King Phojanakong '86

“At Science I met other guys who were really into music. We ended up jamming close to every day. One of the bands I was in played at the Apollo Amateur Hour. I remember one of my English teachers came to watch me, which was amazing. We didn’t know what to call ourselves, and when we were auditioning one of the judges was like, “I got a name for you guys. You’re going to be called Chocolate Elvis.’ We were doing rockabilly music, and our lead singer was a Black guy who sounded like Elvis. We had called ourselves United Nations, but it wasn’t catchy enough, so we decided Chocolate Elvis had a nice ring to it. It was a melting pot of the city, and I remember just meeting people all the time. I was all over the place, just trying to experience new things. It was really fun.”