by Peter Millar
On his tomb his middle name is spelled Aaron, though in real life it was Aron, but that was possibly a misspelling on his birth certificate. Elvis had spoken of wanting to ‘correct’ it to the biblical version, and they did so when he died. I have always vaguely assumed ‘Elvis’ was a made-up name – and that he was really called Trevor or Dennis or maybe something macho-embarrassing like a ‘A boy named Sue’ or John Wayne being called Marion – but no, it would appear, however improbably, that Elvis was a family name. He was called after his father – Vernon Elvis Presley. As a name ‘Elvis’ has virtually no pre-Presley etymology. I have no idea if it was a common boy’s name in southern US – or any other – families in the 1950s, but the Presleys certainly changed its status forever.
To call your child Elvis today would be an act of extreme cruelty akin to mutilation at birth. Which is not to say that people don’t do it. I suspect worryingly large numbers do, though I have never met an adult Elvis myself. But then there are adult men around today – in their forties – who bear a large number of the names of the England 1966 World Cup winning football team. And my mother worked in a nursery school where there was a child referred to as Graham Wilson, but whose full name was Billy Graham Ian Paisley Harold Wilson. He should almost certainly have been taken into care immediately after his Christening.
The other Presleys had odd names too. His grandmother was Minnie Mae Presley, his mother was Gladys Love Presley and he had an aunt called Delta, not to mention Uncle Vester (who sounds like he belongs in the Addams family).
Overlooking this curiously kitschy little family plot is a life-size statue that certainly appears to be Jesus Christ, even though there is but one word engraved on its stone pediment: Presley. Nice touch, Vernon. Those who proclaim ‘Elvis is God’ may do so tongue-in-cheek but the exponential growth of the legend and the multimillion global industry spawned since his sad and somewhat sorry death has been a miracle only matched by the success of those who believed the same thing of Jesus Christ and set out to spread the word.
The Elvis industry grows and grows. When Elvis died the estate was costing half a million dollars a year just to maintain and his daughter’s inheritance had shrunk to just $5 million, half what a top English football player now earns in a year. But her mother Priscilla was inspired to hire professionals to capitalise on the legacy. She became chairman of Elvis Presley Enterprises and oversaw the transformation of the old family home into a major attraction. The trust is now worth well in excess of $100 million. In 2005 Lisa Marie sold 85 per cent of the business and, although she still owns the property and her father’s possessions, she turned over management to entertainment company CKX, fittingly the ultimate parent of the American Idol television show. There are currently plans to redevelop the entire area on a 100-acre site either side of Elvis Presley Boulevard, to tear down the lacklustre Heartbreak Hotel and replace it with three new hotels. His ghost goes marching on.
By after little more than 90 minutes of Graceland, I’m afraid to tell true fans out there, I’d had just a little bit more than my fair share of Elvis. I’ve now been into Elvis’s Automobile Museum, seen the pink Cadillac – and the purple one – admired the prototype 1971 Stutz Blackhawk and Priscilla’s much-loved 1970 Mercedes roadster. I’d walked on and off the two planes with their time-warp ‘luxury’ accommodation and managed not to spend several thousand dollars on a replica diamante-studded jumpsuit. A glance into the Elvis After Dark experience reveals it to be essentially just more memorabilia, much of it perfectly ordinary seventies tat, including ‘the actual Monopoly set’ Elvis used to play with. By far its most interesting exhibit is a 25-inch television with a gunshot hole right in the middle of the screen.
According to some of the star’s surviving friends – and the official Graceland line – the TV is there because ‘Elvis just shot up things’ from time to time. But this particular television has its own legend. The story is that it used to belong to the International Hotel in Las Vegas and was in the room used by Elvis when he was playing there in 1974 and on came the singer and actor Robert Goulet, famed for playing Lancelot in the Broadway musical Camelot. When Elvis was conscripted into the army in the fifties he had been forced to leave behind local girl Anita Wood with whom he exchanged passionate love letters from Germany. Or did at least before he bumped into Priscilla, the daughter of an air force officer serving there. Goulet allegedly added his own postscript to one of them saying he was ‘taking good care’ of Anita while Elvis was away. Even 15 years later it seemed, just seeing Goulet’s face on TV was enough to get the King reaching for his six-shooter.
