Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, Memphis, Tennessee
For devotees to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, this Tennessee city is their mecca.
It’s Saturday night at The Guest House, the sprawling resort hotel next to Graceland in Memphis. On stage in a modest theatre, the main cast of the new biopic, Elvis, is being introduced by director Baz Luhrmann. Then the family arrives; Priscilla, daughter Lisa Marie and granddaughter Riley Keough. The audience, which includes Elvis’s first girlfriend, Dottie, and those who knew him well, are preparing to view the premiere. This may be the toughest crowd to win over but Lisa Marie quickly dispels any misgivings. Austin Butler, who plays her father, “nails it, it’s been done right”, she says. Priscilla and Lisa Marie insist the actor, standing metres away and clearly beaming with delight, captured the essence of Elvis Presley.
Like many music fans, I’ve been searching for that essence for years. I’ve wandered through his midcentury honeymoon house in Palm Springs, peeked into the closet at his Bel Air abode where that ’68 Comeback Special black leather outfit hung. I even got married in the same chapel used in the filming of Viva Las Vegas before staying in the hotel where the jumpsuited Elvis played out his ’70s Vegas residency. There’s a certain allure to being in the place where your musical heroes lived, performed and recorded; of making a pilgrimage to specific locations and trying to imagine what happened there. For devotees to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, Memphis, Tennessee, his home city from 1948 until his death in 1977, is their mecca.
Tad Pierson from American Dream Safari pulls up in a 1955 Cadillac, the same model Elvis owned, outside The Beauty Shop, a restaurant housed in the former parlour where Priscilla had her hair fashioned into a beehive. He’s taking me on a music tour of Memphis, and he’s diving deep. The birth of rock ’n’ roll did not spring out of nowhere. Elvis felt the strong history of music that is unique to this city; the meeting of gospel, country, and rhythm and blues.
“Elvis is sort of a prism through which we can look at Memphis music,” Pierson says. “The big story in Memphis is the collaboration of black and white cultures. Memphis is 65 per cent black and 30 per cent white, which is unusual as an American city.”
The same sort of juke joints Elvis sneaked into as a teen are still around. On any given night, it’s strictly dancing-room only at Wild Bill’s or The Blues Night Club, both in strip malls away from downtown. On Beale St, blues and soul bands play every night of the week. Across the road from the Arcade Restaurant, Elvis’s preferred diner for breakfast, is another club, Earnestine and Hazel’s, where the entry sign reads “no dope smoken, no cursin, no free loden” (sic).
We drive by blues guitarist BB King’s home, bought on a GI Bill. These are the same neighbourhoods where Elvis grew up. You can stay in the Presley family apartment at Lauderdale Courts, a former housing project. We then mosey by the church where Aretha Franklin’s father, the Reverend CL Franklin, would stand at the pulpit delivering gospel-filled sermons. Close by is Aretha’s childhood home, a shotgun shack in disrepair, which is surely worthy of the same reverence that Elvis’s first childhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi, receives.
“People say Elvis appropriated the music but every great artist does that,” says Pierson who has taken some of the greats in the backseat of his Cadillac, including Stax artists William Bell and Rufus Thomas, and the other Elvis – Costello.
“You copy the masters until you get it down and then your own voice emerges, right? It’s not like Presley stole that music. He loved it, he was steeped in the culture, he gravitated toward that.”
Given enough notice (advance bookings are essential), Pierson can tailor a tour to take guests to working recording studios in Memphis. My choice is to glean some of the magic produced at Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, home of Hi Records, one of the most successful soul labels in recording history. It’s where the likes of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together was recorded. Willie’s son, Boo Mitchell, a Grammy-winning producer, generously shows me around. Boo has kept the set-up exactly the same, and it’s in demand. Wonder how they got that sound on Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk? Boo recorded it here. We stop at Stax Museum, the former studio that, together with Royal, helped make Memphis one of the great soul capitals in the ’60s and ’70s. After the tour, I find more music history at the Memphis Rock ’n’ Soul Museum and the Blues Hall of Fame Museum.
