16 August 2007

Graceland



Have you been to Graceland? Do you have the ability to open your heart to the King? It is thirty years today that Elvis left the building for the last time, and there is a legion of fans holding candles in front of the gates to The Mansion. Over a thousand Elvis impersonators are coming from the United Kingdom alone.

He is making more money today, dead, than anyone any deceased star besides Kurt Cobain.

I have to confess that I don't have the fever for either of them, falling into the generation that saw the King on his big comeback, and not understanding why Kurt was such a tortured soil in his flannel shirt.

Between the two, though, the King will always be with me. I remember some antic dancing as a kid in the old house in Birmingham, outside a Detroit that had not yet died. The three of us little ones were herking and jerking madly as Elvis snarled from the spinning 45rpm disk on the phonograph.   Mom and Dad looked benignly on from the dinner table, not knowing what was in the process of infecting the next generation.

"Hound Dog" originally was the flip side of the third single record Elvis recorded for RCA. It took more than thirty takes, and was a statement, of sorts. It was one of attitude, since the lyrics don't signify much:

“You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
cryin' all the time.
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit
and you ain't no friend of mine.”

I can't imagine what possessed the Folks to purchase Hound Dog, since their taste ran more to the Big Bands of their youth, or the cool jazz of the mid-1950s. But there it was, the sound bigger than life and we just had to dance. Scotty Moore played the lead guitar on that, one of the supporting characters who carried Elvis to his sort of immortality.

I don't recall ever hearing his name at the time, but it was a hell of a guitar he played.

The other side ofthe record was “Don't be Cruel,” and to this day I can't hear it and not be transported to a place that is warmed by sun and bright with promise.

That is the way I remember Graceland. It was a warm Saturday seven years ago, and I had a few hours to kill before making a plane back to the capital. I had been dragooned into service on a statutory board convened to select officers for the next higher grade. The proceedings were held at former airfield near Memphis where the Bureau of Personnel had been re-located from Washington. My Dad had done push-ups there during the Big War, and apparently the Department was fearful that the real estate would be taken away if there was not some important activity was not located there.

Consequently, the Navy collided with the Delta Blues, and we walked on Beale Street with the ghost of W.C Handy and the faded memory of great barbeque when not engaged in our sensitive deliberations on other people's futures.

I took the rental car the long way back to the airport. I parked in the lot near the mansion, and bought my ticket, electing not to take the guided tour. I just wanted to see the famous Jungle Room with the waterfall, and imagine who was waiting for the King that night.

The gates were impressive, all white-painted wrought iron with musical notes and guitars, but the house was smaller than the McMansions you see falling out of the sky these days. The formal parlor was lower and smaller than I expected, and the kitchen where all that bacon was fried right next to it.

The Jungle Room was just what I had heard, tinkling water and weird green shag, and I got lost in the gallery that snakes from the house down toward the pool with all the trophies and golden records.

There were many relics of his Hollywodd days, too. Elvis was a huge movie star, though never much of an actor. That wasn't the point. Comatose in my brown chair the other night in front of the big screen TV, I saw his first film Elvis made after getting out of the service. “GI Blues,” was the name, and it recounted a love story with Juliet Prouse as the cute German girl. There were many hi-jinks as they got around the regulations of the dumb old army and found true happiness.

It was made only fifteen years after Hitler's end, and the Draft and a hundred thousand troops driving tanks around the Fatherland only seemed strange at this distance, like the idea of perfectly normal German women falling for American GI's.

Hound Dog was written in 1952, the year after I was born, so you can say that we came up together. There is some conventional wisdom in the African American community that Elvis was a rip-off racist, who stole the tradition of the blues and made his fame on the backs of real artists.

There is something that rings true in that, of course, but I do not think that Elvis had a vicious bone in his body. Hound Dog itself was penned by two white-bread teenagers named Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, They actually wrote it for legendary Blues figure Big Mama Thornton. According to Leiber, the last line in the stanza was also written to include an alternate word, one that disparaged the Hound Dog in the crudest of terms.

Last year, Graceland took in $27 million in revenue from 600,000 paying guests. The house is not as big as you would think. Elvis bought it in 1957 for just over $100,000. There was no parking lot then, nor little trolleys to bring the faithful up to the gates. The place just changed hands again, this time for a thousand times what it originally cost. People are concerned about what might happen, though if they had been down to Beal Street where the music was born, they would know that the magic is long gone, and not coming back.

Graceland has had a lot of value added down through the years. The hundred million that developer Robert Sillerman paid includes the earthly remains of the King and his folks, Gladys and Vernon out back in the memorial park, or the chicken coop and truck patch they cultivated.
Sillerman apparently intends to spend $250 million to remodel the mansion and replace the Heartbreak Hotel that has operated alongside for years, catering to the faithful.

I hope he does not change it too much. I liked Graceland just the way it was, a little down at the heels and approachable. I can imagine the King cautioning Sillerman today, singing the song the way it was written:

“Yeah, they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
Yeah, they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
You just a motherf**er,
and you ain't no friend of mine.”

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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