ELVIS PRESLEY: THE MAN, THE LIFE, THE LEGEND by PAMELA CLARKE KEOGH

 

Elvis official http://www.elvis.com

 

I made a study of Elvis Presley around the tenth anniversary of his death. I read 20 books, watched his movies and bought his records. I took a certain knowledge of the Elvis story into this book. It is always good to read about Elvis. It is almost supernatural, the way he comes to life in his biographies.

 

Pamela Clarke Keogh speaks of Elvis in mythological tones. We feel her wonder as she documents the lure of Beale Street in Memphis. Young Elvis was like everyone, and yet different. He wanted to be different. He wore flashy clothes and long hair to be noticed.

 

Keogh came up with 100 photos from the Graceland archives. She is conscious of clothes and fashion. It is obvious that a woman wrote this book.

 

It was Sam Phillips of Sun Records in Memphis who discovered Elvis. Phillips was a southern gentleman with a high opinion of himself. He was a little crazy. His death in 2003 went virtually unreported. I learned of it through a small piece in a magazine I was thumbing through at the V.A. hospital.

 

The Sun Record label is curious. It is round and yellow, a likeness of the sun. There are rays and a rooster crowing in the morning. c**k-a-doodle-doo!

 

Phillps put Elvis with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black in the summer of 1954. Elvis was trying ballads, obviously the wrong material. Things happened when he stumbled into an old blues song. It was fast and rhythmic and presented Elvis' voice in such a way that it came across.

 

Elvis and his combo began touring the south. Drummer D.J. Fontana had played strip joints and applied stripper drum licks to what Elvis was doing. Girls ate it up. Keogh calls it the "dawn of the modern era."

 

She conveys a feeling of destiny about Elvis. He was larger than life, this shy Memphis kid who became the biggest star of all-time.

 

There are no surprises in her book. Reading it is like listening to a favorite song we have not heard in a long time.

 

Elvis is contagious. I do a lot of his songs karaoke. It is like his spirit comes into me. I start talking like him and cannot stop. We are all Elvises now.

 

Keogh's book reads like a romance novel. She is sentimental. Elvis becomes a fictional character. Keogh dwells on his wardrobe. She tells us what he was wearing for this or that show.

 

Elvis played Las Vegas, in May, 1956, promoted as "The Atomic Powered Singer. Our fascination with the atomic bomb was at its pinnacle. Elvis bombed. His audience at the New Frontier was old and stuffy.

 

Elvis appealed to teenagers and kids, those with no memory of World War II, Nazis or Hiroshima. He created the generation gap.

 

Elvis recorded Hound Dog in New York. That song changed everything. 31 takes were done. Elvis crouched on the floor listening to number 31. "That's the one," he said.

 

I recall hearing Hound Dog on the radio while on the truck with my father. Chills ran down my spine. I asked my father who Elvis Presley was. He said, "Some guy in a leather jacket."

 

Keogh portrays Elvis as a Greek god. She decries the Steve Allen farce. Allen was a jerk anyway. Elvis was naive and candid. He only wanted to sing.

 

Elvis was drafted into the Army at the peak of his popularity and ended up in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Keogh writes that he was "strac." It is an army term for a man who looks good in uniform. I was called "strac" by the guys in my platoon in Bamberg. It was in jest. I was sloppy, my fatigues wrinkled, my boots never polished. Elvis and his future wife Priscilla met in Germany. Keogh calls Elvis and Priscilla "opposite-sex versions of each other."

 

She peppers her narrative with anecdotes, like the time Elvis took Priscilla shopping and had her stage a fashion show for his grandmother. Priscilla was Elvis' doll, and he dressed her as he pleased.

 

Viva Las Vegas was the last movie which can be justified. Keogh calls Elvis and Ann-Margret soul mates and suggests that she was the love of his life.

 

Keogh creates dialogue for her scenarios. It may be real or made-up. She dramatizes the meeting between Elvis and The Beatles. She takes us there. No one recorded the 30 minute jam session, and no pictures were taken.

 

We sense Keogh's own Elvis fantasies. She is aware of the King's southern charm and sexuality. He was a magnet for women.

 

In 1969, Elvis again recorded in Memphis. The sessions produced Suspicious Minds. Elvis had changed. So had America, and Las Vegas was ready for him. He became a fixture at the International Hotel in the era of high collars and jumpsuits. Keogh calls him a lone gladiator. She cannot resist telling what the band wore, the back-up singers, even women in the audience. They looked like stewardesses, flight attendants, as we call them now. Elvis was back on the road, city to city, for the remainder of his life. Every concert ended with Can't Help Falling In Love, and he never did encores.

