How to go
Who: Mike Mingo and Grovor, with Brian Brenner’s tributes to Elvis and Wayne Newton
When: 7:30 p.m. July 31
Where: Casey’s Restaurant, 2205 Park Road
Cost: $25 (includes dinner); call (937) 322-0397 for tickets.
SPRINGFIELD — It’s all in the hair.
“You take away the dark hair,” Brian Brenner confessed, “I wouldn’t look like Elvis at all.
“Elvis impersonators don’t look like Elvis. They look like Elvis impersonators. Nobody looks like Elvis.”
But you see the hair — as black as the velvet on a cheap painting; as over-styled as the Jungle Room at Graceland — and it’s like your cerebrum automatically receives, aloha from Hawaii via satellite, a mental image of Elvis Aaron Presley.
Like the shag carpet on Graceland’s ceiling, you just want to touch it.
You want a lock of it to sell on eBay.
At the very least, you just want to ask about it.
And people do. Constantly.
“If it wasn’t for this darn Elvis thing, it’d just be brown,” Brenner was overheard explaining one recent morning in a hallway at Casey’s Restaurant to Dean Caven, owner of Miami County-based Caven’s Meats.
It was only the second time Brenner and Caven had seen each other in close to 35 years — and whether or not Brenner’s hair is real (it is) was obviously right near the top of Caven’s questions.
That is, once the initial surprise of learning that a guy he knew is now an Elvis impersonator had subsided.
“You don’t pay much attention to each other in the shower,” Caven later admitted, “but I told him, ‘I don’t remember you singing at all.’ ”
Hair like Brenner’s is too nice to be hidden underneath a helmet — which is exactly what would’ve happened had he tried his hand at going pro after leading Wittenberg University to a national football championship in 1975.
Instead, he taught P.E. at Clark Middle and helped coach the North High football team for a few years before, with a divorce looming, he took a chance and joined up with a traveling oldies band in 1979 as an Elvis impersonator.
“Thirty years later,” he said, “I think, ‘You know, I could’ve been retired from teaching by now.’ ”
But at 55 — 13 years older than Elvis when he died — the star quarterback still legally known as Brian Aschenbrenner isn’t ready to retire his 30-pound, $2,000 jumpsuit quite yet.
Why would he?
He’s been able to perform full time throughout the region since 1981, and at 6 feet 3 inches, he still looks like the virile, larger-than-life King at the dawn of the ’70s.
Or maybe the hair is just that good.
Brenner — “I’m not as well known as Engelbert Humperdinck to keep my name long” — will return to Casey’s on July 31 for a dinner show with singer/comedian Mike Mingo.
It was at a Casey’s show this past New Year’s Eve that Caven, who played defensive end on Witt’s 1975 championship team, had seen Brenner for the first time since their football days.
He was impressed.
“You could tell this was natural. Just like being a quarterback. He was a natural quarterback,” said Caven, whose Conover business has supplied Casey’s with beef and pork for years. “He is at ease. He is in his element.
“He was probably a good school teacher, but he’s probably a much better Elvis impersonator.”
All shook up
Some like to be called “stylists.”
More and more prefer “Elvis tribute artists.”
“I’m an Elvis impersonator,” said Brenner, a Cleveland native who now lives in Huber Heights.
Still, he can understand where the other guys — some 40,000 people who dress up like Elvis, by his guess — are coming from.
“There’s a fine line between an Elvis impersonator and a clown,” Brenner said.
That’s why he admittedly nixed the idea of posing for a photo on the 50-yard line of Wittenberg’s Edwards-Maurer Field in full Elvis regalia to accompany this story — seems that would just perpetuate the stereotype of these guys as hunka hunka buffoons.
The thing is, people still take Elvis awful seriously.
“You go to some parts of the country and there are two pictures on their walls, one of Jesus and one of Elvis,” said Brenner, who first started imitating Elvis at a frat party. “It’s a strange phenomenon that’s still alive to this day.”
Even so, he recently had to diversify in order to keep the gigs coming in — so in 2003, he began impersonating Wayne Newton, too.
Hey, the hair’s kinda the same.
And not only that, when Brenner saw Newton live for the first time, “His first 11 songs were Elvis songs.”
In 2004, Brenner performed as Newton for two months at a theater in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.
Come January, he’ll co-star as Newton in a touring “legends show” — 10 weeks of country clubs and casinos around Arizona, Nevada and southern California with Tom Jones, Celine Dion and Engelbert Humperdinck impersonators.
Burning love
Brenner never actually had any desire to move to Vegas, where “you have an Elvis around every corner,” he said.
He instead stayed close to where he went to school and ended up cornering the market.
In 2003, he got to throw out the first pitch when the Reds held “Elvis Day.”
“I never would’ve been able to throw out the first pitch as Brian Brenner or Brian Aschenbrenner,” he said.
But everybody still loves Elvis — especially old folks.
Brenner said he performs hundreds of shows a year at senior centers alone.
“I found an audience,” he said. “There’s nothing more rewarding than when the activities director says, ‘That person hasn’t smiled in a month.’ ”
He once thought about moving to Florida — “the senior capital of the world,” he explained.
“But we’re established here,” he said.
And so Brenner approaches his performing career with the same perspective as someone who played Division III football.
“We were small-college football,” he said, “but we were the best small-college football.”
He tried out for the Browns, instinctively knowing that D-III players only get to make the pros once in a blue Hawaii, er, moon.
“When you’re from a small college like Wittenberg, you’re realistic,” he said. “You have to set passing records and do all kinds of incredible things to get looked at.”
That day in Cleveland, he recalled, “They had 50 quarterbacks try out.”
But how many other Elvis impersonators are there around here?
Or better yet, guys who do a Wayne Newton tribute?
“Was football rewarding? Yes,” Brenner said. “But this part of my life, entertaining to the right audience, is what matters to me.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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