Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley - 'The richest portrait of Presley we have ever had' Sunday Telegraph

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If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The colored folks began singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw." Garth Hudson – keyboards, organ, accordion, piano, synthesizers, vocoder, soprano, alto and tenor saxophones, bells I always loved Elvis' music in the early 70s..... the powerful ballads, the top notch band behind him (that boy can sing!).

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It's impossible to pinpoint where you'd have to time travel to alter history and save Elvis. It's not like there was one big decision that went wrong. There wasn't one bad guy that led him astray. He slowly unraveled for twenty years. He had serious emotional needs, had way too much money, was isolated by fame, and was a hypochondriac with an insatiable appetite for medications. If he didn't like what you were saying, you could be banished from his life forever. To be close enough to try to save you, you had to enable him. The touring at the end of his life drained him of his energy but at the same time, his fans were one of the few things that brought him joy. I just wish he had been able to hold on long enough to enjoy a renaissance like Johnny Cash or Roy Orbison. He deserved to be appreciated on his own terms. This could have been a treatise on what not to do, perhaps useful for the idols of today... But really, there is no time in this book to examine it so any instruction must be found between the lines & can be at best mere 2nd guessing. Elvis dreams repeatedly, what he calls a 'nightmare', that he woke up one morning & his fans had deserted him & all his everything had gone away forever, but I found myself wondering if that was in fact his unconscious mind pleading with him, telling him "This is what you have to do if you want to live or ever again find a quantum of solace, you have to make it all disappear". But his ambition and his what-they-call poverty mentality meant he could never accept that. He was strong enough to fight himself to a draw, but not strong enough to win. Elvis set some all-time records for celebrity, audacity and exuberance. He helped the world break out of a great number of out-of-date constraints and begin new epochs in popular music and style. He spread a joyous sort of Americaness to the rest of the world. For those things he will be remembered, forever, with love and happiness.

I only caught something of the aftermath of Elvis' music as I was a child in the seventies, but recently I became intrigued with people like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles who rose from poverty and obscurity to unfathomable stardom. What were the circumstances at the time that sprouted such abundance of talent, innovation and catalytic changes in music?The volume begins with Elvis leaving the Army, where he seems to have been relatively happy, although that is also where his long addiction to uppers began; these enabled him to party late and to be ‘Elvis Presley’. During this period, as the author tells us in the stupefying detail that blights this volume, Elvis dated many women but then meets air force brat Priscilla (Beau, as was), when she was but 14 years old and is smitten. He is respectful and continues to sleep with other women while chastely ‘courting’ her, which makes for slightly uncomfortable reading in 2020. They eventually marry, in 1964, and have a child, Lisa Marie, shortly after, but he does not take readily to the role of father-husband and continues to do as he pleases, being often away with his entourage on tour or just having fun. It's an interesting enough account but what anyone really wants to read about are the details of his fall from grace. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. The book ends in 1958, the year Elvis's music and movie career was put on hold by his induction into the Army. It's also the year his beloved mother Gladys died. The unselfish love and devotion she had always shown him were suddenly gone, at the very time when the rest of his life was going dizzyingly, ridiculously nuts, and it tore him up. Without her as his moral compass, he was never the same again. I was also acquainted with the boyfriend of the sister of Elvis's last fiancee. I was hearing some of the stories of Elvis's aberrant behavior while obviously on drugs two years before the publication of .