GoElvis.com,

Hard to believe it’s Elvis Week already. Who’d know? It gets so little publicity. To make up for the dearth of coverage, here’s a sampling of quotes - old and new - related to the late King of Rock and Roll, who died Aug. 16, 1977.

Editor Kevin Quain, in the introduction to his anthology, The Elvis Reader:

Elvis is the definitive pop culture hero; infinitely flexible, he encompasses everything American from the sublime to the grotesque.

The beginning of the Memphis Press-Scimitar front-page story by reporter Clark Porteous about the death of Elvis Presley (“A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard”), which ran Aug. 17, 1977:

The King is dead. Elvis Presley - the jiggling, jiving rock ‘n’ roll king - lived just 42 years, seven months and eight days.

Critic Howard Thompson, reviewing the Elvis film Loving You (1957) in the New York Times:

Artistically, Elvis grunts his melodies (with a few audible lyrics), studiously shaking his hair over his eyes, whacking his gee-tar and writhing away as if he had just sat down on an ant hill.

Barbara Stanwyck, trying to teach Elvis the importance of humanity in Roustabout (1964):

You learn that, you may come alive from the waist up.

Roy Blount Jr., writing in Esquire:

Elvis didn’t just siphon off some negritude and slick it up. His (style) was fired by poor-white disrepressed defiance, and to it he added mooniness, juvenility, niceness, hope, fuzz, hype and androgny. Rock ‘n’ roll . . . The next thing you knew, there was a Youth Culture, which I think we may assume Elvis did not dream of in 1954. I knew I didn’t.

Ad copy for the 1965 Elvis film Harum Scarum:

1001 Swingin’ nights as Elvis brings the Big Beat to Bagdad!!!

Associate producer Paul Nathan, in a note to director Michael Moore, prior to the filming of the 1966 Elvis movie Paradise - Hawaiian Style:

In Elvis pictures, we usually try to use girls around eighteen to twenty, since the youngsters who see Elvis think that girls over twenty-three or -four are old bags . . . As often as possible, we should try to get clothes off our cast - in the water, on surfboards, even in the helicopter landing at the beach, etc.

An anonymous Time magazine staff writer, summing up Elvis in an article titled “Creaky Pelvis” in 1966:

His cheeks are now so plump that he looks like a kid blowing bubble gum - and his mouth is still so squiggly that it looks as if the bubble had burst. What’s more, he now sports a glossy something on his summit that adds at least five inches to his altitude and looks like a swatch of hot-buttered yak wool.

Elvis speaking to John Lennon, as quoted in the book The Ultimate Elvis: Elvis Presley Day by Day by Patricia Jobe Pierce:

We pay the price for fame with our nerves, don’t we?

Elvis on meat at dinner, according to the same book:

I like it well done. I ain’t orderin’ a pet.

James Brown on Elvis:

He taught white America to get down.

Writer Lester Bangs in the Village Voice, a few weeks after Elvis’s death:

It’s (hard) for me to see Elvis as a tragic figure; I see him as being more like the Pentagon, a giant armored institution nobody knows anything about except that its power is legendary.

Sign currently on display outside the downtown Pop Tunes music store at Poplar and Danny Thomas:

Elvis Never Left Our Building.