REJECTED!

Recently I answered an open call for submissions from Contiuum Press' 33 1/3 series, a run of monograph-like books dedicated to classic albums. Out of 450 submissions they chose 20. Mine wasn't one of them, which is fine, although I was hoping it would be. Meanwhile, my big piece of Memphis music movies was pushed from the issue it was slated to run in with the possibility it might run in a future issue. Might.

So my freelance writing sideline is at an impasse at the moment. Which is okay, I guess. I've got plenty to do for The A.V. Club, which always publishes my writing to an audience that seems to like it. But I would have liked to have written this book and I would have liked to see my Memphis work pay off. Which it might still. Might.

Anyway, below is my rejected proposal in the interest of just getting it out there. I'm not rereading it, especially since I've thought of ways to improve it ever since I sent it. If it's riddled with typos or misspellings, please don't let me know. That would just depresss me. Also, you should hear the album. It's amazing.

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First let me say that I was thrilled to see you had opened the door for submissions for 33 1/3. I’m a big fan of the series and would love to contribute. With that out of the way, let me get right down to it and propose doing a book on an amazing album I can’t believe you haven’t covered yet: Jerry Lee Lewis Live At The Star Club, Hamburg.

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It’s an album recorded at a crossroads, both for Lewis and for rock and roll, and I would approach it as such. Having seen scandal diminish his commercial fortunes, Lewis has left Sun Records and Sam Phillips for Smash and an unsure future that, in 1964, has yet to pay off. Yet while the hits have dried up domestically, Lewis’ stock has risen abroad. A return to England, the country that unmade him, has been a great success. He has no shortage of fans in Germany either, wildly enthusiastic fans who chant his name when he plays The Star Club in the heart of Hamburg’s nightclub-and-red-light-district, the Reeperbahn. It’s the district that helped birth The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, a wave of rock and roll musicians who grew up worshipping Lewis and his peers, a generation they’re already eclipsing.

One of the bands chasing The Beatles will back Lewis at the Star Club set, The Nashville Teens, who, despite their name, hail from throughout the U.K. They’re soon to have a hit with “Tobacco Road” then begin a slow fade back to obscurity. On this album, they almost seem to be doing battle with Lewis, his inimitable singing and playing outpacing their secondhand competence. They play the British Invasion sound well, but there’s no mistaking it for anything but a copy of a copy made irrelevant here by the presence of an original. As Lewis races through his own hits, and the hits of others from his generation, they’ll lose the battle even if others will win the war for them.

Lewis remains, as ever, a tortured man, believing that the music at which he excels has already spelled his eternal damnation. He’s still haunted by the loss of his toddler son, Steve Allen Lewis, who died in the family swimming pool. His marriage with Myra Lewis, the cousin he married when she was 13, remains volatile. There’s joy in his playing in front of that chanting crowd, but something else as well. Performing high on amphetamines, the state in which he would continue to perform well into the 1990s, he adds his own flourishes to the lyrics. When he sings, “Jerry Lee’s going to rock away all his blues,” while playing “High School Confidential,” there’s exuberance to it but also some wishful thinking. He’s a few years away from a comeback with the country hit “Another Time, Another Place,” but a performance of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart” gives a hint of the guilt-soaked records that will send him up the country charts.

Recorded in a time of great change for Lewis and the music he helped popularize, Live At The Star Club, Hamburg provides a jumping off point for further discussion—of both Lewis and the environment surrounding the creation of the album—with virtually every song. I would structure this book around the album’s set list, discussing the origins of each song, its particular relevance to Lewis as a recording artist, and it relation to a larger discussion. The autobiographical “Lewis Boogie,” for instance, would lead into a discussion of Lewis’ origins. With “Great Balls Of Fire,” a song built around the twisting of Pentecostal imagery into a sexual sacrilege, I would talk about Lewis’ religious beliefs. Other points of discussion would include ‘60s Hamburg (a scene as wild and open in its way as ‘50s Memphis), Lewis’ relationship with the artists and rivals whose hits he’s covering (including Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and, with “Money,” Motown), and the unhappy decades awaiting him as he sank successfully into the sounds of country remorse.

