Memphis magazine, 1994 City Guide
Scattered here and there around Memphis are various places, once luminous in the epic saga of Elvis Presley, which are now husks of memory, more or less – skins shed by a legend who has himself moved on to his reward. There is, for example, the old Rainbow skating/swimming/entertainment complex just east of Pendleton on Lamar. An extant musician or two remember that when the King of Rock-and-Roll was still a prince, he and sidekicks Scotty and Bill worked on their licks down there (as did such other Ur-rockabillies as Warren Smith, Billy Lee Riley, and Sonny Burgess with his two – count ‘em, two – upright basses). Even in the 1960s, when he had quit shaking it for a while and his professional persona was embalmed in the celluloid of planet Hollywood, the privately still-quite-lively Elvis would hire out Rainbow so that he and assorted down-home playmates – some indentured, some devoted, some both – could have skating parties and all-night G-rated bashes. These days that sprawling old art deco stucco structure is a bland, scrubbed-out office-cum-warehouse space in the service of the Pancho’s Taco chain. Signs on the chain-link fence that now surrounds the place say: NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. No doubt about it, Elvis has left the building.
Then as now, Lamar (a.k.a. Highway 78) was a poor man’s Poplar Avenue. Farther down its length from the defunct Rainbow, heading out of town in the direction of Elvis’ birthplace of Tupelo, Mississippi, was the old Clearpool complex. This was another swimming-pool-with-the-trimmings affair, and the Eagle’s Nest there was one of the first early sites played by Elvis, in 1954, just after he and the boys had recorded “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the sound of which got DJ Dewey Phillips – and ultimately a goodly proportion of other mortals – to kicking the moon. Those two sides, along with succeeding cuts on Sam Phillips’’ Sun label and R&B knockoffs like Lavern Baker’s “Tweedle-Dee” were mainly what Elvis did at first, and – to judge both by contemporary accounts and by history – they were enough.
The grounds that were Clearpool back then are bisected now by Winchester, a businesslike east-west thoroughfare which didn’t even exist out that way at the time. On the townside of the new divide is The Americana, a country-western juke joint which in some ways is faithful to the site’s ancestry; it even contains a facsimile of the Eagle’s Nest, with an exterior bearing the vestigial word “Aqua” in cursive script and neon letters. Clearpool Circle, which right-angles into Lamar opposite The Americana, loops around and faces – where the pool itself had been – a storage lot, one of those ubiquitous graveyards of people’s private lives.
Even when they make the effort, they lack the monumental ura altogether – these wannabe shrines that have crumbled or otherwise become distanced from their history – not through war or pestilence or natural calamity, nor even through neglect, but merely through a kind of indigenous indifference.
This is Memphis, U.A.A., where attention to the artifacts of landscape has often been – how to put it? – carefree (Hey, we Americans are the ones who bombed out Dresden and Monte Cassino during World War Two; when have we ever hallowed the ground of any culture, even our own?) Putting that another way, if we venerated our past, hardened it into marble, we would scarcely have been open to the kind of history that was made here.
Self-deprecatory, self-destructive though it is, Memphis has its admirers, most of them from the world at large and many of them passionate. There is none more so than Peter Guralnick of Boston and West Newbury, Massachusetts, a recognized authority on popular music and a bona fide former classics professor (That’s as in Virgil and Cicero, not Chubby Checker or Bobby Rydell, and not even Richard or Fats). Guralnick is the author of a veritable library of source-books: Sweet Soul Music, which documents the great days of Stax-Volt Records in Memphis in the Sixties; Lost Highway, about the folk roots of popular music, black and white; Feel Like Going Home, a primer on the blues; and Looking for Robert Johnson, the little book which first filled in the missing real-world lineaments of the almost mythical Delta personage who, by general consent, stands at the beginning of the modern blues. All this spadework has been a prelude of sorts for the publication in fall 1994 by Little-Brown of The Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, the first of two intended volumes which will likely become the definitive biography of the King of Rock-and-Roll.
