"I don't mind telling you that if I had met this little lady way back when, I would still be 'alive' and singing and performing today," Elvis said in a note to the tabloid on the occasion of his wedding "just days ago" to Karen Crane, a 30-year-old waitress from Mississippi.

Elvis may have left the building, but he certainly hasn't left our hearts, minds and pop culture psyche. Fifteen years after his death, the King of Rock 'n' Roll still reigns supreme, and his life after death is more colorful and storied than his 42 years on Earth.

From 2,000 reported sightings in places as varied as a Burger King in Kalamazoo, Mich., to Midwestern malls and filling stations outside small towns along the byways of America -- and not to mention the almost weekly chroniclings of the exaggerated rumors of his non-death by the Weekly World News, the National Enquirer and other strange-but-true periodicals -- Elvismania has taken on the life Elvis no longer has. And then some. Just ask the 7 percent of Americans who told a 1989 CBS News poll that they believed Elvis was alive.

"Elvis is everywhere
Elvis is everything
Elvis is everybody
Elvis is still The King
Man, oh, man what I want you to see
is that The Big E is inside of you and me."
- from "Elvis Is Everywhere,"
by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper

Indeed, and his likeness lives on both in the respectful and the tacky. He was the first American rock star honored with a stamp by the U.S. Postal Service. The tiny Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent, known more for calypso than rock 'n' roll, this week released a set of Elvis stamps.

And then there's bottled Elvis sweat ("Only for the most devoted fan," boasts the package), Elvis memorial candles (to be lit only on the anniversary of his death), Elvis bedroom slippers, busts of Elvis (many of which double as lamps) and Elvis whiskey decanters, Elvis shampoo, Elvis cologne, "Elvis-as-Waldo" books, and even Love Me Tender Chunks dog food among the many products licensed by the Presley estate, which grosses $15 million a year.

"People want to possess more than his music," says Jack Mingo, author of "The Whole Pop Catalog." "They are buying a piece of Elvis."

As 50,000 faithful converge at Elvis' Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn., this weekend to mourn their long-fallen king, the question lingers: Why this obsession with a dead singer?

Rock critic Greil Marcus, author of "Dead Elvis," calls Elvis "a great, common conversation": Talk about him and everyone - from the Democratic presidential nominee to the kid asking if you want fries with that - knows not just who but what you mean. He's a "perfect, all-inclusive metaphor" for our culture: the dirt-poor kid who won everything and lost himself, the country boy corrupted by city slickers, the monumental talent that never died even when it was sold out.

"Even more important, Elvis was an authentic product of America," Marcus says. "He simply stands up, and you look at him and you say, 'This country produced this person, and no other country could have produced a figure so exciting and so strange.' "

Says Mingo: "In some ways Elvis has been more lucrative dead than alive. He has become an icon and part of that is dying. If he had lived . . . Elvis would probably have his own salad dressing by now . . . either that or he'd be doing toilet-bowl cleaner commercials."