As for the biographical information, I’m the editor of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. I began at The A.V. Club as a freelancer, then worked as assistant editor before becoming editor and I’ve written thousands (no, really) of music and film reviews for it, in addition to interviewing everyone from Sam Phillips to Robert Altman. During my tenure there I’ve helped build a section that was once an afterthought to the satirical news into a respected publication in its own right. I would be the best possible person to write this book both because of my deep love of the music and because of my willingness to throw myself into a project until I’m second-to-none in expertise. What I don’t know about Lewis and this album already I intend to research thoroughly both through secondary sources and by consulting as many primary sources as I can track down. I zeroed in on this album as the result of writing a piece for an upcoming issue of REDACTED on portrayals of Memphis music in film. I’ve long been drawn to the place and period that created the early sounds of rock and soul music, but it was Lewis that I couldn’t let go of when I finished the piece. I would like to write a book with the unmistakable intensity of a Jerry Lee Lewis performance and the scholarly discipline I’ve admired in other volumes in this series. My favorite so far: Douglas Wolk’s Live At The Apollo, which captured the personality of the performance itself, provided illuminating facts about its context, and breathed with a personality all its own.

I sincerely hope you’ll give me the opportunity to write an entry that can live up to the high standards you’ve set so far.

JERRY LEE LEWIS: LIVE AT THE FRENCH LICK RESORT AND CASINO, FRENCH LICK, INDIANA

I've regretted going to my share of concerts over the years, and sometimes not even because they're bad. There's a Tortoise show that stands out as something that would be a truly memorable experience if the band was playing in your living room as you drifted off to enjoy a nice nap. But I've never once regretted turning out for one of the old guys. One of my favorite concert memories ever is seeing Johnny Cash at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994. This was around the same time the first American Recordings album came out. He was that year's token old-timer and I don't think he expected the reception he got. It's not like he ever stopped touring, but I don't think he'd ever played to a sea of black-clad, pierced English youth who could sing along to every song. And I mean every song. Not just "Ring Of Fire" but "Ghost Riders In The Sky," too.

On Saturday night Stevie and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis, like Cash another member of the Million Dollar Quartet. The last one, actually. He even named his last album Last Man Standing and put a picture of himself with Cash, Elvis, and Carl Perkins inside. I've been on a big Jerry Lee kick ever since writing the (apparently still in the editing process) article on Memphis music movies and picking up the aforementioned Last Man Standing. (A side note: It's actually quite good, unlike most of the oldsters-duet-with-younger-stars albums. Of particular note: A duet with Keith Richards called "That Kind Of Fool" on which they lament they were never the kind of fools who could just have one drink and go home to their wives.)

I'll spare you the harrowing ordeal of getting there via Google Maps directions that took us through the back roads of a national forest where no house is apparently complete unless there's half an automobile or a broken stove on the lawn and mention only in passing that southern Indiana is (otherwise) really pretty to get to the show. Once again: No regrets. Lewis' long-serving band warmed up the show with a handful of oldies which the drunken louts behind us dimissed is "bullshit" that quickly got downgraded to "third rate bullshit." It wasn't, but it wasn't star time either. That came when Lewis ambled out, explained that his plane had been rerouted and that he hadn't had time to change then launched into "Roll Over Beethoven." His voice was problematic on some songs, in fine form on others but the playng remained, as always, an inimitable force of nature. And, despite the environment--which offered excellent acoustics but little else in the way of atmosphere--it felt like a Jerry Lee Lewis show. The drunken louts wandered up to the front of the stage to do some dancing, prompting security to escort them to one side, but not before one of them engaged in some spirited finger-pointing in Lewis' direction and Lewis returned the favor. Later Lewis complained about how it wasn't a rock and roll show if people could tell you how to dance and when to dance. This was shortly before a fight broke out (also involving one of the louts.) For a good 90 seconds or so it was more Memphis roadhouse than sterile casino.

One particular highlight was Charlie Rich's "Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave," which Lewis played as a country lament that turned into rockabilly then back again. These are the official words:
"Don't put no headstone on my grave,
All my life I've been a slave,
Want the whole wide world to know,
That I'm the man that loved you so"
For some reason I heard "loved you so" as "loved his soul." I could be wrong. But I do know he finished the song by slamming the cover of the piano keys against the piano and then looking out at the audience in defiance of something. It might have been death or maybe just the woman he took to task for putting her fingers in her ears with the words, "And people say I'm crazy."

As I was hoping, he also did his rendition of "Over The Rainbow," which just kills me. And he closed, of course, "With Great Balls Of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shaking Going On." For the final passages of "Shaking" he rose, kicked over the piano bench, and played standing up. There was great effort involved in every part of that action and to close the show he simply wandered off and let the band play the final notes. But the spirit behind the gesture was unmistakable. One more rock and roll show down and The Killer was off to join the night, even if now it was at a slower pace.

