Feeling Graceland – A Christmas Story

When I first heard Elvis’ voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.

Bob Dylan

There is a disrespect towards Elvis that does not fit his achievements and heritage of being the most important and iconic musician of the last century, the one who changed the course of music and culture globally. Much of this distorted legacy originates in that Elvis stopped talking to the mainstream press as early as 1956 in a radical step that can only be applauded as clairvoyant and beautiful, but also one leading to writer-worms like Albert Goldman filling the narrative void in the worst and most defamatory ways possible. Elvis’ biography in more than one way serves well for Cultural Studies, and it’s not a pleasant picture that it’s drawing of American society. Let’s roll some this up by starting with Graceland, an estate as tacky and kitschy as my Christmas tree: granny style decor with old-fashioned pastel colors, heavy velvet, gold in all forms and variations, and the full splendor of Elvis’ stage persona dominate this place. It’s so not-distinguished, that it’s putting a frown up on the faces of snobs who make fun of it and laugh at a man who was a nouveau rich, a millionaire superstar who lacked good taste in their opinion.

If you grew up in the working class, the mockery of Graceland will ring familiar to you since you very likely had the displeasure of knowing people who walked through your home or your friends’ places observingly and in judgemental silence, signaling that you and your family lacked sophistication and class fundamentally. These victims of class conciousness and uniformity were all adults and usually had no sense of humor and thus could never appreciate, say, the deer antlers and the sinister hunting folklore in oaked German living rooms, or the eccentricity of the sprawling kitsch and bling-bling in Catholic Italian living rooms. Graceland is a place that my mother and most of the mothers I know would have decorated exactly like Presley did.

Elvis Presley came from a very poor family and was born in a one room shotgun house to Gladys and Vernon Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi. His father was a part-time truck driver and served a jail term for forgery, while his adored mother did odd jobs like picking cotton. If you can take your eyes off Elvis’ sheer energy, sultry looks and swinging hips in his first performances, you will see that he is playing them in ragged clothes and with holes in his shoes. A point that so far has only been emphasized by a handful of writers like Greil Marcus is that Elvis was not just thicker in later years, but he had gained 20 pounds within the first year of his breakthrough- he was just constantly undernourished before that. “Undernourished” is an euphemism for having too little to eat, or starving. 

One must emphasize that the King never exercised in mind-numbing poor man’s pride and stubborn ignorance or the romanticization of poverty. But the truth is: Elvis just didn’t have the right background. After taking over the world and achieving immeasurable fame and fortune, he could have brought the stars down from the sky, and it still would not have been enough. A little known fact is that the elites of Memphis didn’t quite roll out the red carpet for Elvis, but treated him with conceit and denied him access to their circles up until his death, labeling him who should have been the pride of the city still as “trash” and making him feel as such. Elvis was not only sheltering from fans that besieged him, but also lived in exile from a community that marginalized him from the cradle to the coffin, and instead sought the company of old companions. Which brings us to the next point: the Memphis Mafia.

The modern kitchen sink psychology about Elvis goes like this: despite all his wealth and fame, the King of Rock’n’Roll was an insecure man which built his own reality full of old friends whose loyalties he bought by gifting them all Cadillacs and putting them on his payroll from the beginning of his career in 1954 until his death in 1977 (23 years that is, longer than most of the employment contracts of most of us). In this discourse it is also out of question that Elvis squandered his money big time by doing so. The main imperative underlying this common interpretations is: “Spend your money on all kinds of self-serving luxuries, but never on your friends- never, ever mix friendship and money!” The imperative that illuminates the other pole goes like this: “Waste your life in all sorts of crappy jobs in which you serve corporations or strangers – but never, ever work for family and friends.”
And you gotta ask yourself: why actually? 

***

My good friend Claudia works in ticket sales, and her income decreased and life worsened remarkably since the Corona pandemic started and live entertainment and cultural institutions got shut down. One day this summer when we had a few drinks together, she complained about the attitude of some of her friends during this year of health & economic crises. Whenever Claudia expressed fears about her future, some of her wealthier friends fobbed her off with platitudes: “Everything will be fine”, “Health is the most important thing”, and “You will surely find a new job soon,” (Claudia is 55 and a single mom with no partner to support her). The same good friends who reacted this way to her very real existential crisis also dropped the following sentences to her this summer: “We bought a nice country house for €250,000, but still have to invest about €100,000 in renovations” and “We haven’t spared any costs and booked two weeks of luxury vacation in Santorini, Greece”. Offering Claudia a little financial injection to pay some bills? Negative.

Why is it that our charity is either anonymous or starts and ends with offering an empathetically humiliating conversation to our friends and neighbors, or a cake, or our worn clothes and other things that we no longer need, but consider it an absolute taboo to give them some hard cash to ease their life struggle? Why do we make decisions for them by determining what we think a struggling person needs (more cake) in modern societies, and how smoothly the help fits into our own routine (“I’ll just bake two cakes”)? We seem to behave downwards in the same way as the rich classes above us behave towards their subordinates. All under the guise of reason and supported by complacent, patronizing psychologization and moralization à la “It’s not good for them if I just give them money, they might get lazy or spend the money on alcohol… and my welfare has to signal a few more virtues than the unglamourous, dull reflection of a fifty euro note.”

