Word: guralnick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Peter Guralnick...
There are several factors in Elvis' "inexorable decline," none of which, as Guralnick emphasizes in his introduction, provides a "simple or monolithic" explanation but which make his death seem all but inevitable. His life is presented as a round of silly escapades with his seemingly ever-present "Memphis Mafia," a group of employees/syncophants/friends whose main purpose was to indulge Elvis' whims, trysts with multiple girlfriends and performances in movies and concerts of varying quality. This was all fueled by a constant stream of drugs, mainly amphetamines, to which he became addicted in Germany while serving in the Army and which...
...Dylan, a legend himself, declared that Elvis "steps from the pages" of the predecessor to this book, Last Train to Memphis, and much the same can be said of this one. The most impressive quality of this book is Guralnick's ability to depict Elvis' life and detach the real person, a flawed yet well-intentioned human being, from the frozen images that make up his legend. The main flaw of this book is not one of flawed research but of excessive enthusiasm; he tells the reader more of Elvis' "sad story" than he or she may want to know...
...think, a tragedy, and no more the occasion for retrospective moral judgments than any other biographical canvas should be," Guralnick writes, switching quickly from slowdown to full stop. "I know of no sadder story." Any of the black bluesmen Guralnick loves and writes about so well could tell him a dozen before a dropped dime hit the floor. But no bluesman, and few entertainers of any kind, has managed to achieve the sheer dimension of Presley's story. Just as Elvis' girth fascinated fans and the press during his last, misbegotten years, so too it is the outsize scale...
Elvis remained haunted by Gladys to the end of his days. He may have been prodigious, but, in Guralnick's thorough and compassionate telling, he could never be the prodigal son. He paid regular visits to her grave, as if trying to reclaim something. He traveled around the country, but he never left home in any deep sense. Indeed, at the end, he hardly left his room. "Oh, God, son, please don't go, please don't die," his father Vernon wailed as Elvis' daughter Lisa Marie, 9, ran frantically around the house, trying to get into the bathroom where...