Below's the setlist. Both it and the photo above come via the thorough European fansite The Jerry Lee Lewis Start Page.

1) Roll Over Beethoven
2) Over The Rainbow
3) Sweet Little Sixteen
4) Memphis, Tennessee
5) Before The Night Is Over
6) She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye
7) Why You Been Gone So Long
8) Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave
9) I Dont Want To Be Lonely Tonight
10) You Win Again
11) Hadacol Boogie
12) Great Balls Of Fire
13) Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! (1989)
DIRECTOR: JIM MCBRIDE

Nick Tosches wrote an amazing biography--of a sort--of Jerry Lee Lewis called Helfire that cast Lewis' life in terms of a Faulknerian drama between good and evil and imagined in the strictest Pentecostal terms. If Jim McBride ever read it before making Great Balls Of Fire! he must have decided to take everything in the opposite direction. Balls' greatest debt belongs to Frank Tashlin, the animator-turned-director who best known for working with that other Jerry Lewis. Tashlin made cartoonish, candy-colored satires in the 1950s and his influence is all over this movie. There's a great scene that falls where most biopics would inset a montage of swirling newspapers and screaming fans to symbolize their subject's ascent to fame. Instead, Lewis, as played by Dennis Quaid, rides through town, cheered along the way by everyone from high school students, to courthouse protestors to cops. Everyone loves Jerry Lee! Later, the sequence is reversed, and all those one-time fans shun him. It's silly, but much of the movie treads the line between knowing camp and, well, just plain camp. In the end it doesn't work out, but it's a valiant effort that's better than most reviews would suggest.

McBride has tried to make a movie with all the cartoonish energy and outsized sexuality of a Jerry Lee Lewis song and sometime he gets there, largely thanks to a daring performance from Dennis Quaid, drawing his inspiration from Huckleberry Hound when he's not channeling Lewis. Here the Ferriday Fireball is played an unreflective bumpkin driven by the power of his music and torn between serving god (as per the wishes of cousin Jimmy Swaggart, played by Alec Baldwin) and playing rock and roll. But really he's not torn enough. Anyone who's ever heard the amazing conversation between Lewis and Sam Phillips before recording "Great Balls Of Fire"--in which Lewis frets over playing "the devil's music," Phillips replies that music can save souls and Lewis replies, "How can the devil save souls?... I have the devil in me. If I didn't I'd be a Christian"--knows Lewis was tormented by the things that gave him joy. But here the dark side's not dark enough and while Balls gets a lot of the energy that made Lewis a star, it can't go much deeper. It ends with Lewis storming out of church, choosing independence over conformity. That was one of the choices he had to make, but far from the only one. McBride made Balls with Lewis' cooperation. (He recorded his songs for Quaid to lip synch.) The portrait of an innocent undone by stuffy '50s morality must have made it an easy sell.

Still, there's plenty to like here. Quaid's romance of his 13-year-old cousin (a giggly Winona Ryder who, in another Tashlin-esque sequence furnishes their new home by going to a store and literally throwing money around) is played for creepy, funny laughs. ("You're all woman to Jerry Lee!") The production design is theme park-perfect and there's a great sequence in which Sam Phillips listens to Lewis' recording of "Crazy Arms," likes it, presses it, runs it down to Dewey Phillips at WHBQ, and has the malt girls swooning before the night is through. The city was open that way then and the world was ready to listen.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: HUSTLE AND FLOW (2005)
DIRECTOR: CRAIG BREWER
I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

When I first conceived this piece on Memphis music movies a completely forgot about Hustle And Flow. I was thinking of old school Memphis blues, country, soul, and rock and roll and forgetting that new music is still getting made there. I blame the autumnal tone of 40 Shades Of Blue and the nostalgia of the unsatisfying doc Only The Strong Survive (which I'll also be writing about. They spend their time driving past the ruins of the old music shrines and never acknowledge that there might be music bubbling up from those ruins? Is there a style of music made famous in Memphis that didn't work its way up from the economic bottom?

That's certainly the vision present by H&F, which impressed me more this time around than last. I loved the Terrence Howard performance but found the underdog-against-the-odds story a little pat. Still do, but it worked for me this time. Maybe it's because this time it played more like a superior b-movie than a failed arthouse movie. But I digress...

