Stereophile, May 2000 issue
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Stereophile, May 2000 issue |
ELVIS! |
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"Here's somebody who just loves to sing." Over the telephone, Peter Guralnick sounds sad, incredulous. "But he's unable at the end of his life to force himself into the recording studio - the fear of completion, fear of exposing your untrammeled idea to execution. What a terrible thing to lose that ability, that faith in yourself."
Writing about the final decade and a half of the life of Elvis Presley is, by any measure, a sad affair. Almost from the time he returned from the army in 1960, things inexorably slid downhill until his death in 1977. Except for a very few oases of artistic renewal and personal triumph, this was when Elvis, who just a few years before had changed the world both musically and sociologically, sold out. He traded his artistic aspirations for lavish consumerism, childish diversions, and numbing self-destruction, in a game with himself he knew one day he'd have to lose - or get out of entirely.
As Guralnick puts it in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, 767 pp., 1999), the recently published second volume of his superb Elvis biography: "Aithough he never permitted himself to fully acknowledge it, [he] was well aware that he had not been faitthful to his ideals, that things were not working out in certain respects the way he had planned." A page later¤ he finishes the thought: "...in the end he felt there was no need to resolve these dichotomics just now; all would become clear when his purpose became clear, his mission revealed. All else was merely temporal; the contradictions between what he desired and what he accepted would one day fade away, hls dedication to doing something great would eventually overwhelm his weakness."
It's such clearheaded synthesis that distinguishes Guralnick's book from the many Elvis bios that have come before and makes it and its companion volume, Last Train From Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little Brown, 560 pp.,1994), a standard in Elvis biography that's unlikely to be equaled any time soon. Each volume won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in the year in whickh it was published.
While more than 300 books have been written about Elvis Aaron Presley since his explosive rise to stardom in 1955, the smaller subset of biographyics has always provided the liveliest, most clearly divided battleground.
On one side are the fans and true believers, the apologsts Who endeavor to not only logically explain away the man's dark sides, but who invariably find intellectual alleyways in which they can morally sanitize his every snarl and fetish. Many Elvis periodicals (like Elvis: The Man and His Music and Elvis World) fall into this category, as well as books like The Real Elvis: Good Old Boy, and a number of reminiscences by friends and family members. On the other, more critical side, one executioner towers above all others. By any standard applicable, Albert Goldman's Elvis (McGraw-Hill, 1981), published four years After Presley's death in 1977, is a vicious, even bloodthirsty dismembering of its subject. Unforgettably salacious, Goldman's retelling of Elvis's rise and fall - the familiar life story slathered in noxious details and scaring perversity - has become a lightning rod for controversy: a "see-I-told-ya" bible for detractors, and heresy for the rest. For anyone aspiring to write an Elvis bio, Elvis is the 800-lb gorilla that must be wrestled with before, during, and after.
"I found the book offensive. It doesn't matter who you are writting about, no humam being should be treated in that way," says Guralnick from his home near Boston. His experience with Goldman dates back long before his own Elvis project. When Elvis was released, Guralnick was a music writer for the Boston Phoenix, an alternative news - weekly, His review of the book was published the same week Greil Marus's more famous one appeared in the Village Voice.
"[Goldman's book] contradicts my ideas of decency and humanity. It has nothing to do with the book I wrote. One of the things I've always tried to do is to leave myself open to truth coming in over the transom. You can't accept any source on faith, but you can't exclude any source. So the fact that I had a visceral dislike for Goldman's book didn't mean I could disregard it. What I did was the same thing I do with fan magazine accounts: I tried to deconstruct [Goldman's] book and remove the attitude, which is a lot of the book - it's probably 70% attitude - to get to what he's really saying and whether it's well-sourced."
As far as Goldman's work being well-researched, Guralnick - who calls Elvis "chewy" - says that in some cases, like his uncovering of the Dutch background of Presley's inimitable manager, Col. Tom Parker, Goldman was solid. But the evidence for many of the numerous sex frolics cited by Goldman has proved more evanescent.
