The Comeback: Elvis and the Story of the 68 Special

‘He wasn’t dead and gone to heaven. He was alive and still in Graceland. Cursed to live another year on god’s earth as Elvis Presley. The man from yesterday trapped in a today of tomorrows…’

As 1968 dawns, the once King of Rock ’n’ Roll faces cultural oblivion. While elsewhere the Sixties are swinging, for Elvis they’re sinking – in terrible films, drug addiction, paranoia, religious mania and the mercenary wiles of his psychopathic manager. At 33 the legend who once had it all is lost, lonely and slowly going insane. Until thrown a last lifeline. His own one-hour TV special: a do-or-die final chance to remind the world who, and what, Elvis Presley really is.

The Comeback plots the incredible true story of Elvis’ fall and rise from Army discharge to iconic black leather resurrection. Simon Goddard takes the reader inside the life, music and mind of Elvis: a 24/7 delirium of women, pills, midnight movies and holy mumbo jumbo, isolated from an America unravelling in its own Sixties chaos of war, racism, riots and assassinations, until his world and theirs collide in the greatest performance of his life.

A genre-busting modernist rock ’n’ roll fable unlike any music biography you’ve ever read, The Comeback is the definitive account of how it took Elvis eight years on the big screen to lose his crown – but just one magical hour on a small one to win it back.