All shook up
Theo Fennell puts on his blue suede shoes and pays homage to the King There is a romance attached to American place names that simply doesn’t exist in their English counterparts. Although Bradford and Milton Keynes undoubtedly have their own stories to tell, for a music fan like me, those that resonate are Phoenix, Baton Rouge and, like a bell at midnight, Memphis.
I have always yearned to take a Griswold-like trip to Tennessee; and I realised that it might be a last chance. At 18 and 21, my daughters — dedicated music fans though they are might never be persuaded to join me and their mother on the road again.
Tennessee is the middle of the mid-South and home to Dollywood, Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry. It is the womb of bluegrass and of country and of rhythm and blues music. All the great musicians came here to record and, of course, Elvis lived and died here.
Quivering with anticipation, we flew to Nashville. Louise then drove to Memphis as I can’t drive — a sin against manliness in America. Although the original Sun recording studios are here, along with the timefrozen motel where Martin Luther King was shot, and there are civil war sites all around as well as the Mississippi, the heart of the town is Graceland.
I had wanted to call our hotel from the car using the operator, so I could say ‘Long distance information, give me Memphis Tennessee’, but found there was no information and Memphis was only a shortish distance away. I was also in disgrace for panicky map-reading, so felt that any tortuously contrived telephonic jokes might not meet a receptive audience.
We had chosen to stay at Heartbreak Hotel and (since my baby hadn’t left me) booked two suites the size of small Cornish estates — ours for the price of a large Chinese takeaway. The decor of the girls’ suite was 1950s Hollywood and ours was Graceland. The lighting was nightclub subfusc; the rooms bore no close scrutiny in daylight. So big were they, with so many interconnecting doors, the overall effect was weirdly spooky. Not so much suffused with the spirit of Elvis, but of a thousand sad impersonators who had sloughed their skin there before us. Interestingly, on the whole trip we saw not one Elvis impersonator, if you don’t count me.
Arriving at Graceland, we went for the VIP package. This was exactly the same as the non-VIP, except that we were segregated from the people enjoying themselves and, to our deep embarrassment, made to have our photograph taken in front of them.
The key to understanding Graceland is that Elvis bought it when he was only 22 and fresh out of a backwoods shack. Although it’s comparatively small and would not look out of place on a Weybridge back road, it must have represented Shangri La to him and his family. Its decor spans Hollywood flash to adolescent fantasy. Very, very good times must have been had there as well as desperately awful ones. It is full of laddish accoutrements: a bank of 70 tellies, a shooting gallery, and various later additions that must have been built when hobbies like racquet-ball and karate took hold. Outside are paddocks and a mini-farm with the tractors he used to play on.
It is not as fitting a monument to the King as I had hoped, but as an altar to Americana it’s hard to beat. You sense that Elvis was in the right place at the right time. His extraordinary mix of voice, absurd beauty and style was forged in a melting-pot found only in that part of America. Had he been born in Purley or Nantes, he could never have happened.
The splendour of his grave, and those of his infant twin and family, caught me by surprise. His sense of style even in death was extraordinary. On their own, the things he wore and the objects with which he surrounded himself flew over the zenith of bad taste, but the way in which he matched his odd clothes and his exotic combining of quite mundane things made him a stylist of genius. I bought some garments from the places he went to, trying to emulate this look. My daughters told me I failed. I think they were right.
We saw many, many other Elvisy things — cars, aeroplanes — till we had to stop, bogged down by the excess. Something was missing. I was glad we’d been to Graceland but, as we crossed the road back to Heartbreak Hotel and looked back at the house, I realised why I felt so hollow. Elvis really had left the building.
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