All Gone to Look for America (45 page)

On his tomb his middle name is spelled Aaron, though in real life it was Aron, but that was possibly a misspelling on his birth certificate. Elvis had spoken of wanting to ‘correct’ it to the biblical version, and they did so when he died. I have always vaguely assumed ‘Elvis’ was a made-up name – and that he was really called Trevor or Dennis or maybe something macho-embarrassing like a ‘A boy named Sue’ or John Wayne being called Marion – but no, it would appear, however improbably, that Elvis was a family name. He was called after his father – Vernon Elvis Presley. As a name ‘Elvis’ has virtually no pre-Presley etymology. I have no idea if it was a common boy’s name in southern US – or any other – families in the 1950s, but the Presleys certainly changed its status forever.

To call your child Elvis today would be an act of extreme cruelty akin to mutilation at birth. Which is not to say that people don’t do it. I suspect
worryingly
large numbers do, though I have never met an adult Elvis myself. But then there are adult men around today – in their forties – who bear a large number of the names of the England 1966 World Cup winning football team. And my mother worked in a nursery school where there was a child referred to as Graham Wilson, but whose full name was Billy Graham Ian Paisley Harold Wilson. He should almost certainly have been taken into care immediately after his Christening.

The other Presleys had odd names too. His grandmother was Minnie Mae Presley, his mother was Gladys Love Presley and he had an aunt called Delta, not to mention Uncle Vester (who sounds like he belongs in the Addams family).

Overlooking this curiously kitschy little family plot is a life-size statue that certainly appears to be Jesus Christ, even though there is but one word engraved on its stone pediment: Presley. Nice touch, Vernon. Those who
proclaim
‘Elvis is God’ may do so tongue-in-cheek but the exponential growth of the legend and the multimillion global industry spawned since his sad and somewhat sorry death has been a miracle only matched by the success of those who believed the same thing of Jesus Christ and set out to spread the word.

The Elvis industry grows and grows. When Elvis died the estate was costing half a million dollars a year just to maintain and his daughter’s inheritance had shrunk to just $5 million, half what a top English football player now earns in a year. But her mother Priscilla was inspired to hire professionals to capitalise on the legacy. She became chairman of Elvis Presley Enterprises and oversaw the transformation of the old family home into a major attraction. The trust is now worth well in excess of $100 million. In 2005 Lisa Marie sold 85 per cent of the business and, although she still owns the property and her father’s
possessions
, she turned over management to entertainment company CKX, fittingly the ultimate parent of the
American Idol
television show. There are currently plans to redevelop the entire area on a 100-acre site either side of Elvis Presley Boulevard, to tear down the lacklustre Heartbreak Hotel and replace it with three new hotels. His ghost goes marching on.

By after little more than 90 minutes of Graceland, I’m afraid to tell true fans out there, I’d had just a little bit more than my fair share of Elvis. I’ve now been into Elvis’s Automobile Museum, seen the pink Cadillac – and the purple one – admired the prototype 1971 Stutz Blackhawk and Priscilla’s much-loved 1970 Mercedes roadster. I’d walked on and off the two planes with their time-warp ‘luxury’ accommodation and managed not to spend several thousand dollars on a replica diamante-studded jumpsuit. A glance into the Elvis After Dark experience reveals it to be essentially just more memorabilia, much of it
perfectly
ordinary seventies tat, including ‘the actual Monopoly set’ Elvis used to play with. By far its most interesting exhibit is a 25-inch television with a gunshot hole right in the middle of the screen.

According to some of the star’s surviving friends – and the official
Graceland
line – the TV is there because ‘Elvis just shot up things’ from time to time. But this particular television has its own legend. The story is that it used to belong to the International Hotel in Las Vegas and was in the room used by Elvis when he was playing there in 1974 and on came the singer and actor Robert Goulet, famed for playing Lancelot in the Broadway musical
Camelot
.
When Elvis was conscripted into the army in the fifties he had been forced to leave behind local girl Anita Wood with whom he exchanged passionate love letters from Germany. Or did at least before he bumped into Priscilla, the daughter of an air force officer serving there. Goulet allegedly added his own postscript to one of them saying he was ‘taking good care’ of Anita while Elvis was away. Even 15 years later it seemed, just seeing Goulet’s face on TV was enough to get the King reaching for his six-shooter.

