'Careless Love': The Writhe and Fall of Elvis
Richard Harrington
* 01/24/99
The Washington Post
Copyright 1999, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
What started for Peter Guralnick as liner notes for the 1987 CD
reissue of "The Complete Sun Sessions" has ended 12 years later with
the publication of "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley." The
new book, the second volume of Guralnick's massive biography, is a
sobering follow-up to his 1994 critically acclaimed "Last Train to
Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley."
Like its predecessor, "Careless Love" is assiduously
researched, meticulously assembled and beautifully written, equal
parts Shakespearean tragedy and psychological mystery. The book
delineates the decline and fall of an American icon with musical,
social and psychological details that will appeal to both Presley
die-hards and doubters.
Guralnick says he never intended to write two books totaling
more than 1,300 pages. But the more he investigated the parameters of
Presley's life, the more apparent it became that the story was best
told as a two-act drama in which an initial arc of triumph and
invention gives way to musical diminution and social dissolution.
According to Guralnick, those two distinct acts were separated
by a curtain that fell in 1958, when Presley's beloved mother, Gladys,
died, and he went into the Army for two years. It's at that crucial
junction that "Last Train to Memphis" ends and "Careless Love"
begins.
"If you look at Elvis before he goes into the Army, he has a
true belief in himself," Guralnick suggested on a recent book-signing
stopover in Washington. "Things are falling into place in the way that
they were meant to, in some mystical way, and then two things happen
to really challenge that belief. One is Gladys dies, which is
traumatic far beyond her being the person he was closest to in his
lifetime. It challenges his belief in the justice of the universe.
Elvis genuinely felt that all of his success was for a purpose and if
his mother is taken away from him at the moment of his greatest
success, what does that say about the purpose of his life?"
At the same time, Guralnick adds, the poor boy born in a
shotgun shack in Tupelo, Miss., a cherished only child who spent
hardly a night away from home until he started making records,
suddenly finds himself alone, in the Army and overseas.
"He's thrown into a world where he's in the company of
strangers," Guralnick explains. "He recognizes that these strangers
are waiting to see him fail, and is desperate to prove them wrong,
desperate to prove himself. I believe at this point he creates the
persona of Elvis and he's stuck with it."
It's during his two-year stint with the 32nd Tank Battalion in
Bremerhaven, Germany, that Presley begins to isolate himself within
the nexus of family and friends that eventually came to be known as
the Memphis Mafia. It's also in the Army that he is introduced to
amphetamines--by a sergeant while on maneuvers.
Guralnick notes that the pills left Presley "so full of energy
he never had to slow down," but they also set the stage for a tragic
finale in which an increasingly lazy, passive Presley succumbs to
nightmares about being poor, alone and deserted. He numbs his paranoia
and self-hatred with women, food and the drugs that finally left him
dead on the floor of his Graceland bathroom, "his gold pajama bottoms
down around his ankles, his face buried in a pool of vomit on the
thick shag carpet."
No fall from a throne was ever so dramatic, and Guralnick
clearly feels that the story of Presley's failure is ultimately as
worthy of exploration as the story of his success. The man who
transformed popular culture was ultimately unable to transform
himself, and according to Guralnick, "there is no sadder story."
What's remarkable is how compassionately Guralnick tells it,
with a depth and wealth of material that illuminate the complexity of
that story. And as well known as the elements of that story are,
Guralnick manages to maintain dramatic tension.
"I wanted to establish a condition of suspense about what's
going to happen next," Guralnick explains. "Not in the sense that we
could ever forget or obliterate our knowledge of what was to come, but
in the same sense that when you watch a movie that you love a second
or third time, you're so caught up in the action that not only do you
set aside what you know, you also hope that it's not going to
happen."
Guralnick's meticulously documented work aims not only to
examine the complexities of Presley's life but also to reclaim his
later artistic accomplishments: the gospel albums, the 1968 NBC
"comeback" special, recordings made in Memphis and Nashville, the
initial performances in Las Vegas, "things that have not been
recognized in recent years as the triumphs they actually were because
the image of Elvis at the end has taken precedence."
If you look at Presley's life and accept the conventional
wisdom--that what ruined his career was a string of terrible '60s
movies that blunted his musical aspirations, Guralnick says you'll
miss the reality that "when the movies ran out, you have a five-year
period from 1966 to 1971 that is in a sense the second golden age for
Elvis, in which he's making real, credible music."
What Presley couldn't do, says Guralnick, was sustain either
enthusiasm or momentum, and it wasn't the drugs that undermined him.