 

42 is young unless you are an athlete or a rock star. Elvis Presley was not meant for middle-age. He died at 42, overweight and hooked on prescription drugs. His girl friend was 20. There is a lesson to be learned. It is that each stage of life demands a transition, an adjustment to a new level of maturity. That is the only way to keep going. Suddenly, we are senior citizens, and our roles are deeper. If Elvis had fired his manager and taken a supporting role in the Barbara Streisand movie, he may have become the serious actor he always wanted to be and found that much more to live for.

 

 

I also have that book and very good it is too, i have also read loads more. I think i have altogether i have about 40, and i still buy them when i see one. Elvis is an inspiration to alot of people, young and old and he will be forever. :wub:

 

 

Nice one Jim :yahoo:

Great review Jim! Thanks for posting it. Like Lesley, I've got loads of books written about Elvis. With each one, I learn a little more about the man. Sure, he wasn't perfect, nobody is, but he was one helluva guy :wub: From my own experience, my two favourite books about Elvis are by Peter Guralnick - 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' If you're only going to read a couple of books about Elvis, these are the two that most Elvis fans would recommend

Great review Jim! Thanks for posting it. Like Lesley, I've got loads of books written about Elvis. With each one, I learn a little more about the man. Sure, he wasn't perfect, nobody is, but he was one helluva guy :wub: From my own experience, my two favourite books about Elvis are by Peter Guralnick - 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' If you're only going to read a couple of books about Elvis, these are the two that most Elvis fans would recommend

 

 

Yay. i also have those two books you have mentioned.......Brilliant :yahoo:

Here are some reviews of the two books that are a 'must have' to every Elvis fan

 

Last Train To Memphis

 

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Peter Guralnick demonstrated in his definitive history of Soul music, Sweet Soul Music : Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, that he has a nearly unique grasp of the singular way in which popular music and the political culture intersect in American society. Along with Robert Palmer (Deep Blues) and Greil Marcus (Mystery Train), he has helped to craft a still pretty slender body of literature which takes pop music and its impact seriously, but also places it within a larger societal context. Now, in his two part biography of Elvis Presley, he has set out to strip away both the mythology (Volume One) and the demonology (Volume Two) that obscure Elvis and to restore some reasonable sense of perspective on the man and his music. In so doing, he offers us a new and useful opportunity to understand the personal and societal forces that converged to make him into The King, one of the genuine cultural icons of the 20th Century, and to trigger the Rock & Roll Era.

 

There are several main factors that Guralnick cites, which appear to have had a particular influence on how events transpired.

 

First is the city of Memphis itself, which served as a nearly perfect crucible for forging the blend of Gospel, Country, Blues and Rhythm & Blues that made up Elvis's sound. A southern city, but not Deep South, there was at least limited interaction between the white and black worlds. But most importantly for this story, the city was saturated with music. Second, Sam Phillips, owner of his own fledgling Sun Records operation, was on the scene looking for a white act that could bring the black sound to a mass audience:

Sam Phillips possessed an almost Whitmanesque belief not just in the nobility of the American

dream but in the nobility of that dream as it filtered down to its most downtrodden citizen, the

Negro. 'I saw--I don't remember when, but I saw as a child--I thought to myself: suppose that I

would have been born black. Suppose that I would have been born a little bit more down on the

economic ladder. I think I felt from the beginning the total inequity of man's inhumanity to his

brother. And it didn't take its place with me of getting up in the pulpit and preaching. It took the

aspect with me that someday I would act on my feelings, I would show them on an individual,

one-to-one basis.'

 

Finally, there was the man, actually he was more of a boy at the beginning, Elvis Presley. And Elvis was himself the product of several forces. There was the impoverished kind of white trash milieu from which Elvis came and which gave him a sense of alienation and otherness. As Phillips said of him:

He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way; his

insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person.

 

Then there was his mother, Gladys, who--in addition to raising him to be polite, respectful, humble, even deferential--also gave him unconditional love, bordering on worship, which he returned in kind. These forces combined, as so often seems to be the case, to make him insecure on the one hand, particularly in the manner in which he approached and dealt with people, but, on the other, left him burning with an inner certainty that he was special and was meant to accomplish great things.

All of these forces combined into a volatile mix in the Sun recording studios on July 5, 1954. Phillips had brought Elvis in to work with a couple of local musicians, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, because he wanted them to do some ballads and Elvis had done some demos there, which Philips was not overwhelmed by but he thought Elvis had some potential as a ballad singer. The session was pretty desultory, if not downright unsuccessful, until that inevitable, now mythical, moment when during a break Elvis started fooling around doing Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's old blues tune "That's All Right [Mama]". Phillips, initially shocked that this quiet white mama's boy even new the song, immediately recognized that this was just the type of thing that he had been looking for and got them to record it.

