know what’s happened to the others. I keep thinking somebody’ll sell them to the tabloids. And hoping they don’t.
LAMAR FIKE: We had our work cut out for us in the seventies. But we kept that shroud around him. And I mean, nobody penetrated it. Or if they did, they had a hell of a time getting out.
Like this one guy who worked at one of the hotels—a guy Elvis routinely gave a $100 tip to—was shooting off his mouth that Elvis was a druggie. Jackie Wilson’s people told Sonny about it, as a favor. And they sent a guy from the real Mafia to Sonny, and he volunteered to take care of the guy. Sonny said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” But Sonny called the guy up anonymously and told him he’d better stop talking or he was history.
Towards the end, there were too many holes in the dike to plug. You could stick everything you had into it, including your dick, and it wouldn’t be enough. It was getting that bad. Stories would appear in different trades [newspapers] of Elvis being fucked up onstage or in public somewhere. And people could tell. Back in the early days, you could hide stuff because there were still Teletypes and telephones, not this fucking satellite in the skies. We still did an awfully good job, but we couldn’t outrun the electronic media.
MARTY LACKER: After Elvis got rid of Hamburger James, Al Strada went on the road as Elvis’s wardrobe manager. He prepared his stage costumes and his bedroom, along with Ricky Stanley. Elvis hired Al in ’72 as a sort of night watchman. He guarded the Monovale house while Priscilla and Lisa were there and Elvis was in Vegas or on the road. He was a Mexican guy, Mexican American. Elvis liked him a lot.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis hired him, it got everybody mad again. The guys said, “What are you hiring him for?” The reason was really just to worry everybody.
BILLY SMITH: Al was a pretty straight person, a nice guy. Of course, he was Mexican, and he had, I think, a kind of a built-in inferiority complex. We always kidded him, but he took it well.
MARTY LACKER: It was Hamburger’s job to pick up and destroy the empty pill bottles and used syringes Elvis left around, so I guess Al inherited that chore, too.
LAMAR FIKE: You’d see two or three syringes all the time during the last five or six years of Elvis’s life.
BILLY SMITH: You didn’t see them laying around very often, unless it would be in his bathroom upstairs. On one or two occasions, syringes were left at hotels, and that never should have happened. There was a few asses tore up about it, to put it mildly. So they started double-checking his room. They’d even take the garbage and put it on the plane and dump it later. It was Joe’s job to make sure everything was kept under wraps.
MARTY LACKER: In October, Elvis and Priscilla’s divorce became final. You can tell by those photos of them leaving the courthouse that Elvis was puffy and that he’d put on weight. Priscilla says in her book that she was shocked at how he looked. They went into the judge’s chambers and held hands while the judge checked off the formalities, and then they went outside. Priscilla walked to her car with her sister, and Elvis walked over to his limo with Vernon, and his attorney, and some of the guys. Priscilla waved goodbye, and Elvis winked at her. That was it. Except they still had Lisa to talk about on the phone.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis changed a lot after he was married and after Lisa was born. But I think he changed the most after his divorce.
MARTY LACKER: Six days after the divorce, Elvis ended up in Baptist Hospital in Memphis. At the time, they said it was for recurring pneumonia and pleurisy, with the additional symptoms of toxic hepatitis and an enlarged colon. They did all these tests under the phony name of “Aaron Sivle,” which was his middle name and his first name spelled backwards. He was really in there for detox. He stayed two weeks—until November 1.
Dr. Nick told Rose Clayton and Dick Heard [Elvis Up Close] that they had to keep his chart locked up, even away from other people who worked in the hospital. He said, “The lab technicians were selling his blood and urine. It was crazy.”
Elvis had three overdoses in ’73. One was near fatal, in St. Louis, the end of June. Vernon witnessed that one.
BILLY SMITH: If that had been my son, we would have had one hellacious knockdown, drag-out. And then if need be, I would have said, “Look, we may lose it all tomorrow, but either you get help or I’ll get it for you.”
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t know if that overdose was near fatal, but he got pretty screwed up. We had to throw him under the shower. He was in bad shape. No circulation, little heartbeat, just out of it. He wouldn’t respond to anything—shaking, slapping, or anything else the guys would do.
Dr. Nick would bring him around when something like that happened. We started calling him “Needle Nick, in the nick of time.” Elvis was in the hospital five times in the last seven years. It was always for detox, but it was under the guise of other things.
That first hospitalization came about after he went for acupuncture in L.A. for bad sinuses and a strained back. I was there when he did that. The acupuncturist used steroids, and those on top of his usual Demerol blew him up like crazy. He looked pretty bad. And Linda and Dr. Nick got him in the hospital. Dr. Nick cut off the Demerol and gave him Methadone, like any other addict.
BILLY SMITH: In the beginning, I tried to justify his taking drugs. He did need them for a colon problem, and he had a liver disease, which I believe was hereditary and came down from his mama. Because I remember Dr. Nick asking me what kind of liver problem Daddy had. Dr. Nick said Elvis had this condition where a portion of your liver diseases and dies off.