Guralnick's interest in Elvis Presley begin back in his teens, when he first begin to love the blues, and particularly the part they played in Presley's version of rock'n'roll. The distinguished author of some of the finest books written about American popular music in the last 25 years - Searching for Robert Johnson, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home - Guralnick says he'd contemplated a book on Elvis for some time before actually beginning work on it. Several specific Elvis projects finally inspired him to try to add a new voice to the already crowded chorus of Presley biographers.
"It actually stemmed from two or three specific impulses. I did the liner notes for the The Complete Sun Sessions in 1987, a two-LP set [reissued as The Sun Sessions CD, RCA 6414-2-R], at the same time I wrote the script for a documentary on Elvis." (The documentary was Elvis '56, from which Guralnick eventually disassociated himself.)
"In doing these things I listendd to all these interviews Elvis did in 1956, got all this primary source material. Then, when I was writing the liner notes for The Complete Sun Sessions, I called upp Sam Phillips, whom I had originally interviewed in 1979. But instead of interviewing him on philosophical matters or taking whatever came, I talked to him about producing Elvis. Then I talk to Stan Kesler [the Sun Studios musician who wrote "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone," which Elvis recorded at Sun (the Memphis Recording Service) in December 1954] and Scotty [Moore, Elvis's first guitar player] with the idea of how did you make these records, how did they come about. It was through doing that that suddenly realized that Elvis can speak for himself. There's a way of telling this story that's entirely different from the received idea.
A woman who knew Elvis remembered him sitting at the drugstore counter, drumming his fingers on the countertop. Then she paused and said, "Poor baby."
"The other thing, which happened at virtually the same time or maybe a year or two earlier: I was driving down McLemore Avenue with a woman named Rose Clayton, who grew up in Memphis and graduated from high school a little after Elvis, but knew him and a lot of people around. I was working on Sweet Soul Music [Guralnick's book about rhythm and blues], and we were headed toward Elvis Presley [Blvd.], just before we got to Stax [Studios] there was this closed drugstore on the right. She said, 'You know, Elvis's cousin used to work there. Elvis used to come in all the time, and he would sit there at the counter waiting for Gene to get off work. He used to sit there drumming his fingers on the countertop.' And then she paused and said, 'Poor baby.' And I had this epiphany, this illumination - that this was a real person, this was somebody I could write about."
The trick for any biographer is to determine which angle to take - to decide what, to the writer, is real, in this case about Elvis Presley. How, for instance, to reconcile or relish a man who lived, to quote Goldman, "in the day world of the squares and the night world of the cats." Does the author have a preconceived axe to grind, pro or con, or does he/she seek balance? And, by the final chapter, what image of Elvis has emerged?
Guralnick, a weekly music journalist turned author, is known for his linear, reliable prose, solid reporting, and reasonable syntheses. He is mostly content with laying out the fact as he hears and reconfirms them. However, when Careless Love reaches the mid-1970s, the time of Elvis's divorce and subsequent decline, there is a pervasive sense that not only is Guralnick struggling with his own crushed illusions about Elvis, but that he's grown disgusted with his subject's lackadaisical nihilism. The pace of the book quickens noticeably toward the end, and a disembodied tone enters in the last 150 pages - which, Guralnick admits, he rewrote more than anything he's ever written. He denies, however, that he ever lost faith in his subject.
"I tried to write it from the inside out. When you know the end, it's hard to keep that knowledge from the reader, but also from yourself.
"What it is is that you try to understand why people do the things they do. It's not a question of saying, 'Oh, that's terrible,' because that doesn't really lead anywhere. [Understanding what people do] is the only interesting kind of perspective, otherwise you're trumpeting about 'Well, I've done this. Well, I wouldn't have done that.' And so what? All human behavior is humam. There's no such thing as inhuman behavior among humans."
