Collective Soul has a new retrospective documentary out on Blu-ray and video on demand, and the film centers around the recording of their 2024 effort, Here to Eternity, which took place at Elvis Presley’s Palm Springs house in late 2022 and early 2023. As it happens, the band was there when the news broke that Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, died in January 2023.
I had a chance to speak to Collective Soul’s bass player and co-founder, Will Turpin, about the event and how it impacted the band ahead of the documentary, titled Give Me a Word: The Collective Soul Story, hitting the 2025 movie schedule. Turpin told me Lisa Marie’s presence was very much felt that day..
‘It Never Rains In Palm Springs’
Lisa Marie was only 54 when she died from a bowel obstruction, a side effect of bariatric surgery, leaving behind four children, including her daughter Riley Keough. Many Elvis fans had followed Lisa Marie’s entire life, from her birth to Elvis and Pricilla in 1968, through the end, and her death came as a real shock to everyone.
Michael Jackson and producer Michael Lockwood. She also recorded three albums of her own, so she would never want to ruin a great session!
Graceland in Memphis, but one bit of security, over the jacuzzi in back, was still there. Turpin says,
The Jacuzzi had this translucent kind of top put on it because he was kind of victim to one of the first paparazzi-type deals where guys were on a helicopter with a zoom lens and they got pictures of Elvis Presley in his Jacuzzi with some USC cheerleaders.
Apparently, Presley had the cover put over the jacuzzi to avoid this in the future, and it was all still there, as Turpin told me,
Literally, the translucent little tops that he put on top of the Jacuzzi, where all that stuff was still there.
This might not be the kind of story his wife, Priscilla, whose own story was recently told on screen in the excellent movie directed by Sofia Coppola, would want to hear, but she must be used to hearing stories about her late husband hanging out with cheerleaders, right?
the rock and roll business, Elvis is never that far from what you do. Even if The King isn’t a direct influence on many bands these days, or even in the ‘90s, you don’t have to go back too far to find some aspect of a band’s music that points to the first true rock star, as Turpin explains about his bandmates Ed and Dean Roland,
[Elvis] was really the only non-Christian type of music that Mr. Roland listened to. So when [Ed and Dean] were young, they were really influenced by it.
Elvis also dabbled in gospel music, so it makes sense that he would be one of the few rock stars the Roland brothers’ preacher father would allow in the house. While Elvis himself might not have been a direct influence, the impact of spiritual music in general is obvious in Collective Soul’s work.
playing all their hits from the 1990s and songs from the new album, hopefully wth Lisa Marie Presley still looking down on them, proud of all they have accomplished.