eXtreme Elvis: The Interview

I recently was blessed with the opportunity to interview eXtreme Elvis. We met at a bar in Oakland for drinks and complimentary soup and had ourselves a little chat.

Sean for thingsihate: So, do you have a connection to the Glamour Pussies?

eXtreme Elvis: The Glamour Pussies certainly share the same sensibility of live rock and roll that I do.

It actually seems that a lot of San Francisco rock and roll is going in that direction--a little more theatrical, a little more interactive.

Sean: Like who else?

XE: Well there's this whole kind of transplanted Providence, Rhode Island scene going on, you know. You've got bands like Pink and Brown, where they actually sit on the floor rather than on stage. The lead singer of that band bounces into other people, you know. During his guitar solo he just kind of runs into the audience.

You've got performers that are just doing incredibly unusual, experimental kinds of things. Bands that do their whole sets backwards. How's your soup?

Sean: I haven't tried it yet.

XE: I was a little suspect, but it's OK.

Sean: So I thought that the same person who did your site did the Glamour Pussies'. The thing that I wrote about them got copied onto their site, too.

XE: No. I forwarded that link to them. But obviously for the purposes of eXtreme Elvis, we don't want people to think that I have more than one gig, you know? That's why we only put the link to the eXtreme Elvis review.

Sean: So is the Easter bunny thing hush-hush?

XE: No, I mean, some people out there actually claim to know my real name, and things about my past.

Sean: Are they right?

XE: Sometimes. But the thing is, eventually all that stuff's gonna come out, and it's not worth it to keep it a secret. The show is a lot about impersonation, right? So the degree to which I can be someone else--not just be Elvis, but be someone else--is what makes the show interesting.

And by extension, when people come into the show acting like they've never acted before, or doing things they've never done before, that's sort of an impersonation too. And after the show, people go back to the way they were.

Sean: At the Folsom Street Fair show, every time you went into the audience people would keep grabbing or spanking you. Does that bother you at all?

XE: No, I think it's really important. I mean, I think it's important for there to be direct bodily contact between the performers and the audience. So, in that deal, there's no distinguishment anymore between the show and the audience.

Now sometimes I'll reassert that control, you know, like I had this idiot get up on stage, and I had to get him off stage. I had to reassert that this is my show. It's still my show, no matter what.

But people touching me, me touching people, people doing unusual or spontaneous things, that's all good stuff. When I first started doing this, I hadn't been laid in three or four moths--six months if you count the last two months of my ex-girlfriend and I's relationship. And so, being touched while naked, and touching other people while naked, became this sexual outlet.

That's a big form of sexual expression, being naked and having all these people touching you and touching them back, and singing them love songs and whatnot.

Sean: So you're getting them involved, but you're still running the show?

XE: Yeah, I'm definitely in control of the show. And that's important, 'cause that's how Elvis would have done it, man. Assuming Elvis ever took a show to this level, due to the bodily fluids, and violence, he'd always remember that the audience needs to be entertained.

I'm so sick of hearing about artists who are expressing themselves. Fuck that man, you need to entertain people. You need to give people a show, you need to give people an experience.

Sean: So you're an entertainer, not an artist?

XE: I'm a performer. Now sometimes that performance takes on a quality of art, and sometimes that performance takes on the quality of a big steaming turd, right? But it's always going to be a performance, and I think that's why someone goes to see someone like Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, or whoever, man. They go to see those people because they're performers first and artists second.

Sean: So when it takes a turn for art, what are you trying to say?

XE: When I do art? Well, I come from a very ... I come from like a lower-middle class background, OK? Not quite Jerry Springer, but not quite middle class either.

In the event that I do something that you could call art, it's not coming from an upper-middle class art school background. There's a lot of people out there that do really good stuff, but they're all kind of rebelling against the art school training they got. I've never been to art school, man.

So, a lot more of the stuff I do is just sort of the stuff that makes me laugh, or stuff that makes my friends laugh, or stuff that I can't believe I'm getting away with. And if that's art--you know, Andy Warhol said that art is anything you can get away with--then I guess I'm doing art when I do that stuff.

But every once in a while it ain't art anymore. Every once in a while, it becomes shock material.

Sean: Do you actually keep in mind "How would the real Elvis have done this?" Is he really a part of the act, or is he just a name you've attached yourself to?

XE: Elvis is a launching pad; he's like a springboard. Elvis is an idea, and he's a great idea. But, if you're an Elvis impersonator, your goal is Elvis. That's your end product. For me, I start with Elvis, and then take it from there.

So that's the major difference. I mean, if you talked about really departing from Elvis and just doing really serious art stuff, then sort of I'm pretty shocking. So Elvis is a good anchor to keep me from doing stuff that's too out there.

Sean: Do you ever meet other Elvis impersonators who think you're just another impersonator like them?

XE: I went to this competition in Laughlin, Nevada. A promotion company wanted an Elvis entertainer they could book in Nevada casinos and nightclubs and whatnot. And I went down there, you know, as a fucking joke, to see what it was like, and my audition was cut off about 20 seconds in.

