What started for Peter Guralnick as liner notes for the 1987 CD reissue of "The Complete Sun Sessions" has ended 12 years later with the publication of "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley." The new book, the second volume of Guralnick's massive biography, is a sobering follow-up to his 1994 critically acclaimed "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley."

Like its predecessor, "Careless Love" is assiduously researched, meticulously assembled and beautifully written, equal parts Shakespearean tragedy and psychological mystery. The book delineates the decline and fall of an American icon with musical, social and psychological details that will appeal to both Presley die-hards and doubters.

Guralnick says he never intended to write two books totaling more than 1,300 pages. But the more he investigated the parameters of Presley's life, the more apparent it became that the story was best told as a two-act drama in which an initial arc of triumph and invention gives way to musical diminution and social dissolution.

Advertisement

According to Guralnick, those two distinct acts were separated by a curtain that fell in 1958, when Presley's beloved mother, Gladys, died, and he went into the Army for two years. It's at that crucial junction that "Last Train to Memphis" ends and "Careless Love" begins.

"If you look at Elvis before he goes into the Army, he has a true belief in himself," Guralnick suggested on a recent book-signing stopover in Washington. "Things are falling into place in the way that they were meant to, in some mystical way, and then two things happen to really challenge that belief. One is Gladys dies, which is traumatic far beyond her being the person he was closest to in his lifetime. It challenges his belief in the justice of the universe. Elvis genuinely felt that all of his success was for a purpose and if his mother is taken away from him at the moment of his greatest success, what does that say about the purpose of his life?"

At the same time, Guralnick adds, the poor boy born in a shotgun shack in Tupelo, Miss., a cherished only child who spent hardly a night away from home until he started making records, suddenly finds himself alone, in the Army and overseas.

Advertisement

"He's thrown into a world where he's in the company of strangers," Guralnick explains. "He recognizes that these strangers are waiting to see him fail, and is desperate to prove them wrong, desperate to prove himself. I believe at this point he creates the persona of Elvis and he's stuck with it."

It's during his two-year stint with the 32nd Tank Battalion in Bremerhaven, Germany, that Presley begins to isolate himself within the nexus of family and friends that eventually came to be known as the Memphis Mafia. It's also in the Army that he is introduced to amphetamines--by a sergeant while on maneuvers.

Guralnick notes that the pills left Presley "so full of energy he never had to slow down," but they also set the stage for a tragic finale in which an increasingly lazy, passive Presley succumbs to nightmares about being poor, alone and deserted. He numbs his paranoia and self-hatred with women, food and the drugs that finally left him dead on the floor of his Graceland bathroom, "his gold pajama bottoms down around his ankles, his face buried in a pool of vomit on the thick shag carpet."

Advertisement

No fall from a throne was ever so dramatic, and Guralnick clearly feels that the story of Presley's failure is ultimately as worthy of exploration as the story of his success. The man who transformed popular culture was ultimately unable to transform himself, and according to Guralnick, "there is no sadder story."

What's remarkable is how compassionately Guralnick tells it, with a depth and wealth of material that illuminate the complexity of that story. And as well known as the elements of that story are, Guralnick manages to maintain dramatic tension.

"I wanted to establish a condition of suspense about what's going to happen next," Guralnick explains. "Not in the sense that we could ever forget or obliterate our knowledge of what was to come, but in the same sense that when you watch a movie that you love a second or third time, you're so caught up in the action that not only do you set aside what you know, you also hope that it's not going to happen."

Advertisement

Guralnick's meticulously documented work aims not only to examine the complexities of Presley's life but also to reclaim his later artistic accomplishments: the gospel albums, the 1968 NBC "comeback" special, recordings made in Memphis and Nashville, the initial performances in Las Vegas, "things that have not been recognized in recent years as the triumphs they actually were because the image of Elvis at the end has taken precedence."

If you look at Presley's life and accept the conventional wisdom--that what ruined his career was a string of terrible '60s movies that blunted his musical aspirations, Guralnick says you'll miss the reality that "when the movies ran out, you have a five-year period from 1966 to 1971 that is in a sense the second golden age for Elvis, in which he's making real, credible music."

What Presley couldn't do, says Guralnick, was sustain either enthusiasm or momentum, and it wasn't the drugs that undermined him.

Advertisement

"For the last three or four years of his life, Elvis was deeply depressed and suffered all the paralysis that anybody in the grip of depression would suffer," Guralnick explains. "And that depression caused Elvis to find a retreat in drugs to a greater and greater extent. The drugs obviously didn't help, but I think they're a symptom, not a cause."

