Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  “Those who go halfway down the path of revolution dig their own graves.”

  —GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968

  MY PATH TO Gare du Nord station on my last day in Paris is blocked by a demonstration. I don’t know what it’s about, and by now I wonder if the demonstrators do themselves. There are people from SUD, AC! and CNT present—one or two of them wave—and though I can’t see the bloke with the donkey, I imagine he’s on his way.

  15

  WHOLE LOTTA FAKE KING GOIN’ ON

  Tupelo, Mississippi AUGUST 1999

  THIS TRIP WAS undertaken for The Independent, who sent me to Mississippi to cover the first-ever Elvis Presley festival to be held in the King’s birthplace. In 1999. I recall spending quite a lot of the flight to Memphis, and the drive to Mississippi wondering what had, in previous decades, been discussed at the strategy meetings of Tupelo’s Tourist Office. “Well, let’s see. We need think of ways to attract visitors to our otherwise largely unremarkable little town, in and around which, frankly, very little of interest has ever happened. Goshdarn it, but this is tricky. If only the most famous entertainer who ever lived had been born here, or something.”

  While writing this introduction, I discovered that Janelle McComb, whom you’ll meet shortly, died in 2005, aged eighty-four. This caused me minor, momentary angst about the disobliging assessment of her poetry that appeared in the original piece. I’ve left it as it was, however, on the grounds that while she seemed nice enough and (as her obituaries properly noted) worked hard and selflessly on worthwhile community projects, her poetry really was dreadful. I also looked up Paul McLeod, the tireless proprietor of Graceland Too. According to any amount of startled, bemused, baffled and/ or somewhat alarmed online reminiscence, he’s still there—and, according to his own MySpace page, ready and willing to give guided tours twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. I have no plans to return.

  There were three or four other British-based journalists covering the festival. The sense of humour among collective hackery on the road being what it is, you may rest assured that at no point did anyone tire of asking for directions to the hotel, in anticipation of the reply, “Down at the end of Lonely Street.”

  FOR THE OPENING track of his 1985 album The First Born Is Dead, the Australian singer Nick Cave and his band, The Bad Seeds, chose to enshrine the Mississippi town of Tupelo in song. It’s a good song, as well, a fine start to a much under-rated record. While the Bad Seeds rumble and clatter with their customary power and menace, like a troop train emerging from fog, Cave appropriates a tone of gothic portent that might have pleased Mississippi’s second-most famous son, William Faulkner: “In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin,” Cave snarls, “Where the rain came down and leaked within/A young mother frozen on a concrete floor/With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw . . . with a bundle and a box and a cradle of straw.”

  It’s not a new idea, recasting Tupelo as a twentieth-century Bethlehem—Greil Marcus, for one, is especially fond of it—but it has rarely been expressed so well. “Tupelo” the song, with its echoes of Delta blues and language of deranged prophecy, paints a vivid picture of Tupelo the place: a storm-lashed huddle of lamp-lit shacks housing an itinerant population of dirt-poor factory workers and sharecroppers; a town too windy for birds to fly, too wet for fish to swim, a place forsaken by a clearly disinterested Almighty until a winter’s night in 1935, when a young woman called Gladys Presley, who lived with her husband Vernon along Old Saltillo Road, gave birth to twin boys.

  “Distant thunder rumble,” sings Cave, “Rumble hungry like the beast/The beast it cometh, cometh down/The beast it cometh, Tupelo bound.”

  The eldest, Jesse Garon, never drew breath in this world, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His younger sibling by thirty-five minutes, Elvis Aron, did rather better for himself.

  “Why the hen won’t lay no egg,” Cave continues, “Cain’t get that cock to crow/The nag is spooked and crazy/O God help Tupelo! O God help Tupelo!”

  Nick Cave, to the best of my knowledge, has never been to Tupelo. His heartfelt prayer remains largely unanswered.

