Guralnick exhibits many of the traits of the best American music writers: his research is painstaking, his expertise wide-ranging, his curiosity unbounded and his enthusiasm unquenchable. Guralnick comes to the job with decent credentials, in particular a terrific account of Southern soul entitled Sweet Soul Music. Last Train to Memphis is the first instalment of a two-volume biography which aims to let some air out of the King’s bloated corpse and conduct an altogether kinder embalming. Goldman’s savage demolition job, based on the somewhat unreasonable assumption that Presley should have been an intellectual aesthete, needed to be counterbalanced, and American music writer Peter Guralnick has duly obliged. The equally deceased Albert Goldman, in his biography of the world’s first great pop star, delivered an unforgettable picture of Presley stupefied by cheeseburgers and pharmaceuticals, trussed up in a giant nappy, surrounded by all the white-trash status symbols that unlimited wealth and stupidity could assemble, and meeting his end in the toilet. Should you seek a working hypothesis as to why Lisa. What survives of him is his reputation and, of late, that too has been in rather poor health. LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS The Rise of Elvis Presley By Peter Guralnick 560 pages. Peter Guralnicks book definitely does start form the beginning of Elvis life and lets us know that he does come from humble beginnings and becomes famous. Despite what the more lurid American magazines periodically tell us, Elvis Presley is as dead as a doornail.
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