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IT KEEPS RIGHT ON A-HURTIN' | PAGE 1, 2
We know the outline: the pills (introduced to Elvis by an officer in the Army); the beginning of his relationship with the teenage Priscilla; the insulating layer of flunkies and hangers on; the crummy movies and lackluster records brought on by the Colonel's inability to see the connection between what sold and what mattered; the all-too-brief rebound of the 1968 comeback special and the initial Vegas engagements; the descent into robotic one-nighters (which, by the end of Elvis' life, had become his only dependable source of income); the preoccupation with spirituality; the desperate attempts to relieve his boredom with shopping sprees or food or women; the sudden enthusiasms for guns or karate or police badges; the spectacle of the last year; and finally death. But Guralnick gives even the most familiar parts of this story fresh life. And as with any rendering of experience that attempts to understand the motivations of the people involved without judging them, the life described takes on an irreducible mystery. The combination of Guralnick's unobtrusive storytelling and his empathy fleshes out people or incidents that have been little more than movie-magazine rumors. Elvis' affair with Ann-Margret is surprisingly moving, largely because it seems the singer missed the chance to be with his soul mate, a woman whose personality, his buddies told him, made her a female Elvis. And Linda Thompson -- the Miss Tennessee usually depicted as a beauty queen bimbo -- comes off as devoted and mature beyond her years. Like Taylor Branch in his ongoing biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Guralnick unifies his story with an absolutely convincing psychological portrait of his subject. The death of his mother, Gladys Presley, is always present in the background of "Careless Love." "Oh God," Elvis cried at her funeral, "everything I have is gone." It wasn't: Money, hit records, all manner of acquisitions were still to come, but -- except for an all too brief resurgence -- whatever will Elvis had once possessed seemed gone. Guralnick explicates this line from Greil Marcus' seminal essay "Elvis: Presliad": "There is a way in which virtually his whole career has been a throwaway, straight from the time when he knew he had it made and that the future was his." Guralnick describes a complex mixture of insecurity, a need to control others ("The way that Billy saw it, Elvis promoted conflict among others just to keep himself amused") and above all a passivity, nowhere more so than in his musical career. It was Elvis' special tragedy to be someone who seemed able to express himself only through music, yet someone who lacked the discipline and focus to dedicate himself to it. Guralnick dispenses with the notion that Elvis was some untutored folk artist, unconscious of what he did. Elvis' awareness of what his '60s music lacked, and his inability or unwillingness to change it, make for some of the most painful moments in "Careless Love." On the set of "Blue Hawaii," he's visited by RCA publicist Anne Fulchino, "who had helped Elvis draw up a long-range plan for success when he first joined the label," to whom he says, shamefacedly, "This isn't what we had in mind ... was it?" He was, Guralnick says, someone enamored of "instant result with minimal effort." The embarrassment he felt about the movies and music he made simply wasn't enough to overcome his fear of the possibility of losing his audience by challenging them. "He enjoyed being Elvis Presley," says Guralnick. It's the sense of that ambivalence that lingers as Guralnick describes the 1968 comeback special, the fire in the records that surrounded it ("From Elvis in Memphis," perhaps the finest sustained record of his career, and the single "Suspicious Minds") and the initial Vegas engagements. Those triumphs have been written about many times. I've read and re-read accounts of them, watched tapes of the TV special and listened to his records from that period as if I could somehow forestall what eventually happened to Elvis. (While reading this book, the only two Elvis records I could bear to listen to were 1960's "Elvis Is Back!" his first post-Army album, and the recently released "Tiger Man," a complete recording of one of the informal jam sessions that were the heart of the '68 special, which contains probably the greatest music Elvis ever made.) In light of "Careless Love," the freedom, exhilaration and release of the '68 special's music -- especially in "One Night" and "Trying to Get to You" -- takes on the special, desperate poignancy of an all-or-nothing bid for greatness. This is music that truly earns the title of Robert Johnson's song "Hellhound on My Trail." Elvis is trying to outrace his boredom, his willingness to