The book closes on that somber and poignant note. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army an his mother died shortly thereafter. These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis' life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records ("That's All Right, " "Mystery Train"), and the early RCA hits ("Heartbreak Hotel, " "Hound Dog, " "Don't Be Cruel"). Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Guralnick exhibits many of the traits of the best American music writers: his research is painstaking, his expertise wide-ranging, his curiosity unbounded and his enthusiasm unquenchable.From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture. Guralnick comes to the job with decent credentials, in particular a terrific account of Southern soul entitled Sweet Soul Music. Last Train to Memphis is the first instalment of a two-volume biography which aims to let some air out of the King’s bloated corpse and conduct an altogether kinder embalming.
Goldman’s savage demolition job, based on the somewhat unreasonable assumption that Presley should have been an intellectual aesthete, needed to be counterbalanced, and American music writer Peter Guralnick has duly obliged. The equally deceased Albert Goldman, in his biography of the world’s first great pop star, delivered an unforgettable picture of Presley stupefied by cheeseburgers and pharmaceuticals, trussed up in a giant nappy, surrounded by all the white-trash status symbols that unlimited wealth and stupidity could assemble, and meeting his end in the toilet. What survives of him is his reputation and, of late, that too has been in rather poor health.
Despite what the more lurid American magazines periodically tell us, Elvis Presley is as dead as a doornail.
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