A hush fell over the audience as the lights dimmed. A low, rumbling bass blared from the public address system, followed by the first muted strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”. The piece built to a blood-pounding climax, and before the kettle drums had been stilled the band onstage was well into C. C. Rider. This was the ritual, and every person in the coliseum knew it.

Then, like magic, he was there, wearing a jumpsuit the color of a robin’s egg with bell-bottom flares out to here. The spangles and studs and rhinestones glittered under the spotlights like a disco ball, sending spears of light into every corner of the building.

There were restraining barriers; that was in the contract. But the fans, the true fans, would not be stopped. By anything. He looked down at the lip just beyond the footlights and there they were. The way they jumped and hollered and screamed and flopped, reminded him of those big old ugly fish that waller in the water in the spillways of dams. Stage carp.

He threw a few moves on them. Karate chops and stuff. In response, they squealed and cried and like to have fainted. He smiled once and then sang a slow, tender song, Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” that jerked their little hearts right out of their chests.

Thankyouverymuch, he said into the microphone in that way that got them every time.

He took a red scarf from around his neck and wiped the sweat that poured off his face and exposed chest. Give ’em something to smell. He walked to the edge of the stage and dangled the scarf teasingly. He bent over to give it to one particularly excited fan when another one grabbed the thick gold chain around his neck and pulled for all she was worth. He tried to pull back, but by then others had ahold of it, too. With two or three mighty jerks he was flipped right off the stage and onto his back without ever hitting the floor. The fans held him aloft and passed him over their heads like a coffin at an ayatollahs funeral. His legs were sticking straight up and wiggling, his white shoes dancing in the air.

I’m either gonna die or be the silliest-looking sonofabitch in history.

_Bill Haney never liked being called an Elvis impersonator. “I’m a lousy imitator,” he says. “If you asked me to sound like anybody, I couldn’t. I don’t know how to change my voice. People automatically started comparing my voice to his. I never once tried to sound like Elvis. I tried to sound like Bill Haney.”

It has been more than a decade since Bill Haney, the world’s first full-time Elvis impersonator, the man who little by little created what has become a permanent cultural iconography, hung up his jumpsuit and turned his back on the money, the crowds, the adulation, not to mention the competing fan clubs that stretched from Memphis to West Berlin. By the time he quit in 1982, there were an estimated two thousand people doing the same thing Bill Haney did for a living.

"There are too many bad Elvis acts out there stinking things up for the rest of us,” he told a reporter at the time. By then, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Elvis impersonator. There was a young Elvis, a fat Elvis, a black Elvis, a girl Elvis, a Mexican Elvis, even a midget Elvis. The image of Elvis Presley on those stages was becoming increasingly sick and twisted and ugly, and the camp aspect of it—those people who thought the whole thing was some great white trash joke—well, it all got to be too much for the boy from Blytheville, Arkansas, the one who started it all when he fell in love with Jerry Lee Lewis’s red hot piano.

_Bill Haney is now fifty-five years old—“thirteen years older than he was when he died,” he says—and still carries himself with the athletic grace of his performing years. The lines around his eyes and the few telling signs of gray in his black hair are all that belie his youthful appearance. When he grins, which is often, Haney is still strikingly handsome, and one can guess what the effect of that smile must have been like in the early ’70s when he was creating a new form of pop culture.

Haney is a shy, unassuming man who prefers the anonymity and comfort of sitting behind a piano to standing in the spotlight, yet he quickly becomes animated when the mood strikes. He is sitting in the break room of the Four Seasons Realty Company in West Memphis, Arkansas, a highly successful real estate enterprise he and Gail, his wife of thirty-five years, own. The office is decorated in nouveau West Memphis with tall cathedral windows, designer awnings, and peach-colored, floral-pattern furniture. The teal carpet is thick and cushiony, the matching walls bright and filled with sunshine. Bill is wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a bright red tropical print, khaki pants, and canvas deck shoes. He looks as if he has made afternoon plans to go sailing.

