so und nun gehts weiter

In Guralnick’s scenario of the vanishing Elvis, the movies are more than just awful. They are the Colonel’s idea, done against Presley’s will, and add up to “a trivialization of his music,” as Guralnick writes of Blue Hawaii, where “he is forced to publicly repudiate his commitment to rock ‘n’ roll.” Many of his movies were terrible; they were, also, very successful. In the United States, Blue Hawaii was the second highest grossing film the week of its release and ended at fourteenth overall for 1962. Overseas, where Presley never toured, his films had an immense influence on how people thought rock & roll looked and acted. Over and over again, he played charismatic, moderately rebellious heroes, who pushed the limits of acceptable behavior without breaking them. To Guralnick, this goes against “the very image of rebellion that had always defined” Elvis, although he has to admit that it was “not really all that removed from the aspects of the real Elvis Presley that aspired to middle-class respectability.” It’s this “real Elvis” that keeps disappointing his biographer.

In “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Elvis fashions a performance which deals specifically with this issue: the dangers of acting, in particular, and of being manipulated, in general. “You read your lines so cleverly,” he says in the monologue, “and never missed a cue.” Then, after a weighted pause, Presley gets to the actual moment of betrayal: “Honey, you lied.” From here on, everything he says or sings includes this betrayal. The way he puts across that awareness is by rolling out his Mississippi accent on the word “lied.” We hear the country in his voice, and it creates a strange disturbance in the middle of the song, as if he were suddenly drawing attention to himself, to the Southerner saying the lines. As a listener and a fan, if you’re still enjoying the fantasy that Elvis is speaking directly to you — that you are the sweetheart — it’s a disturbing moment. Your heart-throb has just turned. The switch in his speaking voice comes right at the moment when there’s a shift in the logic of the song: now, he’s calling you a liar, and you have to either accept that idea, or quickly decide he’s not really talking to you. But if you look for relief in the notion that he’s actually addressing that broader “you,” the general public, the song is about the relationship between the star and his audience. And the star is saying the world out there, beyond the darkened studio, not only can turn and drop its idols as quickly as it embraced them, but that it never really cared. “Honey, you lied when you said you loved me.”

People often cite as proof of the “unmaking” of Elvis the songs he chose to record in later years. “Suspicious Minds,” “Stranger in My Own Hometown,” “There Goes My Everything” become evidence of the star “caught in a trap,” whether his failed marriage and isolated lifestyle, or his fading career. But “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” argues that Presley was interested in the theme of betrayal early on and in a larger context. Faced with deceit, the singer strikes a bargain. “I’d rather go on hearing your lies,” he says, “than to go on living without you.” It’s quite a confession to make to your audience.
It leaves the narrator on a bare stage, the illusion of truth and love gone, “emptiness all around.” Here, in a line, is the picture Careless Love spends 750 pages painting. Here is the artist betrayed, isolated, compromised past the point of understanding. It foreshadows all the images we have of Presley, years later, holed up in his bedroom, the windows covered with tin foil, seeing only his women and a hand-picked group of insiders, the Memphis Mafia. Except the myth would have it that the poor, drugged Southern boy had no idea what hit him, where the song stands as evidence to the contrary. In “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” the narrator knows what reality is and knows that he’s giving it up.

Careless Love paints a picture of a man who is virtually unaware of the outside world. When we’re told that Presley wept at JFK’s assassination and stayed in front of the TV for days to watch the aftermath, that common response comes as a shock. Given this book’s portrait, we’re surprised that Elvis even knew who Kennedy was. Careless Love covers the years 1960 through 1977 but manages to mention Dr. Martin Luther King only once, and the civil rights movement, the summer of love, the Vietnam war only in passing. Arguably, this is because Guralnick has tried, as he says in his introduction, “to tell the story as much as possible from Elvis’ point of view.” But the result is a narrative disconnected from history and culture.

Elvis may have ended up, as the song puts it, with emptiness all around, but it was a particularly Southern emptiness. Presley’s taste for peanut butter and banana sandwiches didn’t come out of nowhere. Nor did his passion for pink Cadillacs, gospel music, and amusement parks. One way to understand Presley’s life is as a regional and generational dream writ large. Of course, if you’re trying to make the argument that he was an inexplicable original, an aberration, then context only hurts your cause. In Careless Love, everything from Presley’s loyalty towards his relatives to his collection of sheriff’s badges happens in a void.
Even if you’re willing to accept that Elvis existed in his own universe, that doesn’t mean that we, the readers, have to. In November, 1960, when “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was released, Kennedy had just been elected President, and the social changes that rock & roll is often associated with — that Presley is often credited with beginning — were under way. The listeners who propelled the single to the top of the charts put down their money for this haunting, slightly antique tune in the midst of the Cold War, when pop music ran the gamut from the #1 song Presley’s single displaced — the r&b snap of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay” — to the tune that eventually bumped him — the lush cocktail music of “Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra.

And a little context makes the song’s crossover strength into the r&b market even more extraordinary. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” sold to a Negro audience that had begun its rebellion against the old South and the very “parlor” values that Presley’s song seems to embody. As he recites in the Nashville studio, sit-in protests have spread to thirty-one cities in eight Southern states. During the time the record is on the charts, the first Freedom Riders set out to desegregate southern bus terminals. It isn’t that the song, or Presley’s performance, reflect these social changes. But the record spoke to people living through these times, and a biography that fails to mention this runs the risk of being more insular than its subject.
As the singer comes to the end of the spoken narrative, he melodramatically declares that if his sweetheart won’t come back, “they can bring the curtain down.” The song’s emotional ride could end on that note, with the grandiose, adolescent threat of suicide, but it doesn’t. The narrator, instead, returns to his singing voice and to the original series of questions. They’re changed, now, by what he’s been through — and put us through. “Is your heart,” he sings, “filled with pain?” The first time he gave us those lines it was with a sweet innocence. Now, on both the words “heart” and “pain,” his voice corkscrews up to the tremulous part of his range, as if he doubts she has a heart — or knows what real pain is.
Then, he takes a deep breath, and, when he phrases the next question, it begins as almost a roar. Presley is in adult voice: a baritone that was occasionally in evidence on the early Sun sides and became more and more pronounced as he got older. It’s his way of conveying the bravery (and maybe stupidity) of someone deciding to walk back into a relationship based on a lie. “Shall I come back?” he asks: angry, ashamed, aware of what he’s asking. For the sweetheart, and for the listener/public, it’s a kind of challenge: Are we going to enter into this deal with him? If we are, we’ll be just as aware, just as potentially self-destructive, as he is. The quality of his voice translates “Shall I come back?” into “Can you take it?” Can you accept the fact that we’re going to live with a lie, that this is the way the world works?