Club Date:
The Brothers E perform at 9:30 pm Sunday, Aug. 17, at LaLuna. Opener Girl Crazy, from Tacoma, Wash., will play a set consisting partially of songs from Elvis Presley films. The venue will feature table seating on the main floor. Tickets for the 21-and-over event are $6 at the door.

Spins of the Week:
Faceless, Faceless  (Mutant Sound System)--The British duo Faceless meanders from dance-floor electronic music to psychedelic trip-hop, incorporating jazzy piano and garbled vocals into its entrancing breakbeats.

Puff Daddy & the Family, No Way Out (Bad Boy)--This album has reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart on the strength of the single, "We'll Be Missing You," which plunders the Police's "Every Breath You Take" in an homage to slain rapper the Notorious B.I.G.

 According to The New York Times, the forthcoming documentary about Presley's bandmates, All The King's Men, estimates that approximately 35,000 Elvis impersonators exist worldwide.

 

Elvis' twin brother, Jesse Garron, was stillborn.

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Since Elvis Aron Presley died, 20 years ago this Sunday, Elvis impersonation has become one of the world's strangest cottage industries. There are Japanese Elvises, Elvis ministers, a Nude Elvis--even a man who had plastic surgery to look like the King. Portland, meanwhile, is home to an especially peculiar Elvis-inspired entity, the Brothers E.

Mike Hughes, 27, and Ted Miller, 30, became friends in the early '90s when they met through mutual acquaintances in Portland's rock music scene. Soon after, the two burly men noticed that people often confused them for one another, and occasionally for Elvis himself. The situation led them to combine their talents into an Elvis tribute act, with the two looking and dressing the part of the King in his declining years, when he stalked the stages of Las Vegas nightclubs and arenas nationwide, tossing scarves to his ever-adoring fans.

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"Mike and I always get asked if we're brothers, or we're mistaken for the same person," says Miller, also known as "Little E." "Or people say, 'Hey Elvis.' So those two things told us what to do. We're just victims of our own fate."

Both fans of Presley since their youth, Hughes, who goes by "Big E," and Miller studied concert footage from the 1970s and organized a band to back them. A friend reconstructed and manufactured the oversized, white karate-style suits and colored scarves Elvis favored in that era, and the Brothers E began performing in 1994.

"Once we talked to people about doing it, everybody had something to chip in," says Miller.

In the ensuing years, the Brothers E played only periodically, as the two concentrated on more serious-minded rock projects; Miller, onetime drummer for Crackerbash, went on to join Satan's Pilgrims, while Hughes drummed for Vehicle and is a current member of Towncraft.

In January, the Brothers E agreed to help commemorate Presley's birthday with appearances on a local morning television show and at a noontime celebration at Borders Books and Music. Their backing band had disintegrated, so the duo sang along with a karaoke machine.

Last month, as preparations began for the 20th anniversary of the day Elvis was found dead of a heart attack in his Graceland mansion at the age of 42, Hughes and Miller rekindled their interest in the Brothers E. The two enlisted friends from Satan's Pilgrims, the Maroons and 52 Devil Babies, as well as other veteran Portland musicians, to work on an act similar in scope to Presley's Las Vegas cabarets.

The new Brothers E debuted at Berbati's Pan in July, with a full band consisting of backup singers, a horn section, piano, bass, guitars and drums. The ensemble performed Vegas-era Elvis classics like "Jailhouse Rock," "Suspicious Minds" and "Proud Mary" while Hughes and Miller reprised the moves, facial tics and vocal style that kept Presley immensely popular until the time of his death.

According to Miller, the estate that looks after the multimillion-dollar business known as Elvis Presley Enterprises, which is stewarded by ex-wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa-Marie, is attempting to eradicate the image of a bloated, drugged-out Elvis, so part of the Brothers E mission is to keep the "Big Elvis" in the public consciousness. Miller says he even voted for the stamp depicting the Big Elvis a few years back, when postal patrons overwhelmingly chose the sleeker, '50s portrait of Presley.

Hughes notes that he and Miller don't have much choice about which type of Elvis to represent in their act. "What else are us big guys gonna do?" he asks.

"I guess we could work out," Miller replies, before both dispel this idea.

Weight issues aside, the Brothers E insist that theirs isn't the typical Elvis impersonation act. When they perform again Sunday at LaLuna, Big E and Little E will have their tongues planted firmly in cheek, which puts them on a different level than a man who surgically alters himself or advertises in the Yellow Pages under "Elvis Impersonators."

 "In a way, we're impersonating Elvis impersonators," Miller says.

 "Most of them are so serious," adds Hughes. "If you watch Elvis, most of the time he was cracking up himself."

"The serious ones," Miller concludes in a bit of E-Boy posturing, "it's like they don't get it."

With their stage-strutting, scarf-tossing, karate-chopping celebration of Elvis in his final years, the Brothers E not only get it, they perfect the combination of kitsch and showmanship that has helped the King retain his title 20 years after his death.

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