On first meeting him one is startled to discover that he doesn’t look a thing like Elvis and, to the practiced ear, Haney’s flat Arkansas drawl is nothing like Elvis’s mumbling Memphis brogue. Yet the longer Bill Haney talks, the weirder it gets. Maybe it’s the crooked grin, the carefully controlled coiffure, or the deadpan Southern wit. Or maybe it’s some more mysterious osmosis taking place. Whatever the source, Haney is off the scale on the Elvis meter. At times one finds it impossible not to simply sit and stare.

_Bill was four years old when music moved center stage into his life. He heard his next-door neighbor in Blytheville pounding out a boogie-woogie on the piano and told his mother, “I want to do that. She saw to it that Bill got piano lessons and everyone was greatly surprised at how quickly the boy became fluent, but before reaching his teens he had quit all formal musical training and was rocking on his own. Although eager for any opportunity to perform, Haney was too shy to sing, even though he had a strong, distinctive tenor voice. As long as he was behind his keyboard everything was fine.

Shortly after he turned fifteen, Bill’s father announced to the family that they would be moving to Southern California. His father had been a policeman in Blytheville for over twenty-five years, but was willing to risk his family’s future on the promise of a better job at a far better salary. However, Bill didn’t take to California.

“As soon as school was out for the summer, I’d head back this a-way,” he says. “I never liked California and was homesick. I’ve wondered a lot of times if things would’ve changed if I’d stayed back here to begin with and hadn’t had anything to do with California. But parents have to change jobs sometimes...back then everyone was goin’ out there for the gold, the California gold. A lot more pay than you could make back here. I was there, but I hated it.”

He was in high school when a swivel-hipped boy from back in  Memphis took the music world by storm. “I wore my hair like Elvis. I always had. But at that time I thought Elvis was just a pretty boy for girls—you know, with ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Teddy Bear’ and all that, and those girls screamin’.”

Bill was more interested in Chuck Berry and Little Richard and smooth piano players like Fats Domino. Then came the craziest, poundingest piano player the world had ever seen, a blond-haired demon who literally set his piano on fire: Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer. Bill listened to all those singles on the Sun record label—“Great Balls of Fire,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Breathless”—and was transformed into a flailing keyboard wildman. “Man, you oughta seen me,” Bill says. “I wiped them pianos out. I was killin’ pianos.”

By the time he graduated from high school in Torrance, California, in 1958, Bill had won several amateur talent contests with his piano act, including one on a television show, Town Hall Party in Los Angeles, that featured many of the nation’s best country and western artists. He was invited back on the show to compete with other finalists and won the quarter finals. He was invited again for the annual finals and won that one, too.

RCA Records then came knocking.

“RCA got in contact with me after my win on Town Hall Party and wanted to groom me as an instrumentalist like Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, who had a popular organ act going at the time. I wasn’t singing at all then, but I didn’t want to be just an instrumentalist. I wanted to have a band, so RCA told me to go ahead and get one.

“Well, I found a group of boys from Arkansas out there and we got up a band called the Flares and cut some singles for RCA. RCA got behind the records and sent us on a promotional tour to push the singles and we went across the country and were supposed to end the tour on American Bandstand. We started the tour and this old boy who was our singer, well, his daddy got sick and he had to leave the band. That left me as the only one in the band that knew the words to the songs. We were doing covers of Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, and everyone else, and when I took over on vocals everybody was sayin’, ‘Hey man, you sound a lot like Elvis. Do you know any of his stuff?’ Well, I hadn’t learned any Elvis material, except for the few things that old boy, our singer, had done. So I started pickin’ it up.

“At that time, if you were going to get a club to hire you, you had to play what the people were asking for so you could get up a crowd. Every time I’d go to play, peopled say, ‘Do you know this song? Do you know that song by Elvis?’ As they’d start naming them off, I’d go and learn them. And so people started to associate my voice with his. Even the songs that wasn’t his came out Elvisy. It was easy for me; I didn’t have to learn how to train my voice to be similar to his. I think it was because the colloquialisms we had, being from the South, were the same as far as the way we pronounced things and all. But then whenever I’d hear him sing something, it was just [he snaps his fingers]...the song was just natural to me.

