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Elvis On Stage

December 24, 2000 | Book
Well, what can we say about this one? It's not often that we are in need for words, but this time the cooperation between Keith Alverson, Ed Bonja and Elvis Unlimited made us looking for the right expressions. It is amazing how much this production has improved compared to the first book by Elvis Unlimited, "Elvis Shot by Bonja". Besides the much better quality in print and the hardcover it is also edited very well. Where you stumbled over the misprints in the first one, this one is almost free of them.

As said, the printing itself is much better, although there are some pictures of lesser quality, probably due to the source. Still the quality never gets annoying and often it is even amazing, especially the Huntsville pictures are outstanding. Also the choice for printing a lot of the pictures horizontally was a very good one, indeed those pictures deserve it!


The book covers a lot of Elvis' concerts from July 3, 1973 to June 26, 1977. As always it is painful to see the decline but merely it contains great photos with an amazingly good looking Elvis on most of them. As said before the Huntsville photos from 1975 are amazing, and surely they deserve the major place they have in the book. A lot of the pictures are known, but having Keith's work collected like this and in this quality is great. Obviously Keith Alverson likes the jumpsuits more than the two piece suits, but we were delighted to have a fair amount of pictures of those latter.


As Keith already told us in our interview with him the book doesn't contain much text. An introduction of one and a half page, and some remarks on particular concerts is all you'll find, besides the dating of the pictures. Talking about those dates, our very own "date freak", the editor for our Picture of the Week, found a discrepancy in a comparison with Skar's "The Concert Years". Where on a picture dated May 3, 1975 Elvis wears a blue outfit with blue/gold ornaments, Skar tells us he wore a blue suit with red ornaments (2.30 pm), or a white suit with blue ornaments (8.30 pm). Gladly Keith was able to clarify this for us. He is sure that his picture is dated well, and only regrets they forgot to print the time of the show (8.30) with the picture. Keith also stated that during the afternoon show Elvis wore the navy blue with red ornaments, he took a picture of Elvis arriving in the parking lot that day.


We can not come up with much more than a deeply meant "Go and buy it! You won't be sorry".


Sharong wrote on August 19, 2004
This book is a must have for Elvis fans. Excellent pictures of Elvis in the '70's. Keith is a fantastic photographer. A real quality book!!