‘Elvis was, in many circles, considered an idiot savant... I wanted to take him seriously as a creative artist'

Irish Times

4 days ago

Now a grandmaster of American letters, at the age of 81, Peter Guralnick remains unique among his generation of music writers. His contemporaries – Nick Tosches, Paul Williams, Greil Marcus – leant heavily on voice, idiosyncrasy and myth, but the Boston-born biographer and critic (or, more often, evangelist) always placed himself beneath the narrative.
I first learned of his work through reading Lester Bangs's speaking-in-tongues notes on Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, Guralnick's book from 1979. The two couldn't have been more different; Guralnick is closer to a portrait artist, best known for his towering
Elvis Presley
biography, the exultant, inspiring Last Train to Memphis, which was published in 1994.
'The Elvis book was an extreme example of rigorous self-suppression,' Guralnick says with a laugh. 'I was determined to keep out of it completely. I don't think that's as true of any of the other books. What I was also determined to do was, to the best of my ability, rescue him from the mythicisation, the whole process of creating someone who was either a superhero or, in the case of the Colonel' – aka Tom Parker, Presley's manager – 'the way people perceived him as a super villain.'
A stray phrase can create a universe. In his introduction to Last Train to Memphis Guralnick described a eureka moment, driving down McLemore Avenue in South Memphis in 1983, past the old Stax studio, when his friend Rose Clayton, a native Memphian, pointed out a drugstore where Presley's cousin used to work.
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'Elvis used to hang out there, she said; he would sit at the soda fountain, drumming his fingers on the countertop. 'Poor baby,' said Rose, and something went off in my head. This wasn't 'Elvis Presley'; this was a kid hanging out at a soda fountain in South Memphis, someone who could be observed, just like you or me, daydreaming, listening to the jukebox, drinking a milkshake, waiting for his cousin to get off work.
'Just to be there on that street where the First Assembly of God church was,' Guralnick says, 'and there's a boarded-up drugstore, and Rose says, 'Poor baby.' It just galvanised me, caused me to recognise the possibilities of not writing in this theoretical way about Elvis, which I had up until that time.
'I had that same kind of revelation when we got into the archives of Graceland through the good graces of Jack Soden' – president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, who opened the singer's mansion to the public – 'way back, and we started reading these letters. Then to have the advantage of the Colonel's widow, Loanne – I was just going to do [a book of] the letters, because I thought they offered a window into an interior story, but she became so caught up in the idea [of a biography], determined to do justice to Colonel.'
And so, after Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, which appeared in 1999, we come to the third instalment of Guralnick's trilogy, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World.
Guralnick has a taste for stalking phantoms, whether in Searching for Robert Johnson or Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. In many ways 'Colonel' Tom Parker, born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in the Netherlands in 1909, was the archetypal American dream chaser, the self-created migrant, a man with no past, who might have fallen off the back of a truck like Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, before quickly establishing himself as a carny, then as a talent manager and promoter.
Elvis Presley and manager Colonel Tom Parker in Miami. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images
'This is the ultimate American self-invention,' Guralnick concedes. 'And the way in which he invented himself is he used all of the aspects of his real self, his real background, his birth date, his interests, his love of animals, his love of the carnivals. He used all of them but transposed them to an America he sought out from the time he was 16 years old.
'Really, he wanted to be American before he could even speak English. He stowed away, got sent back at 16, came right back again. Here's what I wonder – you might have an angle on this, because Ireland has developed such a passion for country music, and for dressing up country and everything – but did he read comic books? Did he see movies? You know, I try to get in touch with him; I call him up many times in my dreams. I have yet to get an answer!'
It must be a bizarre experience, I suggest, to immerse oneself so completely in a subject's life for years at a time.
'So much of that derives from [the biographer] Richard Holmes, from [his book] Footsteps, his framing of it, the way the person you're trying to write about, the character you're pursuing, you feel like you're gaining, you're gaining, you're gaining, and then he or she disappears around the corner: 'Where'd they go?'
'When I finished the Sam Phillips biography' –
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock'n'Roll
, from 2015, about the founder of Sun Records – 'I said, 'That's it. No more!' I was thrilled with the Elvis book. I was thrilled with Sam Cooke; that was an immersion in a world that was so extraordinary and wide-ranging.
'Sam Phillips was more of a self-invented world, but there were no limits to it. It was without boundaries. I was convinced I didn't want to do anything further, because it involves such total immersion. What are the specifics? What was the colour of the sky on that day?'
