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Song keeps hoax afloatSALINA (HNS) — They saw him crying in the chapel ... and eating at Burger King, fixing a flat on the highway and in a supermarket checkoutline.Is Elvis really alive? Or is it nothin’ but a hoax?“The legend lives, never dies.It’s up to you, to decide ... I never left — I haven’t gone. Check the spelling on the stone,” go the lyrics to the song “Spelling on The Stone.”For two weeks, listeners of radio station KQNS-FM in Salina have been swamping the station with requests to hear what is rapidly becoming a radio phenomenon across the U.S. But is “Spelling on The Stone” really a message from The King of Rock and Roll?“A lot of people say ‘Who cares? Play the song, we like it,’ ” said Rod Rogers, KQNS program director.The record, the authenticity of which is debated, came to light about five or six weeks ago when a black-haired man, about 6 feet tall, with a mustache, entered the studios of LS Records in Madison, Tenn., after pulling up in a limousine, said Lee Stoller, owner of the recording company.The man dropped off a cassette tape with the label “Spelling on The Stone” and simply asked if the studio would release his new single. The man turned and walked out, leaving no name and no address on the tape.Since then, the record has been released to about 4,000 stations in country-western and adult contemporary formats across the country, Stoller said. Requests from other stations are pouring in. No other stations in Salina are playing the song.“I’ve been around, too long to believeit was Elvis,” said Stoller, husband of gospel and country singer Christy Lane, whom LS Records was formed to represent nearly 15 years ago.“It’s a record the stations are having fun with. It is a good record. It’s good quality. It’s something his fans should love. If it is not Elvis, they love it just the same; he’s got a beautiful voice, he sounds like Elvis and they would like to meet him personally.”The record’s title refers to a controversy since Presley’s death in 1977 over his tombstone, said Cindy Stoller, I^e Stoller’s daughter and assistant.“From what I ve heard, his middle name legally is Aron,” she said. “But on the tombstone it’s spelled Aaron. The reason supposedly it was misspelled was, he couldn’t stand to have his name spelled correctly on a tombstone if he wasn’t really dead.”But hold on to your blue suede shoes, Elvis fans, said James Scott, publisher of Independent Records magazine in Nashville. The record, he points out, is copyrighted by LS Records, which gleans royalties each time it’s played on the radio.Lee Stoller said those royalties areKoing back to the company. Profits are eing put in a trust fund until the artist steps forward, he said.Scott asked Stoller if he could be provided a tape of the song and pay half the cost of a $1,200 test at Vanderbilt University to compare the voice of the singer with a real tape of Elvis. A machine, called a spectrograph, can positively identify voice prints like finger prints, Scott said.Stoller refused to pay half the cost of the test and would not provide a tape, Scott said.“It didn’t sound exactly like Elvis but it sounded like he might have if he were alive today,” said Scott. Presley would be 53 this yearMeanwhile, other stations playing the record have received other ideas from listeners.“We’ve been getting a lot of calls, some of them have been pretty interesting and bizarre,” said David Block, program director of station KRMD in Shreveport, La., who began playing “Spelling on The Stone” Thursday.
Newspaper Details
Garden City Telegram
Garden City, Kansas, US
Sat, Nov 05, 1988
Page 19
Full Page
Clipped by
Salina P.
KS, USA 11 Apr 2022
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