Although the singles the Flares cut for RCA didn’t burn up the charts, Haney had gotten his taste of the musician’s life and liked it.

“After winning those contests out in California, I decided what I wanted to do was either play baseball or play music. Man, I was heavy into baseball, but I decided to stick to music. Music just consumed me. You know, man, you see those pretty little girls and all and I says to myself, ‘Forget baseball.’”

Still homesick for his native Arkansas, Haney moved back to Blytheville, recruited another band, and married a pretty hometown girl, Gail Slaughter. Throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s, he covered the Arkansas-Missouri Bootheel circuit, playing many of the roadhouse honky-tonks that Elvis had played when he was still called the Hillbilly Cat and recorded for Sam Phillips’s Sun record label. The tough clubs and joints that Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins toured became Haney’s stomping grounds—clubs like the Rebel Inn in Osceola, the B&B Club in Gobler, the Zanza Club in Haiti, Top Hat in Kennett, Twin Gables in Blytheville. People kept requesting Elvis songs and Haney began to develop a core of fans who came just to hear him do Elvis. Even though he sat behind a piano, didn’t particularly look like Elvis, and sang in a much lower key, people told him over and over again how much he reminded them of Elvis.

Unlike many musicians, Bill Haney was a savvy businessman. With a wife and two young daughters to support, he knew his success depended on his ability to deliver onstage and knew if he could pull in a packed house, his bookings would multiply and he could demand more money. And Elvis had never let him down.

Although Haney had played throughout the South, he had purposely avoided Memphis. “I didn’t move into the Memphis market because I was hesitant about going where that Elvis monster was. I didn’t know how I’d be accepted over there based on the kind of stuff I was doin’. Well, I wound up playing on Dance Party a couple of times, which was a local music show on WHBQ television station in Memphis that was hosted by Wink Martindale. Anita Wood, who was Elvis’s girlfriend at the time, was on the show that day, and I didn’t know who she was. She walks up to me and says, ‘You know, when you’re on TV, you remind me a lot of a good friend of mine.’ I says, ‘Oh really?’ I thought she was just some gal who was goin’ to Memphis State University and just happened to be on there as an extra that day. She said, ‘Yeah, and I’d like to introduce you to him, but he’s out of the country right now.’ I says, ‘Well, who is it?,’ ’cause I was still in the dark. She says, ‘Elvis Presley,’ and I says, ‘Oh yeah, man. Ed love to meet him.’ But they busted up and that was that.”

Around this time, Haney began to have doubts about his career as an entertainer. He’d had more fun than any man was entitled to and had left his mark in the small towns that dotted Memphis’s tri-state expanse, but he wanted to be a devoted father and husband. Shortly after the Beatles had nudged Elvis off the charts, Haney decided to leave the business. He obtained a real estate license and began to concentrate on selling houses and lots around Hardy, Arkansas. It was something he liked, was good at, and it provided a solid, steady income. But there was still that call of the wild.

“I played for all the parties the real estate company I worked for would put on. And I played and practiced at home, keeping up with all the new stuff. When we had sold off most of the residential lots in Hardy, I told my wife I was going back into music. I missed it. I wanted to move the family back to Blytheville, and one day when I was visiting there I went out to the Ramada Inn and they had someone in the bar playing your ordinary, basic piano music. There were a few people there who knew me, and they asked if I’d get up and play something. I let ’em talk me into it, and so I got up and played and sang a few songs.

“The people just...God..they was goin’ wild. They was coming in from the lobby and all over the hotel to watch me. Even the help was comin’ out from everywhere. I knew I was onto something.”

Bill Haney was by no means the first person to imitate Elvis Presley. Undoubtedly, there were Elvis imitators performing in living rooms all over Memphis the same night disk jockey Dewey Phillips premiered “That’s All Right, Mama” on his radio show. Even before Elvis’s historic appearances on “Ed Sullivan,” several comedians had incorporated an Elvis bit into their routines, along with impersonations of Dean Martin, John Wayne, JFK, Kirk Douglas, and whomever else would get a laugh.

