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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
For decades his writing has celebrated traditional blues music, but it's his brilliant Elvis biography that has made him almost a household name.
Jun 16, 2000 | "My aim in everything I write is to disappear into the world I'm writing about," says Peter Guralnick. More often than not, that world has been one of rural juke joints and dance halls, "brush arbor" revivals, fish fries and old primitive recording studios -- the sites of the music that is often reverently and sometimes condescendingly referred to as "vernacular." As an undergraduate in the early '60s, Guralnick turned in a paper about Roman poet Catullus and bluesman Robert Johnson, and ever since he has written about blues, country, rockabilly and soul with the sweep and depth of a cultural historian and the boundless enthusiasm of a longtime fan.
His "Feel Like Going Home" (1971), "Lost Highway" (1979) and "Sweet Soul Music" (1986) -- a trilogy of books that have acquired something of a cult following since they were originally released -- are collections of revealing, remarkably affectionate portraits of musicians that, taken together, read like an atlas of Guralnick's own musical journeys and discoveries.
Invariably, they offer a trenchant look at the Faustian bargains of commercial success, seen through the eyes of both established stars such as James Brown and Ernest Tubb and relatively overlooked musicians such as Stoney Edwards and Johnny Shines. Surprisingly, their perspectives on their vocation are often equally ambivalent. Reading these books today, one also cannot help marveling at the evocation of a long-lost regional culture that appeared to be slipping away even as Guralnick chronicled it; years later it can seem like a mirage.
In 1994, Gurlanick's "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" was released to nearly universal acclaim, and became the definitive Presley biography virtually overnight. The novelistic account of Presley's early years almost single-handedly reclaimed one of the culture's prodigal heroes: The book renewed interest in Presley and replaced the accumulated clichis and speculation with a portrait of a conscious, deliberate artist with a uniquely democratic vision of popular music.
His book "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley," released in 1999, completed the increasingly sorrowful story with characteristic empathy and detail.
Throughout his career, Guralnick has retained the missionary ardor that characterized his early writing on the blues; he has worked as an executive producer on recordings by, among others, Charlie Rich and Sleepy LaBeef, has written two documentaries about Elvis and has produced an ocean of liner notes. On June 18 -- Father's Day, appropriately -- A&E will premiere "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll," a documentary about the legendary producer and Sun Records founder directed by Morgan Neville, a project that Guralnick calls "my first real film collaboration."
As we speak during a rare break between research trips for his upcoming biography of soul singer Sam Cooke, I ask him about the origins of "Last Train to Memphis" -- in the midst of a mini-industry of Elvis books and the kitsch that had engulfed Presley's reputation, the book must have seemed like an unlikely contender for the success it ultimately achieved.
"I didn't believe there was an audience for it," admits Guralnick. "I thought that the interest in Elvis was saturated and that the bias against him was too pronounced. His fans turned out to be a true silent majority."
I ask him about the inspiration for the book.
"I was driving down McLemore Avenue in Memphis with my friend Rose Clayton, a native Memphian," Guralnick recalls. "She pointed at this boarded-up drugstore, where she said Elvis' cousin used to work, and talked about how Elvis would sit at the counter and just drum his fingers on the countertop, and then she said, 'Poor baby.' And I just had this revelation of a real kid, with acne, with enthusiasm, with this omnivorous interest in music.
"Right around that time Gregg Geller, who started the Elvis reissue program at RCA, asked me to do the liner notes for the Sun Sessions," Guralnick continues, "and I interviewed Sam Phillips and [songwriter] Stan Kessler again. All of a sudden we were talking about a real person working in the studio, not the grand theory behind it all but what actually happened. Finally, I became involved with a documentary about Elvis, and in working on it gathered the interviews that Elvis had given in 1955 and 1956. Again, I came to realize that this was not the mythic Elvis, there's a real Elvis here -- this is Elvis speaking for himself. In writing about him, I always tried very hard to strip away the layers."
One of the frequently cited dead-ends in Presley research has been Elvis' manager of 22 years, the late Col. Tom Parker, who maintained a long-standing silence on the subject of his most famous client.
"I never thought I'd get a chance to meet him," says Guralnick. So when it was announced that the Colonel would speak at Presley's birthday celebration in January 1988, he flew to Memphis "solely to be in the same room with the Colonel, to absorb his aura." When Phillips, who sat with Guralnick at the event, decided to take the opportunity to speak with the Colonel for the first time in more than 30 years, Guralnick tagged along and obtained an introduction that led to a cryptic encounter with Elvis' notorious manager.