But then by that stage Elvis was already killing himself on a daily basis. I was disappointed to find that on the day of my visit none of the Graceland eateries was offering, as I had been assured they did, the King’s favourite – and possibly terminal – meal: the fried banana-peanut butter sandwich. Here, however, for the delight of those of you who want to live a bit of rock history – the bit where you die an early death of heart failure (ideally on stage) – is the recipe from
The Presley Family Cookbook
, written by his Uncle Vester. So here you go – the food of kings:

You need: two slices of white bread, two tablespoons of smooth peanut butter, one small ripe banana (mashed), 2 tablespoons of butter. Spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread and the mashed banana on the other, press the slices gently together. Then melt the butter in a pan, or if you prefer the genuine Elvis variation, melt some bacon fat instead! Place sandwich in the pan and fry on both sides until golden.

Consume with a glass of buttermilk.

Count the cholesterol.

That last bit was my own advice. Elvis would apparently consume a dozen of these at a single sitting. As the natives around here say: go figure!

Personally, I’d consumed enough Elvis for one day. I headed back into town, having found the Blues City Tours driver who was easily open to
persuasion
to drop me downtown, even though he was sceptical that I could really have had my fill after barely two hours at Graceland. I also declined his offer of a supplementary tour of Sun Studios, the legendary recording venue where the King first laid claim to his crown.

This might seem a bit dismissive, but when I tell you that all there is to see nowadays is a tiny two-storey building surrounded by vacant parking lots, unused except for tours that on their own attract so few punters they make it a condition of the ‘free’ shuttle bus from the city centre to Graceland that you stop and ‘do’ Sun Studios on the way back. I had had enough of the ‘as
brochured
’ Memphis and wanted to see a bit more of the real city. That seemed initially at least to mean back to Beale Street. I was gradually beginning to
realise that almost everything else in Memphis could be summed up in those two words: Beale Street. I was about to find out that apart from Beale and
Graceland
, there really isn’t anything much else at all.

Back in the 1850s Beale Street, as now, led down to the Mississippi, only then it ended in docks crowded with steamboats, the main means of transport on the country’s major thoroughfare. Memphis was a cosmopolitan frontier town filled with Jewish, Italian, Greek and Chinese immigrants to mix with the Anglo-Americans and a burgeoning African-American community, most of whom were then still slaves but less than a generation away from freedom (though more than a century from true equality). The fact that Memphis was so important to the black civil rights struggle is particularly poignant given that the city’s early growth was due almost entirely to its flourishing slave market. The slaves, of course, and later the supposedly free black families who lived on in the area, were there primarily to pick the cotton and, spurred by the arrival of the railroad in 1857, in the early years of the twentieth century some 40 per cent of the entire world production of cotton was traded here. By 1900 the city had its own opera house to cater for the ‘gentry’ arriving from the east coast to build up commerce, not to mention finishing schools for their daughters. Memphis was giving itself airs, but it was also bringing in a mixed bag of gamblers, bootleggers and street conjurers. In short, Beale Street had absolutely every ingredient necessary to become a cauldron out of which would come some of the most vibrant, poignant music the world had ever heard.

The man they still revere as the ‘father of the blues’ is someone I should probably be ashamed to admit I’d never heard of. If I’d thought of it at all, I had probably just assumed that that line in ‘Walking in Memphis’ that begins ‘WC Handy’ was a bizarre reference to Memphis’s otherwise little-known
reputation
for public convenience provision. Thanks to a plaque outside a little wooden house down past the busy bit of Beale, I now know better: William Christopher Handy – always known as WC – was born in 1873 in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, still preserved there. His grandfather had been a slave, his father a preacher. Handy became a handyman, DIY carpenter, painter and plasterer. In his spare time he took up playing the cornet and then a guitar which led to a row with his father who called it a ‘sinful thing’ – and he had never even dreamt of how Elvis would play it.