“Memphis is my favorite city, one of the great places on earth, and it doesn't particularly matter what’s still there physically,” says Guralnick, who has spent much of the last quarter-century in and out of Memphis, using the Bluff City as the headquarters for his life’s work of social and artistic archaeology. “Memphis is to me a matter of the people who live there. Even more, it’s a matter of their spirit, which is unique. It transcends buildings, places, locales. It even transcends the city’s efforts to advance economically. In fact, I think that the creative ferment of Memphis might actually prevent the city from developing the corporate structure that other cities are given to.”
In other words, says Guralnick, the true monuments to Memphis besides its “great, great music” are various hip-pocket populisms which, like rock-and-roll, Jes’ Grew: Clarence Saunders’ vintage Piggly Wiggly (which, way back in the 1920s, set off the supermarket explosion); Fred Smith's Federal Express (whoops! FedEx, as the company recently chose to restyle itself, in line with longstanding customer lingo); the Holiday Inn chain, that Kemmons Wilson-Wallace Johnson homage to transitoriness which, true both to its own semiotic meaning and to the essence of Memphis history, has itself now flown the coop – its new out-of-country ownership having chosen to relocate the chain’s HQ away off in imperial Atlanta. And so forth. In the physics of contemporary history, Memphis accounts for the unseen wave, not the visible particle.
Elvis is by no means the only consequential person, place, or thing to go without full commemoration in these parts, In the realm of popular music alone, there are two other glaring examples, one significant, one perhaps quirky. The old Stax-Volt building on McLemore – symbol of what was arguably the most fertile period ever in Memphis music history, teh age of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas and Booker T and the MGs and Sam ‘n Dave and the Bar-Kays, et al, et al. – was razed to the ground several years ago, amid half-hearted efforts among preservationists to meet its bargain-basement selling price. Then there was the Taliesyn Ballroom over on Union Avenue, a fin de siecle frame worth preserving both for its vintage architecture and for its rightful place in music history as the last site ever played by England's incendiary, cometlike Sex Pistols. Now a Taco Bell (What is it with tacos and the snows of yesteryear around here?).
And although honorary Memphian Guralnick is much too polite to say so, maybe it’s best to keep down the number of official Elvis iconospheres: After all, we have the restored Sun Studio at 706 Union; and we have Graceland, which is not only restored but englossed with a semblance of Good taste that, for better or worse, it rarely if ever possessed in life and which evokes – one rock critic has suggested – the Era of Priscilla rather than that of Elvis.
Elvis’ prior residences, most of them nondescript during his tenure and that or worse today, hardly bear visiting. The music notes have long since been stripped from the wrought-iron fence around the ranch house on Audubon Drive where Elvis briefly lived among a subsection of complaining East Memphis gentry. Before that he was at 1414 Getwell, a modest brick house which was hauled off to a nearby side street to make room for, not a taco house, but a tire store. Before that he was at 2414 Lamar, behind whose plain glass post-Elvis front this or that child nursery has been doing business for most of the time he has been gone. And before that, for the hard-pressed Presley family, there were barracks-like rental places which no amount of sentimentalism can gussy up.
Leonard’s and various other drive-in eateries favored by the King are Out of Here; the original Lansky’s on Beale, where E bought his style-setting threads, has long since yielded to a suburban version of itself; and the Memphian Theatre, where the King was wont to hire a projectionist and hang out with his pals for all-night bouts with popcorn. Pepsi, and kung fu flicks, has now transmogrified into the far tonier Playhouse on the Square.
And the venues of Elvis’ public triumphs? The most famous perhaps was Russwood Park, the old Memphis Chicks ballfield to which, having conquered the entertainment world, Elvis returned for a homecoming concert in 1956. It is a concrete parking garage now, fate having reduced the stadium to ashes in the course of a famous five-alarm four years later. Ellis Auditorium, where Elvis performed on several notable occasions, still exists – sort of – as a greatly revamped component of the Memphis Convention Center. As does the outdoor Overton park Shell, saved from demolition some years back by a public campaign owing as much to the memory of outdoor ballet recitals and bluegrass fests as to the fact that Elvis Aaron Presley and Scotty moore and Bill Black appeared on its stage in 1954. In the Beginning.
