Colonel Tom Parker

Elvis Presley’s manager was more carny than colonel — the title was a Kentucky honorific, casually bestowed and hungrily embraced — but he transformed the rock business from a sideshow to the main event. By today’s standards, his deals look primitive, his splits with Presley unconscionable, and his affected pose as a southern-fried midway barker seems premodern. But there wasn’t a playbook, yet: Rock’n’roll was barely a business in January 1955 when Parker negotiated an enormous-for-the-time $35,000 deal to move Elvis from Sun to RCA. The following year Parker launched Presley’s superstar career in earnest, with TV appearances that caused a media frenzy, and then Love Me Tender, the first of 31 feature films. The last record deal Parker made for his client was to sell Presley’s future royalties from his recordings to RCA for the then-astronomical sum of $5.4 million — the kind of late-career cash-out deal that’s very much back in vogue.