Books |
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley & Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
Peter Guralnick
By
Published: May 02, 2012
Category:
Biography
Guest Butler Mark Hipgrave lends his voluminous musical expertise to a blues show on community radio station 4ZZZ in Brisbane, Australia. On HeadButler.com, he has shared his enthusiasm for Son House and Blind Willie Johnson.
The sad and shabby details revealed in a Los Angeles courtroom surrounding the death of Michael Jackson recall the similar details that were revealed in 1977 when another king — the real one — died with his body chock full of drugs.
When doctors examined Elvis Presley, they found a significant “polypharmacy” — fourteen different drugs in his system, including ten in quantity, with codeine ten times the therapeutic level. And this wasn’t an unfortunate one-off overdose. Elvis had been living this way for years, courtesy of his doctors, dentists and friends, some of whom, at least, should have known better.
There has been more written about Elvis than any other 20th century entertainment figure, and we all know the skeleton of the story — the truck-driving-only-child from a Memphis housing estate records a couple of tracks at Sun Studios for his loving mother and goes on to change popular music. A string of tacky movies, a controlling manager, a sensational 1968 comeback, then a long slow decline into Vegas schmaltz, overeating, starlets, drugs, lackluster performances that became a parody, and finally, an early death at 42. A sad demise, but “a good career move,” as former SNL head writer Michael O’Donoghue reportedly said.
The whole story is told in Peter Guralnick’s wonderful 1994/1999 two-parter. “Last Train to Memphis” takes us from Elvis’ birth to his departure for Germany with the US Army in September, 1958. “Careless Love” takes the Elvis story from there to the sad and sorry ending in a pool of vomit on the bathroom floor at Graceland in the summer of 1977. [To buy “Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley” from Amazon, click here. To buy “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley” from Amazon, click here.]
Guralnick is a music journalist who made his name with a collection of blues music essays. He had no great interest in Elvis. But then….
“I was driving down McLemore Avenue in Memphis with my friend Rose Clayton, a native Memphian. She pointed at this boarded-up drugstore, where she said Elvis’ cousin used to work, and talked about how Elvis would sit at the counter and just drum his fingers on the countertop, and then she said, ‘Poor baby.’ And I just had this revelation of a real kid, with acne, with enthusiasm, with this omnivorous interest in music.”
As Guralnick learned, Elvis was blazing a new trail, but without much guidance. His parents were overwhelmed and overawed with his early success. His manager — Tom Parker, the Dutch-born carny worker and one time Florida dog catcher — was a brilliant showman who showed little interest in Elvis’ companions, how he spent his money, or what he did when he wasn’t performing or acting.
Elvis knew his movies were junk and that he was a Hollywood joke, but Parker was convinced that movies would help turn Elvis into the next Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby. Worried about his own uncertain immigration status, Parker refused to let his charge leave the USA and travel to Japan or Europe, where his career could have soared above the Vegas neon. Meanwhile, Presley’s Memphis friends acquiesced and went along for the wild ride, the free Cadillacs and the annual Christmas cash handouts. They took the King’s shilling, in more ways than one.
In the early days Elvis performed with a fierce energy that astounded watchers. A young Roy Orbison commented in 1955: “His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.” Future country singer Bob Luman saw Elvis in Kilgore,Texas the same year:
“He wore red pants, green shirt and a pink shirt and socks, and he had a sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I’d been playing ten years and I hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling and he hadn’t done anything except break the strings yet and these high school girls were screaming and fainting ……”
Near the end, though, it was a lot different. In June 1976, after a show in Maryland which a reviewer described as a “a series of postures by a performer too tired – or bored to care” his orchestra leader suggested to friends “you know, all he can do now is die.” But rather than organize help, his entourage merely made contingency plans to ship a body back to Memphis.
Elvis had many “helpers,” including an LA “acupuncturist” who gave him treatments for karate workout injuries and an LA dentist who made frequent house calls, as well as Dr. Nick, his regular Memphis physician. “Bugger the Hippocratic Oath, where’s my check?” they all might have said.
The other striking feature of the Elvis story is the genuine love, affection and care his female companions showed him. Contrary to tabloid reporting, Elvis in his earlier years seemed to prefer a kiss and a cuddle to physical sex; in his latter ones, he liked bedtime discussions about spirituality. Right from his earliest girlfriend (Dixie Locke, whom he dated when he released his first records) to Ginger Alden (who was with him when he died), none are portrayed as gold diggers. They variously loved him or felt sorry for him, and so will you.
Perhaps that is why, in the final chapters of “Careless Love,” a strange matter-of-factness creeps into the writing, almost as if Guralnick couldn’t maintain his usual enthusiasm for his subject. “It required a considerable level of discipline to stay out of the picture,” he says. “I rewrote the last 150 pages of the book more often than anything I’ve ever written. I tried to cut away everything that was extraneous. I felt that at a certain point, you just had a sense of this inexorable fall, and I didn’t want to repeat ‘and then he did this destructive thing again.’ I wanted to evoke the pathos of what was happening.”
He did.
