#64: Elvis Presley Dies At 44

Q: What do you do if you are a floundering rock star and you want to be immortalized into an icon?

A: Die!

Elvis Presley had shot to fame in the late fifties with hit songs like “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up,” which sent teenage girls howling at the pelvis-shaking wonder and made him the third-bestselling recording artist of all time. But twenty years later his star was fading — as fast as his dependency on painkillers, uppers, and depressants was rising. And then, in 1977, his fiancée Ginger Alden found the 44-year-old King of Rock ‘n’ Roll lying in a pool of his own vomit on the bathroom floor of his Memphis mansion, Graceland. He died of heart failure, thought to be related to drug use.

A former member of his backup band recalled how bad off the King had become shortly before his death: “He walked onstage [at a concert] and held on to the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody was scared.”

It’s conceivable that Elvis could have made a comeback, but his shocking sudden death — followed by conspiracy theories and Elvis “sightings” that continue to this day — helped to secure his position as one of rock’s immortal icons.