Baby, Let's Play House: Graceland, Memphis, TN

We arrived at Graceland late-morning, high time for Memphis’ signature lung-swaddling heat. Coping with the temperature, as hundreds of thousands do annually, is the first step of the pilgrimage to see where The King lived and died. For fans, it is worth it, granted you can stomach the ornery tourists and copious, blatant merchandising.

It’s like Disneyworld, except Mickey Mouse is Elvis.

Attendants corralled us into queues, handed us headsets and placed us on a tiny bus, which travelled approximately a quarter of a mile, just across the boulevard, past the iconic music-staff gate and up the long driveway, through the front yard and up to the front of the house. Tours depart approximately every ten minutes — a failed system as the average tourist could spend more than ten minutes photographing the azalea bushes by the veranda. It only takes the first tour of the morning to back up tours for the remainder of the day, leaving guests jousting their way through a human barricade to photograph the baby grand piano in the music room.

“Please try to keep moving,” a docent urges. Nobody moves.

The home is modest in size and outrageous in decor. It’s the Versailles of the 60's. No color of the wheel or yard of faux animal fur were spared. If it could be edged in gold, it was, and nothing has changed since the day the music died. Like Alex said after our trip to Tupelo, Elvis' primary decorative motif was "hillbillies who won the lottery, and what they think rich people live like."

Every artifact remains exactly in place, the same feeling you get being in someone's home after a funeral — any minute they could walk in and pick up just the same. That, or there should at least be a spread of cold cuts, potato salad, and baked goods. The portraits of Priscilla and Lisa Marie in their “pre-plastic” years smile from every wall. (It was somewhere on this tour that Alex also pointed out that I look like I could be Elvis and Priscilla's kid - but seeing as Elvis died 12 years before I hatched, I'll just stick to pretending my dad is John Fogerty.) The piano stool where Elvis sat to play “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” stands before the glossy instrument. The built-in waterfall in the jungle room still trickles, surrounded by tiki upholstery and emerald ferns. The bar is fully stocked, the pool balls racked, the kitchen clean.

Guests aren’t allowed anywhere near the bathroom where Elvis died. They aren’t even allowed upstairs.

As we descended to the basement down a narrow staircase, both arteries leading into and exiting the basement clogged. The woman directing traffic from the TV room heaved gruffly and called to her coworker upstairs.

“We’re completely jammed down here!” Distressed as though she was the first to spot the iceberg from the Titanic...or at least managing who got onto what lifeboat.

It took twenty minutes of prodding and moaning for traffic to resume again, the entire time people continued to lunge for photos of the sofa where Elvis used to sit and watch his three televisions at the same time.

Pretty sure that's a bullet hole in the slide on Lisa Marie's play set.

The tour wound back upstairs and outside, across the backyard and into a hall filled with Elvis’ gold and platinum records, trophies, and the wood-box television set his record label gave him after he sold his first million records. His hall of fame.

The procession emptied outside again, this time into the meditation garden where The King, along with his parents, stillborn twin brother, and grandmother, are buried. The cavalcade halted to photograph the graves. Some looked visibly distressed behind their sunglasses and point-and-shoot Nikons. Some placed notes and flowers on the five graves, mouthing a little prayer. Paul McCartney reportedly left a guitar pick on Elvis’ grave when he visited earlier this year, so The King could play in heaven.

Back across the street are museums housing his cars, airplanes, and outlandish wardrobe, plus roughly twenty gift shops selling every Elvis knickknack you can imagine — license plate frames, sunglasses, travel coffee tumblers with The King’s signature “TCB” (which stands for Taking Care of Business) in pink glitter. Every museum has it’s own gift shop and some of the gift shops have museums inside them.

There’s no hiding what Graceland is: a moneymaker. When the Presley estate began to dwindle, Lisa Marie was expected to inherit only $1 million. It’s a way to ensure the Elvis legacy lives on, both monetarily and spiritually. One of the great American icons whose life you can briefly step into for a small fee, to pay your respects, and remember The King.

O, Come, All Ye Faithful: Elvis Presley's Birthplace, Tupelo, MS

The Elvis Presley Museum (no photos allowed inside)

This article is dedicated to our good friend Harry Sewlall, one of the biggest Elvis fans in the world, and certainly one of the biggest Elvis fans in South Africa.

If there is a cultural religion unique to American history – a source of devotion, dedication, and discipleship that can almost entirely be traced to happenings on American soil – my vote would be for Rock and Roll. As a New Religious Movement of the 20th Century, Rock and Roll is a syncretic religion, with obvious influences from other belief systems (Blues, Folk, Country, and Gospel), but with its own set of leaders and prophets.

