The beginning and end of Elvis Presley
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The JC gets all figurative
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Elvis Presley’s career began and ended in Memphis, Tennessee.
End
Millions of tourists visit Graceland, 3734 Elvis Presley boulevard, where for $75 an adult can tour the king’s mansion: a bored school leaver from Bartlett, MS hands you an iPad and headphones, ushers you into a cinema for a 15-minute film and then onto a minibus which ferries you across the Boulevard to the mansion where, following a bored lecture about touching nothing and taking no film, you follow a narrow barricaded path through Graceland’s ground floor and basement — you don’t get to see the King’s throne, alas — exiting through the Jungle Room and out to the Meditation Garden where you can stand reverentially over the Presley family graves and harmonise Heartbreak Hotel in raga. For extra you can go inside the Presley airplanes. It’s dull.
Doubtless the worldwide fascination with Elvis ensures a good commercial return for Elvis Presley Enterprises — the pipeline of foreign rock ’n’ roll tragics, like the JC, doing their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage guarantees that — but the “Gracelands experience” is a singularly uninvolving one: rather like being put on hold when you ring up the council.
Beginning
A few miles up Elvis Presley Boulevard, on the outskirts of the Memphis downtown area, is 706 Union Avenue. It was a car-parts warehouse called “The Magic Throttle Company” until Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service in 1950. By 1952 Phillips had started his own record label, and in the summer of 1954 a 19-year-old Elvis Presley recorded his first single there.
You can visit Sun, which by night is still a working studio, today. The tours cost $15 a head, take about an hour, are led by knowledgeable, passionate volunteers. The studio proper is as it was in Elvis’s day, with some of the original microphones and instruments, and x marks on the floor indicating where are Elvis, Scotty and Bill stood. There is also an impressive museum of this little building. Sam Phillips discovered and recorded B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Rufus Thomas, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich, and Roy Orbison. Say what you like about rock ’n’ roll, but that’s an extraordinary contribution to the cultural history of the 20th century from one car-parts workshop in the middle of nowhere.
Sun Studios is a lovingly curated, interactive, human experience. It might not make as much money, but the memories the faithful take away will be indelible.