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Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick
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From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture.
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.
This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis' life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records ("That's All Right," "Mystery Train"), and the early RCA hits ("Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel"). These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army and his mother died shortly thereafter. The book closes on that somber and poignant note.
Last Train to Memphis takes us deep inside Elvis' life, exploring his lifelong passion for music of every sort (from blues and gospel to Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza), his compelling affection for his family, and his intimate relationships with girlfriends, mentors, band members, professional associates, and friends. It shows us the loneliness, the trustfulness, the voracious appetite for experience, and above all the unshakable, almost mystical faith that Elvis had in himself and his music. Drawing frequently on Elvis' own words and on the recollections of those closest to him, the book offers an emotional, complex portrait of young Elvis Presley with a depth and dimension that for the first time allow his extraordinary accomplishments to ring true.
Peter Guralnick has given us a previously unseen world, a rich panoply of people and events that illuminate an achievement, a place, and a time as never revealed before. Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
- Sales Rank: #30173 in Books
- Published on: 1995-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.38" w x 6.13" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
Amazon.com Review
There's no mention of sequins, drugs, or peanut butter in this understated biography of the teenaged Elvis, a serious and worthy attempt to answer the question, "Who was this guy before he was an icon, the voice of a generation, the King?" The essential clarity and honesty of Guralnick's prose clearly limns the eager, malleable boy whose immense talent changed the course of American music.
From Publishers Weekly
Vol. one of Guralnick's exhaustive, two-volume biography details the King's first 24 years, leaving off when his rise is interrupted by his being drafted into the army.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Another work on Presley? Since Guralnick is "one of the best, most respected popular music historians" in the business (Sweet Soul Blues Music, LJ 6/1/ 86), this could be good.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
49 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Elvis 101
By Amazon Customer
"Last Train to Memphis" and its sequel, "Careless Love", make a deeply engrossing, carefully researched, finely written biography of Elvis Presley.
Author Peter Guralnick took eleven years to exhaustively research sources and interview people who knew Elvis personally and would tell their firsthand experiences. Guralnick's scholarly approach automatically eschews any hint of the fan adoration that can taint celebrity biographies. Guralnick might even have erred on the dry side rather than the juicy or dishy side of the story. This is all to the good, because Elvis' life story, a fantastic, zany, epic arc through American pop culture, is one that needs no embellishment and is served well by a measure of journalistic restraint.
Guralnick made a wise choice with the two-book format, because in Elvis' life there was a distinct "Rise and Fall." "Last Train to Memphis" is the rise: "Careless Love" is the fall. In each volume, Guralnick reveals much not just about Elvis, but about the people who were his family and closest friends and how their actions and relationships to him and to each other shaped Elvis into the man he became.
Accounts of his school days, his early days as a musician, his early girlfriends, and his family life all flesh him out as a human being and penetrate the shell of celebrity to offer a three-dimesional glimpse of the individual and his own ideas and aspirations and insecurities. The first volume ends with the death of Elvis' mother, a loss that sent him into the first tailspin of many, from which he never seemed to recover.
After reading this volume, you will be hooked on the story and will want to immediately begin the second volume, which is much darker and sadder as the King's world starts to unwind, chronicling his spiraling drug habit and his battles both public and personal. The second volume is catalogued and reported as dispassionately as the first, so that the same unblinking honesty that gave "Last Train" such sparkle and joy reveals the true depth of Elvis' isolation without having to resort to hyperbole.
Guralnick said it himself; that the rise to fame and the person were larger than life, and so too was the decline larger than life. It's an ending that leaves you feeling sad that what began so brightly should end so awfully.
I read these books because I knew very little about Elvis and wanted to know his life story, and they are a deeply satisfying and very credible account of the King's life. I can't imagine that there is a better bio out there for anyone who wants to study Elvis 101.
89 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
Some People Actually Think He's Dead...
By A. Wolverton
But it's not true...Elvis DOES live...in the pages of Guralnick's outstanding biography of Elvis Presley, a biography that will stand the test of time as the definitive study of the King of Rock n Roll.
In Volume One, Guralnick takes us from Elvis' humble beginnings in Tupelo, Mississippi to his departure for Army duty in Germany twenty-three years later. In between, readers will be fascinated with what they THOUGHT they knew about Elvis. LAST TRAIN differs from other books about Elvis in two very distinct ways: First, the author gives us first hand accounts from the people who were actually there. There's no tabloid journalism or second-hand anecdotes. Guralnick has done his research and it shows. Second, Elvis is never presented as an icon or an idol. Guralnick has the unique ability to step back away from the action as an impartial observer and give us an extraordinarily clear image of what Elvis was really like - a really nice, clean, religious kid who was consumed with music and making people happy.
You can almost feel the electricity of the recording sessions at Sun Studios. You can watch Sam Phillips as he realizes that this boy could change the course of popular music forever. Elvis' girls, friends, musicians...they're all here and they all have a piece of the story to tell. And what about the "Colonel" Tom Parker? Genius or huckster?
Of course, the hysteria is recorded as well. After all, it's part of the story. Crazed fans were nothing new. After all, girls had been going nuts over singers like Frank Sinatra and many others for years. But the world had never seen anything like this? How can you explain it? Guralnick never really comes right out with an explanation, but you'll be able to pick it up between the lines. But you'll enjoy the book so much in the process, all you'll care about is what happens next.
