Indeed, the wide range of Elvis’s musical interests is one of the revelations of both volumes. Although the author’s proficiency as a music analyst does not match his skill as a reporter, one comes away with a much deeper understanding of Elvis as an artist.
The book comes most alive when it discusses Elvis’s recording sessions. The reader may tire of the coming and going of Elvis’s entourage, but the detail mirrors the tedium that often engulfed the singer. The depth of Guralnick’s research, based on hundreds of interviews and printed sources, is evident everywhere. This second book details the star’s increasing dissatisfaction with his career (especially his movies), intermittent enthusiasms (particularly karate), wild generosity, failed marriage, boredom and isolation, and his nightmarish tailspin into drug addiction. The first, Last Train to Memphis, follows the performer’s remarkable career until he entered the army in 1958 and is, in a way, the more interesting work, explaining as it does where the phenomenon that was Elvis came from and mapping the cultural streams that fed his musical and performing styles. This volume is the second half of Guralnick’s biography of the legendary singer.
Elvis hurls down a track of self-destruction that is harrowing and, one feels, so unnecessary. You know what’s coming and wish you could do something about it, but you can’t. Reading Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley is like watching a train wreck about to happen. Book Review: CARELESS LOVE: THE UNMAKING OF ELVIS PRESLEY (by Peter Guralnick) : AH CloseĬARELESS LOVE: THE UNMAKING OF ELVIS PRESLEY, by Peter Guralnick, Little, Brown and Company, 784 pages, $27.95.
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