Elvis has left the building (and my current reading list)

I just finished Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick and I am utterly and completely heartbroken and destroyed by the life, the death, the spirit, the soul and the utter and complete hopelessness that was Elvis Aron Presley.  I can’t put into words how heartbreaking the final years of this man’s life were. He was troubled by addiction, grief over the passing of his mother nearly 20 years earlier, and his self confidence and swagger destroyed by his divorce.  I really just want to sit here and write a detailed synopsis of the book, but I don’t know if doing that really illustrates why this book and the last few years of the man’s life has really destroyed me in such a spectacular fashion.

I guess Elvis’ decent into addiction, his trouble with his weight and the shooting of television sets are enough for everyone else, but those things (in their own rather peculiar way) are so mundane by now. What struck me instead was how Elvis fucking Presley had no self confidence at the end. All of the accounts of the man’s life just recall him being utterly defeated by the world and himself.  It seemed like for the last five years of his life, Elvis was aware of the inevitability of his death, and worried that people wouldn’t remember him as the devastatingly talented (and important) person that he was.

From Guralnick’s book (the conversation was said to have taken place around this time in 1977:

Over the next few nights he brought up things they had talked about often in the past, but now they took on a different tinge.  He spoke to her about his mother, he talked about his pain, he spoke of his place in history.  “How will they remember me?” he asked over and over again.  “They’re not going to remember me.  I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never done a classic film” But then his mood would change. His mission in life, he said was “to make people happy with music. And I’ll never stop until the day I die.

Those mood swings- often in the same conversation seemed to be the norm for Elvis in his final years. It seemed like to me- granted I wasn’t there and I only know Elvis from his music and from the 1,200 pages of Guralnick’s books- that Elvis had no sense of who he exactly was in those final years.

I remember reading an interview with George Harrison about his time on tour with The Beatles and he said that it felt like he was just part of the circus when The Beatles rolled into town. I’m sure that Harrison was referring to the spectacle of Beatlemania, but I think Elvis probably felt this also, only he was some sort of grotesque version of our collective past- the rebel as a cartoon character. It’s heartbreaking to think that Mr. White Jumpsuit was the same person who introduced the concept of having hips and shaking them to white people, but they are one and the same.

But that’s not what destroyed me about the book. I guess my own neurosis at times is seeing the neurosis of other people and worrying that I have the same problem. But I do wonder- do I have a true sense of myself? If Elvis fucking Presley wasn’t aware of his own self and what the world around him thought, then how am I, a foul mouthed wannabe writer in Jackson County, North Carolina ever going to have a true sense of who I am and what I’m here for?

I guess I define myself by my friends and family. I define who I am by the smiles on their faces and the warmth in their hearts. I may never do anything 1/1,000,000^th as cool as “Hound Dog”, but sitting with my friend Miguel and making fun of Little League Baseball players does compare in some way.

But enough of my neurosis- it’s on to other things. Tonight I downloaded a bootleg of Elvis playing the Asheville Civic Center in 1975. By the sound of the music, he’s not the zombie playing to blue hairs that all written reports like to make him out to be in this time. Instead, he’s playing his hits for a crowd of people 35 years and a million times different from the quaint shithole that is today’s Asheville. The crowd is eating it up, and Elvis sounds like he’s having fun. Jerry Schiff (one of my new bass heroes) is playing his ass off. It sounds like a rocking affair that I wish I could have been alive to see- even if the crowd never really gave Elvis a standing ovation (according to every account that I’ve read).

I hope Elvis, a person that I wasn’t alive to have known, found his peace- either in his final moments or floating through the ether as he is now.  I hope that the Elvis from the first half of that quote is long gone and the Elvis from the second half of the quote is looking down at people like me- who wasn’t there for the glory years, the comeback or the decline- is still finding awesomeness in his music.

I don’t usually do this, but I figured some people around here would appreciate it- here’s a download of Elvis’s Asheville show from July 23^rd, 1975.  It’s a great bootleg entitled “Gyrating Asheville”. Check out the track listing and information here.

Elvis Presley- Gyrating Asheville

Until later, be good.