The wild swings of Elvis Presley's career -- from innocence to crassness, authenticity to commodity, Tupelo to Hollywood -- are so dramatic that writers are tempted to exploit these contrasts and explain America through them.
Few Americans, after all, make a better icon than Elvis. He has served for almost a half-century as a symbol of America abroad. One need only spot sideburns in Paris, leather jackets in Tokyo or the rockabilly revival in England to sense Presley's presence. One need only scan a supermarket checkout to sense Presley's survival in the American imagination, even in death.
Peter Guralnick, though, is less interested in the national or global impact of Elvis -- Elvis as myth -- than he is in Elvis as flesh-and-blood human being. Mr. Guralnick's Elvis is a poor son of the post-War South, an awkward and likable boy who drew a C in music class and grew sideburns to look like a truck driver.
Instead of the trashy treatment Elvis' life has received from dozens of biographers, including the late and largely unmourned Albert Goldman, Mr. Guralnick's book focuses not on scandals or the grotesque but on the everyday and ordinary.
Instead of the intensely intellectualized approach of critic Greil Marcus, who made Elvis a signifier for capitalism and punk parody, Mr. Guralnick casts Elvis in his own terms. We see Elvis surrounded not by literary theory but by the Tupelo and TC Memphis of the 1950s. Mr. Guralnick maintains a hushed, reverent tone throughout, letting his story tell itself, ignoring those who see in Presley a figure of fun.
The writer refuses to condescend to his subjects, most of whom are barely educated working-class Southerners. Mr. Guralnick's even hand and sympathetic eye provide the book's greatest strength. His reverence is also his book's prime weakness.
Mr. Guralnick is one of our finest rock critics, best known for his writing about blues, country and R&B.; His "Searching for Robert Johnson" and "Sweet Soul Music Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom" are acknowledged classics.
But Mr. Guralnick, a longtime Bostonian, knows the South as only a Northern intellectual can, and sentimentalizes the region throughout his books. At his best, his affection for the South compels the reader; at his worst, he sounds quaint.
"Last Train to Memphis" emerges from nearly a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, and the wealth of material assembled is enough, by itself, to make this the definitive Presley bio. Mr. Guralnick scoured early newspapers and interviews and talked to everybody who knew Presley: band mates, girlfriends (of whom there seems no shortage), even a Memphis haberdasher.
Mr. Guralnick has uncovered valuable details, and some of his anecdotes are gems: D. J. Fontana, Presley's drummer, explaining that the band always arrived late to gigs because Elvis stopped every 3 miles to buy firecrackers; RCA executives wondering whether to shave Presley's sideburns; a country musician complaining that Elvis would never stop tapping his feet or turning radio dials in his attempt to hear everything on the radio at once.
The reverence of Mr. Guralnick's tone makes the first half of the book feel less electric than it should. The Elvis described by peers is remarkably normal, and this portrait of the artist as a young man is striking in its simplicity. "Sweet and average," one teacher judges, while a classmate calls Elvis "a sad, shy, not especially attractive boy" whose guitar-toting was seen as a harmless, if annoying, eccentricity.
Mr. Guralnick perceptively explains the rifts between the young Presley's introspection and brash extroversion, between his lack musical training and his astonishing command of early audiences. But after a few hundred pages, readers may tire of hearing that Elvis was a loner, a natural, a spontaneous performer, a young man of aching vulnerability and aw-shucks charm.
The book's close is powerful. Elvis prepares to depart for Europe in 1958 as the world's most famous G.I.; Presley's mother dies right before he boards a ship for Germany; and the writer sketches one of many affecting scenes in which Elvis must bid goodbye to the women in his life.
The flatness of the first half of "Last Train to Memphis" may say less about Mr. Guralnick's writing than about the act of reading: Slow, steady success compels us less than meteoric rise or cataclysmic fall. Readers should await the second volume of Mr. Guralnick's Elvis bio, as Presley betrays his gift and descends into self-parody.
Mr. Timberg is a writer living in Connecticut.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley"
Author: Peter Guralnick
Publisher: Little, Brown and Co.
Length, price: 560 pages, $24.95