 

All of the tumblers had clicked into place. It was the nature of Memphis that Elvis and Sam had been exposed to, more like drenched in, the music of the black community. Sam happened to be looking for someone who could transport that music and, most importantly, the style and atmospherics of the music, into the white community. And in walks Elvis, that quintessential hybrid of insecurity and manifest destiny.

If success did not come overnight it did come quickly and Guralnick masterfully charts the meteoric rise that took them up the charts and took Elvis to television and then to Hollywood. This first volume also sees Colonel Parker take over from Sam, the purchase of Graceland, the eventual breakup of the original band, the death of Elvis's mother and his induction into the Army. Guralnick makes it all seem fresh and exciting, carrying the reader along on the tide of events. An incredible number of famous names stud the narrative and prove to have significant roles to play, including: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Snow, B.B. King, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddy Arnold, Bill Monroe, Steve Allen, Milton Berle and, of course, Ed Sullivan. This is a great biography.

 

 

Careless Love

 

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y48/elvis1959/book_carelesslove.jpg

 

Careless Love recounts the second half of Elvis Presleys life in rich and previously unimaginable detail, and confirms Guralnick's status as one of the great biographers of our time and is the follow up the the aclaimed Last Train To Memphis.

This is the quintessential American story, encompassing race, class, wealth, sex, music, religion, and personal transformation. Written with grace, sensitivity, and passion, Careless Love is a unique contribution to our understanding of American popular culture and the nature of success, giving us true insight at last into one of the most misunderstood public figure of our times

Peter Guralnick had considerable ground to cover in his sequel to Last Train To Memphis. A lot happened to Elvis between 1958 and 1977 and it is all explored in the 768 pages making up Careless Love ... And as Guralnick explores and analyses Elvis' life, he does so with incredible detail, insight and compassion. He celebrates Elvis Presley's genius as an artist without ignoring his flaws - but even these are presented in a balanced way. Guralnick's account avoids the over-the-top expose style so evident in many other biographies about Elvis Presley. For various reasons, many readers, particularly those who are recreational readers rather than die-hard Elvis fans, will find Careless Love more entertaining than Last Train To Memphis. Guralnick's two volume Elvis Presley biography is likely to stand the test of time as the definitive account.

 

Until Peter Guralnick came out with Last Train to Memphis in 1994, most biographies of Elvis Presley--especially those written by people with varying degrees of access to his "inner circle"--were filled with starstruck adulation, and those that weren't in awe of their subject invariably went out of their way to take potshots at the rock & roll pioneer (with Albert Goldman's 1981 Elvis reaching now-legendary levels of bile and condescension). Guralnick's exploration of Elvis's childhood and rise to fame was notable for its factual rigorousness and its intimate appreciation of Presley's musical agenda.

 

Picking up where the first volume left off, Guralnick sees Elvis through his tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Germany, where he first met--and was captivated by--a 14-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu. We may think we know the story from this point: the return to America, the near-decade of B-movies, eventual marriage to Priscilla, a brief flash of glory with the '68 comeback, and the surrealism of "fat Elvis" decked out in bejeweled white jumpsuits, culminating in a bathroom death scene. And while that summary isn't exactly false, Guralnick's account shows how little perspective we've had on Elvis's life until now, how a gross caricature of the final years has come to stand for the life itself. He treats every aspect of Presley's life--including forays into spiritual mysticism and the growing dependency on prescription drugs--with dignity and critical distance.

 

More importantly, Careless Love continues to show that Guralnick "gets" what Elvis Presley was trying to do as an artist: "I see him in the same way that I think he saw himself from the start," the introduction states, "as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strand of the American musical tradition." From rock to blues to country to gospel, Guralnick discusses how, at his finest moments, Elvis was able to fulfill that dream. --Ron Hogan

 

Guralnick's account shows how little perspective we've had on Elvis's life until now, how a gross caricature of the final years has come to stand for the life itself.

More importantly, Careless Love continues to show that Guralnick "gets" what Elvis Presley was trying to do as an artist: "I see him in the same way that I think he saw himself from the start," the introduction states, "as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strand of the American musical tradition." From rock to blues to country to gospel, Guralnick discusses how, at his finest moments, Elvis was able to fulfill that dream. --Ron Hogan

I have to add that I see that particular point as very important. So many people don't see beyond that image of Elvis and completely miss out on so much more of the man :(

I have the Careless Love book and i also have the Audio Tapes, that i have never listened to. They are still sealed. :cheer: :cheer:

 

Great book though :wub:

Great review Jim :wub: I love the King and his work. Couple a months ago I was watching some documentary on his life and his career and some things just sat in their place after that. I really hope I'll manage to get those books you all recommend :wub:

One more time, thanks for the great review ;)