H&F works well as a companion piece to 40 Shades. Where Rip Torn plays a man whose found the limits of what music can provide him--spiritually if not financially--Howard plays a guy who's just finding out where music can take him. And where it can take him as a lot more to do with his soul than his wallet. From an early scene in which Howard cries listening to a spiritual in church to a finale that leaves him not on top but somewhere a few notches up from where he was before, it's much more about finding oneself as an artist and a human being than as a commercial success. In fact, commercial success, as embodied by Ludacris' character Skinny Black--a Memphis born rapper who's found great success--is treated with no small amount of suspicion. Early on, Howard looks at the cover of a Skinny Black CD as if he's not sure what about him bugs him. By the time they meet, he's figured it out. He gets Black's attention with weed and holds it with the words "What the fuck happened to you?" He explains that Memphis misses him and delivers an impassioned monologue about how, when the present civilization crumbled arcehologists would sort through the rubble of New York and Paris but, "If a nigga wanted to know about me, wanted to know about Memphis, all they gotta do is find your first underground tape.”

A city can be defined by music but it can also be explained by it. James Joyce wrote that he hoped Dublin, if destroyed, could be reconstructed brick by brick from his descriptions in Ulysses. But I don't think that's why he wrote the book and I don't think that's why Howard loves that tape so much. Sometimes art justifies who we are by explaining to the world how we lived and why we did the things we did, even when those things pained us, which is something that D.J. Qualls touches on in another monologue:

The thing is, and I believe this man, rap is coming back home to the south. This is where it all began: Heavy percussion, repetitive hooks, sexually suggestive lyics… It’s all blues, brother. “Back Door Man” to “Back Dat Ass Up,” it’s all about pain and pussy and making’ music man. With simple tools. By any means necessary. You’ve got to get what you’ve got to say out. Because you’ve got to. Every man, you know what I’m sayin’?... Has the right, the goddamn right, to contribute a verse.

He's tying Howard's "It's Hard Out There For Pimp" lament to the same tradition as Furry Lewis. The song just keeps changing shape and anyone who feels that Memphis' contributions belong in the past just isn't looking hard enough.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: FORTY SHADES OF BLUE (2005)

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Writer/director Ira Sachs' 40 Shades Of Blue was one of the films that first got me interested in doing this piece. A washed out mood piece starring Rip Torn as an aging Memphis music producer (who looks a bit like Sam Phillips but whose career seems closer to a Chips Moman or a Dan Penn. Torn's haunting performance really grabbed me, as did a portrait of a place that had drifted away from its moment of greatness. Accepting an award early in the film, Torn says, "“Music is the only valid thing to come out of this whole mess we call an industry. It’s just a moment in time that happened in Memphis that was just pure magic, when the music of the blacks and the whites came together.” But it's a time that's past, both for the city and for Torn. He now lives in a luxurious, lakeside house with a beautiful girlfriend (Dina Korzun) and their young child but the only moments in the film in which he appears even the least bit happy come when he boozes it up with some old music buddies. "Dark End Of The Street" brings him to tears, but he's disconnected from the rest of his life.

The film's as much about Korzun—whose performance is as dead-eyed as it is deep—a Russian emigre whose relationship with Torn is, to all appearances, just a more refined version of a sex-for-survival strategy she's used her entire life. That's too harsh though. She's the most sympathetic character in the film.

Getting back to the music, Torn goes on about growing up with attention divided between white string bands ,the sounds of jukeboxes in black clubs and it's clear he played a large part of bringing them together. But what has he done lately? We see him in the studio, acting with a focus he never has elsewhere, but the focus turns into rage in a flash. This is the intense, method-y Torn of Cracking Up, not the guy from the Men In Black movies. We see him later, contributing a lovely piano line to an ungodly piece of Europop. They drive through Memphis, past old studios and hangout spots now fallen into ruins. They drive to clubs that thump to dance music with no connection to anything like soul. The crowd's all white. He throws a party for himself with music he keeps interrupting for speeches and drunken proposals. By the end, when he begins drunkenly talking about how all he cared about was the the music, his guests pay no attention to him. The good times went away and the togetherness they created goes with them. Maybe it was all an illusion after all.

