gell ... zuerst denkt man sich, so viel zum lesen ... wie fad ... aber wenn man dann damit begonnen hat, ist es einfach nur faszinierend ... wie die Aspekte beleuchtet und dargeboten werden .... hier der letzte Teil


It’s this voice that will grow more pronounced during the last two-thirds of Presley’s recording career, and it’s this voice Guralnick can never quite embrace. His favorite description of songs like “It’s Now or Never,” “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” or “Suspicions” is “sentimental” and “melodramatic.” His opinion is that the roaring crescendo, often, “all but overwhelmed the song.” Any listener to middle and late Elvis knows what he means. There was a rolling, thunderous tone that came from deep in the singer’s chest and that he called up — complete with orchestra and back-up singers — to bring a song crashing to its end. When it works, it’s a sound of transcendence, as if he were trying to rise out of himself. Listen, especially, to Presley’s gospel recordings: “How Great Thou Art,” “Stand By Me.” When it doesn’t work, it rattles into bombast. But, either way, it’s the sound of a man. Not a rockabilly kid, not an innocent, not an untutored genius, but a grown-up.

It’s no coincidence that this voice works so well in gospel; its clearest antecedent is in the work of religious quartets like the Statesmen, the Stamps, the Harmonizing Four, and the Golden Gate Quartet. Elvis loved this kind of music, and, while Guralnick recognizes that, he never tells us why. He’s much more comfortable with how rock & roll ties into blues and country-western than these deep harmonies about Jesus. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that for those raised on gospel, white or black, this particular vocal quality equals spirituality. It is the instantly recognizable sound of a man trying to fill emptiness with faith.

Guralnick concedes that the session for Presley’s 1966 gospel album, “How Great Thou Art,” produced “some of Elvis’ warmest, most profoundly felt work,” but compare that to his praise for the early Sun sessions: “It was as if he were reborn.” And place it next to the insightful description of “How Great Thou Art” in Ernst Jorgensen’s Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, and you get the feeling that the best Guralnick can manage is to acknowledge the achievement. It isn’t simply that Jorgensen likes the music more, although that helps. He’s interested in where the singer is going and gives us a portrait of Presley as an artist: crafting his performance, rehearsing with his colleagues, refining a sound he heard in his head. Jorgensen writes:
In the studio it became clear that Elvis’s months of practice at home had paid off: he knew the song inside and out, instructing the singers on the powerful lead-in during a brief, fifteen-minute rehearsal before the final take. Elvis sang with sincerity and dedication, in a slower tempo than the Statesmen’s version that accentuated the spirituality of the material, and allowed him to build the song into a powerful anthem. He had crafted for himself an ad-hoc arrangement in which he took every part of the four-part vocal, from Big Chief’s bass intro to the soaring heights of the song’s operatic climax. In an extraordinary fulfillment of his vocal ambitions, he had become a kind of one-man quartet, making the song both a personal challenge and a tribute to the singing style he’d always loved.

By the time Presley uses this gospel voice, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is about to end. But there’s one more twist. When he asks the final question — the song’s title question — he produces a sound that we haven’t heard before. As he sits in the dark, the Jordanaires humming behind him, he rises to the word “lonesome” and attacks it in a nasal quiver. He’s way up in his high range, past choir-boy tenderness and into an eerie, near falsetto. You might recognize the tone from Buddy Holly, who used it on “Peggy Sue” and “Rave On:” an edgy, rebellious, other-worldly sound. It passes in an instant, but, in that instant, what we get is an unmistakable sneer.
“I bet you’re lonesome tonight,” Presley seems to be saying, and this is a different kind of anger — a sarcastic rage, like Bob Dylan asking Mr. Jones if he knows what’s happening here. It’s not only a long way from the character who began singing the song, but a long way from the Elvis Presley Guralnick most admires, the one who “represented the innocence that had made the country great ….” [author’s italics] It’s a knowing voice, an accusatory voice, which only makes sense now that we’ve come to the end. “Are you lonesome?” has become a question posed to someone who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, who never really loved, who’s been acting all along.
That someone is us. “Fate,” Presley told us in an earlier section of the song, had him “playing in love,” just as fate made him an icon for millions of adoring fans. But it isn’t fate, now. We’ve struck a bargain with the singer: a whole, complicated tangle we’re not particularly willing to take apart. He uses a rock & roll voice to point it out, because it’s a particularly rock & roll moment, piercing the conventions of the old ballad. “Lonesome?” he asks, and the edge to his voice cuts the question wide open.

The New York Times has all but crowned Careless Love Presley’s official biography. “[It] is not simply the finest rock-and-roll biography ever written. It must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial biographical undertaking yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the 20th century.” There’s no question that Guralnick’s done a fine job of pulling together a myriad of sources. His extensive research offers us exhaustive (if often exhausting) detail. On the occasions when Guralnick seems authentically excited by what Elvis is doing — his Comeback Special, a performance in Hawaii — he offers vivid description. His portraits of the Colonel, of Priscilla, of the atmosphere around Graceland, though not new, are well done. The net result is a useful but not very compelling book for those who want all the facts in one place.
But “ambitious and crucial?” That suggests a degree of analysis that Guralnick never even attempts. He makes his main point when he divides the biography into two volumes, supporting the questionable distinction between the young Elvis and the old while coming down heavily on the side of the former. The best of Elvis (like the best of rock & roll?) was adolescent: a “purely instinctual gut level response.” The result is that Careless Love becomes a kind of morality tale. Our hero is born with a magical talent that breaks all the rules and makes him King, but he is (inevitably?) punished for it. The Times is praising an approach to Presley which successfully neutralizes whatever threat he posed to “societal norms.” “If only,” the biographer writes, “he had been able to approach recording consistently as an art.” Instead, the rebel with his “innocent transparency” ends up fat and dead.

Whether or not you like the music Presley produced in the last half of his life, millions of listeners loved it. To dismiss the music is to dismiss them, and arguing that Elvis couldn’t grow up (he could only “unmake”) implies the same about his audience. But a close listen to recordings such as “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” reveals that they are anything but innocent or immature. In fact, they offer a far more complicated look at what it means to be an adult than does Careless Love. Which is why Jorgensen’s volume — even though it’s essentially an expanded discography — offers the more interesting and convincing portrait. Published to much less fanfare, Elvis Presley: A Life In Music describes a creative, troubled artist at work. Here is a dangerous man, dangerous because of his ability, even towards the sad end of his life, to inflame emotions and create beauty.

In his later years, Elvis spoke of his mission as simply trying to “make people happy with music.” It’s a humble enough goal, a lot more difficult than it sounds, and he worked hard to make himself successful at it. Careless Love may leave us in the dark as to how and why the last twenty years of Presley’s music touched so many. But, luckily, Elvis doesn’t. Out of the darkness, comes his voice.