But then by that stage Elvis was already killing himself on a daily basis. I was disappointed to find that on the day of my visit none of the Graceland eateries was offering, as I had been assured they did, the King’s favourite – and possibly terminal – meal: the fried banana-peanut butter sandwich. Here, however, for the delight of those of you who want to live a bit of rock history – the bit where you die an early death of heart failure (ideally on stage) – is the recipe from The Presley Family Cookbook, written by his Uncle Vester. So here you go – the food of kings:
You need: two slices of white bread, two tablespoons of smooth peanut butter, one small ripe banana (mashed), 2 tablespoons of butter. Spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread and the mashed banana on the other, press the slices gently together. Then melt the butter in a pan, or if you prefer the genuine Elvis variation, melt some bacon fat instead! Place sandwich in the pan and fry on both sides until golden.
Consume with a glass of buttermilk.
Count the cholesterol.
That last bit was my own advice. Elvis would apparently consume a dozen of these at a single sitting. As the natives around here say: go figure!
Personally, I’d consumed enough Elvis for one day. I headed back into town, having found the Blues City Tours driver who was easily open to persuasion to drop me downtown, even though he was sceptical that I could really have had my fill after barely two hours at Graceland. I also declined his offer of a supplementary tour of Sun Studios, the legendary recording venue where the King first laid claim to his crown.
This might seem a bit dismissive, but when I tell you that all there is to see nowadays is a tiny two-storey building surrounded by vacant parking lots, unused except for tours that on their own attract so few punters they make it a condition of the ‘free’ shuttle bus from the city centre to Graceland that you stop and ‘do’ Sun Studios on the way back. I had had enough of the ‘as brochured’ Memphis and wanted to see a bit more of the real city. That seemed initially at least to mean back to Beale Street. I was gradually beginning to realise that almost everything else in Memphis could be summed up in those two words: Beale Street. I was about to find out that apart from Beale and Graceland, there really isn’t anything much else at all.
Back in the 1850s Beale Street, as now, led down to the Mississippi, only then it ended in docks crowded with steamboats, the main means of transport on the country’s major thoroughfare. Memphis was a cosmopolitan frontier town filled with Jewish, Italian, Greek and Chinese immigrants to mix with the Anglo-Americans and a burgeoning African-American community, most of whom were then still slaves but less than a generation away from freedom (though more than a century from true equality). The fact that Memphis was so important to the black civil rights struggle is particularly poignant given that the city’s early growth was due almost entirely to its flourishing slave market. The slaves, of course, and later the supposedly free black families who lived on in the area, were there primarily to pick the cotton and, spurred by the arrival of the railroad in 1857, in the early years of the twentieth century some 40 per cent of the entire world production of cotton was traded here. By 1900 the city had its own opera house to cater for the ‘gentry’ arriving from the east coast to build up commerce, not to mention finishing schools for their daughters. Memphis was giving itself airs, but it was also bringing in a mixed bag of gamblers, bootleggers and stree
t conjurers. In short, Beale Street had absolutely every ingredient necessary to become a cauldron out of which would come some of the most vibrant, poignant music the world had ever heard.
The man they still revere as the ‘father of the blues’ is someone I should probably be ashamed to admit I’d never heard of. If I’d thought of it at all, I had probably just assumed that that line in ‘Walking in Memphis’ that begins ‘WC Handy’ was a bizarre reference to Memphis’s otherwise little-known reputation for public convenience provision. Thanks to a plaque outside a little wooden house down past the busy bit of Beale, I now know better: William Christopher Handy – always known as WC – was born in 1873 in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, still preserved there. His grandfather had been a slave, his father a preacher. Handy became a handyman, DIY carpenter, painter and plasterer. In his spare time he took up playing the cornet and then a guitar which led to a row with his father who called it a ‘sinful thing’ – and he had never even dreamt of how Elvis would play it.
