The media is filled with stories today about the death of Elvis Presley 30 years ago today. On that day I was in Spain, writing for The Christian Science Monitor, living in a “train apartment” — a long apartment with rooms off it — in the white collar Madrid neighborhood of Carbabanchel.

I was always some 20 years behind on my music and, true to form, I “discovered” Elvis in the 70s and played his stuff all the time, often to the annoyance of my many student friends from Madrid University.

On that day Mrs. Gomez, the manager of the apartment and the wife of a leather-faced Spanish Guardia Civil who loved to drink wine squeezed from an animal skin bag, knocked on my door. “He’s dead,” she said in Spanish. I thought it was her husband because she looked so sad. “Who?” I asked her, getting ready to console her. “Elvis! And I know you love his music so!”

And, yes, I was devastated. Yes, I had remembered him vaguely from my elementary school days when my sister and other teens went crazy over him when appeared before screeching teens on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show .

But I had really “discovered” his stuff in Madrid in the 70s, when his career had revived but was quickly on the wane again. And one of my all time favorites was a song he recorded in the 70s, one of his last real solid rock hits: Burning Love. And here it is:

PS: The other bit of news Mrs. Gomez broke to me was about a new Pope. “He’s Polish,” she said. I laughed, waiting to hear the REST of the joke’s punchline…

Here’s a link of an ailing Elvis singing My Way two months before his 1977 death.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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