"Colonel Parker and I had begun a correspondence, and his letters always opened with 'Friend Peter,' which was his customary form of address. About a year and a half after we met, I received an invitation to his 80th birthday party in Las Vegas. Of course I attended, and when it was time to leave I thanked the Colonel and said goodbye. He was sitting in a high-backed chair with a giant stuffed elephant behind him and was wearing a Stetson hat. He looked straight at me, took my hand and said, 'Peter, I put you on the list.' I wasn't sure whether he was saying what I thought he was saying, so I thanked him again for inviting me. He held onto my arm and repeated: 'Peter, I put you on the list.' And he was right. He did put me on the list. Without having spoken to anyone at the party about the book I was writing, I met many people that evening whom I subsequently wrote to, for whom I was validated by the Colonel's invitation. I still don't know why he did it."

In his earliest writing, Guralnick approached Elvis as primarily a blues singer and was somewhat dismissive of much of his work from the '60s and '70s. "My tendency was to write off everything that I wasn't already sold on," he admits when I ask about how his conception of Elvis had changed during the time he spent on Presley's two-volume biography.

"I went into the project with many prejudices. I originally came to Elvis in the reverse way -- through the blues and not the other way around, and I had a vested interest in Elvis being the pure blues singer that I thought I had discovered in songs like 'Mystery Train' and 'Good Rocking Tonight.'

"In writing the biography, however, I started to listen more to Elvis' ballads -- especially the Don Robertson and Doc Pomus-Mort Shuman 'late night' ballads from the early '60s. Songs like 'That's Someone You Never Forget' or 'I Need Somebody to Lean On' from 'Viva Las Vegas,' which I didn't even know existed, astonished me. They were so moving.

"I also discovered a multiplicity of influences that I never suspected -- whether it was the gospel quartet music of the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers, which was at the heart of everything Elvis did, or something like Teresa Brewer or Frankie Lane, which was music that I had never listened to. I came to see the songs he recorded after his return from the Army as an expansion of his ambition, a very conscious attempt to broaden his musical talent. To a lesser extent, I came to see the Las Vegas years in the same way."

In the final chapters of "Careless Love," which chronicle Presley's decline, a strange matter-of-factness creeps into the writing, almost as if Guralnick couldn't maintain his usual enthusiasm for his subject. "It required a considerable level of discipline to stay out of the picture," he says. "I rewrote the last 150 pages of the book more often than anything I've ever written. I tried to cut away everything that was extraneous. I felt that at a certain point, you just had a sense of this inexorable fall, and I didn't want to repeat 'and then he did this destructive thing again.' I wanted to evoke the pathos of what was happening."

Guralnick points to the Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy and Howling Wolf LPs he first heard as a teenager as the genesis for his lifelong obsession with the blues. In the late 1950s, black music was an unpopular preoccupation for a Jewish kid growing up in Boston. Guralnick remembers seeing blues legend Bukka White, attired in a tuxedo, perform to an audience of fewer than 15 at Boston's Huntington Avenue YMCA. Later, as his tastes expanded to encompass soul, Guralnick worked as "the worst usher in the world" at concerts at the old Donnely Theater: "I tried to absolutely avoid showing anybody to their seat. You could end up in disputes which I felt I lacked the expertise to adjudicate."

In the mid-'60s, the appearance of small magazines and tabloids that catered to younger readers and published the first serious writing about rock -- Crawdaddy, the Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone -- provided Guralnick with his first opportunity to share his musical discoveries with others.

"Getting paid was a big surprise," he laughs, and for years his profiles of blues, soul and country musicians appeared in pages dedicated almost exclusively to rock articles and reviews. "I felt sometimes I stuck out like a sore thumb," Guralnick says. "I would be in Crawdaddy writing about Robert Pete Williams and here [alongside it] would be an article about Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape."

The differences between Guralnick and his colleagues were often more than thematic. Celebrated contemporaries like Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer wrote about music in a self-referential, often expletive-riddled style that was a corollary to the new journalism of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, and varied almost diametrically from Guralnick's self-effacing approach.

"I was looking for a clean, colloquial style that treated the subject with dignity and respect," he says, "but that wasn't condescending. Sometimes I used myself as a foil to bring out the atmosphere around a musician, but it never occurred to me that I was or that I should be the subject."

Guralnick has become close friends with some of the musicians he has written about, and I ask whether the role of the interviewer came naturally to him. "I don't think you could have found anyone less outgoing or more consumed with self-consciousness," he says.

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