I went to Graceland (with substantial reservations). There's a passage in (probably) part one of Peter Guralnick's biography on Elvis in which Elvis said to his father just after his mother, Gladys, died: I guess Mama won't be feeding chickens on the lawn any more.
I've probably botched the quote in some important way, but I like the sentiment, and I like the image that it makes about Graceland--there's something sort of hilarious and practical about using the front yard of a mansion to spread chicken feed. You can tell that Gladys was a sensible woman. (James Agee would have liked her.) I can tell why Elvis missed having this person in his life. These are the images that I didn't want to spoil. I didn't want to have that replaced by the image of shag carpeting (see the Jungle Room) or other examples of vintage furniture from 1974 (the year Elvis did had the substantial remodelling of the place), and I knew that going through Graceland would do something to that.
It did*, and I regret that, but I did find out things that I otherwise wouldn't have known. I got to see a copy of an article that I had heard about a long time ago from my father, who was not anything of an Elvis Presley fan, although he also had nothing against him either. Elvis was just another part of American culture that he had heard about in passing, in this case in a manner typical of the way I also hear about American culture, that is, from some art history professor who prepared a lecture in which he compared Elvis's facial features to classical Greek statuary. Now when I hear about this, I think about George Melly's ``Aeolian cadence'' article about The Beatles, but another part of me sort of likes the fact that this academic in 1956 was open-minded enough to say that ``hip-swivelin' man'' (as Ringo called him) was this classically beautiful figure. I like this because it underlines part of what I've mistrusted about Elvis--early Elvis, anyways. He was good-looking, too good-looking in a certain sense, to have anything to do with real rock and roll. Little Richard--now that's what rock and roll is supposed to be: six-inch pompadour, gay, maniacal, beautiful, but in fundamentally bizarre and eccentric way. Little Richard is what Elvis aspired towards in his gold lame suit. Little Richard is the person I would like to have appear at Al Green's sermon when he starts preaching against homosexuality. ``Wooooooooooooo...ooh mah soul'' You can imagine it now, and if you can't, there are kinescopes of Little Richard's appearances on Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett in the late 1960s in which he runs up and down the aisles and displaces the host, his face filling up the camera. You can imagine it, Rev. Al Green delivering his little homily against being gay, and Little Richard, called to action, feeling the spirit, rushing the pulpit, scaring away Al Green, commandeering the stage.
*Although it also raised some odd questions I haven't been able to figure out. Why is it, after all, that the white fur on the inside of Isaac Hayes's Cadillac (from the Stax Museum) works, but the shag carpet on the CEILING of the Jungle Room doesn't. Both are outrageous, although not as outrageous as Meret Oppenheim's Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (Breakfast in Fur/Fur Teacup). 1936. But Isaac Hayes's Cadillac has style (sort of the equivalent of The Coasters' ``Shopping for Clothes'' or Chuck Berry's ``No Money Down''; Elvis's Jungle Room doesn't. You'd want to ride in Isaac Hayes's car. You wouldn't want to live in Elvis's room.
What else at Graceland? I stupidly forgot to write down the title, but there was a book that was open in Elvis's study. I leaned over to get a better look, but the automatic alarm system said droll-ly, ``do not lean into the exhibit, blah blah blah.'' It was some fairly old book from the 19th century or early 20th century about the ``utility of women'', but that's not exactly it. It was some other phrase I don't remember about women, not explicitly political as in the suffragist movement, but along the same lines, and I didn't know what to make of this: that is the image of Elvis reading and UNDERLINING this book about women's movements in the early 20th century. I like that thought, the idea of Elvis getting hip to the early history of women's liberation.
There are a lot of things I don't really understand about Elvis, and those are the things I usually enjoy the most. There's this passage from a book that Stanley Booth wrote about Memphis that I've been carrying around for 14 years.