As early as the mid-’50s a British singer, Terry Dene, had a short-lived Elvis-inspired act that toured England. According to Elvis intimate George Klein, there were one or two other performers who did an Elvis song or two as part of their routine. But these artists performed much more comically and tongue-in-cheek than with the studied seriousness we associate with modern-day Elvis impersonators.

Ral Donner was one of the first successful Elvis sound-alikes on record and was followed by Terry Stafford, who had a huge hit with “Suspicion” and was never heard from again.

Hollywood, in its own way, got in on the act with bland Elvis clones like Fabian, Tommy Sands, Frankie Avalon, and Ed “Kookie” Byrnes.

The great leap of faith had not yet happened; no one had been asked to believe, to pretend for an hour or two that the person on stage was not some talented mimic from Blytheville, Arkansas, but the real deal—the King himself in the flesh. This is what separated mere imitators from impersonators.

But by 1968 Elvis Presley’s career was in a serious decline. After his stint in the Army, the hits began to dry up. Shortly after he gave up live performing for Hollywood B-movies and lackluster soundtrack albums, the Beatles and all the other Brits rendered Elvis passe. Between 1962 and 1969 Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, didn’t have a single number one hit. He hadn’t appeared on TV since he’d teamed with Frank Sinatra in 1960 after being discharged from the Army, and hadn’t performed before a live audience in nearly a decade. The movies were getting worse practically frame by frame; even the die-hard fans were beginning to wonder what had happened to Elvis.

Finally, in 1968, Elvis stood up to Colonel Tom Parker, his smothering manager. There would be no more dumb movies, and he would start performing again. He was also determined to make some more decent records. Elvis must have been stung when he met the Beatles in 1965 and they asked, “Why don’t you go back to your old style of record?” He wanted to prove to the world he was still the King and filmed a television special, now known as the “Comeback Special,” that fully restored him to his throne. Clad in skintight black leather, Elvis was all raw animal power. The world watched and the world responded. Elvis was back.

_In 1971, an Elvis fan and singer named Dave Carlson from Oak Forest, Illinois, discovered the same thing Bill Haney had a few years earlier: Elvis fans, the true-blue fans who would be called Elvi in years to come, were starved for their idol. Carlson, like Haney, had started in bands singing a few Elvis songs. The Elvis fans wanted more and told him he sounded just like Elvis. Carlson soon found he could draw a consistently bigger crowd by playing to the Elvis contingent.

“You’ve got to remember,” he says today, “that for years in the ’60s Elvis was unavailable. It was like he was in hiding, a recluse. Until 1969, he didn't perform live and nobody had seen him. Even when he started touring again, if you were lucky, he came to your city once. And in those big auditoriums and arenas who could feel close to him? He was underexposed to the public and had been for years.

“You’ve got to understand one thing about the real Elvis fans: they’re like drug addicts. They can’t get over Elvis or ever get enough of Elvis. These people were having severe withdrawal symptoms, and guys like me and Bill Haney and one or two others who were out there before Elvis died—Johnny Harra and Elvis Wade—were filling that void, that emptiness. If you’re a heroin addict and you can’t get any heroin, morphine is a good substitute. Well, we were like that—the second best thing. Sometimes the second best thing can satisfy for a moment.”

_Bill Haney moved back to Blytheville and began performing regularly at the Ramada Inn there. Rather than performing Elvis oldies, he began to concentrate on the newer material, “Suspicious Minds,” “C.C. Rider,” “An American Trilogy,” and “Polk Salad Annie,” and tried to keep the song list as current as possible. The response was immediate and overwhelming. The people, especially the women, went crazy.

“I played at that Ramada Inn for about a year, and business was better than they had ever had. The manager got sent down to manage the Levee Lounge in Memphis at the Ramada Inn on Lamar Avenue. It was new at the time, and they were bringing in some big outfits, some big-name bands. He wanted me to come down there and play, but I was intimidated by it...I was playing with a little of four-piece group and still singing from behind the piano. I went down there nervous as hell, you know. I never had worked Memphis. But the response was good, real good, so he fixed me up for another couple of weeks.