  THERE ARE THOUSANDS of towns like Tupelo, scattered like carelessly flung wheat across the expanses of the United States. Too small to be cities, too big to be villages (Tupelo claims a population of 30,000), these places subsist on some startling yet strangely dull freak of economics (Tupelo is the second or third largest manufacturer of upholstered furniture in either the world or the United States, or something like that).

  Places such as these generally boast a wide, dust-blown and deserted main street, punctuated by the boarded-up fronts of recently-bankrupted family businesses, and are generally orbited by self-contained metropolises of immense shopping malls, owned by the global corporate monoliths that bankrupted the family businesses, and Tupelo does and is. These towns also generally offer, for the amusement and edification of passing tourists, a site of desperately minor historical import—the termite-chewed remains of a fencepost to which J.E.B. Stuart briefly tied his horse, perhaps—or something more up-to-the-minute, like a giant fibreglass prairie dog.

  Tupelo has one natural advantage in the tourism department, though the town makes astonishingly little use of it. Whether out of abashed deference to the Presleyian riches of Memphis, two-and-half hours’ drive to the northwest, or due to chronic modesty, Tupelovians seem disinclined to make much fuss. I have come here for Tupelo’s first Elvis Presley festival—Tupelo’s first concerted effort, forty-three years since Heartbreak Hotel, to make capital from the fact that one of the dozen most famous people who ever lived spent his first thirteen years within its limits.

  Some of the weekend’s scheduled events make sense: a performance by Vegas-based Elvis impersonator Trent Carlini, an exhibition of posters, screenings of Presley’s still arrestingly awful films at Tupelo’s pleasingly bedraggled pink cinema. Others have a certain tangential relevance: a vintage car show in Main Street, a gospel singing competition on the temporary open-air stage. Yet others make me feel like I’m spending three days in an episode of The Simpsons—like the “celebrity” bicycle race, which features the local equivalents of Mayor Quimby, Troy McClure and Kent Brockman, and is watched by nobody at all. On Sunday morning, a front-page report in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal rather halfheartedly suggests that “Sizzling heat kept daytime crowds to a minimum Saturday during day two of Tupelo’s inaugural Elvis Presley festival.”

  Still, even if the locals can’t be bothered, I try to enter into the spirit of things, such as they are, and it seems logical to start where Elvis Presley did. The street he was born on is now called Elvis Presley Drive, and the tiny, two-room house that Vernon Presley built in 1934 in anticipation of his imminent family is immaculately maintained, and filled with authentic furniture of the period. It is part of a humble complex of buildings devoted to Elvis—there is also a museum, a chapel and a souvenir shop—which is overseen by the Elvis Presley Memorial Foundation of Tupelo, which in turn is overseen by Elvis fan and friend of the Presley family Janelle McComb. “Elvis was born on a Tuesday and died on a Tuesday,” she says, at one point. “His life was full of coincidences.”

  Ms. McComb’s enthusiasm is commendable, though she often seems keener to stress her own connections to her hero than she is to impart anything about Elvis himself. The small museum does contain some genuinely fascinating memorabilia but affords undue prominence to the artworks and verse Ms. McComb has created in Presley’s honour; the latter, which she reads tearfully aloud, offers little but the awesome possibility that the North American continent contains a worse poet than Maya Angelou.

  Tupelo’s other Elvis-related sites sulk unsignposted and unlinked by anything so self-aggrandising as a bus tour. At 114 West Main Street, Tupelo Hardware—where Gladys Presley bought her eleven-year-old son an eight-dollar guitar—survives the discounting of the mega-barns on the outskirts. At Lawhon Elementary School, where Elvis attended grades one to five, a peeling artwork on a cor
ridor wall reads “Elvis Was Here” and a photocopied sign in the window observes that guns are prohibited on school premises. Milam Junior High, where Elvis completed sixth and seventh grades before the Presleys moved to Memphis, is a nondescript brown brick bunch of blocks making no outward boast of its famous alumnus. Tupelo Fairgrounds, where Presley played legendary concerts to riotous audiences of hysterical teens in 1956 and 1957, is a ruin.