compromise and play nice, to throw off all the shackles, and, for the moment, he's succeeding. These two volumes contain some of the finest thinking and writing about Elvis' music ever. Guralnick has moved away from the purist stance that once caused him to value the Sun Sessions above all the rest of Elvis' music. "Once I saw Elvis as a blues singer exclusively," he writes, "now I see him in the same way that he saw himself from the start, as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strain of the American musical tradition." Guralnick hits on something essential about Elvis in his analyses of "If I Can Dream," the inspirational song that closed the '68 special (and "In the Ghetto," the final track of "From Elvis in Memphis"). He understands the conventionality of these songs, both of them attempts to make Elvis "topical": "The song is a well-intentioned liberal statement about peace and brotherhood and universal understanding," Guralnick writes of "If I Can Dream." But you can say the same of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" or Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist." Guralnick understands that, like Griffith or Dickens, Elvis was one of those artists able to invest the conventional with so much emotion that convention is transcended. What matters in the performance, Guralnick writes, "is the pain and conviction and raw emotion in Elvis' voice." That is what lifts these songs from the generalized to the urgent. They are refusals of barriers, and refusing barriers -- musical, racial, class -- is what Elvis' best music is all about. What's haunting about Elvis, in death as in life, is how someone who aimed to embrace so much of his country's music functioned, at his greatest, as an outsider. His life and legacy express a never-settled conflict between acceptance and rejection. At one point in "Careless Love" Elvis looks at the people streaming into an arena to see him and remarks, "People will come from miles around just to see a freak." In some very real sense, Elvis never stopped being a freak. His freakishness is what he tried to hide by lifting himself to the level of myth, of sequined demigod -- and what he tried to deny by shoehorning himself into mainstream showbiz. Sometimes it seems as if the battle for the meaning of Elvis is played out between the freaks who see him as impossibly straight and the straights who want to deny his freakishness, his rebellion and his sense of danger. Any Elvis fan has probably encountered both. A few Christmastimes back I was in a record store trying to find a cassette of "The Sun Sessions" for my mother-in-law. When I asked a clerk, a kid in a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, if the store had it, he looked at me blankly and asked, "What's 'The Sun Sessions'?" ("The reason you're here, you little candyass," I wanted to say.) A few months before that, reviewing Guralnick's first volume for a Southern magazine, I argued with an editor who wanted me to excise a connection I attempted to draw between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. I'll never forget his argument: "Some of us," he began, pausing for effect, "think there's been no rock 'n' roll since 1968." The subtext of his words couldn't have been clearer: "That weirdo junkie doesn't belong in the same company as Our Elvis." But there can be no such thing as "Our Elvis." And I think this is what Guralnick meant at the beginning of "Last Train to Memphis" when he wrote, "This is my story of Elvis Presley: it cannot be the story of Elvis Presley." Elvis can't be given any one meaning because he is about the freedom of inventing yourself, of finding your own meanings. His tragedy is that he denied himself the freedom that his own example encouraged others to demand. When you burst upon the world with the unabashed energy of Elvis, compromise seems a sellout. Even though he knew he'd made that compromise, Elvis continued to present himself as if he embodied that energy, and that pose became a kind of prison.
That may be why the best recordings of Elvis' last years -- like his
versions of Billy Swan's "I Can Help" and Faye Adams' "Shake a Hand" -- are
country and gospel songs, genres that allow for compromise and admissions
of defeat. The same is true of his unearthly version of "Danny Boy,"
recorded the year before he died, in which he seems to be bidding farewell
to his own younger self, reaching for a peace that eluded him. During the
last hundred harrowing pages of "Careless Love," I kept thinking of the
concluding lines of the epitaph Elvis' father Vernon composed for his son's
gravestone, "God saw that he needed some rest and called him home to be
with him," and wanting it to be true. I've never wanted anything more for
anyone in my life.
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