Greg Wohead's Take On Elvis Presley's 1968 Comeback Special

It’s 2016 in Shoreditch Town Hall, London. Greg Wohead, 33 as well, recreates Elvis Comeback, or at least fragments of it. Sort of. Dressed in black, on a square stage, he sets the scene for the audience, describing himself as Elvis. No costumes or makeup can be found and the nearly empty setting only includes chairs and a microphone. The monochrome reconstruction stands in complete opposition to the synthetic colour and fashion of the 1960s, as a black and white negative. The whole atmosphere is created by Wohead’s description in the beginning. He builds up the re-enactment slowly in careful layers and tries to make the scene of ‘68 visible by talking the audience through the details: Elvis’s look, the behaviour of his musicians, the clothing of the fans and the whole studio including the position of the cameras. Gradually the performance is increasing, music is being built up, projections around the stage show short clips of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and Greg Wohead slowly transforms into Elvis by impersonating pieces of his appearance: The hair flip, the hip swing and the singing voice. He catches the smile and the sex appeal. In his precise description and action you can definitely see how much time Wohead spent watching the Comeback Special, over and over again for the past two years, as he starts to develop an intimate, familial relationship with it.

The show zooms into one ten second long moment; the Guitarist takes a piece of lint off Elvis Presley’s face and gives it to a female fan in the audience who pockets it like a treasure. It started as a one-man show, however the audience are now a part of it. Wohead choreographs one after one, until half of the audience participates in the scene. This is where you would want to avoid the first row, if you don’t like audience participation. The focus is thrown on moments like the fans screaming and jockeying for a tissue, the cheering brought about by eye contact and the small sequence sung by Elvis. What starts as a bit uncomfortable soon comes together — the performance, the audience at Shoreditch Town Hall and Wohead as Elvis brings the small clip alive (that is shown on the projectors afterwards.)

The ‘68 Comeback Special was considered groundbreaking for its authenticity. It was meant to feel like a relaxed jam session, although it was partly pre-filmed. However, there was a major TV broadcast, which in many ways was a live event. The repeated viewings during Wohead’s Comeback Special started to make the clip loose authenticity until it became more and more inauthentic. It seemed much like that of repeating a word so much it eventually loses its meaning. Elvis wanted to show the fans a glimpse of him as a global star, but also of himself as a man. But knowing that the whole television show was carefully constructed, the loop watching pattern makes the scene predictable, fake and displays the pressures Elvis Presley faced to come back as the best version of himself. It’s the intention to fight the general feeling of him being ‘uncool’ in a time where The Beatles and British Invasion were leading the music scene. It shows the immense power as well as the vulnerability that comes with the Comeback Special, when Elvis tries to be the untouchable young man he was in the years before. Watching the TV broadcast of 1968, it’s clear that Elvis is not at the heights of his powers: he forgets the lyrics, interrupts his own songs and his laugh seems to be exposed and controlled at once. It showed that he was human, fragile and just as vulnerable as everybody else.

In his re-enactment, Wohead achieves his wish of displaying that the ’68 Comeback Special holds a plurality as to the way Elvis wanted to be seen — a strong, but still human person — and how the whole television show seemed to be predictable and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll was vulnerable, which becomes especially clear after looking closer at that one scene. As the show isn’t exactly about Elvis, but about authenticity and self-identity, there’s no need to have any knowledge about the original 1968 Comeback Special or its star, but if you’re an Elvis fan, this re-enactment can give you an interesting, as well as different, perspective.

With funny moments, but also parts of pure description of Elvis’ surrounding, it is hard to explain what makes the performance as entertaining and strong as it is, and surely the opinions about Greg Wohead’s piece will be polarised. For us it definitely was an intriguing and dynamic piece of work, that is worth seeing and forming an evaluation about.