I didn’t come close to comprehending the impact of Elvis Presley until I visited Graceland and saw an attractive, middle-aged woman with a life-sized portrait of his face tattooed on her back.

That woman has been my most vivid memory of Aug. 15, 1997, when I stood outside Graceland and watched the candlelight procession through the gates and into the mansion. Hundreds of thousands of fans had gathered to remember the King on the 20th anniversary of his death.

Whoever that woman was, I’m guessing she is in Memphis this week to celebrate Elvis’ Jan. 8 birthday. Her idol would have been 66 years old. Her husband or boyfriend has had to accept that the face of the one true love of her life is permanently inscribed upon her body. To add insult to injury, it’s a man she likely never met.

But try telling her and the kindred spirits gathered at Graceland this week that the King is dead. I’ve spent enough time in Memphis to verify that he is still very much alive.

Memphis, like New Orleans, isn’t so much a city as it is a state of mind. In certain parts of town, in afternoons of driving rain or nights of sweltering heat, you start to understand some things about that weird kid who came to town in 1948.

Musicians talk reverently about a “Memphis Attitude,” a pinnacle of achievement that legitimizes a right to rock. Elvis had attitude to burn, and in Memphis, you can still walk the favorite haunts of its most famous ghost and absorb some of that attitude yourself.

An appropriate starting place is 706 Union Avenue, where an 18-year-old Elvis nervously walked into Sun Studio and announced, “I don’t sound like nobody.” Walk in the tiny studio today and you can still hear the echoes and reverb from Howling Wolf, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Anyone who doesn’t get goosebumps in this place has no soul.

I toured the studio and saw the “Elvis microphone.” The guide told my group we could touch the mic all we wanted, but not do what one female guest had done. She had knelt at the mic stand and licked it.
“That ordinarily would not have upset me,” the guide said, “but that woman was my mother.”

You can walk on Beale Street, once the center of Memphis’ black culture before city leaders turned it into a tourist trap. A casual Elvis fan (is there such a thing?) might visit Elvis Presley’s Memphis, a restaurant/bar located in the building that once housed Lansky’s, a black clothing store where Elvis loved to shop.

The true Elvis fan will venture south of Beale Street to a shabbier part of town to gain a sense of the real Memphis, the one that had given Lansky’s a reason for existing. Plan a lunch at the Arcade diner on 540 S. Main St.

Sit in the booth in the far back corner. It’s the Elvis booth, where the young singer would sit and gobble cheeseburgers before he got too big (figuratively and literally) to sit there.

The Arcade maintains the look and feel of a 1950s diner, without the tacky trappings of a modern restaurant struggling to look retro. I ate there once before I visited Graceland.

Only one house in America, the one in which Bill Clinton awaits the moving vans, draws more visitors than Graceland. I have toured Elvis’ home and confess that I was underwhelmed. Graceland is what happens when you give a poor boy from Tupelo, Miss., millions of dollars to decorate his home. He ends up with a Jungle Room and orange shag carpet walls

The last part of the tour left me bitter. I walked into the racquetball court area and saw the piano where Elvis sat and sang gospel songs hours before his death. Beyond the piano I encountered a giant obelisk, a monument to Elvis from RCA Records. The exit door led me to a slab of granite in the Meditation Garden.

It was the King’s grave. So this is what all that fame got him. Immortality, sure, but an earthly existence that ended at 42 years old. I read that if all Elvis records sold were laid side-by-side, they would circle the Earth twice. But when Elvis died, he couldn’t have told you what planet he was on.

Be careful what you say about all this at his grave. An Ole Miss graduate student told me that she had a giggle fit at his grave and a security guard escorted her off the premises.

If you can’t afford a trip to Memphis, you have many ways to enjoy Elvis in your home. His greatest recordings never lose their vitality, and he has inspired others to create masterful works about him. Here then, as part of my celebration of his birthday, is one fan’s summary of the best of the King.

Start with his music and start with “The Sun Sessions CD,” essential for anyone who wants to understand rock history and the power of the pre-Army Elvis. Impossible to categorize, it features Elvis as rocker, crooner, country boy, pop singer and balladeer. “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Mystery Train,” in their echoey production and rattling railroad trestle beats, define rockabilly as art, and “Blue Moon” defines nothing except the regrets and ruminations that come to broken hearts in the wee small hours. The collection includes 12 outtakes and previously unreleased alternate takes. The in-studio chatter reveals a raw and unpolished Elvis, bristling with natural talent and the Memphis Attitude.

Jump from Sun Records to the RCA years, Elvis 56 in particular, which gives us the most rocking Elvis on record. This is best listened to LOUD! Here is Elvis in a fury and confidence seldom equalled in his later recordings. The slow burn of “Heartbreak Hotel” and Leiber and Stoller’s “Love Me” provide effective counterpoint to the blazing rockers, “My Baby Left Me,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Ready Teddy,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and of course, “Hound Dog ...”