“We started off and people was acceptin’ it and I got a little more comfortable. I decided to add a few things to the group. So I added a lightman, upgraded  the equipment, hired me another keyboard player who played the strings stuff and the Hammond B-3 organ—I was still playing the piano—then we go along and I started wearing different stuff. Stuff that more closely resembled what he was wearing. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to do this Elvis thing, I may as well give the flavor of it. What the hell, I’m not going to copy him.’ Then I started having stuff made up for me, you know, jumpsuit-style and all. I started wearing it and people really liked it, it got a response. And I thought, ‘Well, I can make it even better than that.’ And I did some more and the response was even better.

“I seen that my Elvis act was really going over good even in his hometown, and I said to myself, ‘Hey man, it’s showtime.’ But it wasn’t until 1974 that I was doing a stand-up Elvis routine. I felt lost without that piano. Piano was a part of me and still is. But promoters and everybody kept telling me that I could make a lot more money if I could get out from behind the piano and do a stand-up.

“I said, ‘Man, I can’t do that.’ I was thinkin’, ‘What am I gonna do with myself out there?’

“Charlie Hodge, who was one of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia boys, used to come to the show a lot. He walked up and says, ‘Man, you get your butt up off that piano and give those people something to see.’ I said, ‘Man, there ain’t nothin’ to see.’ Hell, I’m proud of the piano work that I do and I didn’t want to leave that. Charlie finally says, ‘You either stand up out there or I’m goin’ to embarrass the hell out of you.’ So I got up and I was nervous, man...that’s probably the second hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The first was ever singin’ in front of people in the first place.

“Well, I got up there and as I went along I decided I’d see if I had enough balls to keep on with it. It’s hard to do for someone like me who’s a little bit reserved. Now even when I went stand-up, I never studied Elvis, so even now I don’t know exactly what all he did. I’d seen some of his shows, of course, and I knew basically what he did. But I sure didn’t want to copy nothin’. I’da felt like a idiot doin’ that. So whatever I did, it was something that felt comfortable to me. If it was somethin’ that would turn on the gals someway or other, if it was somethin’ that would get their attention, I’d say, ‘Hey, I think I’ll do that again.’ So you learn as you go along. I was learnin’ more about this and that, and then I started getting braver and not letting it bother me. Like doing karate moves and all when I’d never took karate. I just punched with the beat. The thing is, it seemed to work because what I did was me and it was natural and wasn’t like saying, ‘Okay, he used two fingers to do this and he put his foot down here, and he...’ You know, I didn’t want to get into that at all. I would’ve been too embarrassed to do that. I have to do it my way."

_When Bill Haney got away from the piano and stood by himself in the spotlight, the effect was complete. The jumpsuits, the belts, the spangles, the shades, the red scarves, and the note-perfect song arrangements made Bill Haney’s act much more than a clever illusion—they made it reality.

The crowds had always been good, but they soon became unbelievable: standing room only every night, reservations weeks in advance, long queues in the lobby of people eager to get in. Haney was pulling down thousands of dollars a week and word got out that seeing Bill Haney perform was as good as seeing Elvis himself, maybe even better. Haney, after all, would nod toward your table and dedicate a special request, save a scarf just for you, speak to you sweetly during a break, maybe  even give you a hug and a kiss and thank you from the bottom of his heart for coming out to see him.

Elvis fans weren’t the only ones curious about this guy who looked and sang just like Elvis. Bill Burk, a columnist and music writer for The Memphis Press-Scimitar who had covered the Elvis beat for a number of years and is now the editor and publisher of Elvis World magazine, heard about Haney’s unusual act and went to the Levee Lounge to check out the rumors. Like so many others, Burk was astounded by what he witnessed: “The crowd response to Haney was unreal. The girls would scream and crowd the stage and grab for the scarves.

“Bill’s timing could not have been better for what he was doing. Elvis had been away from the public spotlight for a long time and when he made his comeback in 1968—it ignited the whole Elvis thing all over again. Plus, Haney was good. I’ve seen literally hundreds of Elvis impersonators over the years and only a handful have been worth a durn. Haney was about the best I ever heard.”