The music wasn't enough. At film's end there's a nearly wordless driving sequence in which Torn and Korzun both seem to have found a kind of sadness no song could prepare them for.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: U2: RATTLE AND HUM (1988)
DIRECTOR: PHIL JOANOU

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)
DIRECTOR: ROB REINER

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Rattle And Hum is the name of both a 1988 album by U2 and the accompanying tour film directed by the band's frequent video director Phil Joanou. Both document U2's attempt to connect to American roots music and both, however accidentally, document the failure of that attempt. By 1988, U2 had transformed themselves from critics' darlings and college rock staples into arena-filling, world-conquerors, filling a biggest-band-in-the-world void left when Springsteen decided that the E. Street machine had had its day. The band would soon radically, and successfully, rework its sound, joining its sweeping anthems to early '90s dancefloor sounds to create a self-consciously clamorous pop sound. This, however, is a reinvention that, while producing some great music, doesn't quite take.

Why? It's pretty evident in the scenes of the band recording in the then recently reopened Sun Studios with songwriter/producer "Cowboy" Jack Clement, best known for discovering Jerry Lee Lewis. Sure, Clement's there and so are the Memphis Horns. But there's no willingness to bend to tradition in the performance. Whether by accident or design, the way Joanou shoots the scene couldn't be more appropriate: There's Bono in the foreground singing into a classic microphone (maybe microphone, the one that stands so casually on the floor of Sun but which captured all those classic performances). There's a picture of Elvis in the background, singing into another mic. It's all just stage-dressing. Bono's the show.

Later, after some shots of The Edge staring soulfully at the Mississippi, we join the boys on a trip to Graceland. It's a rare opportunity for drummer Larry Mullen Jr. to speak and what he says suggests that he might not be the quiet one by choice:

I was a little bit disturbed by going to Graceland to be honest because, unlike some of the other guys I love the Elvis movies… It was great to see a film star who was a musician. In every single one of his movies. He wasn’t acting as a car salesman. He was acting a car salesman who loved to play guitar. And I really related to that. Because I worked in sales for a couple of years.

Mullen gets to sit on one of The King's guitars after some smooth talk from Bono ("“What Harley-Davidson means to this man you wouldn’t undersand.”) Then the U2 show lumbers off to find another town and another tradition.

The trip echoes an earlier pilgrimage from Spinal Tap. A "thorougly depressing" outing to Elvis' grave that Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel at least believes "puts perspective on things." "Too much," Michael McKean's David St. Hubbins decides. "Too much fucking perspective."

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: MYSTERY TRAIN
DIRECTOR: JIM JARMUSCH (1989)

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Mystery Train is Jim Jarmusch's fourth feature film and, according to the critical consensus, one of his least successful. It's a favorite of mine, however, if only for the time at which I saw it and the fact that it contains too many Keith-pleasing elements—the South, rock and roll, the time-capsule presentation of a particular place at a particular time—not to be a favorite. Mystery Train was the first film I rented from Four Star Video Heaven—where I would later work—in Madison, Wisconsin after moving there to go to attend grad school in 1995. It was a time when I was falling hard for Jarmusch and, beneath that, an entire way to approaching film that I'd never experienced before. I first saw Jarmusch as part of a double feature on campus at Lancaster University in 1994 where the film society screened Stranger Than Paradise and Night On Earth (along with the Tom Waits/Iggy Pop segment of what would become Coffee And Cigarettes). I'd never seen a movie like Stranger before. The takes were long. The camera stationary. The dialogue circular. The story eventually went somewhere, but it didn't get there fast. The settings were an unglamorous corner of New York, the snowiest winter in Cleveland, and a mostly hotel-bound trip to Florida, all shot in the same grainy black and white. It was as much about how people behaved while attending to the mundane details of their lives and negotiating the minefields of friends and family relations as any grand dramatic incident. Wherever you go, the most important things tend to take place in small rooms filled with familiar faces. To me it was revolutionary. Now I know it was part of a different, minimal tradition. Heck, Jarmusch even namechecks Ozu in the dialogue.

It was another year before I'd see Jarmusch again. The video stores in Springfield, Ohio didn't stock his films, for some reason. It was a happy reunion and, revisiting Mystery Train I found it held up well, even if it's never better than its opening segment starring Masatoshi Nagase (Jun) and Youki Kudoh (Mitsuko) as Japanese rockabillies making a Memphis pilgrimage. They arrive, and leave, by train, to the tune of the title song. On their arrival its played by Elvis. On their departure by its originators, Little Junior's Blue Flames, who recorded in 1953, two years before Elvis. It was written by Junior Parker, the Blue Flames'. Upon arrival, they argue over where to go first, Sun Records or Graceland. She wants Graceland first. He wants Sun. She loves Elvis. He's partial to Carl Perkins, but this seems to be as much an issue of contrarionism as taste. He keeps a cigarette tucked behind his ear, just behind a careful pompadour. He wears a neat, green jacket.

