Before getting into the matter, simply point out one fact above all: at the end of this book, it is difficult not to think of it as the most overwhelming musical biography ever written. To reach such a consideration, one reality is enough that prevails over all the others: reading these almost fifteen hundred pages reads like that great American novel that every North American author craves from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. . Precisely, these two books here combined as one emerge as a devastating x-ray of the ins and outs that give shape to the American dream. One, here starring the most popular rock cult figure, that of a human being who made himself and self-destructed through a final era, equally great in terms of artistic achievements.
Both for everyone who knows the story of the “King of Rock” and for those who only know his name, what oozes from such a kilometric manuscript is an immersion into the heavens and hells of it as (or more) exhaustive and brilliant as the one that Jimmy McDnonough did regarding Neil Young in the essential “Shakey”. Like this other biography (probably the best after the one we are dealing with today), music critic Peter Guralnick detectives what the Elvis world means, not only that of the man with the toupee, but of his entire environment in a work that justifies an entire career and elevates him as the author of the most brilliant pages around Elvis, even above what, at the time, the great Greil Marcus left reflected in the pages of “Mystery Train”.
Here there is no devotion or pernicious vouyeur airs. Not at all. Here all the work carried out is circumscribed to a sober and elegant prose through endless tests that articulate the story of the rise and fall of a mystery made man, portrayed without the slightest intention of emphasizing the grotesque (which is a lot) or of flatter her different torrid episodes with the muses. No, this is the truth and the weight of it. A very high one, encrypted around a journalistic feat of those that are counted at one per decade. That is how important this book is and that is how it should always be.