In 1909 Handy, by then married and making money playing and teaching music, moved his family to Memphis and wrote a song for the mayoral candidate which he named after him, ‘Mr Crump’. He later changed the tune and renamed it ‘Memphis Blues’. It set the standard for the 12-bar blues we still know today and which would eventually give birth to rock’n’roll. From then on he composed prolifically, producing ‘Beale Street Blues’ – which laid the foundations of the street’s claim to fame – and ‘St Louis Blues’. His music was picked up even by white jazz bands and ‘St Louis Blues’ became an RCA movie starring Bessie Smith. Handy lived to the ripe old age of 84, dying in 1958, but still too soon to see the black people of Memphis win the same rights as their white fellow citizens. Handy’s little wooden house has been preserved and there is a statue of him in WC Handy Park as a counterpoint to the statue of Elvis on Elvis Presley Plaza at the other end of the Beale Street strip, two demigods of modern American – and therefore world – music.
The only trouble with all of this is that it makes Memphis seem a lot more interesting a place than the city itself in these early years of the twenty-first century actually is. At the corner of Beale and Main Street, beyond Elvis Presley Plaza and a good hundred yards from the end of the actual ‘entertainment strip’ there is a Hollywood-style gold star set into the pavement commemorating the Grand Opera House which stood there from 1890 until it burned down in 1923, and paying tribute to the nearby New Orpheum Theater which replaced it in 1928 and still stands there following an expensive renovation in the 1980s. The star in the street proudly proclaims, ‘For over a century this corner has been the entertainment centre of the Mid-South “where Broadway meets Beale”.’ It is a proud boast, and a terribly, woefully idle one. There is nothing there but a half-empty parking lot, an underused tram stop and the Orpheum itself which may once have hosted Cary Grant and Andy Williams but is today little more than a nostalgic shell.
Modern Memphis has suffered Buffalo’s complaint. The city has been not so much eviscerated as had its heart ripped out and is struggling in vain to retain a memory of its soul. Admittedly my enthusiasm is not helped by a slanting icy rain but with the best will in the world I want to find a vibrant city centre and have so far found only the ghost of one. Opposite the Orpheum I board a tram, one of the fabulous antique conveyances that so miraculously rescued me from depression outside Central Station the night before.
The word ‘tram’ is, of course, wrong. They are locally referred to as ‘the trolley’ although their movements are controlled both by guide rails on the ground and the overhead power cables. These are the ‘streetcars’ that Tennessee Williams, in a New Orleans context, named ‘Desire’. Metropolitan areas all over America are experimenting with their reintroduction, restoring and redeploying beautiful examples of an ancient, efficient and colourful mode of public transport. But not as such. In almost every case they are tourist attractions and nothing more. Memphis is a case in point. The trolley runs in a loop around a large chunk of the so-called city centre including a ‘scenic’ portion along the Mississippi riverfront. I never saw more than six people on one. And none of them are natives. We tourists are only there for the ride, which is just as well, because there is nothing much to see. Downtown Memphis is a mess: the stop by Elvis Presley Plaza is the trolley’s highlight. From there it runs by faceless buildings, hotel convention centres, office blocks and the inevitable surfeit of parking lots, before turning in a wasteland of petrol stations and warehouses to roll along the Mississippi under a crowded confusion of highway flyovers with an unused and all but unusable stop next to the Memphis Pyramid.
Ah yes, the Pyramid. Well, a city called Memphis in honour of the capital of ancient Egypt would have to have one, wouldn’t it? That was certainly what the city fathers thought when they invested in building the third-largest in the world, smaller only than the original Great Pyramid of Giza and the high kitsch Luxor Hotel in (where else?) Las Vegas. When it opened in 1991, ahead of the Vegas theme-park monstrosity, the 32-storey stainless-steel structure was hailed (by its sponsors) as one of the wonders of the modern world. It isn’t, though, and in fact never was, even though its glistening silver shape does indeed incongruously dominate a cityscape that otherwise ignores it. What it was, was a 21,000-seater arena for the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team who shared it with the local university side. Apart from basketball the only event of any note it ever served was a concert in 2002 on the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death. In 2004 the Grizzlies deserted it for the newly built – and architecturally wholly nondescript, if potentially less embarrassing – FedExForum. The university team followed them. Since then the city’s landmark architectural achievement has lain empty, a white elephant in the shape of a silver pyramid marooned on the muddy shores of the Mississippi.
