Book Currents
Rock Notes

Elvis Presley, who would have been sixty-three this week, once said of rock and roll, "I don't think it'll ever die completely out, because they're gonna have to get something mighty good to take it's place." To date, nobody has come up with anything better.

The singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw has never been able to resist the allure of rock and roll, and he says about seventy-five percent of the books he owns are about pop music. He likes Stark Raving Elvis (Berkley), William McCranor Henderson's novel about an Elvis impersonator, but mostly he favors biographies. "The truth of rock and roll is far, far more twisted than the fiction," he says. "The fiction just hasn't measured up, compared to what you can find in some of these true-life stories of unfortunate dead rock stars."

Crenshaw's favorite rock biography is Cry: The Johnnie Ray Story (out of print), by Jonny Whiteside, which he calls "an essential book about fame and pop culture." He also admires Bill Haley: The Daddy Of Rock And Roll (out of print), by John Swenson, and The Day The World Turned Blue (out of print), a biography of Gene Vincent by Britt Hagarty, about which he says, "After about page forty, it's like a roller coaster ride into hell." The book includes a picture of Vincent's headstone, on which the melody of "Be-Bop-a-Lula" has been engraved. "The sad part of it is, they have it written incorrectly."

The Elvis book Crenshaw likes best is Peter Guralnick's Last Train To Memphis (Little, Brown), not least because it includes a photograph, taken in Memphis in July, 1954, that, he feels, captures the essence of Presley's story. In it, Elvis seems to be wearing heavy eye shadow, and his hair is "sort of greased all over and a little bit unkempt in the back, and then it just shoots up straight in the front about two and a half inches...He looks like nobody else. Somebody who'd dare to present himself in that way, you figure they're gonna get famous or something."

-- Doug Allen

from
The New Yorker
January 12, 1998