"For the last three or four years of his life, Elvis was deeply
depressed and suffered all the paralysis that anybody in the grip of
depression would suffer," Guralnick explains. "And that depression
caused Elvis to find a retreat in drugs to a greater and greater
extent. The drugs obviously didn't help, but I think they're a
symptom, not a cause."
That severe depression became particularly evident to Guralnick
when he examined the undoctored audio recording of a CBS television
concert filmed just two months prior to Presley's death. Guralnick
writes that what he heard was panic, the voice "almost unrecognizable,
a small, childlike instrument in which he talks more than sings most
of the songs, casts about uncertainly for the melody of others, and is
virtually unable to articulate or project. He gives the impression of
a man crying out for helpwhen he knows help will not come."
Adds Guralnick, "you'd be very hard pressed to listen to that
voice and not hear someone who simply had lost his sense of place in
the world."
Guralnick was 12 when Elvis Presley found his place in the
world in 1956. Though affected by Presley, Guralnick developed a
* deeper love for America's roots musics--soul, blues, bluegrass,
country, gospel. It was the very music that originally inspired
Presley and provided the underpinnings of his rock-and-roll
imagination. Guralnick began writing about it for alternative papers
in his native Boston. In December of 1968, he was assigned to review
Presley's famous "comeback" television special.
Before he wrote the first word of "Last Train to Memphis,"
Guralnick spent four years doing hundreds of interviews. And he
probably got closer than any other writer to "Colonel" Tom Parker,
Presley's famously elusive manager and almost his equal as a totally
self-invented character.
Guralnick first met him in January 1988 at a Presley birthday
celebration in Memphis, where he was a guest of Sun Records' Sam
Phillips, who hadn't seen Parker in 25 years. "Being the fearful but
intrepid reporter that I am, I trailed along behind them as they
talked. I wrote to him as soon as I got home, said it was great to
meet him and I was writing a book about Elvis and asked for any input
he could offer. I got a letter almost by return mail and it began, as
his letters generally did, with 'Friend Peter . . . ' "
Over the next few years, Guralnick tried many different
approaches to getting information out of Parker, but "he'd just bat
them away, though the way he batted away my questions was as
instructive as any answers I could have gotten."
A year later, Guralnick was invited to Parker's 80th birthday
gala in Las Vegas. "At the end of the evening I thanked him for
inviting me," says Guralnick. "And the Colonel touches my shoulder and
says, 'Peter, I put you on the list.' And I say, 'Thanks so much' and
he taps me again on the shoulder and says, 'I put you on the list.' "
And that, Guralnick feels, ultimately gave him access to many
people who might otherwise not have talked to him. "There's no
question that many of the interviews I got subsequently were because
I'd gone to the party and he'd put me on the list. I don't know why he
put me on the list, but he validated me in that world to which there
was so little access."
When "Last Train to Memphis" was published in 1994, Guralnick
heard from the Colonel. While admitting that the book was "very
different from all the others, he took great exception to a few things
that people had said in the book. . . . At the end, I said I wrote my
book for love, not for money. There's a pause and then the Colonel
says, 'You know, there's nothing wrong with money!' "
That, of course, was the driving motivation for Parker, who was
not a colonel, a Parker, or even an American (he was born Andreas
Cornelius van Kuijk in Holland). He and Presley made the oddest of
couples, yet, unlike most Presley biographers and critics, Guralnick
is loath to demonize Parker, even as he recognizes his complicity in
Presley's creative stultification.
"I see the Colonel as a Shakespearean character who provides
some comic relief, and is a very funny person intentionally, but who
also provides ominous notes struck as one considers the implications,
not necessarily intentional, of his discovery of a brilliant system to
market Elvis."
Presley's "totemic belief in the Colonel" was cemented while he
was in the Army, when his greatest fear was that time and distance
would crash his career and destroy his popularity. Parker, the canny
manager-merchandiser, promised that wouldn't happen and his tireless
efforts to keep Presley's name before the American public as both a
box-office star and recording artist convinced the singer that they
were an unbeatable team and he remained loyal despite the inevitable
artistic and commercial decline. Though "Careless Love" adheres to
Guralnick's notion that
"retrospective moral judgments [have] no place in describing a life,"
he recently came to the conclusion that the only thing that might have
saved Presley would have been the critical response of his fans.
"In the end, this was the relationship that meant the most to
him," Guralnick explains. "He saw his connection as being an almost
mystical one, saw all of his strength deriving from them. And I think
this is why the fans were willing to forgive what they saw, because
they felt that Elvis had never forsaken them. Elvis never left
Memphis, never left his class, never turned his back in any way. He
may have been living a life that his fans fantasized about, but it was
not a life which denied his originsin any respect. He never got above
his raising."
