On the afternoon of August 16th, 1977, my family and I were headed back from my Grandma’s little house in the woods in Southern Oregon. As we made our way up I-5 in our orange Volkswagen Bug, I laid in the back seat, drifting in and out of consciousness, when an urgent bulletin came over the radio: “…ELVIS PRESLEY… FOUND DEAD… MEMPHIS TENNESSEE…” Utter grief and disbelief breaks out in the front seat, which was all the more shocking because neither of my parents were any kind of Elvis fan (they were the half-generation after him, and came of age with the music of The Beatles and Stones).
The funny thing is that even as an 8 year old kid, I felt like I knew what Elvis was about. After all, his myth and music were more or less common property of America – something akin to the Statue of Liberty, in sequined, musical form. He was Young Elvis – belting out killer tunes like ‘Return To Sender’ and ‘All Shook Up’ while making ladies swoon with a swivel of his hips. He was Old Elvis – a fat, sweaty mass of over-emotive singing, bad karate, and pre-packaged glitz. He was a cautionary tale about the dark powers of fame and fortune. He was a walking anti-drug poster. Even if I wouldn’t have articulated it in exactly those words, that was my general understanding of him at that time.
And that’s pretty much where things stood between me and Elvis for several decades. Somewhere along the way I stumbled across an LP copy of the The Sun Sessions, which blew me away, but perversely made me think less of him as a musician. The brilliance of his Sun work only magnified his late-period albums as the efforts of a bloated, drug-impaired clown. But recently I picked up Peter Guralnick’s Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley, and discovered how little I really knew about the man behind the myth. Fame is a hall of mirrors that tends to distort and dehumanize, and perhaps no celebrity has been as twisted out of shape by the process as The King.
Guralnick’s masterful biography reveals that Elvis was both much more and much less complicated than I’d ever suspected. He was a poor kid from Tupelo, MS whose ambitions didn’t extend far beyond buying his mama a house and making sure his parents didn’t have to worry or work. It’s nearly impossible not to view Elvis through the modern prism of fame, and judge him by blueprints that were drawn up long after he built his career. But as much as humanly possible, Guralnick walks in his shoes and makes clear not only why Elvis made the decisions he made, but also why those decisions made perfect sense at that time.
For instance, just before he went into the Army, Elvis put a successful recording career on the back burner so that he could concentrate on making movies. That shift is now widely viewed as either horrible artistic miscalculation or contrived sell-out. But in 1958 there was no template for a 40 year career in rock & roll. Everyone concerned with it saw it as a passing fad, and so Colonel Tom Parker sought to hitch his client’s star to a more stable (and yes, better-paying) line of work. At that time, to earn a fraction of what he would make in 15 days shooting a motion picture, Elvis would have had to tour 45 cities over two grueling months.
Perhaps the most stunning revelations in Last Train To Memphis concern his commitment both to his music and his acting. Many stories are told of a young Elvis in the studio, pressing for extra takes of a song because he knows he can do it better. The portrait Guralnick paints is of a young man moved by the spirit of the music that came through him, and surprised by the violent reaction that music caused. After his mother died (the conclusion of the first of this two-part biography) Elvis got lost in the maze of fame and drugs. But before he became The King, he was just a likable, charismatic kid, riding a wave for as long as he could…