At the new non-profit Memphis Listening Lab, located in what was once Sears department store and is now known as Crosstown Concourse, you can hear just about every song recorded in Memphis. John King, DJ and co-founder of Ardent Records, has generously donated his impressive 60,000-strong vinyl collection for the world to hear. Step inside, ask advice on what to listen to (the rarer the better) and they will cue it on one of the 10 listening stations. The beautifully designed space has walls adorned with photographs of Memphis musicians by Patricia Rainer. It also regularly hosts workshops, including classes on how to DJ. Goner Records and Shangri-La Records are among the local vinyl stores that hold extensive Memphis collections for purchase. Even A. Schwab, the general store on Beale St in operation since 1876, has reintroduced its Memphis music vinyl department.
Over at Lansky’s in the Peabody Hotel, staff at the “clothier to the King” are expecting business to pick up with the release of Luhrmann’s biopic. The collection features re-creations of the flecked sports coats Elvis wore in the 50s, his racing jacket from the movie Speedway and my purchase, the woollen jumper from Jailhouse Rock. Baz has been in, so has Austin. Both Hal Lansky and his father, who opened the business 76 years ago, spent time with Elvis. Hal proffers his hand.
“I want you to know you just shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the world,” he says. He admits it’s a corny line, but he’s a smooth operator and has told the same story for years. “People come to Memphis, and they want to see the sights Elvis saw; they want to shop at our store,” he says.
I dedicate an entire day to Graceland, Elvis’s home for the last 20 years of his short life and the second most-visited house museum in the US (after the White House). The star’s interior design choices have been questioned but as the years roll by and trends come full circle, it’s possible to look at Graceland with a fresh eye. The mirrored yellow and blue TV room would not look out of place in a maximalist interior designer’s home these days. And the Jungle Room, inspired by Elvis’s love of Hawaii, is pure fun; almost enough to inspire a return to shagpile-carpeted walls and ceilings.
Repeat visitors touring Graceland will note that Priscilla Presley’s narration has been replaced by the more laidback style of actor John Stamos, and the squash court has been restored to how it looked the night Elvis died. It was here, after a game, that Elvis sat down at the piano and played his last song.
Visiting Graceland is a sombre reminder that this was, and still is, a family home. Stamos tells us that Priscilla and Lisa Marie like to spend time alone at their old address. I wonder, since they are in town, whether they are in residence upstairs. The poignant ending at Elvis’s gravesite in the Meditation Garden, with If I Can Dream playing on our headsets, is still moving, 45 years after his death.
But it’s Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio where the spirit of Elvis and his influences looms largest. Phillips exalted African-American music, and was one of the first white men to record black artists such as Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner and the Prisonaires (a doo-wop group of convicts released for a day to record), and the first to get that crossover sound to a wider audience. His catchcry was “give me something different”. It’s here that Phillips recorded Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and of course, Elvis. Phillips championed them all. Our guide cues Elvis’s That’s All Right and the visitors cheer; some dance. The room is exactly as it was in 1954.
We take turns holding the original microphone (Phillips didn’t want it behind glass in a museum), standing on the gaffer-taped cross on the linoleum floor precisely where Elvis belted out his first hit, a song that changed the world.
On another tour years ago, history has it that a tourist leant down and planted a kiss on that cross. It was Bob Dylan. “We all have our heroes,” he told a fellow traveller.
In the know
Delta flies to Memphis from Australia via Los Angeles.
In the South Main District, near the Arcade Restaurant, is the 62-room boutique Arrive Hotel. Housed in the former Memphis College of Art building, it has a bakery, a shuffleboard-themed bar and Memphis-based coffee roaster Vice & Virtue Coffee. Upstairs is a poker room, its walls lined with pleated material in a reference to Graceland’s billiards room. Studio rooms from about $280 a night.
American Dream Safari runs customised tours of the sights of Memphis.
Andrea Black was a guest of Memphis Travel and Delta.