By KATHY BRYANT
When he was 5 years old, College Park native Johnny Seaton’s aunt took him to the former Perpetual Savings Bank near Prince George’s Plaza. In the car on the way to the bank, the two listened to Wayne Newton on the radio, singing “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Johnny Seaton
When the pair arrived, Seaton’s aunt asked him to sing the song for the bank president.
Everyone applauded. Seaton, now 64, credits that performance with launching a singing career that has lasted nearly 50 years.
“My aunt said, ‘You can sing,’” Seaton recalls.
Then, when Seaton, still in elementary school, attended a performance of “The Wizard of Oz” at the University of Maryland (UMD), he realized, “That’s what I want to do.”
Over the years, Seaton, an Elvis Presley lookalike, toured with singer Donny Osmond and traveled the world as an Elvis impersonator.
After living and singing Elvis songs in Las Vegas and California, he said, actor James Garner once told him, “You could have been Elvis’ son.”
Seaton returned to College Park in 2004, where he lives on Metzerott Road not too far from where he lived as a boy.
Seaton’s rockabilly and classic-rock band, Johnny Seaton & Bad Behavior, draws sell-out crowds at the the American Legion, Knights of Columbus and Moose Lodge in College Park, at The Jetty, a Kent Island restaurant, and at venues all over Maryland. Every year the band channels Elvis, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Stray Cats and Jerry Lee Lewis at the Greenbelt Labor Day Festival.
From a young age, Seaton capitalized on his Elvis looks, which he said opened a lot of doors in the music world, starting with talent shows at High Point High School, where he played football and graduated in 1978.
“Secretly I had visions of singing,” said Seaton, who used to do imitations during football practice of Jimmy Stewart, Elvis, Johnny Mathis, Muhammad Ali, Richard Nixon and Donald Duck.
He participated in the “Bong Show” – a local version of the popular 1976 TV game show, The Gong Show, at the Paragon, a long-closed College Park club for UMD students. He won first prize for his rendition of “All Shook Up.”
Afterward, he sang all over Maryland and won prizes ranging from a bag of nickels worth $200 to $10,000 from radio station DC 101.1 FM for his performance in the Battle of the Bands.
The only time Seaton ever saw Elvis perform was at Cole Field House in 1974. When Seaton left the concert with his brother, Albert, whom Seaton said looked exactly like Elvis, fans rushed their Cadillac, thinking Albert was Elvis.
“That 20-minute concert was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen. It was so electric,” Seaton told College Park Here & Now. “So Elvis was a very big, important part of my career.”
Two weeks after graduating from High Point, Seaton got a band job with a USO trip to the Mediterranean. He performed in Sicily, Greece, the Azores, Naples and in an extinct volcano with singer-songwriter Harry Chapin.
Seaton then recorded his first album, “Uptown,” with non-Elvis songs and went to New York City to promote it. As he was walking around Times Square after a disappointing day of trying to sell “Uptown” to MCA Records, he stopped for an impromptu audition for an Elvis character in an off-Broadway show. The owner of the theater told him auditions were closed, so Seaton responded, “But you haven’t seen me yet.”
He got the part and performed in “Elvismania” for 13 weeks.
“It was quite a success,” Seaton said.
Renegade Records eventually released “Uptown” in 1982 to “a great review from Cashbox,” an American music industry trade magazine, Seaton said. Two years later, a Dutch company noticed and invited him to tour Holland, which led to “a lot of play in the European market.”
But Seaton wanted something different and tried hard to move away from impersonating Elvis.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that,’” he recalled. “I don’t want to wear a jumpsuit,” but shows would pay him $2,000 to perform while wearing one.
In 1981, Seaton relocated to California after spending some time writing his own songs.
“Every time I tried to get away from Elvis, I got plunged back in,” Seaton said.
In 1988, People magazine featured Seaton in an article about Elvis. He also did an interview with Today show host Bryant Gumbel and multiple local news and magazine shows.
He later performed as Elvis in the long-running tribute show Legends in Concert and for six years as the Elvis-inspired Pharaoh character in a 1990s U.S.-Canadian tour of the play “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Osmond played the role of Joseph.
“I was the most frustrated guy,” Seaton said, because he had to sing the same song twice a day throughout the run.
Still, Seaton recalled, Andrew Lloyd Webber, who composed the music for the play’s songs, called him “brilliant” and praised his performance as the Pharaoh. When the musical closed, Seaton moved to Las Vegas and landed his own show at MGM Grand. There, he became friends with Newton, the singer whose song had inspired Seaton to sing at the bank as a child.
Seaton described a fond memory of Newton, who snuck into Seaton’s shows wearing glasses and a hat so fans wouldn’t recognize him.
Meanwhile, Newton invited Seaton to appear as Elvis in a music video for “The (Elvis) Letter,” Newton’s song about a handwritten note that a lonely and sleepless Elvis wrote and threw in a hotel room trash can. His maid found it and put it up for auction 10 years after Elvis died. Newton bought the note and wrote a song about it.
After performing 15 shows a week in Las Vegas for three years, Seaton returned to College Park in 2004 to, he said, find himself.
“The best thing I did was to come to be Johnny Seaton and not Elvis,” Seaton said. “I’ve recreated my life” in College Park. “I’m only a star to the people I love.”
