I still remember the bubblegum cards.
A neighborhood friend of mine introduced my brother and me to them one summer when I was a kid, and we became absolutely obsessed. There were 66 cards in the collection, and we eventually managed to get 52 of them before they disappeared from stores forever.
That drove us crazy.
My brother and I practically emptied the local deli buying packs of those cards. We’d dig through garbage cans at the park across the street looking for returnable bottles because every empty bottle was worth another ten-cent pack of Elvis cards. But before too long we drank the well dry.
That was our economy for a while.
But looking back now, the cards themselves were never really the point.
The real obsession became the music.
When I was growing up, Elvis had just died, and even though I was too young to fully understand it, I could feel how enormous he still was culturally. People today probably need a modern comparison to even picture it. He was the kind of larger-than-life figure that consumed the culture completely. Imagine something like the level of attention Taylor Swift gets now — except without the internet amplifying it every second of the day.
Elvis was just everywhere.
I remember kids singing his songs at the bus stop. My grandma had several of his records, and there was one in particular that completely captivated me. It was a double-album greatest hits collection with a blue cover and that iconic silhouette image from his Hawaii concert special. He looked almost superhuman on that cover to me as a kid.
And every time we went to my grandparents’ house, the first thing I wanted to do was head straight for the record player.
Well… assuming one of my aunts or uncles didn’t stop me first to quiz me on Elvis trivia.
Because apparently I had become that kid.
The funny thing is, after I became a consciously obsessed Elvis fan, my mom told me something years later that made the whole thing feel even stranger. Apparently when I was an infant and started crying, my grandma would put Elvis records on and I’d calm down almost immediately.
Maybe this whole thing started earlier than I realized.
At first, I loved collecting things connected to Elvis. I memorized the facts on the backs of the cards. I checked out library books. I read whatever I could get my hands on. At one point, my parents even let me read Elvis: The Final Years when I was still really young. Looking back, I’m honestly shocked they let me get away with that one.
But the deeper I got into it, the more it became about the music itself.
I loved spending my allowance money on Elvis records. Every shopping trip with my mom or grandma became an opportunity to dig through the bins at Musicland or one of the other music stores and see if there was another album I didn’t own yet.
And then I discovered something devastating.
Some of the albums had been deleted.
As a kid, I didn’t understand how any of that worked. I had gotten a book that listed Elvis’s entire discography, and next to certain albums was the word “deleted.” Eventually I learned that meant they were no longer being printed because they hadn’t sold well enough.
That was unacceptable to me.
In my mind, you didn’t stop making Elvis records.
But suddenly I was facing the same frustration I’d already experienced with the bubblegum cards: incomplete collections.
I even wrote RCA a letter once asking if I could somehow buy the deleted albums directly from them. I’m sure the idea of some ten-year-old kid trying to complete his Elvis collection gave somebody a good laugh somewhere.
Occasionally I’d get lucky. My dad once took me to a larger record store in Minneapolis that carried imported albums, and somehow I found overseas pressings of several deleted Elvis records that I had been searching for forever. I felt like I had hit the jackpot.
But through all the collecting and obsessing, the thing that fascinated me most was the music itself.
Even as a kid, I was struck by the sheer variety in Elvis’s voice and style.
This was the same singer doing:
- “Hound Dog”
- “Jailhouse Rock”
- “Don’t Be Cruel”
- “Love Me Tender”
- “It’s Now or Never”
And somehow all of it sounded believable.
That fascinated me.
Some songs sounded explosive and rebellious. Others sounded vulnerable, warm, or almost painfully sincere or haunting. One of my favorites was “I Beg of You” because it had this pleasant, easy groove most of the way through, and then suddenly Elvis just completely lets loose vocally and electrifies the whole song. I remember as a kid actually thinking they must have taken the cover photo while he was belting out that part of the song, “HOLD my hand and promise!”
I didn’t have the timeframe references quite yet to understand the cover photo was more contemporary than the music on the 2 discs.
I just knew I loved it.
Over time, my musical tastes evolved. Eventually I discovered The Beatles, though I remember feeling weirdly guilty about it at first — almost like I was betraying Elvis somehow. That’s the kind of strange loyalty kids can develop toward their heroes.
Then later came Led Zeppelin, Motley Crue, and eventually Van Halen.
And once I heard those sounds, I knew I wanted to learn how to make them myself.
But before any of that…
Before Van Halen…
Before guitar…
There was Elvis.
And what started with a handful of bubblegum cards eventually became a lifelong fascination with music itself.
And funny enough, decades later, when I finally discovered eBay in my 30s, I ended up tracking down both things I never managed to complete as a kid:
my grandma’s elusive blue Elvis album…
and a complete 66-card set of those Elvis bubblegum cards.