Tourists who came to Memphis to see Graceland and maybe catch a glimpse of Elvis found out about Bill Haney and went home telling their friends about this amazing guy who imitated Elvis. Fan clubs began to form including a hardcore group of locals who dubbed themselves Haney’s Honeys and wore special t-shirts to all his performances. A rival group called Haney’s Heinies banded together and they engaged in a friendly, but earnest, competition with the Honeys.

The Elvis Presley fan clubs also heard about the Elvis wannabe and were none too pleased about some copycat who thought he wanted to be the King. Before one of his shows at the Levee Lounge, Haney was approached by a middle-aged woman who informed him she was the president of one of Elvis’s largest fan clubs.

“I just want to know who the hell you think you are?”

“Just Bill Haney, ma’am,” he answered.

She went on, “I want you to know one thing. There is only one Elvis and there ain’t never going to be another. Who are you? You don’t look like him, there ain’t nobody who sounds like him—”

Haney politely interrupted, “I hope you’re not offended, lady. I’m just doing a show based off his. That’s all.”

After the show, the club president approached him again, this time with tears in her eyes. “I want you to know something. I really enjoyed that. You are for real and I’m a Bill Haney fan now. Believe me.”

The hubbub over Bill Haney didn’t escape the attention of the Memphis morning deejay Rick Dees, who is now one of the nation’s best-known radio personalities. Dees had been poking good-natured fun at Elvis for a number of years with a series of hilarious imitations, including one about Elvis eating too many jelly doughnuts. Dees called Haney on the air to rib him about taking over Elvis’s job and concocted an imaginary rivalry between the two, claiming Haney wanted to change the name of Elvis Presley Boulevard to Bill Haney Avenue. Dees staged a sing-out on the show between Haney and Elvis, and did both voices himself. The publicity brought even bigger crowds willing to pay more money to get in, including several of the secretaries who worked at Graceland, and practically all of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia.

_The commotion didn’t go unnoticed by Elvis Presley. Every time one of Elvis’s songs would come on the radio out at Graceland, one of his Memphis Mafia friends would quip, “Hey man, there’s that cat who sounds just like Bill Haney.” And they would all laugh.

One weeknight after Haney’s show, the Levee Lounge manager came up to him and asked, “Do you know who was here just a while ago?”

Haney shook his head no.

“Elvis.”

“I looked at that manager and says, ‘Man, you’re kidding me.’

“He says, ‘Naw, man.’

“And I says, ‘Holy shit.’

“And the manager says, ‘Charlie Hodge is still here and he wants to talk to you. Elvis was sittin’ right back there in that booth. I went back and let them in through the kitchen ’cause they called before they came and told me what they wanted. They didn’t want any attention, they wanted lights out, and they wanted back in a dark corner somewhere.’

“And that’s what they did. They turned the lights out back in the booth—several booths, actually—and he came in with a cowboy hat on, sat in the back with the lights all out. Nobody even knew he was there and there was people all around him. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know about him being there. I probably would’ve got all tongue-tied on the stage.

“Well, the manager brings Charlie Hodge around and Charlie says, 'Hey man, where you want me to pick you up?’

“I says, ‘What you mean?’

“And he says, ‘You do want to meet Elvis, don’t you?’

“I says, ‘Oh, hell yeah.’

“And Charlie says, ‘Elvis told me to stay and bring you out to the house for awhile.’

“So we started over there to Graceland and I thought that was great, but the impact didn’t hit me until those gates opened up and we started up the drive and I thought, ‘Holy shit! I’m really gonna meet this guy!’ You know, hundreds and hundreds, millions, of people would like to meet him, and here I am going in to meet him.

“I went in the house, and Elvis was upstairs and me and Charlie just messed around in the Jungle Room, Charlie joking around and stuff. Finally, Charlie says, ‘Hey man, c’mere, c’mere, Elvis is coming down the stairs.’

