Careless Love

I just finished Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. Now throw me down the well.

This is the second of a two-part, extremely detailed history of Elvis. I read the first book, Last Train From Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, on the recommendation of Dr J. Last Train was one of the best books about music I have ever read. Careless Love, on the other hand, is a slow downward spiral into a pit of darkness and despair with no hope of escape. I’ll assume that the book’s publishers were too filled with ennui to bother correcting the typo that has been on their web site for the six years since Careless Love was published. Nice marketing.

I have no idea what the title refers to. Love? Everyone in this book is looking out for number one. Maybe not Lisa Marie, who is around nine when Elvis dies. But everybody else sucks. There is greed, backstabbing, addiction, jealousy, pettiness, greed (did I say greed already?) – but none of it is in a good way. You know how this book is going to end before you even start, but I was amazed at how little hope and joy there was. If I was Peter Guralnick, there is no way I could sit down at the computer (typewriter?) and work on this every day. It would have sucked all happiness from my life. And it had to have taken him years to complete. 661 pages of unmitigated gloom.

Careless Love was not without interesting side notes, however. I did not know that Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s redneck manager, was actually a Dutch immigrant named Andreas. Seriously. The section that describes how Elvis came to meet Richard Nixon is just surreal. I also thought it was a little weird, creepy even, that Ann Margaret was discovered by George Burns. Elvis once gave his minions a sermon that began “Whoa, all ye Pharisees and motherfuckers”. I though that was darkly humorous (he was whacked out on drugs at the time).

But in the end, Elvis’s autopsy reveals that he was taken while “straining to stool” with 14 (fourteen) different drugs in his system, ten above therapeutic levels. My recommendation: if you have any interest in the subject matter whatsoever (American music in general, really), then read Last Train. Just forget that you ever heard that this book existed (it worked for the publisher on the second of the tow books). Your life will be that much better off.

That said, do go see Kingsized every chance that you get all you Pharisees…