  By far the most interesting relics on view this weekend are those that are only in town for the occasion: Joe Esposito and George Klein, friends and associates of Elvis, perform compering duties on the open-air stage. More excitingly, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana, guitarist and drummer on Elvis’s early hits and constant touring companions during the unimaginable years in the 1950s when their employer was inventing rock’n’roll stardom and modern celebrity as he went along, take the open-air stage on the final day.

  In sight of the remains of the fairground where, a little over forty-three years ago, they played before a crowd so wild that reporters and photographers were forced out of the front row to seek safety behind the police guards on the stage, Moore and Fontana smile amiably at the few dozen people crumpled in deckchairs in the street, and fall in behind cabaret singer Ronnie McDowell.

  McDowell is a capable crooner, who has ghosted Elvis’s voice in films, but he knows who’s in charge this afternoon, and cedes centre stage as he should. Moore, as venerable and hefty an antique as his Gibson guitar, and Fontana, an extravagantly quiffed vision of rock’n’roll aristocracy, rattle off their parts of songs that can hardly be more familiar to them than they are to anybody who has ever been touched by western popular culture; this muggy afternoon, Moore’s exquisitely mournful solo on “Heartbreak Hotel” still rings as true as six strings ever have.

  “I can’t believe it’s forty-three years since you recorded that,” says McDowell. “Does it feel like that long?”

  “Yep,” says Moore.

  Over the weekend, there are one or two minor outbreaks of Elvis impersonation on the street corners of Tupelo, but otherwise the festival is devoid of the sort of unselfconscious fanaticism generally held to characterise hardcore Elvis fans. For that, I have to go to Holly Springs, a pretty, well-kept town on the road to Memphis. Here, Paul McLeod and his son Elvis Aaron Presley McLeod operate Graceland Too, a two-storey warren of rooms crammed with testaments to an obsession that might be charitably described as impressively thorough: in the gloomy lounge, six televisions and video recorders run twenty-four hours a day, scanning broadcasts for mentions of Elvis, all of which are diligently noted and filed.

  McLeod Sr. personally conducts tours of his home and its immense collection of pointless ephemera. Unfortunately, his unruly top false teeth and congenital inability to construct a coherent sentence prevent him from communicating anything beyond an aura of demented devotion that discourages any questions along the lines of “Why?” or “Who cares?” McLeod, like most people who have sublimated every aspect of their lives to a cause (“I only sleep three hours a day, keeping up with all this stuff”), is initially dimly amusing, eventually extremely tedious and ultimately downright worrying. The reek of formaldehyde that permeates the building is not encouraging.

  “My wife told me twenty-two years ago to choose between her and Elvis,” McLeod splutters, in a rare burst of lucidity, “so she had to go, ’cos you have to do what makes you happy,” and on he goes, a man whose Elvis—in clinical terms, at least—has well and truly left the building.

  AT ONE OF the press conferences on the first day of the festival, I speak briefly with D.J. Fontana, all raffish middle-aged affability, a comb protruding from the pocket of his pink bowling shirt. I ask him what he recalls of the sessions that yielded “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Hound Dog,” “Any Way You Want Me” and any number of other sounds for which, and with which, this century will be remembered. I wonder whether D.J., Scotty Moore, bass player Bill Black and Elvis had any inkling at all of what they were wreaking at the time, or whether they just walked out of the studios at dawn shrugging off another average night at the office.

  “We were only ever thinking of the next record,” says D.J. “We didn’t understand what was going on, and to be honest I’m still not sure I do. Elvis never got it. He took one record at a time, one show at a time, always worried that it was going to end. He remembered how he grew up. He didn’t want to be poor again.”

  Rock’n’roll is, still, more than anything else about the desire and the struggle to escape—circumstances, upbringing, boredom, routine, whatever. Rock’n’roll is also, still, defined by the template established by the high-cheekboned, half-smiling kid from Tupelo, and if his hometown today suggests little else of him, it’s very recognisably a place such a driven and restless young man wouldn’t want to be. At midday on the Saturday of the festival, Tupelo Hardware closes as usual.