In 1909 Handy, by then married and making money playing and teaching music, moved his family to Memphis and wrote a song for the mayoral candidate which he named after him, ‘Mr Crump’. He later changed the tune
and renamed it ‘Memphis Blues’. It set the standard for the 12-bar blues we still know today and which would eventually give birth to rock’n’roll. From then on he composed prolifically, producing ‘Beale Street Blues’ – which laid the foundations of the street’s claim to fame – and ‘St Louis Blues’. His music was picked up even by white jazz bands and ‘St Louis Blues’ became an RCA movie starring Bessie Smith. Handy lived to the ripe old age of 84, dying in 1958, but still too soon to see the black people of Memphis win the same rights as their white fellow citizens. Handy’s little wooden house has been preserved and there is a statue of him in WC Handy Park as a counterpoint to the statue of Elvis on Elvis Presley Plaza at the other end of the Beale Street strip, two demigods of modern American – and therefore world – music.

The only trouble with all of this is that it makes Memphis seem a lot more interesting a place than the city itself in these early years of the twenty-first century actually is. At the corner of Beale and Main Street, beyond Elvis Presley Plaza and a good hundred yards from the end of the actual ‘
entertainment
strip’ there is a Hollywood-style gold star set into the pavement
commemorating
the Grand Opera House which stood there from 1890 until it burned down in 1923, and paying tribute to the nearby New Orpheum Theater which replaced it in 1928 and still stands there following an expensive
renovation
in the 1980s. The star in the street proudly proclaims, ‘For over a century this corner has been the entertainment centre of the Mid-South “where
Broadway
meets Beale”.’ It is a proud boast, and a terribly, woefully idle one. There is nothing there but a half-empty parking lot, an underused tram stop and the Orpheum itself which may once have hosted Cary Grant and Andy Williams but is today little more than a nostalgic shell.

Modern Memphis has suffered Buffalo’s complaint. The city has been not so much eviscerated as had its heart ripped out and is struggling in vain to retain a memory of its soul. Admittedly my enthusiasm is not helped by a slanting icy rain but with the best will in the world I want to find a vibrant city centre and have so far found only the ghost of one. Opposite the Orpheum I board a tram, one of the fabulous antique conveyances that so miraculously rescued me from depression outside Central Station the night before.

The word ‘tram’ is, of course, wrong. They are locally referred to as ‘the trolley’ although their movements are controlled both by guide rails on the ground and the overhead power cables. These are the ‘streetcars’ that
Tennessee
Williams, in a New Orleans context, named ‘Desire’. Metropolitan areas all over America are experimenting with their reintroduction, restoring and redeploying beautiful examples of an ancient, efficient and colourful mode of
public transport. But not as such. In almost every case they are tourist
attractions
and nothing more. Memphis is a case in point. The trolley runs in a loop around a large chunk of the so-called city centre including a ‘scenic’ portion along the Mississippi riverfront. I never saw more than six people on one. And none of them are natives. We tourists are only there for the ride, which is just as well, because there is nothing much to see. Downtown Memphis is a mess: the stop by Elvis Presley Plaza is the trolley’s highlight. From there it runs by
faceless
buildings, hotel convention centres, office blocks and the inevitable surfeit of parking lots, before turning in a wasteland of petrol stations and warehouses to roll along the Mississippi under a crowded confusion of highway flyovers with an unused and all but unusable stop next to the Memphis Pyramid.

Ah yes, the Pyramid. Well, a city called Memphis in honour of the capital of ancient Egypt would have to have one, wouldn’t it? That was certainly what the city fathers thought when they invested in building the third-largest in the world, smaller only than the original Great Pyramid of Giza and the high kitsch Luxor Hotel in (where else?) Las Vegas. When it opened in 1991, ahead of the Vegas theme-park monstrosity, the 32-storey stainless-steel structure was hailed (by its sponsors) as one of the wonders of the modern world. It isn’t, though, and in fact never was, even though its glistening silver shape does indeed incongruously dominate a cityscape that otherwise ignores it. What it was, was a 21,000-seater arena for the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team who shared it with the local university side. Apart from basketball the only event of any note it ever served was a concert in 2002 on the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death. In 2004 the Grizzlies deserted it for the newly built – and
architecturally
wholly nondescript, if potentially less embarrassing – FedExForum. The university team followed them. Since then the city’s landmark architectural achievement has lain empty, a white elephant in the shape of a silver pyramid marooned on the muddy shores of the Mississippi.