WHEN Sam Phillips at Sun Studios asked the young Elvis Presley who he sounded like, Elvis replied that he didn't "sound like nobody". He was right too and Phillips couldn't believe his luck. He had always known that there was a music yet to be successfully made that would be a lucrative combination of styles. He also knew that it had to be somebody very special to carry it off. Elvis was obviously the very man. The truck driver from Tupelo was unstoppable - he was handsome, he was full of it himself?? and e wanted it. Presley was to be at the very core of what they were calling rock 'n' roll, and his influence on America and the rest of us cannot be overestimated.
Peter Guralnick, whose Careless Love, The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (the second volume of his autobiography) has just been published, first began to write about Elvis Presley at a time when the world had already lost any proper sense of what the King of Rock 'n' Roll had really been about. It was the late sixties 1960s, and nobody had seen the real Elvis for many years. Apart from harmless appearances in a string of mostly ridiculous movies, the abiding image in those days was one of a newly cropped G.I. cheerfully carrying his pack off to a base in Germany. The once-glorious spirit of the mid-1950s fifties had been tamed, repackaged and quite probably destroyed. By 1967, The Pelvis was about as threatening as Pat Boone. The dream was over.
Guralnick, however, was one of those to keep the faith. He deeply wanted to believe that the Elvis who once shook the very ground he gyrated upon might still be present somewhere, and he hoped that through his writing, he might go some way towards rescuing his fallen hero from ridicule and neglect. But worse was still to come. Soon Guralnick's vision of Elvis would have more than daft movies to contend with. The very man he had wanted to rescue from ridicule was to take a headlong dive into the lost world of Las Vegas and painfully throw it all away in an American nightmare of drugs, jewellery and karate chops.
There was a clear intent in the first part of the Elvis biography - Last Train to Memphis - the Rise of Elvis Presley. Guralnick not only wanted to rescue Elvis from his detractors but also from his admirers. It was, he says, his intention to release Presley from "the dreary bondage of myth and from the oppressive aftershock of cultural significance". And while he acknowledged that all he may have achieved was simply to expose his subject to yet more forms of encapsulation, the book was certainly a detailed restatement of basic yet neglected truths about the early days of the King. Here Guralnick was dealing with the Elvis he loved: the truck driver, the blues singer, the punk in the pink suit, the Elvis of the Sun Sessions, the Elvis who really did rock the world. And so the first book was about music. Volume two, Careless Love - The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, is inevitably about something else entirely.
There are of course many Elvis Presleys to deal with. The difficulty for everyone, including his biographer, is that all of them are real. Another Preslian Presley an scholar, Greil Marcus, put it like this: "Elvis has emerged as a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of schlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American." Having come to terms with all of the above, Guralnick no longer sees Elvis simply as a wonderful blues singer. He now sees him as he believes he saw himself right from the start: as equally complex musically as "someone whose ambition was to en- compass every strand of the American musical tradition".
One of Guralnick's particular disappointments is that Presley's music has now become a focus of conflicting ethnocentric claims. The charge of cultural theft is often levelled and, while it may be understandable, it is nevertheless unjustifed. To make such a charge is to completely misunderstand American music and Presley himself. Yes, many of the songs had been recorded before by relatively unknown black performers and, yes, Elvis got a lot of his moves from the likes of Wynonie Harris and Sonny Til, but there was much more to it than that. Elvis was as much Bill Monroe as he was Arthur Crudup and, as Guralnick points out, he was no more a copy of Crudup than he was of Monroe. In short, Elvis really was an inspired original, a truly unique figure ignited by the sparks that had always flown whenever American musics musical genres clashed.
It is important to know where Guralnick stands on Presley. The King's grave has been robbed before, and any biography has to be approached with care. The Elvis of Guralnick's mind is someone who actually enjoyed being what he had become: the world's greatest entertainer and someone with "a democratic musical vision which could not have been broader". He contends that while you don't have to like Presley, you simply cannot question his originality and achievement. Above all Guralnick, a consistently great music writer with impeccable credentials, always wants the story to come back to the music. The pain in the writing (and in the reading) is that this largely sad period in Presley's life had very little to do with music at all.
And so this second volume is a bleak one. The previous book was about a wild and wide-open America where the thunderbolt Presley laughed and shook his hips and upset (one way or another) everybody in sight. Careless Love, however, is a story of a figure in steady and seemingly careless decline. The book takes us into a world that shrinks inexorably into a smaller and smaller place and ultimately to a place of death. Many critics have used the word "unblinking" to describe Guralnick's version of events. And it is just that. While there is obvious discomfort in his confirmation of a story we already know, Guralnick continues to attempt to rescue his man from the myth.