The packaging includes classic photos by Alfred Wertheimer, the first and last look at the day-to-day life of Elvis. “People ask me what Elvis was really like,” Wertheimer writes in the liner notes. “To me, he was an enigma. I was close, and yet I can’t pretend to say I knew him.”

You won’t come close to knowing Elvis unless you listen to his gospel material. It was probably the one genre that never suffered in the hands of Elvis, even near the end of his life. The Amazing Grace collection features 55 songs that provide all the Elvis gospel you need. Elvis once claimed that he knew “every religious song that’s ever been written.” However misguided the claim, Elvis knew southern gospel quite well, and he sang it with fervor and conviction. Some of the songs here rock as hard as his early Sun and RCA material. The collection includes a live “How Great Thou Art” recorded in 1974 at the Midsouth Coliseum in Memphis, and previously unreleased studio jams from 1972. Elvis records from the 1970s are spotty in quality, but the later gospel material still holds up.

Elvis movies tend to be fluffy exercises in bad filmmaking, but Jailhouse Rock, in all its 1957 black-and-white glory, is still the most entertaining and the one that successfully captures the rebel mystique. If your personal Elvis runs more to sequins and Vegas, maybe this movie will change your mind. The best scene features a sullen and surly ex-con Elvis slumped in a couch at a high society party, when a woman asks his opinion on certain contemporary jazz musicians. Elvis snarls and declares, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you talkin’ about,” before swaggering out of the party with a sneer.

Selecting the best books about Elvis is easy thanks to Peter Guralnick, who has completely erased anything that came before his masterpieces, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999). The former chronicles Elvis’ life up to his induction into the Army, and the latter studies the sad, strange 1960s and 1970s. Both are gracefully written, painstakingly researched and full of historical and musical context.

Perhaps Last Train to Memphis is the most exciting because of the sense of euphoria that Guralnick creates while describing the rise of Elvis. Sam Phillips, the producer of the Sun sessions, nearly shares equal billing in the hands of Guralnick, who vividly recreates Memphis of the 1950s. Readers understand the social and historical influences surrounding Phillips and the force of nature that he molded into a star. Music scholars debate who was responsible for Elvis the rock star. Was it Elvis himself or Phillips? Or was it simply that an Elvis had to happen, given the fusion of white and black music melting together in the Memphis heat? Guralnick eloquently describes a coalescence of all of these.

Filmmakers have explored the Elvis myth but none have captured the bond between Elvis and Memphis better than director Jim Jarmusch. His 1989 dark comic masterpiece, “Mystery Train,” looks at the intertwining experiences of guests in a seedy Memphis hotel. The ghost of Elvis haunts the hearts of a young Japanese tourist couple, the confused mind of an unemployed British punk named Elvis (played by Joe Strummer of The Clash) and actually appears in the room occupied by a Mafia widow.

“Mystery Train” is full of brillant scenes, but the most effective ones take place in the hotel in the dark, early morning, with no sound but the radio DJ voice of Tom Waits and the Sun version of “Blue Moon,” which wails eerily as Elvis’ ghost fades in and out of the room. Some late night scenes are filmed in the Arcade diner, where a slimy stranger tells an Elvis ghost story to the widow.

Another essential movie, Showtime’s 1998 comedy, “Elvis Meets Nixon,” combines fact and a bit of fiction to tell the bizarre true story of the King’s 1970 meeting with President Nixon. The events leading to the almost surreal incident are nearly overshadowed by the introspective confessions of Elvis, played to the hilt by Rick Peters. In a private moment in a limo, he tells himself, “Man, I’m tired of being me.”

An even more revealing testimony occurs later in a limo when Elvis condemns his title as the King of Rock-and-Roll and tells a trusted friend about the first Sun sessions. Nothing had gone right and the musicians thought about scrapping the whole thing when Elvis playfully went into a blues number, “That’s Alright, Mama:” “And Sam Phillips comes out and says, ‘That’s it. That’s the sound, boy.’ And that was my first hit. I mean, do you understand what I’m telling you here? It was an accident. That whole rock-and roll thing, my entire career was an accident.”

It’s a believeable moment, and one that forces us to ponder what would have happened if the original Sun sessions had fallen apart, if there had been no “That’s Alright, Mama” and if there had been no Elvis as we know him.

On Jan. 8, 2001, a 66-year-old retired Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley might have wondered how his life would have been different if he actually had the nerve to walk into Sun Studios in 1955. But because that truck driver actually walked into that studio at 18 years old, we have been left with a body of work that has held us fascinated for 46 years. No other American has had such a devoted following and possessed the hearts and minds of fans like the King has done.

Face it, guys. How many women have your face tattooed on their backs?
(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu)

 

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