  16

  TAKE THE VEDDER WITH YOU

  Lollapalooza in America

  JUNE 1992

  IT IS EXTREMELY weird reading things that you wrote nearly half a lifetime ago, and even weirder to prepare them for repeated public exhibition, especially when your every instinct is to bury them under tonnes of reinforced, lead-lined concrete, around which you then propose to establish a total exclusion zone ringed with razor wire and minefields, punctuated by watchtowers staffed by armed sentries issued with exceedingly relaxed rules of engagement. Such ambivalence is the inevitable consequence of the excruciating experience of encountering a much younger version of oneself, and being uncertain whether to pat him on the head, or slap him upside it.

  At the time I wrote what follows, I clearly believed that Lollapalooza and events like it mattered, were important, could change things—despite being informed bracingly otherwise by at least two of the acts on the bill. I seem to have believed that quacking, attention-seeking clowns like the (no longer extant, so far as I can tell) Parents’ Music Resource Centre—and other similar simpletons whose sole claim on public attention is how dreadfully offended they have decided to be about something or other—should be either engaged with, or rebelled against. Whereas what I believe now is that querulous buffoons of this ilk should be ignored. And/or, should the opportunity present itself, teased.

  I’m at least pleased to detect a note of sour cynicism in my dispatch about the prospect of a Bill Clinton presidency. If I’m honest, I doubt that I’d really picked the then Governor of Arkansas from that distance as a duplicitous, insincere, ruthless, ego-crazed thug who would establish a record for foreign policy incompetence which would have been regarded with baffled and appalled awe down the aeons, had he not been succeeded by someone who made him look like a diplomatic genius to rival Bismarck and Metternich—a successor who would, indeed, have conferred similar honour by comparison upon any given inhabitant of the macaque enclosure at the National Zoo. I was probably just trying to sound wise, knowing and cool—meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and so on.

  Most of the artists encountered below are still active enough, in one way or another, that anyone sufficiently interested can find out what they’re doing fairly easily. I saw a few of these people again over subsequent years. At some point in the mid-90s, charged with interviewing The Jesus & Mary Chain about their single “I Hate Rock’n’Roll,” I took them to dinner at Bill Wyman’s theme restaurant in London to annoy them; it worked. Around the same time, I spent a few careful days on tour in Britain with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, making sure I was nowhere in the ringmaster’s sightline when the show reached the point at which Matt “The Tube” Crowley sought volunteers to sup the cocktail he brewed in his own stomach. At time of writing, Kevin Westenberg is yet to be troubled by much in the way of peer as a photographer, as may be confirmed at www.kevinwestenberg.com.

  Readers overly sensitive on the subject of premature departures from this mortal coil by vibrant and amusing souls are advised to skip ahead at this point, while I furnish the dedication of this chapter. It’s to the memo
ry of Lush’s drummer, Chris Acland, 1966-96.

  “THEY’VE TURNED DOWN the cover of Time magazine today, you know.”

  So he keeps telling me. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ tour manager, after enduring two days of my nagging, has secured me an interview with the band’s singer, Anthony Keidis.

  “This is Anthony,” says the tour manager, and I shake the hand of the tiny, chunky singer. “Anthony will talk for three minutes exactly, starting . . . from . . . NOW.”

  Having fun, mate?

  “Yeah. Hopefully, we’re bringing a slightly diverse collection of musical cultures together. It’s a big, fun, wreck-it-up summertime package. It’s for everybody. In terms of the political aspirations of Lollapalooza, what you have to understand is that so many of the right wing are such boring people that they have nothing better to do with their time than sit around organising themselves. And what this thing here today does is to help people that are maybe more interested in having fun to broadcast their views to America. And to the world.”

  The press release couldn’t have put it better.

  REWIND THIRTY-SIX HOURS or so.

  “Sir, I’m calling from the United States customs office at the Canadian border, and . . .”