There were nights when Elvis Presley walked onto a Las Vegas stage already fighting a battle the audience knew nothing about. Elvis had glaucoma and other eye problems, conditions made especially difficult for a performer whose work required standing beneath powerful stage lighting. Ronnie Tutt, the drummer who watched Elvis from only a few feet away night after night, later recalled seeing him backstage wearing an eye patch. This was not part of the famous jumpsuit image or some theatrical costume. It belonged to the private minutes before the show, when Elvis was trying to prepare an aching eye for another evening beneath the lights.
Then came the transformation. The musicians took their places, the room darkened, and the opening fanfare announced that Elvis was coming. Whatever discomfort had existed backstage now had to coexist with the job in front of him. He stepped into the light and became animated by the music, exchanging looks with his musicians, reacting to the audience and pushing his voice through songs that demanded enormous concentration. The interesting part was not that his pain magically disappeared. It was that thousands of people could watch the same performance without realizing it had been there at all.
Those backstage moments also reveal something easily lost when discussing Elvis’s later years. His physical decline was not one continuous downward line. There were difficult periods, but also nights when he could suddenly become energetic, playful and intensely engaged with the band. Music could change his mood. Gospel singing after hours could keep him at a piano long after a show had ended. Karate gave him another outlet for concentration and discipline. The Elvis his musicians encountered could therefore seem exhausted one day and remarkably alive the next, which may help explain why the seriousness of his health was not always easy for those around him to judge.
Perhaps the image worth remembering is not Elvis beneath the spotlight at all, but the few minutes immediately before it. A man sitting backstage with an eye patch, waiting for his cue, knowing that the very lights required to make him visible could also cause him discomfort. Then the introduction began, the patch came off, and he walked toward those lights anyway. The audience paid to see Elvis Presley the phenomenon. Ronnie Tutt and the musicians occasionally saw something more revealing: the ordinary human effort required to create that phenomenon one more night.