This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public
Phillips 'became a great friend, but I would ask him these questions which really were of no relevance to him, and he would touch his head and say, 'You're making my brain hurt.' But he would make the effort. People really want to tell their own stories.'
Tom Parker had long threatened to write his autobiography. (How Much Does It Cost if It's Free? was one his pet titles.) He never got there, but he was a prolific – some would say compulsive – letter writer, and many of his dispatches are collected in the new book.
In some ways Guralnick, who knew the Colonel as an old man, has charged himself with fulfilling that vow. The character he reveals is far more complex, and more sympathetic, than the Machiavellian plotter of matinee biopics. For one thing, the Colonel steadfastly refused to interfere with Presley's creative process, always confining himself to business negotiations. Why did he get such a bad reputation?
'People like to mythologise. Elvis was, in many circles, considered sort of an idiot savant. I started writing about him when he put out those singles in 1967 and then the [1968 comeback] special and then From Elvis in Memphis, but I wanted to take him seriously as a creative artist. That was something that was more difficult for people to get their head around, just like
Jerry Lee Lewis
.
'Jerry Lee Lewis was a f**king genius. He was perceptive; he was insightful ... He was also, as he would be the first to admit, an idiot when it came to money, when it came to women, when it came to taking care of himself. But he was not a cartoon figure.
'Why did the Colonel get this reputation? One [reason] was nobody had any idea what he did. He was totally uninvolved in Elvis's creative process, but he was totally committed to furthering Elvis's creative process, and he signed on to doing that almost from the moment they met.
Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker in Hawaii, March 1961. Photograph: Michael'Except for Sam Phillips, who didn't have the money to promote him, nobody else saw what Colonel saw, which was not necessarily the music that Elvis was doing but the vision that Elvis had. He saw Elvis as being entirely apart, and was prepared to set aside all the conventional success that he had achieved – which was the greatest success that anyone could achieve at that time within the world, with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow – and he was prepared to walk away from that in a minute for this untried, untested, unproven kid that he saw unlimited potential in not for money but for artistic self-expression.
'I would say, until the mid-1960s, maybe even until Las Vegas, he was seen as the smartest manager in the business, somebody whose imperious sense of humour set him apart and above. I mean, who did
Brian Epstein
seek out when he wanted advice? Nobody ever questioned his integrity.'
So how did this trailblazing character end up adrift, lost, purposeless, prey to a gambling addiction?
'This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public. After the glorious Las Vegas debut, descriptions of him in the New Yorker and New York Times as a God come down from heaven, his performances began to suffer, his abuse of prescription drugs became more and more evident. And the sense that he was stuck,' Guralnick says.
'All of a sudden, who is there to blame? Well, Colonel: 'He didn't give him the artistic opportunities. Colonel is stealing his money,' all this kind of thing. It's understandable in a sense. Colonel's perspective was the artist wears the white hat, the manager wears the black hat; the manager takes all the blame.
'The thing that came as a shock to me was the extent of the tragedy of the ending, on both Elvis's side and on Colonel's side. If you look at the portrait that I drew in Looking to Get Lost' – a collection of Guralnick's profiles – 'or in Careless Love, Colonel is a Falstaffian figure. I thought of him as a character who was untouched by any of this. And it's absolutely crystal clear from what Loanne told me, which comes straight out of her diary, her journal, how devastated Colonel was by his own addiction.'
[
Priscilla Presley on marriage to Elvis: 'I knew what I was in for. I saw it from a very young age'
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In fact, The Colonel and the King contains a desperately sad photograph of Presley and Parker taken in Las Vegas in 1972. The singer looks completely out of it, and for the first time his manager appears fragile and frail.
'Isn't that awful? At first I said, 'I can't put that in the book.' And then I thought, it has to be in the book, because whatever was happening at that moment, it expressed so much of what you just described. It was like I thought Colonel was a lovable rapscallion, and as foolish as what he was doing was, he never overextended himself. He lost a lot of money, but he left Loanne with $1 million in the bank. He always had $1 million in the bank to cover both his and Elvis's potential losses.
'But, jeez, I mean, to be up three days in the casino and then just to go to bed, to be so overwhelmed, the devastation of the [final] tours – and again, this is not putting the blame on Elvis, but I think I may have used the words in Careless Love: it was like a folie a deux. Everybody was living in a fool's paradise. Everybody seemed to believe that Elvis could rise to the challenge. That was the crippling illusion that Colonel was under.'
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World is published by White Rabbit on Tuesday, August 5th