Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick

Peter Guralnick went to my high school. He came back to talk once. The only thing I remember is that he said going to college had been for him "a dumb idea." That notion was completely opposite to the whole point of my high school, it was quite jarring, I couldn't even really understand what he meant.

Anyway, this is a good book, although for my taste it was maybe 200 pages too long. It's a tough trick for "authoritative" biographers: they have to cover all kinds of side journeys, occasional characters, and messy meanderings that are not "on story" in the way movies have spoiled me to expect.

I feel like what I want from this blog is for people to summarize books for me and tell me the best parts, so let me do this one for you!

Elvis' parents were real country folk. His father had done time in Louisiana's dreaded Parchman Farm prison for writing a bad check. It all seems pretty Dickensian, his boss was "making an example of him." Elvis' twin brother was born dead, and Elvis' mom told him he'd acquired the power of the dead twin.

Then the Presleys moved to Memphis and lived in public housing until they made too much money to qualify (still not much money). Even in Memphis they were seen as kinda bumpkins. Elvis was completely devoted to his mother.

In Memphis Sam Phillips was running Sun Records, trying to record "real Negro music," and the unrelated Dewey Phillips had a radio show that broadcast to a mostly black audience. Elvis listened mostly to gospel music and sometimes sang at an Assembly of God church.

As a boy Elvis used to turn on lights on Saturdays for his Orthodox Jewish neighbors.

Elvis was driving a truck for an electric company and trying to be an electrician, even though he felt he was too easily distracted to be good at wiring - he was a little afraid of blowing himself up. He was dating a girl named Dixie who was really in love with him. They were committed to remaining "pure" until marriage.

Elvis used to hang around Sun Records, and he recorded a demo of himself. Sam Phillips had him on a list of maybe promising singers. Months later he found what he thought was a good song for him. It turned out to not sound so good, but Elvis and the musicians Sam had recruited kept screwing around for hours until Elvis started singing an old blues song.

When Elvis' record of That's Alright Mama first got huge on Dewey Phillips' radio show. The first time it was played on the radio Elvis was too nervous to listen and went to the movies. Dewey Phillips kept calling his parents and demanded Elvis come down to the station. When he got out of the movies he went down there. Dewey tricked Elvis into being interviewed on air. He asked Elvis where he went to high school so everyone would know Elvis was white.

Elvis wore "crazy" clothes, like a pink shirt. But he was also incredibly sensitive. He was always afraid people were laughing at him. Sam Phillips wouldn't let him play at a bunch of rougher bars because he thought Elvis would get beaten up.

"[Roy] Orbison later said of his first encounter with Elvis: 'his energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing... Actually it affected me exactly the same way as when I first saw that David Lynch film [Blue Velvet]. I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.'"

One thing I took from this book was that musicians in those days died on the road like all the time. Cars caught on fire. At some point Elvis' mother made him promise not to fly anymore, so he would take the train to Hollywood and New York.

(says a bandmate of an early tour): "he would run the women, he'd run two or three of them in one night - whether or not he was actually making love to all three, I don't know, because he was kind of private in that sense and if I thought he was going to run some women in the room with him, I didn't stay. But I just think he wanted them around, it was a sense of insecurity, I guess, because I don't think he was a user. He just loved women, and I think they knew that."

By 1955 when Elvis was 20 girls would tear his clothes to pieces. "Of course the police started getting them out, and I will never forget Faron Young - this one little girl had kind of a little hump at the back, and he kicked at her, and these little boots fell out." ??? Sometime after this Elvis took Dixie to her junior prom.

Manufacturing a hit record back then could actually put a small record company out of business, because there were high upfront costs of making the record, so Sam Phillips had to sell Elvis' contract, seemingly without rancor.

"Popular music has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley," wrote the Daily News. OH REALLY!

In between having his clothes ripped off Elvis seemed to "date" relatively pure-heartedly. There's a weird account on p. 315 of Elvis and his girlfriend sort of dry-humping and tickling each other and almost doing it but then not doing it: "'we almost did it, didn't we baby?' And I said, 'We almost did.' He said, 'That was close, wasn't it?'"

Later, in Hollywood, "more experienced girls" were surprised to find that "what he liked to do was to lie in bed and watch television and eat and talk all night - the companionship seemed as important for him as the sex - and then in the early-morning hours they would make love."

This book had a good amount about what food everybody ate. Elvis liked eggs cooked rock hard and burnt bacon. At age 23 he's conducting an interview "while lunching alone in his dressing room on a bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of tomato juice, lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter."

In Hollywood he seems to have fallen in with some real lame characters and professional best friends. He stayed at the Knickerbocker Hotel until that got too nuts and he stayed at the Beverly Wilshire. His movies were shot on the Paramount lot. Sometimes he would call his mother and talk to her all day.

This book ends with Elvis getting drafted into the Army. He agreed with his weird hypnotizing carnival-guy manager Colonel Tom Parker that he should turn down all special offers and just be a regular soldier. He joined the Army and then his mother died. He was totally shattered.