It’s a strange thing. The man whose advent, in effect, blew away the stale conventions of music and of culture in general, the Dionysian figure who nearly upheaved it all and was forefather to the social convulsions that have occurred since and which, indeed, keep on coming, fancied himself a preserver. In the last decade of his life, he looked around and perceived civilization as being under assault from the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles. He saw them as dope-crazed revolutionaries who meant to overthrow the world of settled meaning, and he made a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., where he expressed those concerns and offered, in an effort chronicled by a famous Oval Office photo, to join forces with that archdeacon of anal retention, Richard Nixon himself,. Of course, the very fellow artists whom he denounced to Nixon and whom he offered to spy upon and subvert were all on record as saying they owed him everything. “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” pronounced John Lennon. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, nothing to nothing – the creative cycle, more or less, the same for Elvis Presley as for Vishnu the Destroyer, Except that Elvis, like the rest of us, wanted to have his cake, too. And he– and we –have it, of course, if you count those true memorials, the legions of admirers who never die out, who in fact increase and multiply through the succeeding generations, whose boots bring the dust of Dubuque and Denmark and Djakarta to raceland and who keep the name of Memphis, Tennessee, as alive in teh world as it will ever be, as it was ever meant to be.
It is ironic, of course, that Memphis’ – and the world’s – most famous anarchic genius and the rollingest of all stones was obsessed with the contrary principle of stability and the idea of roots.And here at home is where the largest single repertory of reliable Elvis memories may be, residing within the community of law enforcement professionals, past and present.
Bob Ferguson, now retired from the Memphis Police himself, has bothered to ferret out the cops who knew Elvis (which was most of them), and he has by now taped longish interviews with several score, extending into many, many hours as the VHS flies (Ferguson and this writer are now culling the best of these recollections into a video-cum-literary production, tentatively called The Elvis Files). Extraordinary number of the officers and homicide detectives and file clerks and sheriff’s deputies and private eyes whose memories Ferguson has recorded either went to school with Elvis or made music with him or both. Some of them served warrants on Elvis or wrote him up for traffic violations. Others had the peculiar experience of seeing the King (who collected law enforcement badges and once tried to hit up J. Edgar Hoover himself for one) try to work their side of the street. “He, uh, helped in the investigation,” one of them recalls about a case with a mixed embarrassment and pride.
What comes across in the recollections of these men and women – seasoned in the Nitty-Gritty of the streets – is their affectionate awe for a being who lusted after their lifestyles even as they envied his. All of them would have traded their squad cars for a ride on his magic carpet. And they wondered what kept him so close to home. As one said, “If I was to win a $10 million lottery, people around here might not see me much. That’s just how it is.”
And another officer, recalling his general stupefaction from a lifetime of knowing Elvis, summed up what it was like to be in Elvis’ company: “It was the hardest thing, for me to concentrate on what was real and what was not.”
That, as Joe Friday would say, is about the size of it. Elvis Presley was about as close to myth as he could be, and about as far from facts, Even his Middle American exemplars of choice knew that. Really, for all the random details which collected about him in his life, most people’s recollections of him bear minimal resemblance to anything in the physical realm. Both on and off vinyl, he was an inveterate singer of gospel standards, and the on which some of us would have given anything for him to have recorded was “If I Had My Way,” second only to “Motherless Child” in the spiritualist repertoire, the song about Samson chained to the temple, whose refrain completes the title with the ever-intensified inflammatory line, “...I’d tear this building down!”
Spirit of place? Elvis is the spirit of this place, and there are times when bricks and mortar and the rest of it just get in the way.
