cover image Good Rockin' Tonight: Twenty Years on the Road and on the Town with Elvis

Good Rockin' Tonight: Twenty Years on the Road and on the Town with Elvis

Joe Esposito. Simon & Schuster, $22.5 (268pp) ISBN 978-0-671-79507-8

Esposito met Elvis Presley in the army. In 1960, when both were discharged, he accepted Elvis's offer of a job, becoming one of the ``Memphis Mafia,'' the inner circle of friends and employees who went virtually everywhere with the King until his death in 1977. With freelance journalist Oumano, Esposito writes of a puerile fantasy lifestyle, the chief pleasures of which were boyish pranks and the pursuit of women. Elvis emerges as both charmingly naive and a tyrannical prima donna, while his much-maligned manager, Colonel Parker, was, Esposito maintains, simply a shrewd businessman who cared about his protege's best interests. Esposito soft-pedals some of the more controversial aspects of Presley's life, e.g., his drug abuse and womanizing, but on the whole the singer portrayed in these pages, one of the most mythologized figures in American culture, seems human and perhaps even likable. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Oct.)