"I know no sadder story," he writes. "But if the last part of Elvis's life had to do with the price that is paid for dreams, neither the dreams themselves, nor the aspiration which fuelled them, should be forgotten. Without them the story of Elvis Presley would have little meaning."
There is much rescuing to be done. Elvis in death has become for many a handy symbol of all that is tacky and the tawdry. Furthermore, the iconography is now so powerful that so much is simply taken for granted. Most difficult of all is that it's primarily the declining Elvis who is remembered and worshipped. It is precisely this most unfortunate of all the Presleys whose memory is grotesquely dragged around in public by impersonators who have frequently missed the point. The main point being that this late-period Elvis was a very ill man who was addicted to a frightening array of drugs. This was the Elvis who disintegrated in public.
But Guralnick never preaches. "There are no villains here," he writes. The story, he says, may have no greater moral than that of Job or Oedipus Rex. "Count no man lucky until he reaches his journey's end." Nor does Guralnick look for much sympathy on his subject's behalf. Again, he preserves the unblinking approach to whatever decline might concern the reader most. While asking us to acknowledge that Presley was in a quite impossible situation given the level of his fame, he then adds that Presley himself would never have given it up. Whether you like it or not, Elvis himself actually liked the white suits. He liked Las Vegas. He liked Mario Lanza and Dean Martin just as much as he liked Jimmy Reed and Jackie Wilson. Above all, he liked being Elvis.
To make his very existence possible, Presley spent his money on himself and his friends. In the palatial open prison of Graceland he indulged his many whims and played with motorbikes, cars and guns as the mood took him. His gang of hangers-on were was his security in more ways than one, and he gave them cars and jewels in an increasingly profligate manner. In return, they never questioned anything he did and they too passed from dream into nightmare.
EQUALLY ever present was Colonel Tom Parker - not quite the ogre of previous books but just as efficient in the deal-making department of legend. There was also Vernon Presley, the surely bewildered Daddy, - and of course the famous Dr . Nick, who, according to Guralnick, may well have tried to actually regulate the King's intake of pills. In fact, except for the Vegas medics who were sending "medicine" to Elvis behind the back of even Dr.Dr Nick, nobody really gets the blame. If anything, Guralnick tends to leave Elvis himself responsible for his own tragedy. There is no sensational finger-pointing here, just a very depressing sequence of events. He Elvis yielded to the physical decline as much as to the musical.
This whole period is a mystery. The 1968 television special had promised great things. Presley was in black leather, in quite stunning voice and entirely full of attitude. He was also full of humour: all those movies, he was saying, were nonsense; I have wasted a lot of time but this is what I'm really about. It was all jawdropping stuff, and the Elvis Presley of Tupelo seemed to be back. Then in 1969 he recorded Suspicious Minds - - not only a great song but also, as Guralnick puts it, a new musical hybrid "a cross between Old Shep and contemporary soul". Even the first of the white suit shows are described in detail as being quite extraordinary. Guralnick has no doubts whatever that Presley was the most important entertainer ever.
But what was all that other stuff about? The guns, the badges, the desire to be a policeman, even going to a police funeral in uniform. This was Elvis the aspiring narcotics agent who would go to quite extraordinary lengths to get his honorary Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge. He even asked Nixon to help him get him one on an apparently stoned visit to the Whitehouse where the King not only informed the president that the Beatles were a bad influence but also complained that young people had no respect. So much for rock 'n' roll.
A bigger mystery still is that someone who changed popular culture on a world level could remain so insulated from it for the remainder of his life. This is the bleakest image of Presley still performing, still going through the motions but in many ways no longer relevant, no longer creative. Yes, he liked being Elvis but he was also full of self-hatred. He knew, writes Guralnick, just how far he had fallen from what he had set out to achieve. He was no longer magnificent and his voice was shot and yet "he continued to seek out a connection with a public that embraced him not for what he was but what he sought to be".
In the final pages, Guralnick brings it all back to the music and allows the legacy to redeem the man who left it.
"The cacophony of voices that have joined together to create a chorus of in- formed opinion, uninformed speculation, hagiography, symbolism, and blame, can be difficult at times to drown out, but in the end there is only one voice that counts. It is the voice the world first heard on those bright-yellow Sun 78s, whose original insignia, a crowing rooster surrounded by boldly stylised sunbeams and a border of musical notes, sought to proclaim the dawning of a new day. It is impossible to silence that voice." Here Peter Guralnick begins to blink and he is right to do so. It is time to re-read volume one.
Careless Love, the Unmaking of Elvis Presley is published by Little Brown, price 19.99 in UK