I get out of the trolley and walk around it – not as easy as it might be given that it lies literally on the wrong side of the tracks. The wind blows old programmes and out of date brochures around crevices in the concrete understructure. The glass doors are dirtied and verging on the opaque, the lobby within slowly decaying, the whole thing a spectacular monument to municipal folly and the American fad for the ‘next thing’ leaving the last decade’s obsession to slow decay. There is continual municipal speculation about finding a new use for it. But everyone I ask thinks they’ll probably just knock it down.
Along the railroad track a bit further on is a placard to mark the site of long-gone Poplar Street station from which John Luther ‘Casey’ Jones drove the Cannonball Express for the last time on a cold morning in April 1929. Further down the line outside Vaughan, Mississippi, a faulty set of points left the train on a collision course with freight cars. Rather than jumping off to save his life, Casey stayed in the cab slowing the train to minimise the impact. He was the only fatal casualty. He remains America’s best-known hero of the railway era, but probably only because he died in a place where they valued any excuse to write a song and ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’ ensured his immortality. Some railway historians reckon he had been going too fast anyhow.
Just up the road is a more poignant if equally bleak memorial to another, rather more significant, American hero. At first glance it seems, as so often in America – a country that we think of as embodying the future – like stepping into a time warp to the 1960s: a drab, nondescript motel that looks eerily like the Universal Studios tour set from Psycho. The faded turquoise pillars outside support the sign that in big letters on a one-time illuminated sign proclaims ‘Lorraine Motel’, the latter word with each letter picked out in red on big white circles. The building itself is long and low, two stories with turquoise panels between the rooms, and net curtains pulled behind thin balconies. On every room save one.
On 6 April 1968 (April is a particularly cruel month in Memphis) civil rights leader Martin Luther King, at the height of his fame and the peak of the campaign for equality for American blacks, had come to Memphis to support black sanitation department workers strik
ing for equal treatment. At just after 6:00 p.m. King went out onto the balcony of room 306 and was shot in the head. President Lyndon Johnson declared a day of national mourning but it was not enough to stop rioting engulfing more than 60 cities including Memphis where the National Guard were called out to impose order.
Two months later an escaped white convict called James Earl Ray, who had broken out of jail in Missouri a year before the assassination, was arrested travelling out of London’s Heathrow Airport under the name Ramon George Sneyd. He was extradited to the US, taken to Tennessee and charged with King’s murder. He pleaded guilty but later insisted he did so only to escape the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years, escaped briefly in 1977, but was recaptured and spent the rest of his life trying to withdraw his guilty plea, alleging conspiracies and demanding a retrial, to the extent that even King’s own son came round to supporting him. He died in 1998 aged 70, still in prison, still insisting on his innocence. No murder in American history other than that of President John F. Kennedy has been the subject of more suspicion and conspiracy theories, involving groups as disparate as white supremacists, rival Black Power groups and the US government itself. With Barack Obama leading the Democrat race for the presidency as I write, it seems all at once poignant, symbolic and ominous.
As a powerful centre of black culture it was logical that Memphis would play an important role in that civil rights struggle, of which Obama’s rise is the most obvious, startling product. Next to the motel is the national Civil Rights Museum, a pointed memorial to decades of injustice, but which is not free from controversy, being considered by some blacks as more of a ‘gesture institution’ than a real apology. The unrest, of the 1960s and early seventies particularly, also played a role in bringing the city’s musical heyday to an end, as the conflict exposed, bled and eventually upended the melting pot that had created it.