Scooter Braun and the Twilight of the Music Manager

The rock-and-roll manager proper, or improper, really begins with Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, the former carny with the omnipresent cigar, nodding, winking, and fanning his latest flame into a global conflagration. Parker was a huckster—he liked to call Presley “my attraction”—but he never, as far as one can tell, thought of Elvis as anything other than a leg-quivering dynamo who, sooner or later, might be capable of bringing in more than a hundred thousand dollars a week in Vegas. Working the lights from the shadows, Parker was a shambling Svengali, his pockets, one imagines, stuffed with ready cash, matchbooks, and a plethora of calling cards.