It's a Japanese approximation of a tough, American rock and roll cat, but Jarmusch doesn't really play it for laughs. Like those two versions of "Mystery Train," it's all a matter of interpretation. Junior Parker wrote "Mystery Train." Elvis, or somebody, added to the lyric. But where does it really come from? You can chase that Mystery Train back further. Furry Lewis—a Beale Street fixture as both a performer and a street sweeper—cut a song called "Good Looking Blues" in 1927 that sings of a train "sixteen coaches long." Did he dream it up, or does the phrase go back further? Does it predate the trains themselves?

Sun or Graceland? Significantly, these seem to be the only points of interest for the tourists. Memphis has gotten flattened out between Tennessee and Yokohama but the real Memphis has other plans for them. That's none other than Memphis music godfather Rufus Thomas—he of Sun and Stax and WDIA and "Walking The Dog" and its countless sequels—who greets them at the train station (a spot as nearly deserted as the Amtrak train that brings them into town. Sun Records comes first by accident. They're ushered into the famous studio then assualted with a tour guide's spiel that segues from "race music" to endless chatter about Elvis at a rapid clip. Elvis cannot be escaped. Here is a room that's played host to the recording of "Rocket 88," the early work of B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, virtually every blues and gospel artist in Memphis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and on and on. But he's bigger than it all. They'll later meet him as a statue and, in her scrapbook, see his image juxtaposed against the statue of a Middle Eastern King, Buddha, the Statue Of Liberty, and Madonna. Jun: "Elvis was even more influential than I thought." It's an understatement.

Elvis is everywhere but he's also elusive and unobtainable. Standing in his t-shirt, watching a train pass by, Jun's image falls apart. He's a skinny kid with a scowl chasing a sound of freedom first heard on a Walkman many miles away. In the love scene that follows, he proves himself no tiger. He's 18 and stiill growing into an image that may not work out for him in the end.

Elvis is just as elusive for Nicoletta Braschi in the film's second segment. An Italian woman returning to Rome with her husband's body, she becomes an accidental tourist in Memphis. She's also a dupe—sort of—for every hustler to pass her way. She's a knowing dupe, however, one who goes along with their schemes just because it's easier, and more polite, not to call bullshit. First she's talked into buying an armful of magazines. Later, in a diner, she's subjected by Tom Noonan to a long story about picking up the ghost of Elvis who told him to give her a comb... But there is a small delivery fee. Lonely, she agrees to share her room with Elizabeth Bracco, who's just left her husband and can't afford the $22 room in the rundown hotel presided over by manager Screamin' Jay Hawkins and bellboy Cinqué "brother of Spike" Lee. (It's the same place Jun and Mitsuko stay.) But then she has an authentic encounter with the ghost of Elvis himself. Has he come lookng for his comb after all? It's never quite clear. Before fading away he simply says, politely, "I musta got the wrong address or somethin’. I gotta go.” There's no escaping Elvis. But what Elvis means remains up for debte. (In a quirk of history, the actor who looks so eerily like the young Elvis is Stephen Jones, the husband of Paula Jones who was only a few years away from her own alleged hotel encounter with our most Elvis-ish president.)

"I can't get rid of that fucking guy," laments Joe Strummer playing a hard-luck character referred to by his almost exclusively black friends as "Elvis." (Funniest exchange in the whole movie: Strummer: "Don't call me Elvis! If you can't use my proper name, why don't you try "Carl Perkins, Jr." or something? I mean, I don't call them "Sam & Dave", do I?" Black guy: "Hey man, my name is Dave.") Soon he'll be on the run in all the most neglected parts of Memphis, the places where tourists in town for Sun and Graceland would never go, bad neighborhoods with openly racist liquor store clerks, the crumbling remains of a years-from-being-revived-Stax, the spots underneath the rail lines where nobody goes, beneath the place the trains run, keeping their secrets from those who they delivers and those they whisk away.

(Follow up: Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, Robert Gordon's It Came From Memphis, Peter Guralnick's Last Train To Memphis, look into Furry Lewis)