In June 1972, Elvis Presley was about to do something he had never done before. He was going to play Madison Square Garden in New York City, four shows over three days, and the whole music world was watching.
The afternoon before that first show, Elvis sat down for a press conference at the New York Hilton. Reporters packed the room. And sitting right next to him was a quieter man most of the crowd didn’t know by face. That was Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father.
Vernon had been there from the very start, back when the family had almost nothing in Tupelo, Mississippi. He’d watched his boy go from a kid with a guitar to the most famous singer on the planet. By 1972 he handled much of Elvis’s business behind the scenes.
So the reporters turned to him too.
One of them asked Vernon a plain question. After all the years, all the money and the screaming crowds, had the fame changed his son?
Vernon thought about it and gave an honest, down-home answer. Then Elvis leaned in with three words of his own, and the room cracked up.
You can watch the whole thing play out here, with Vernon beside him the entire time.
The full June 9, 1972 New York press conference, with Vernon sitting next to Elvis
Here’s what Vernon said. “No, not really. I can’t tell any changes.”
A proud father, basically saying his boy was still his boy.
And Elvis? He topped it in the funniest way. “I sweat more!”
It was a joke about how hard he worked up on that stage, pouring everything he had into every show. The reporters laughed. His dad probably did too.
The warmth between them kept showing all afternoon. When a reporter asked Elvis if he still talked to his father much, Elvis answered right away. “I have to, he handles all my personal affairs.”
That one line tells you a lot about how close they stayed. Vernon wasn’t off somewhere enjoying the fame from a distance. He was in the room, in the business, right beside his son.
Elvis got serious for one moment too. Someone asked about the larger-than-life star the public saw, and he said something fans repeated for years. “The image is one thing and the human being is another.” He admitted it was very hard to live up to an image.
If you’d rather see it in sharper picture quality, this HD upload of the same press conference is worth a look.
The same 1972 press conference in HD
Watch the two of them together and for a few minutes you forget this is the biggest name in the world. It just looks like a dad and his boy, teasing each other in front of a crowd.