I didn't even get naked. They just saw me, saw that I was wearing maybe like a hundred-dollar costume bursting at the seams, and couldn't sing for shit, right? And they knew there was something a little weird about it all.

But, I'm hanging out in the hotel at the nickel slots later, and I was getting some fuckin' dirty looks from one of the other guys at the audition. And it makes sense, 'cause I get hate mail from Elvis impersonators. I don't know if you've read my web site, but that's all real, man.

Granted, some of the shit on my web site is not real, but letters from angry Elvis fans are real. And the people that hate me the most are not Elvis fans, they're Elvis impersonators, because they think I'm making fun of them. And there's an element of truth in that.

Sean: Do you ever get real threats? Face-to-face threats?

XE: Um, surprisingly none yet.

Sean: And no threats from mail that you take seriously?

XE: Well, it helps that I don't have a postal mailbox. I don't have an address. There's no direct way to contact me besides email. So I've gotten some email correspondence that was threatening.

But my friend that does the website, he does a trace on that stuff and he's been able to convince me that almost all of it comes from the Midwest. And I think it's highly unlikely for someone in Bumfuck, Idaho to get in their car and drive down here.

Unless they've got my phone number or something like that, they don't have anything. So I'm not too worried about those things.

Sean: So you've taken the act to other cities. How many other cities?

XE: Well, after I got a little bit of press, I got offers to do a couple of gigs. One of them was for this gallery. It was a series of religious-theme pieces.

So, this gallery down in L.A. called The Smell, and they were doing religiously themed pieces. They had two of them each night over a course of three nights; it was a Friday-through-Sunday deal.

And for a long time I'd been trying to put some religious elements into my show, mostly to make people wonder, because I think there's a lot of mythic power in religion. So I'd kind of circulated through the grapevine and through email and a couple of people who were my cohorts at the time that I'd converted to Judaism.

And my piece down there was a live, on-stage bris. 'Cause uh, my whole life I've been, you know, fully intact. But I felt like if I had an opportunity to do something that would convince people that I was serious about converting to Judaism, and that I could do something that was shocking and confrontational and weird, then I would get circumcised on stage.

Sean: Did you do it?

XE: Yeah I found this mohel, um, actually this crazy rabbi that I met at Burning Man. Actually a friend of mine met him at Burning Man. And he was trained, and he's studied, and he'd performed brises before, and he liked the idea.

It didn't bother him that I was pretending to convert to Judaism. I was going to make a big sacrifice to make a joke.

So when we started that performance in the gallery, there were maybe 35 people there. By the time people realized what was going to happen, there were about 12 people there. When it was over, there were about six people there, and two of those were friends of mine who came out from The Valley to see the show.

So that was pretty amazing, and the only reason I can think that it never got the kind of press and attention that my chicken stunt did was that everyone was too squeamish.

Sean: So is clearing a room a success, or is clearing a room a failure?

XE: Um, it depends on whether I think that the people who were at the performance, who remained at the performance, had a powerful, transformative experience. I know I did.

You know, I couldn't even touch my dick for three weeks. And I gotta tell you, man, they're right about the difference being like the difference between color and black and white. I sure wish I could have pulled that stunt without having to actually lose my foreskin to do it.

Sean: What about other places?

XE: Well, um, we went up to Portland one time, me and my backup singer in the band. We went up to the kind of college area, where they have all the coffee houses, know where I'm talking about?

Sean: Yeah.

XE: And I just did an acoustic set. I had my guitarist and my bassist and we did an acoustic set. But as far as actually touring, we haven't done that yet. I've been a kind of city phenomenon for a long time.

I went to the Laughlin thing on my own, but I didn't even register on the radar, man, because nobody in Laughlin knew anything about me. And Portland, it was just a house party.

Sean: Do you think other cities would be as accepting as San Francisco?

XE: Well, I don't have a lot to go on, except the email and the web site traffic. The web site gets a lot of hits from Spain and Sweden. And I've had offers to play in Madrid, I've had offers to play in Berlin, so there's a lot of interest in Europe.

I get email from places like Buffalo, New York; Vancouver, British Columbia; Phoenix, Arizona, so there's a scattering of interest but I don't know if those deranged teenagers in those cities actually constitute a following or a potential audience.

My major reason for choosing to go to any particular place would be physical safety, but also paradoxically, controversy. I think I'd love to play much more conservative areas without getting killed. If it meant that I only got arrested and brought up on charges, I could handle that.

There's some areas I know like, uh, Memphis for instance, I don't think I could ever bring the show to Memphis based on what I know.

Sean: Too rednecky?

XE: Well, let me just say that even the punk rockers there love their Elvis. I mean, you don't fuck with Elvis man.

One thing I've learned: You can fuck with chickens, and you can fuck with feminists, and you can fuck with black people, but you can not fuck with Elvis Presley. That's the thing that pisses people off more than anything else.


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