The writing, the storytelling, the descriptions...it's all outstanding. But if I had to pick two moments that really struck me, one would be Elvis near his popularity peak looking out of a train window. He saw a lone dog running in a field and longed for the freedom to roam the world unhindered by masses of admirers. It's a very simple, but powerful image of things to come. The other is the [end of life] of Elvis' mother near the end of the first volume. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes I've ever read, Elvis kneels beside his deceased mother's body, crying out that he would give up all of his success and go back to digging ditches if he could only have her back again. If you have dry eyes at the end of this book, your heart needs to be jumpstarted.
Like all good writers, Guralnick expertly foreshadows the tragic events that will take place in Volume Two. Even if you think you know the full Elvis story, you'll learn plenty by reading this book. The only bad part about finishing Volume One is not having a copy of Volume Two nearby. Buy both. You won't be sorry.
488 pages of text, 50 pages of notes and bibliography
51 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
great bio
By Orrin C. Judd
Peter Guralnick demonstrated in his definitive history of Soul music, Sweet Soul Music : Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, that he has a nearly unique grasp of the singular way in which popular music and the political culture intersect in American society. Along with Robert Palmer (Deep Blues) and Greil Marcus (Mystery Train), he has helped to craft a still pretty slender body of literature which takes pop music and its impact seriously, but also places it within a larger societal context. Now, in his two part biography of Elvis Presley, he has set out to strip away both the mythology (Volume One) and the demonology (Volume Two) that obscure Elvis and to restore some reasonable sense of perspective on the man and his music. In so doing, he offers us a new and useful opportunity to understand the personal and societal forces that converged to make him into The King, one of the genuine cultural icons of the 20th Century, and to trigger the Rock & Roll Era.
There are several main factors that Guralnick cites, which appear to have had a particular influence on how events transpired. First is the city of Memphis itself, which served as a nearly perfect crucible for forging the blend of Gospel, Country, Blues and Rhythm & Blues that made up Elvis's sound. A southern city, but not Deep South, there was at least limited interaction between the white and black worlds. But most importantly for this story, the city was saturated with music. Second, Sam Phillips, owner of his own fledgling Sun Records operation, was on the scene looking for a white act that could bring the black sound to a mass audience:
Sam Phillips possessed an almost Whitmanesque belief not just in the nobility of the American dream but in the nobility of that dream as it filtered down to its most downtrodden citizen, the Negro. 'I saw--I don't remember when, but I saw as a child--I thought to myself: suppose that I would have been born black. Suppose that I would have been born a little bit more down on the economic ladder. I think I felt from the beginning the total inequity of man's inhumanity to his brother. And it didn't take its place with me of getting up in the pulpit and preaching. It took the aspect with me that someday I would act on my feelings, I would show them on an individual, one-to-one basis.'
Finally, there was the man, actually he was more of a boy at the beginning, Elvis Presley. And Elvis was himself the product of several forces. There was the impoverished kind of white trash milieu from which Elvis came and which gave him a sense of alienation and otherness. As Phillips said of him:
He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way; his insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person.
Then there was his mother, Gladys, who--in addition to raising him to be polite, respectful, humble, even deferential--also gave him unconditional love, bordering on worship, which he returned in kind. These forces combined, as so often seems to be the case, to make him insecure on the one hand, particularly in the manner in which he approached and dealt with people, but, on the other, left him burning with an inner certainty that he was special and was meant to accomplish great things.
All of these forces combined into a volatile mix in the Sun recording studios on July 5, 1954. Phillips had brought Elvis in to work with a couple of local musicians, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, because he wanted them to do some ballads and Elvis had done some demos there, which Philips was not overwhelmed by but he thought Elvis had some potential as a ballad singer. The session was pretty desultory, if not downright unsuccessful, until that inevitable, now mythical, moment when during a break Elvis started fooling around doing Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's old blues tune "That's All Right [Mama]". Phillips, initially shocked that this quiet white mama's boy even new the song, immediately recognized that this was just the type of thing that he had been looking for and got them to record it.
All of the tumblers had clicked into place. It was the nature of Memphis that Elvis and Sam had been exposed to, more like drenched in, the music of the black community. Sam happened to be looking for someone who could transport that music and, most importantly, the style and atmospherics of the music, into the white community. And in walks Elvis, that quintessential hybrid of insecurity and manifest destiny.
If success did not come overnight it did come quickly and Guralnick masterfully charts the meteoric rise that took them up the charts and took Elvis to television and then to Hollywood. This first volume also sees Colonel Parker take over from Sam, the purchase of Graceland, the eventual breakup of the original band, the death of Elvis's mother and his induction into the Army. Guralnick makes it all seem fresh and exciting, carrying the reader along on the tide of events. An incredible number of famous names stud the narrative and prove to have significant roles to play, including: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Snow, B.B. King, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddy Arnold, Bill Monroe, Steve Allen, Milton Berle and, of course, Ed Sullivan. This is a great biography, one that should especially appeal to folks whose only image of Elvis is the fat, sweaty, drug-addled lounge lizard of popular caricature.
GRADE: A
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