MARTY LACKER: While Elvis was in the hospital for this first detox, he got a drug shipment from Las Vegas from one of his doctors. Jerry Schilling was in Memphis—he wasn’t working as a film editor anymore—and he intercepted the package and took it to Dr. Nick.
Jerry told Nick he thought Elvis was really trying to dry out and get straight. And Nick decided to test Elvis on it. He told Jerry to take it to Elvis, to see if Elvis was serious about getting better. Two days went by, and Elvis never mentioned it to Nick. Dr. Nick searched Elvis’s medicine cabinet and found all the stuff hidden in the back.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had been taking a lot of cortisone in Las Vegas. Just heavy doses. That’s why he was so puffy.
MARTY LACKER: His colon was distended. And I’ve heard, and read, that he had little control over his bladder function during this time. And he’d taken so many drugs that he’d aggravated his digestive system something fierce. Dr. Nick got him to see a Memphis gastroenterologist, Dr. Lawrence Wruble. Wruble helped him with his symptoms, but when he tried to counsel him, Elvis told him he needed drugs to get up for his shows and more drugs to come down afterwards. Wruble told him, “Either you’ve got to quit doing two shows a night or nobody will need to take care of you any longer.”
But Elvis couldn’t do that. Not with the deal Colonel cut with the Hilton.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t think the colon trouble was entirely related to drugs, but I think it had a whole hell of a lot to do with it. They just throw your natural cycle off. He’d always had a little bit of difficulty. But it increased as years went on.
Being on the road lends itself to constipation, too. That and his eating habits. It wasn’t just the junk food. He didn’t have a real routine. It was just whenever the hell he got up. It could be twelve o’clock noon, or three o’clock in the morning, and that’s when he ate. So it’s not surprising that his colon bothered him.
MARTY LACKER: During this first detox, Dr. Nick called in two psychiatrists, Dr. David Knott and Dr. Robert Fink. They put Elvis on methadone treatments. Dr. Knott came in the room all the time when Elvis was in the hospital. He was a consultant at Baptist, but he was also the head of the Tennessee psychiatric hospital. He’s well known in Memphis as an alcohol and drug abuse doctor. He used to treat Jerry Lee Lewis. But Elvis dumped both their asses. He didn’t want anything to do with a psychiatrist.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis would have thought it wasn’t macho to see a psychiatrist. Besides, Elvis thought he was in control of everything.
LAMAR FIKE: In the years since Elvis died, there’s been a story floating around that Vernon hired John O’Grady to track Elvis’s drug use in ’73, after he blew off the Tahoe engagement.
MARTY LACKER: Vernon hired O’Grady? I don’t think so. O’Grady was gotten through Ed Hookstratten, who was taking his directions from Colonel Parker, not Vernon. Now, Parker might have talked Vernon into doing that. But Vernon knew what was going on. He was on some of the tours when Elvis couldn’t sing a lick up onstage.
Vernon wasn’t going to say anything because Vernon didn’t want to lose the money. If Vernon was that concerned with Elvis’s reputation, he would have given back the money for that CBS special [Elvis in Concert] that ran after Elvis’s death and told them not to air it. Elvis is so fat and drugged there, you just wish the television would blow up. It’s a disgrace to his memory. And it’s a big reason comedians have cracked jokes about Elvis’s size since he died. That’s the image that sticks in a lot of people’s minds.
BILLY SMITH: Hookstratten may have been Elvis’s lawyer, but he was closer to Colonel than he was to Elvis. And it wouldn’t surprise me if I found out Colonel had nonchalantly asked Hookstratten to work John O’Grady into being around Elvis a lot, to see what he could find out.
I’ve heard that Hookstratten hired O’Grady and another detective named Jack Kelly to find out where Elvis got his drugs. O’Grady says he give Vernon a copy of his investigative report, and they supposedly went to ’em and put pressure on them to stop giving Elvis all that stuff. You see how much good it done.
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve read that after Elvis and Priscilla divorced, she went to Elvis and asked him to go into the Scripps Medical Clinic. This was supposed to have been at the suggestion of Hookstratten and O’Grady. That didn’t happen that I know of. Mother Teresa she’s not. And I don’t think O’Grady had enough fuckin’ intelligence to do it.
BILLY SMITH: That’s possible, but none of us knew about it, if she did. First of all, why in the hell didn’t Priscilla do that when she was married to him? Or make the suggestion herself? Or talk to some of the guys in the group? I’ve never heard one person mention that Priscilla was worried about Elvis’s drug problem. And I don’t know of any conversation she had with Elvis or anybody else about it.
Instead, she went her separate way and let him go. Priscilla’s feelings were, “Give me a quarter, and I’m gone.” I don’t think she cared a damn about helping him. Nobody who was in a position to legally do something seemed to give a shit.