After his mother died, he invited his dentist over and showed him around the recently purchased Graceland. "He said, 'the newspapers have made my house so laughable' - that was the word. He said, 'They have made it sound so laughable, I would love to have your opinion of my home.' He took us all through the house, my taste is not so marvelous, but it was very attractive, it all fit - there was a modern sculpture on the chimney over the fireplace, and I had the same sculpture in my office, it was called 'Rhythm.' Anyway, when we got back to the living room, he said, 'What do you think? and Sterling said, 'If you give me the key, I'll swap you."

I don't think I'll read volume two anytime soon because I don't want to read about the sadder things that will befall my new friend Elvis.

The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding, by Robert Hughes

This was a book I kept seeing on certain kinds of bookshelves: there was one on the Commerce Street apartment of Rosen's grandmother, for instance. I bet Helen Stevens' dad had a copy. Finally a trip to Australia coincided with coming across a chance mention of it in SDB's writings so I read it.

My favorite kind of book: books where the thesis is "history is absurd," some amazing fact on every page, and the author writes like he's had one or two before sitting down at his typewriter. You've heard that Australia was settled by convicts, but the details of England deciding to transport boatloads of people, basically treated like human garbage, onto a distant place nobody knew the slightest thing about keeps getting more incredible.

England was filling up with criminals - people who'd, say, stolen some cheese or a shirt. It seemed too much to hang these folks, so they kept them on leaky hulks in the river. There was a vague plan to send them to America, but then the Revolution happened. The ships kept filling up. There was an idea to dump them in West Africa and let them fight it out with the locals, but that was scraped, finally, in favor of sending them to Australia, which had been visited like three times.

To the busy FunFriend I can't recommend a 605 page book about Australia, so share in my joy vicariously through these highlights.

- "At the lower end [of poor London circa 1788] were occupations now not only lost but barely recorded: that of the "Pure-finders," for instance, old women who collected dog-turds which they sold to tanneries for a few pence a bucket.

- one guy who got transported was "an impecunious young actor" named Mansfield Silverthorpe who stole a trunk.

- of the first night the convicts were allowed on land in Australia: "as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning form the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun."

- sometimes people would have a heavy iron put on their leg. "Months later, when the weight was removed for the voyage, the prisoner's right leg would jerk up uncontrollably as he walked."

- "Davey marked his arrival in Hobart Town in February of 1813 by lurching to the ship's gangway, casting an owlish look at his new domain and emptying a bottle of port over his wife's hat."

- runaway convicts were called "China travelers," because they thought they could maybe run all the way to China. Instead they'd starve in the bush or be bitten by snakes or killed by aborigines.

Anyway, if you like floggings and sadism, there's lots of that in this book, on average a flogging per page.

I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves

1. Know going in that the book is about Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, and not really about Claudius as Emperor.

2. If you want to know more about Roman history, this is a great book. He personalizes all these figures into the "horny Stalin" types they really were. I feel like I know how the whole Imperial Rome thing worked now, and why Caligula was a bad guy (or at least, the few remaining historical sources make him out to be such a bad guy.)

3. As a "novel," it's a bit of a slog as you get very few scenes where Claudius talks to people. He's mostly talking about other people's lives and historical events.

Blue Blood, by Edward Conlon

Blue Blood is the cop memoir ("copoir") by Edward Conlon '87, who went to Regis, wrote for the Lampoon, and became a beat cop in the South Bronx. The book is an extremely detailed account of the years before Conlon became a detective. If some sections feel repetitive and mundane, I think that's intentional; Conlon seems to want to show just how repetitive and mundane police work can be. Even so, I was never even remotely bored; I actually found the book hard to put down.

As an added bonus, it's fun to imagine literally anybody else from the Lampoon in literally any one of the scenarios he describes. (Klein interrogating a crack dealer; Vali asking, very seriously, if there are any guns in the apartment; Dubbin using the word "skell," etc.)

Have any FFs had the chance to meet Conlon?

Wanted (2010)

I wanted to hate this movie, but instead I found it mildly entertaining.

Appointment in Samarra (1934)

In the last 3.5 years, I've read 53 novels chronologically from 1900 to 1934. John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra likely marks the point where American novels get cynical, dark, and creepy — like the 1930s' equivalent of Bret Easton Ellis. The main character is completely loathsome, and there's no real moral center of the book.

That being said, it's a brutally honest portrait of small-town Pennsylvania of that time, and pretty easy to read. Not sure that there is truly any literary value but perhaps historical. John O'Hara's star has fallen from the literary pantheon, but it's interesting to know that this guy was huge at some point. 

Also if you want to write about anti-semitism in pre-WWII American novels, the characters spend their days bashing Jews the entire time.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I thought this book sucked! Did anybody else read it? I loved The White Album, and there was stuff in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that blew my head open. HATED Where I Was From.

Is this a safe space to discuss the wild unevenness of Joan Didion? Most of TYOMT seems to be about which hotels Joan Didion stayed at.