“Well, Charlie introduced me to him and Elvis stuck out his left hand and said, ‘Excuse my right hand, man, I’ve got a burn.’ I couldn’t help but notice that his left hand was just full of diamonds. Both his hands were unusually puffy. Soft, puffy. When I seen him come down the stairs it was like there was some damn aura around the guy. I mean he was different. More different than anybody I’ve ever met. I’ve never met anybody who projected that type of electricity. It was...different. I’ve met a lot of stars in my lifetime...Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson...and I never met anything like Presley. And never will.

“When I was out there with him he says to me, ‘Hey man, come on outside. I wanta show you my motherf—ing cars.’ We went outside and there was a brand new Lincoln Mark IV; he had just given away five brand new Marks to people. He looks at me and says, ‘Ain’t this one a motherf—er man?’ And I said, ‘Yeah man, that is nice.’ He made me feel pretty easy. We sat around in the house for a long time just talkin’, jokin’, and playin’ with the dogs. Charlie was cuttin’ up and asks him, ‘Elvis, what do think about ol' Haney?’ Elvis looks at me and laughs and says, ‘I like his style.’

“I went out to Graceland many more times after that, not to see him, but to visit all his people who I had become good friends with. That was the only time I went out there just to see Elvis. After that, my schedule of concerts and his schedule of concerts often was in conflict with each other, and I didn’t get to see too much of him. Plus, he really wasn’t in that good of health after that. We waved and said hi to each other and that was about it. You could really see he was changing. You could tell he was getting way, way overweight and didn’t seem to be like he was. He stayed in his room nearly all the time; you just didn’t see Elvis that much.”

After meeting Elvis, Haney would frequently get calls from Graceland. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff Elvis doesn’t want and we’re going to bring it out to you,” they would tell him. Haney was given teddy bears and other stuffed animals, sweaters, and even one of Elvis’s custom-made jumpsuits that wasn’t the color he had ordered. “It was brown,” Haney says, “and he didn’t like to wear browns. So they re-did Elvis another one in black with silver trimming.”

_On August 16, 1977 Haney was booked to play Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was relaxing in his motel room when one of his band members came into the room with a pained look on his face. “Did you hear about Elvis?”

When he was told that Elvis had died, Haney slumped in his bed and held his head in his hands. He felt as if he had lost a member of his family, perhaps even some part of himself. He wanted to cancel that night’s show, but was under a tight contract; the show had to go on. When he went on, the crowd was unusually quiet and reserved. There was no screaming, no fainting, none of the usual frenzy. Instead, the women cried softly. “When I did some of his songs that really hit home,” Haney says, “well, all I can say is it was real emotional. For me, too.”

Elvis’s death had both a positive and negative effect on Haney’s career. He was soon out of the clubs and lounges and playing large arenas and coliseums. Only days after Elvis was laid to rest, Haney nearly sold out the Pine Bluff Coliseum in Arkansas, and the crowd reacted as if he were the King resurrected from the grave. “We took in over thirty-two thousand dollars that night on the gate. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn only did twenty-eight thousand, so that gives you some idea of what kind of impact his death had.”

From there, Haney got an exclusive contract to play the Silver Bird in Las Vegas. The management there gave him a suite, a hairdresser, a makeup artist, and a wardrobe assistant. He played the Cow Palace in San Francisco and the Los Angeles Sports Arena. He was featured numerous times on television news programs. The money was better than Bill Haney had ever imagined. The road, however, was beginning to take its toll. He was tired, burnt out, and lonely for his family. His wife had begged him for years to get off the road and join her in the real estate business again.

Before Elvis had died, there were only a handful of impersonators, all of whom, it would seem, had followed in Haney’s footsteps. Now there were hundreds and they were turning the whole thing into a sour joke.

“I knew when he died others would be coming out of the woodwork,” Haney says. “I always said I wouldn’t become part of some circus. There were so many cheap acts—I mean, cheap—some guy wearin’ a few dollars worth of bad clothes, didn’t look like him, didn’t sound like him except in the shower, got some musicians together and decided he wanted to do a show. That hurt the business. I couldn’t watch those guys. They made me want to throw up.”