When Guralnick begin uncovering some of the motivation for Elvis's behavior on his visits to Memphis, he was startled to learn that mere logistucs played a part in someof the most revered Elvis myths.
"A very simple example of that would be that I'd always repeated the litany that Elvis went to Beale Street to hear the blues. But even though I'd been to Memphis many times, what I didn't realize when I said that was that Beale Street was just around the corner from where he lived. It wasn't like he trudged miles through the snow to get to Beale Street."
Another incidence of logistics modifying popular lore concerns the famous first phone call between Elvis and Sun Records, when Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips' secretary, called Elvis to come down to the studio to make his first record. Legend holds that Elvis was there before she hung up the phone, which may in fact be nearly true - Sun Records and the Lauderdale Courts housing project, where Elvis and his family lived at the time, were only a mile apart.
Any Elvis biography is necessarily the story of an amazing cast of characters: Elvis, his family, his many girlfriiends, his buddies in the so-called Memphis Mafia, and, of course, the biggest character of them all other than the singer himself: his manager, Col. Tom Parker. That relationship of client and manager had an incalculable effect on Presley's career
"[Presley and Parker were really like, in a sense, a married couple, who started out with great love, loyalty, respect which lasted for a considerable period of time, and went through a number of stages until, towards the end of Elvis's life, they should have walked away. None of the rules of the relationship were operative any longer, yet neither had the courage to walk away, for a variety of reasons."
Guralnick wrote to, then met and established a relationship with Parker before the Colonel's death in 1997.
He does offer straight reporting of the smarmier aspects of the Elvis-In-Decline story - the singer's promiscuity and rampant drug use - as well as of Parker's gambling.
"[Parker] was very helpful to me. He'd tell me how he wasn't going to give me these answers. But then he'd also sat where I might go for the answers. It's misleading, because [officially] he didn't do interviews. I'd put things out there, he'd volley them back by return mail. I spent a lot of time thinking of how to say things, and he'd still always be three steps ahead of me."
Parker is usually cited as one of the chief villains of the Elvis story, the man who sold Elvis's talent down the Hollywood river for cash. But as Guralnick makes clear, the Colonel had other, darker, more personal flaws that often resembled those of his client. Back in the halcyon days, as Elvis's addiction to pills grew, so did the Colonel's fondness for gambling. Though Gurainick does not address the rumors of Presley's homosexuality, he does offer straight reporting of the smarmier aspects of the Elvis-In-Decline story - the singer's promiscuity and rampant drug use - as well as of Parker's gambling, a problem often linked to his raising of the price promoters had to pay to book Elvis for a concert.
If there's a flaw in Guralnick's simple, straightforward writting style, it's that at times it's dry, almost academic. But this works to his advantage in the coverage of Elvis's Last years, providing a somewhat refreshing change from the hysterical tone adopted by most chroniclers of that period. About the Colonels's gambling, for example, Guralnick calmly relates:
"The Colonel's friends and associates were growing concerned about his behavior as well: more and more they were coming to see his predilection for gambling, which had seemed like a harmless aberration at first, as an addiction over which he had no control. It was something no one would have ever figured him for, but one by one all the signs fell into place as they watched him drop ever-larger sums of money at the roulette table, playing with a grim determination that seemed to blot out everything that was going on around him." (p.447)
Guralnick's ultimately sympathetic portrait of Parker may be the only flaw worth noting in his two-volume masterwork. Although he initially describes Parker as "a heavyset, crude and blustering man with a brilliant mind and a guttural accent" (Last Train, p.165), it's clear - and again, Guralnick is a champ at trying to withhold judgment - that the author respects the Colonel's drive to be the master of whatever game he happened to be playing. Perhaps because of his acquaintance with the man, Guralnick is too forgiving of Parker's ruthless pursuit of fame and wealth for himself and his too-pliable client. Worse, Guralnick does not identify Parker's meddling in the artistic side of Elvis's career as the disaster it proved to be.
