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CNN Live Today
Interview with Peter Guralnick
Aired August 16, 2002 - 10:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: We've heard a lot of kidding around this week about Elvis, but there is a very serious side to Elvis and his place in popular culture.
Peter Guralnick is the Elvis biographer whose two-volume work has been called "a triumph of biographical art" by the "New York Times."
Peter is now with us from Graceland. We should point out the names of the book, "Careless Love: the Unmaking of Elvis Presley," and "The Last Train to Memphis" -- thanks very much for being with us this morning.
PETER GURALNICK, ELVIS BIOGRAPHER: Thank you.
SAVIDGE: Wanted to ask you, as a serious biographer, what drew you to someone like Elvis Presley?
GURALNICK: I'll tell you the truth what drew me to Elvis was the blues, and when I was a kid at the age of 15, I just kind of fell into the blues, you know Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and it was just around that same time that RCA put out two albums while Elvis was in the army that had all of his Sun sides, and I had never heard this -- growing up in New England, I had never heard this on the radio, and I listened to these songs, and I said, Oh, my God. Elvis is a blues singer. He is a great blues singer. And, that was really what led me to sort of reexplore, reassess, and then I discovered so many other sides of Elvis, but that was what first drew me to him.
SAVIDGE: When you wrote the first book, "Last Train to Memphis," did you envision at that time there was going to be a follow-on?
GURALNICK: Oh, yes. No, I mean I started out -- when I started on the biography in 1988, it was with the idea of writing a neat, elegantly compact one volume biography of Elvis, and then after working on it for four years in 1992, I called my editor and I said, you know, you better sit down. I think you are in for kind of a shock because I had a vision last night. I suddenly realized that this is a book -- a biography that should take place in two volumes, because it is as if, with the death of his mother, a curtain fell down on Elvis' life, and when that curtain rises, it is just a whole other story.
SAVIDGE: Well, many people look at Elvis' life as divided in two ways. You have the young Elvis, which is what your first book sort of chronicles there, and we can take a look at some of the photographs.
Elvis, at this young age, really is -- that is when he captured our attention and captured a lot of people's hearts. And one of the things he also captured was the attention of women, and I am wondering what is the influence of women in his life, and you mentioned his mother there.
GURALNICK: I think that Elvis felt more comfortable with women in many ways than he did with men. He felt able to sort of deliver his -- an emotional truth that he felt somewhat inhibited from sharing with -- we may still live in a macho age, but the era in which Elvis grew up, I mean, guys -- it was difficult to reveal emotion, reveal a vulnerability.
Elvis always felt totally comfortable with women from the time he was a teenager, in just showing his feelings, and you can see it. I mean, you can see in the women that he knew from the time he was 15, 16 years old, and all of them are unique. They are individual. Many of them are funny. They could be sassy. They are all very, very different, but they are all -- they are all remarkable individuals, each in their own right, and they are all people to whom Elvis confided aside of himself that he really wasn't going to share with the guys around him, however much else he did share with them.
SAVIDGE: Priscilla Presley is obviously one woman we closely associate with Elvis. What did you learn about her and the love between the two of them?
GURALNICK: Well, I think that was most remarkable about Priscilla is that when Elvis met her at the age of 14 or 15, she was a girl who knew her own mind. She was a very determined person, and it was -- I think that everybody who was around Elvis at that point -- this was in Germany when Elvis was in the Army in 1959, in the fall of 1959, late summer, and everybody who was present was aware that it was as if a spark of electricity had gone off. I mean there was no question in anybody's mind, up until that time, people thought that Elvis would be going home, marrying the girl he left behind, marrying this woman who he had -- certainly he had every expectation that he was going to go home and that they were going to get married, and that isn't what happened. I think from the moment that he met Priscilla, everyone who saw this meeting, everyone who was witness to it, or everyone who was around Elvis and Priscilla in Germany knew that whatever else happened, Elvis wasn't going back to his previous life.
SAVIDGE: We often say Elvis, the man, the myth, and the legend. As a biographer, there must be so many people you run across who have a story, but it may not actually be factual. I'm wondering how you separate what is the legend into what is the life of Elvis Presley.
GURALNICK: I think what you are always looking for, is -- I mean all of us inflate our own roles in the past. I mean if you ask me about what I did in the past, I mean, I might -- you know, I might be trying to be honest with you, but I might raise up -- I might put myself in the center of the picture more than I actually deserve, and certainly almost everybody does that. What you are always looking for in a sense is the story which is not focused on the person who is telling the story, but is focused on the subject of the story, and you are also looking to corroborate -- for corroborating evidence. You are looking for two different pictures, you are looking for where things cross. But most of all, I think you are looking for a kind of both an emotional and a factual truth. I think that documentation can so often change your picture of the way things are. For example, with Elvis's father, Vernon, who is often pictured in the past as a kind of lazy ne'er-do-well, claimed he had a bad back. When I got into the archives here at Graceland, I discovered documentation which showed that he always worked, he always paid his bills. He was the most conscientious of people. This may not make him a hero, but it was a very, very different picture than the picture that people were painting of him.
SAVIDGE: Peter, let me ask you this. In all your research, was there a question perhaps you had about Elvis that you never really found the answer to, or anything that still maybe lingers in what you want to learn?
GURALNICK: I will tell you, there are so many -- you know, history is something which is constantly expanding. The more -- you have to recognize that the more you learn, the more you realize you actually don't know, so it is something that is going to continually evolve, and that continually expands.
There are little questions, I mean -- I think that if I had -- if there were one thing I could do, it would be to sit down and talk with Elvis about the music, because I think that was the core of his life, it was the central passion of his life. And if I could ask him one question, I would ask him, All right, now you said in this interview in 1956 in Charlotte, North Carolina, I used to hear old Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, the blues singer who wrote Elvis's first record, I used to hear old Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup bang his box when I was a boy in Tupelo.
And I would ask Elvis, now did you really see him? Where did you see him in Tupelo? Or did you just listen to his records? And it is that kind of thing, it is these details, it is the kind of how the weather was, it is the specifics that really paint a portrait, and that you are always looking for.
SAVIDGE: It is the perspective on a person's life. Peter Guralnick, thank you very much for joining us. Author of "Careless Love: the Unmaking of Elvis Presley," and "Last Train to Memphis." Thanks again.
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