Before our journey to Tupelo – which in itself is a nice little town, one that with its three local universities would most likely have retained its hip vibe with or without the presence of Elvis – I was among the rock history purists who balked at the idea of this greasy-coiffed hillbilly being the inventor of rock and roll. But no more, for I have seen the light!

Before I really begin flogging this metaphor to death, (and with comparative religion being one of my pet interests, I know very well that I could,) I will quickly jump to my conclusion: Elvis, for a segment of the population, is revered as a Christ-figure in our cultural landscape. Some of the more dedicated make pilgrimages to his tomb at Graceland, to where he did most of his early preaching in Memphis at Sun Studios, and also to his boyhood home in Tupelo.

The Lyric Theatre, a former Vaudeville venue where Elvis performed on a return visit.

The Elvis Presley Birthplace and Museum is set on a gorgeous piece of land just off of the main drag, with several unique exhibits. The first is the actual home where Elvis was born and subsequently spent the first 13 years of his life. A two-room shotgun house, recreated with period furniture and with wallpaper that is consistent with a few photographs taken inside the house, Elvis came from startlingly humble beginnings.

Across the pavilion, which Elvis had commissioned to double as both a museum and a park, is the Pentecostal Church the Presley family attended in Elvis’ youth. The church originally sat about half a mile down the road from the site, but in 2008 the Museum gathered the funds to pluck the church out of the ground and haul it to their park. Inside the church is a unique video presentation, where three screens come down from the ceiling, projecting a surround audio-visual experience of a typical Pentecostal church service. When we were there, a busload of senior citizens were visiting as well, and their reaction to the experience was similar to the awe of a child seeing Disneyworld.

Inside the museum itself is a massive gift shop. It has a lot of the usual Elvis ephemera – cookbooks, lunchboxes, t-shirts – but it also features every single one of his movies, a large number of complete concert and performance anthology DVD’s, and nearly every album Elvis released during his lifetime – although that awful Having Fun With Elvis On Stage album, the one that features only Elvis’ onstage banter between songs still has yet to be digitized. (On the one hand, this is probably for the best, but then again, I do have a morbid curiosity about it – the album reached #130 in the rock charts in 1974, and perhaps more disturbingly, hit #9 in the country charts!) Beyond the gift shop is a theater that shows a dramatized account of Elvis’ time in Tupelo. Shot locally with amateur actors, the end result is professionally done and actually boasts some great performances.

The actual museum gallery is roughly the size of the gift shop, a bunch of glass cases containing many of the physical artifacts from Elvis’ youth. With the help and generosity of a childhood friend-turned-collector named Janelle McComb, the museum also features items from Graceland and even some gifts given to her by Elvis himself. When we got to the exhibit featuring Elvis’ gator-skin shoes, his fur coat, and the church-meets-crushed-velvet aesthetic of Graceland, I turned to Alexa and said, “He lived like someone who won the lottery!” With his roots in extreme poverty – his father even spent time in jail for check forgery, altering an amount paid to him in an effort to pay of his debts more quickly – Elvis is the rags to riches story. He may have lived extravagantly, but it seems less like, say, The Great Gatsby and more like the scene in The Jerk when Navin Johnson makes his fortune.

At the middle of the pavilion is a statue of 13-year-old Elvis, clutching a guitar and clad in overalls, with a circle of plaques and engravings that detail major life events during Elvis’ time in Tupelo. Furthering the religious connection is a chapel on the premises, another component of Elvis’ plan for the site. Although it was closed, it was a modern-looking chapel with gorgeous stained glass windows. There are also markers placed by two separate Mississippi institutions, one honoring the history of Country music, the other honoring the Blues.

This duality of Elvis’ musical influences, of both white and black musical traditions – made obvious by the film, the church experience, and the museum gallery – shows why he is so relevant to the history of Rock and Roll. It doesn’t matter that he never wrote a song, that he was not a virtuoso musician, or even that he was a good-looking fellow with shaky hips. One need look no further than his first single, released on Sun Records, “That’s All Right, Mama” backed with “Blue Moon Of Kentucky.” Elvis took Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s blues tune and injects it with some country swagger on the A-side, and on the flipside gave Bill Monroe’s mournful ballad a jumpy blues background. It is that marriage of two seemingly disparate musical styles that gave us Rock and Roll, bereft of racial politics and who-did-what-first-ism.

Although I may still balk at Rolling Stone’s rockist white-boy assertion that “That’s All Right, Mama” was the first Rock and Roll record – such a statement only serves to generate debate, prompting the public to buy their publication, or at least bring traffic to their website – but my position on the lad responsible for the record has definitely evolved for the best. 

Praise Elvis!