The other traditional villain in the Elvis melodrama fares even better Dr. George Nichopoulos, the infamous "Dr. Nick," comes off here as significantly less menacing - and rightfully so, as evidence presented in several court trials has shown. As one of the doctors who supplied Elvis's outrageous appetite for opiates, Dr. Nick, who lived in Memphis and was the personal physician to Elvis and his entire entourage, is usually made out to be the monster whose irresponsibly free hand in the writing of prescriptions helped kill Elvis. As the title of a famous article by Stanley Booth had it, "The King is Dead! Hang the Doctor." In Guralnick's account, however Nichopoulos is seen as someone who, after failing to break Elvis of his habit, at least felt his presence could help control it.
"[Dr. Nick] showed very poor judgment at times. He himself would say, or he has said in the last few years ,that he was an enabler," Guralnick says. "If you climinate Dr. Nick from the picture, [Elvis] still had doctors all over the places, people who would do anything he wanted. Of all the doctors who ministered to Elvis, the only one who cared about him as a person was Dr. Nick. He compromised his objectivity, he took money from Elvis, he made a lot of money off Elvis, he made real errors. What he did is not the kind of thing thast would lead you to him as a family physician, but at the same time it doesn't create the picture of a villain."
"I think Elvis was clinically depressed for the last three or four years of his life."
The only times that Guralnick allows his narrative to veer across the line into the kind of luridness infesting the Goldman book is in some of the direct quotes. One of Elvis's friends from his time in Germany, Cliff Gleaves, contributes one of the very few eyewitness accounts here of Elvis's abuse of drugs. Speaking of the spring of 1967, Gleaves said:
"Elvis didn't care if anyone else took them or not. He was getting off on them. He loved to sit there high and wiggle in the chair, just wiggle his legs with a big pitcher of ice water in front of him - he'd drink tons of water 'cause you could see it dehydrating him - just sit there and watch TV. He didn't give a damn whether you did anything. He was going to do what he wanted anyway." (p.240)
Inevitably, any Presley biography comes to the point where the singer's decline began to gain momentum. The question then to be addressed is, why? In Guralnick's view a complex amalgam of force drove Elvis to destroy himself and his music. He feels that, sometime in the aftermath of Priscilla Presley's departure - late 1972 or early 1973 - Elvis fell into a depression from which he never emerged. This assumption, he says, is why the book's final chapters are short and rapidly paced.
"I think Elvis was clinically depressed for the last three or four years of his life. It's very much like writing about a person who's a heroin addict. Once you've established that this is the case, you're not going to write about every time the person shoots up - it's irrelevant. What's relevant is the fact that it exists, and how it affects the people around him and how it affects his own life.
"What I wanted to do [in the chapters covering the last days] was climinate everything that wasn't essential. I wanted the pace to pick up because I felt, at that point, we were on an inexorable march to its conclusion. I felt at that point that everything had been said, and Elvis was on this monorail to a destiny that couldn't be avoided."
For Guralnick, tragedy also lies in the fact that Elvis had a spritual side that, had it developed, might have saved him. This theme runs throughout both books.
"If you look at his spiritual readings over the last 15 years of his life, his mind remained exploratory, but it was all within a certain framework, all within a certain world. Everything that he learned he had to teach himself because he couldn't get outside of that world. Somebody once asked me, 'If you could give Elvis anything, what would you give him?' I was kind of joking, but I was serious, too: I said I'd give him a course in comparative religion at UCLA, because it would have opened up the world to him - from acting lessons to being able to admit `Hey, I don't know everything' to'I am vulnerable.'"
By the last page of Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, at the summit of this mountain of reporting, it has become abundantly clear that the person who must bear the most responsibility for that unmaking is Elvis Aaron Presley himself. The inescapableness of this conclusion, coupled with the author's stubborn refusal to indulge his personal belief s without corroborating evidence, is what makes Peter Guralnick's Careless Love, and Last Train to Memphis before it, such skillful and determined accomplishments.