The fans had changed also. After Elvis died the hardcore fans seemed to become more aggressive, almost militant. “They were people who idolized Elvis, and then Elvis was gone. Their second choice was me. They were great fans because they supported me everywhere I went. Without them, I never would have gone anywhere. They made things more exciting, they screamed and carried on and gave me a little taste of what Elvis would have felt like. But I’ve said many times that I never understood the people who would go crazy. I’ve seen women bite each other, get in fistfights, knock cops all around. At times we would just be mobbed by fans and they would grab at you, pulling and tearing at your clothes. I would think, ‘Man, these are some expensive friggin’ suits to be tearin’ up.’ But they would go for anything, necklaces, belts, anything. There were quite a few who would climb up on stage and grab ahold of you and not turn loose. We would have to pry them off.

“I was hit one night by three girls all at the same time. These girls, I swear to God, looked like Green Bay Packers. They all hit me at the same time and knocked me about ten yards back, flat on my ass. I just laid back on my ass and sang the rest of the song looking up at the ceiling.”

When asked how the fan worship affected his wife and their relationship, he sighs and answers, “Trouble, man. Lots of dark clouds. Lots of things to overcome, lots of growing up to do, lots of questions to answer, all kinds of shit. Many times I’ve asked myself if it was all worth it. All the late night phone calls. I couldn’t afford to have an unlisted number because I was doing my own bookings most of the time. I finally got to where I couldn’t handle the calls anymore, though. Fans might call at any and all hours of the night; they might find out where you live and come by to sit around for awhile. I understand that part of it, I really do. They just didn’t realize how inconvenient it could be. Imagine you’ve got a gal callin’ you up at all hours, sayin’ how much she loves you and all, and you’ve got a wife who’s mad as hell layin’ in bed right next to you. And you’re trying to talk and be polite to some fan. It was a lot to go through.

“The girls coming up on stage, all the kissing, the worship aspect of it...it was pretty heavy, man, plus the fact there was some awful pretty girls around sometimes. To sum it up for you, if my wife didn’t go along to the shows, we got along a lot better.”

_Elvis impersonator Dave Carlson, who continues to perform after  twenty-five years of doing Elvis, is even more blunt about the  problems associated with fan worship:

“At times it becomes a big monkey on your back. Some of those fans  literally want a piece of you. Imagine what it’s like to be idolized by  overweight, ugly, blue-haired old ladies who want to fantasize about  you as Elvis. I feel sorry for those people—that’s all they have. But they  get jealous of one another and they all think they’re your number one  fan. If you forget to dedicate a song to them or speak to them at their  table, they can turn on you and it can get very ugly. Some of the worse-off ones will claim to be having your baby and everything else.  Imagine how that kind of thing goes over with your family.

“I’ve had kids who’ve grown up and come up to me and tell me  their lives were ruined and they got into drugs and trouble because  their mothers were in love with me and spent all their time at my  concerts or in some lounge watching me. That’s so sad.

“Now I only play private gigs, conventions, and so on. I make good money and don’t have to deal with girls getting their arms broken stampeding the stage, or choking each other with the scarves I’ve given them. I’m a novelty act to the crowds I play now, and some of them enjoy it as a joke, or for laughs. But at least I don’t have to put up with that frenzied kind of adulation anymore.”

_In 1982 Bill Haney quit the road and stored the jumpsuits in  the attic. He has played on rare occasions, including a gig at the  National Homebuilders Convention where he shared the stage with Frankie Valli and the Commodores. He has toned down the Elvis and gotten back behind the piano. When he performs now he plays a lot  of songs Elvis never recorded. He also has gone back to wearing ordinary stage clothes. People still come out to see Elvis, but aren’t that disappointed when all they get is Bill Haney. He can still do a mean Jerry Lee Lewis.

“I’m recording a gospel album right now,” Haney says. “I’m trying to develop something that nobody can identify Elvis-wise. I don’t want to sound like Elvis. If it sounds anything like Elvis I won’t do it. Seeing as how my voice was always connected to Elvis, I’ve started singing a little bit different...softer, easier. I’ve always been in a lower key range than Elvis. Always. How someone could identify me singing a song in C that he would sing in E or F in a high voice,  don’t know. But they did. It’s weird.”