That severe depression became particularly evident to Guralnick when he examined the undoctored audio recording of a CBS television concert filmed just two months prior to Presley's death. Guralnick writes that what he heard was panic, the voice "almost unrecognizable, a small, childlike instrument in which he talks more than sings most of the songs, casts about uncertainly for the melody of others, and is virtually unable to articulate or project. He gives the impression of a man crying out for help when he knows help will not come."

Adds Guralnick, "you'd be very hard pressed to listen to that voice and not hear someone who simply had lost his sense of place in the world."

Advertisement

Guralnick was 12 when Elvis Presley found his place in the world in 1956. Though affected by Presley, Guralnick developed a deeper love for America's roots musics--soul, blues, bluegrass, country, gospel. It was the very music that originally inspired Presley and provided the underpinnings of his rock-and-roll imagination. Guralnick began writing about it for alternative papers in his native Boston. In December of 1968, he was assigned to review Presley's famous "comeback" television special.

Before he wrote the first word of "Last Train to Memphis," Guralnick spent four years doing hundreds of interviews. And he probably got closer than any other writer to "Colonel" Tom Parker, Presley's famously elusive manager and almost his equal as a totally self-invented character.

Guralnick first met him in January 1988 at a Presley birthday celebration in Memphis, where he was a guest of Sun Records' Sam Phillips, who hadn't seen Parker in 25 years. "Being the fearful but intrepid reporter that I am, I trailed along behind them as they talked. I wrote to him as soon as I got home, said it was great to meet him and I was writing a book about Elvis and asked for any input he could offer. I got a letter almost by return mail and it began, as his letters generally did, with 'Friend Peter . . . ' "

Advertisement

Over the next few years, Guralnick tried many different approaches to getting information out of Parker, but "he'd just bat them away, though the way he batted away my questions was as instructive as any answers I could have gotten."

A year later, Guralnick was invited to Parker's 80th birthday gala in Las Vegas. "At the end of the evening I thanked him for inviting me," says Guralnick. "And the Colonel touches my shoulder and says, 'Peter, I put you on the list.' And I say, 'Thanks so much' and he taps me again on the shoulder and says, 'I put you on the list.' "

And that, Guralnick feels, ultimately gave him access to many people who might otherwise not have talked to him. "There's no question that many of the interviews I got subsequently were because I'd gone to the party and he'd put me on the list. I don't know why he put me on the list, but he validated me in that world to which there was so little access."

Advertisement

When "Last Train to Memphis" was published in 1994, Guralnick heard from the Colonel. While admitting that the book was "very different from all the others, he took great exception to a few things that people had said in the book. . . . At the end, I said I wrote my book for love, not for money. There's a pause and then the Colonel says, 'You know, there's nothing wrong with money!' "

That, of course, was the driving motivation for Parker, who was not a colonel, a Parker, or even an American (he was born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk in Holland). He and Presley made the oddest of couples, yet, unlike most Presley biographers and critics, Guralnick is loath to demonize Parker, even as he recognizes his complicity in Presley's creative stultification.

"I see the Colonel as a Shakespearean character who provides some comic relief, and is a very funny person intentionally, but who also provides ominous notes struck as one considers the implications, not necessarily intentional, of his discovery of a brilliant system to market Elvis."

Presley's "totemic belief in the Colonel" was cemented while he was in the Army, when his greatest fear was that time and distance would crash his career and destroy his popularity. Parker, the canny manager-merchandiser, promised that wouldn't happen and his tireless efforts to keep Presley's name before the American public as both a box-office star and recording artist convinced the singer that they were an unbeatable team and he remained loyal despite the inevitable artistic and commercial decline.

Though "Careless Love" adheres to Guralnick's notion that "retrospective moral judgments {have} no place in describing a life," he recently came to the conclusion that the only thing that might have saved Presley would have been the critical response of his fans.

"In the end, this was the relationship that meant the most to him," Guralnick explains. "He saw his connection as being an almost mystical one, saw all of his strength deriving from them. And I think this is why the fans were willing to forgive what they saw, because they felt that Elvis had never forsaken them. Elvis never left Memphis, never left his class, never turned his back in any way. He may have been living a life that his fans fantasized about, but it was not a life which denied his origins in any respect. He never got above his raising." CAPTION: Priscilla, Lisa Marie and Elvis in 1971: Trying to fill the void 13 years after his mother's death. ec CAPTION: The president and the king: Presley with Richard Nixon in 1970. Despite his successes, Guralnick says, Elvis never "denied his origins." ec CAPTION: Biographer Peter Guralnick: "If you look at Elvis before he goes into the Army, he has a true belief in himself." ec

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ6Opxq2xjmpwcnFfZX5wfpNompqqlaGytL%2BMpaavnV2ptaZ51qugraCVYq6vsIyfmKWkXaSzbrHLr6CsZ2aXgXN9xWxwZmpjl4RugJhpbGaaYJh9boLCbZ2enZVnhHaCj2g%3D