As teenagers, me and my friends sometimes imagined what we would buy and do if we suddenly got rich. All sorts of lifestyle phantasms followed, but each time our families and close friends were involved in these daydreams. It was crystal clear that we would not only make our parents retire in a big house but also that our best friends would not have to worry about money anymore. We seem to lose this sense for care-taking as we learn to love money with an anal and often greedy fixation and accept it as the absolute value. Elvis didn’t lose it. His “TCB” not only meant “Taking Care of Business” but also taking care of family and friends and sharing his wealth with them.

But it’s not only that. In modern societies we are taught to liberate ourselves from our parents in any case, to be good modern individuals who should dispel any suspicion of being a “mother’s boy” and rather opt for family relationships from a distance. Truth is that this is not the most heroic and strongest form of living, as psychoanalysis and a consumer society want us to believe, but the safest and most evasive (albeit often lonely) one. Modern distanced life and work can mark the boundary between you and an epic life. We like to study epic sagas and myths in order to understand the world and our relations through them. We like it less to live through intense emotions and tragedies described in these stories ourselves, since feeling authentically and alive is most often a painful experience- better to avoid all pain, disappointment and betrayal, and feel cosmically numb. Are you sure that Elvis did not expect and even crave for betrayal instead of loyalty?

My father is a patriarch who centers life around him somewhat similar to Elvis, and he also shares the bitterly poor background with the King. It was when he told me outright, “I need you,” that I dared to give drama a projection surface in my shielded and safe ‘individual life’, and help him out in his taxi company. There were no strict money negotiations or contracts, I just knew that my father would take care of me. Suddenly, with almost 40, I heard sentences like: “Just listen to me, do what I say, and shut up- then all will be good.” What a character! What an outrageously open demonstration of patriarchic dominance!!

Explorations of the new balance of power not just once led to screaming-fests in my father’s garden. I found myself in a life without a protective facade, in the middle of complex relations and tragedies, with literary concepts like fraternal betrayal suddenly coming alive. Greek tragedies and Kain and Abel started to make sense. But I found out other things, too. That my father speaks to sunflowers in his garden, Don Corleone style. Over time, I observed that he employs six people and provides a living for their families, and didn’t lay off this people, although his business has considerably collapsed during the pandemic. I also counted four refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan working for him in the garden and house, which is an intentionally never-ending construction site to keep things busy and flowing, to give himself and these men a sense of usefulness and purpose besides the money. I saw him regularly give 50 euros to the divorced and poorish woman next door, without her having to beg for it or ever pay it back. I saw him appoint the ex-husband of this woman, a drinker and gambler who regularly stole money from my father, who was aware of this, but never confronted the guy or fired him. Needless to say that my father’s taxi driver career is riddled with free rides and struggling clients and homeless people that he would bring home for a warm meal. When my father was in hospital this summer, none of these persons just sent flowers, but 20 of them gathered in front of the hospital and waited, deeply worried. I looked at them and realized that my father is a big part of their lives, and couldn’t imagine how that feels, and how much strength this responsibility takes. I realized that my terribly difficult father is a saint. 

And so was Elvis. Microcosm is macrocosm, and Elvis’ private way of living stood in stark contrast to the cruel capitalist system and modern alienation around us and represented an alternative model. Elvis was a man who gave life to those around him like no wage-slavery job or alternative hippie commune with fascist structures ever could manage to give. His daughter Lisa Marie remembers: “I only remember him giving to people. I remember people going to him saying, ‘I just got a bum deal,’ and bang, there was a check. I never saw him not doing something for somebody, ever. /…/ That was probably the one thing that kept him sane, his ability to give back.” 

Globally, Elvis has no image problem like he has in America. Maybe more of his compatriots would acknowledge and admire Elvis’ humanity and generosity if more modern architecture and Scandinavian design had been involved in it. More Jaguar E-Types and less pink Cadillacs. More ‘class’. Who knows. But the explanation of the mystery for me is less to be found in these processes of marginalization than in the systemic rejection of Elvis’ universal and unprejudiced understanding of humans and cultures, and the system-challenging alternative way of living that he introduced to the biggest global audience any star ever had. The paradox of his bold and revolutionary innovations, the “democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category” as Peter Guralnick puts it, is that this vision conversely seems to make it difficult for any particular race and class to categorically embrace or own Elvis. The irritation which the boy from Tupelo caused seems to persist even after almost 70 years. Time to feel Graceland before it turns into our Nemesis.

by Saliha Enzenauer

(Also read: How did Elvis get turned into a racist? by Peter Guralnick)