These are two real oddities. They came out in 1990 & 1991, and I can't for the life of me remember where I saw them advertised, or how much they cost me. They're not so much 'self-published' as 'self photocopied', and were probably made to order. You know, send the man his money and off he goes down to the local copy centre, then he comes home with his sheets of A4, folds them and staples them and sticks them in an envelope back to me. I do remember that they stunk of cigarette smoke.
There are about 112 A5 pages in each booklet, and there are no photographs. So what is in them? And who is the mysterious Deke Rivers?
Well Deke comes (or came) from Blackpool, England. His home address is even on the front of each book. Very brave of him. The town of Blackpool has a bit of an Elvis connection itself, because it was in Blackpool (round about the same time as these were published) that the UK Fan Club chose to host the first ever Elvis Exhibition. Whether there's a connection between the two things, I couldn't say.
Start reading and you'll soon be confused. Are you reading a set of short stories? Are they true life events? They're a sort of mixture. For example one piece concerns "The English Elvis" - this amounts to a few pages about Billy Fury, which is clearly a factual tale. Then you'll come across a story entitled "American Trilogy", which is a fantasy bit, an article 'reprinted' from the New York Times dated January 10th 2035.
So you read things like that, some definitely true, some definitely made up, and then it leaves you unsure about the rest of it. There is an interview, for instance, with an un-named source who claims to have been present when Elvis cut his vocal for Memory Revival. The books are littered with this kind of thing.
One for the file marked "For Elvis Nuts Only"