(Calvin Newborn speaking) One night, probably in late 1952, a teenaged white boy `came in there, didn't have on any shoes, barefooted, and asked me if he could play my guitar. I didn't want to let him, I don't usually -- I didn't know him from Adam. I'd never seen him before. In fact, he was the only white somebody in the club. He made sure he won that one. He sang ``You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog'' and shook his hair--see, at the time I had my hair processed, and I'd shake it down in my face -- he tore the house up. And he tore the strings off my guitar so I couldn't follow him.' The boy turned out to have a name even more rare than Phineas Newborn -- Elvis Presley. he became friends with the Newborn family, and Mama rose has recollections of going off to church with Senior, leaving Junior and Calvin with a fresh-cooked ham in the kitchen, and coming home to find that Elvis had been there and left only the hambone. Elvis often remembered the Newborns with Christmas cards and presents, and on the day he died, Junior, touring Japan, dedicated the evening's concert to his memory.
Stanley Booth, Rythm Oil: a Journey Through the Music of the American South, ``Fascinating Changes'', page 202, Pantheon Books, 1991
There are details that I don't quite believe, particularly the bit about Elvis being barefoot--that just doesn't feel quite right. It sounds too hokey--but I want to believe the basic gist of the story, which is that Elvis knew the Newborn family and that he grew up with Phineas Newborn, Jr. I want to believe this because just about the same time as I read Stanley Booth's essay, I first heard Martin Williams's anthology, The Smithsonian Collection of Jazz Piano (included on the Memphis JU CD) in which he included one track by Newborn, which was his rendition of Bud Powell's ``Celia'' albeit it at a blinding speed (approx. 350 quarter notes a minute). It's one of those performances in which you don't even bother thinking about how fast the playing is because you're thinking about how fast the thinking is, that is, the speed at which Newborn had to think to improvise over those changes is where the real virtuosity is. It's intellectual virtuosity, not playing playing thousands of notes, which is why it doesn't feel sluggish (think ``Blueshammer'') the way so much blues rock feels. It feels light as if it's the rest of us that are moving in slow-motion.
The possibility that this a pivotal figure like Elvis knew this great jazz musician and ate the family ham from underneath the household is what I want to believe (even though there's a part of me that doesn't believe it) because there's a part of me that wants to have had something to have talked about with Elvis, even though he is as dead as he ever will be. I want to have thought that in a hypothetical world in which Elvis were still alive and in which he happened to have been momentarily freed from Col. Parker and the dungeon that Graceland is and all the hangers-on around him, that we would have had something to talk about (because you can't really talk about chickens on the lawn. That's just too private.): ``so...uh...you knew Phineas Newborn, Jr. when you were growing up, right? Did he play as fast when you first heard him play?''
Anything else? There's something very sad about Graceland. When you look at the graves, you gloss over the Biblical passages (or I did). The dates stand out, or they did for me. Elvis dead in 1977; his father dead in 1979, his paternal grandmother dead in 1980 at the age of 90. The order is entirely wrong, and you get the feeling that the tragedy is also a familial one and that a line has simply died out.
I've been thinking about Elvis as long as I've been reading what Greil Marcus has had to say about Elvis, but the older I get, the more I think that it's what Lester wrote about Elvis that resonates the most with me. Marcus's reading of Elvis is brilliant, but it makes no sense in some essential way to me. Lester though is different. Lester wrote what I would have wanted to write, or what I would have wanted to have seen written on the graves even though I knew in a million years that the corporation that elvis.com has become would never have this.
It's what Lester wrote that got down what is the most poignant thing about Graceland, which is that you see all these fans coming to say goodbye to this performer--but in reality, the process of saying goodbye to Elvis began years and years before he died, maybe sometime in the late 1950s or the early 1960s. The final entombment in the back garden is unexpected end product of something that started long before and that probably Graceland was in part responsible for, even though I know it's ludicrous to blame an aedifice alone for the metaphysics of isolation.
If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for you own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis'. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.
--Lester Bangs, ``How Long Will We Care,'' Village Voice, August 29, 1977