Richard Hawley

Richard Hawley Forum
It is currently Fri Mar 29, 2024 8:06 am

All times are UTC [ DST ]




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 15 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: Last train to Memphis
PostPosted: Fri May 14, 2010 10:19 pm 
Offline
Regular
User avatar

Joined: Thu May 13, 2010 4:49 pm
Posts: 25
Location: near Leeds
Just finished Last train to Memphis. Its about Elvis starting out up to him going in the army. Probably the best book I have read about Elvis and I am a huge fan. Found myself willing Sam Phillips to give him a chance even though he obviously did. Fooking brill, even if you are not a fan its still a good read as it mentions loads of other artist around at the time.

_________________
Think of the good times, only the good times! Jay and the Americans


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon May 17, 2010 4:14 pm 
Offline
Regular poster
User avatar

Joined: Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:22 pm
Posts: 96
Location: Rochdale
It's a great read and is widely regarded as by far the best Elvis biography. Have you got part two 'Careless Love'? It's quite heartbreaking even though we all know the ending...

Both volumes pretty much add up to the definitive account of Elvis.

_________________
__________________________________
Chris


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon May 17, 2010 4:40 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!
User avatar

Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2004 9:06 am
Posts: 4372
Location: SHEFFIELD
i read it a few years ago, fantastic book. i've been meaning to get the 2nd part too. heard it's equally good. l

_________________
we're gonna rock this town, rock it all night long!

www.myspace.com/roamingson
www.facebook.com/roamingsonuk
www.facebook.com/marklyall


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon May 17, 2010 4:56 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!

Joined: Wed Apr 19, 2006 12:14 pm
Posts: 13446
Together its the best biography I've ever read of Elvis - there have been some really dire ones (Goldman for a start :evil: ).

Mind you, Elvis by Jerry Hopkins (published 1972) is also a very good one, but obviously its not a complete account - I'm not sure if he ever updated it or wrote a companion volume about the last few years.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 8:02 pm 
Offline
Hawley Super-Groupie

Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 8:37 pm
Posts: 292
Location: Derby
Quote:

Actually, he did and I have a copy. It's titled 'Elvis - The Final Years', ISBN 0 491 02873 3, published 1980. Also a very good ,reasonably balanced, read.

_________________
The bitter and the sweet


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 8:06 pm 
Offline
Hawley Super-Groupie

Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 8:37 pm
Posts: 292
Location: Derby
Sorry, got me quotes all mixed up :!: The 'quote' is my response to the Baroness' post. Must try harder!

_________________
The bitter and the sweet


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 8:11 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!

Joined: Wed Apr 19, 2006 12:14 pm
Posts: 13446
Thanks Robbo I'll have to get myself a copy :D


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2010 9:55 pm 
Offline
The Boss
User avatar

Joined: Fri May 30, 2003 9:54 am
Posts: 18679
Location: Sheffield
its a great great book really beautifully written,be careful though careless love is a bit of a car crash and you just know its all going to go horribly wrong made me so sad for a long time,but also made me aware of what NOT to do,although i find it hard being critical of Elvis very few human being's have carried the weight he did in modern culture.

_________________
now,then!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed May 19, 2010 7:09 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!
User avatar

Joined: Thu Nov 24, 2005 12:12 pm
Posts: 4530
Agree with Richard re: both books. Last Train To Memphis is detailed, inspirational and just captures the best of Elvis and the things that got to him. I'd only read it out of the library but picked up a secondhand paperback in Carlisle over Easter so I'll be re-reading. Careless Love is very sad but it's also Elvis and he wasn't one without the other. Excellent evocative writing - I'd read anything by Guralnick anyway but he gave Elvis the biography he deserved.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri May 21, 2010 12:49 pm 
Offline
Hawley Groupie

Joined: Wed Jul 18, 2007 10:43 pm
Posts: 198
Location: Stockport
I'm half way through Careless Love. I think Elvis was a kind and good man who had completely lost control. They were different times though and although the Colonel is much maligned he did a great job of keeping Elvis in the public eye...just not a great job artistically...but, of course it was different times so you can't compare...the beatles changed everything because collectively they had the power to do what they wanted, Elvis just seemed to do what the colonel set up for him.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun May 23, 2010 11:45 pm 
Offline
Regular
User avatar

Joined: Thu May 13, 2010 4:49 pm
Posts: 25
Location: near Leeds
Not read careless love, will look out for a copy and let you know my thoughts.

_________________
Think of the good times, only the good times! Jay and the Americans


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon May 24, 2010 4:54 am 
Offline
Too much time on my hands

Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2003 10:23 pm
Posts: 781
The Hawleyboard reads my mind. I found a used copy last year and filed it, already knee deep in other books, and pulled it off the shelf...today.

~ K


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 10:05 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!

Joined: Wed Apr 19, 2006 12:14 pm
Posts: 13446
Interesting Mojo blog here about musical biographies - in particular the hated Goldman biography of Elvis -



ON THE SHELVES of nearly every large charity shop in the UK you can find a battered 50p copy of the biography that in 1981 saw middle-aged teddy boys running into their local WH Smiths. Their mission - to buy as many copies of Albert Goldman's Elvis as possible in order to burn them.

Nearly thirty years later, it's possible to see a glimmer of value in Goldman's Elvis (the passages on early '50s gospel music are decent) and if it forced Peter Guralnick's magisterial '90s Preslography, Last Train To Memphis/Careless Love, into existence then you could argue that it actually did some good. Yet Goldman's prurient approach - painting a gaudy picture of a 20-stone blob obsessed with girls in white knickers, popsicles, cheeseburgers and Monty Python's Flying Circus - entirely overlooks the importance of Elvis's music (critic Greil Marcus famously dubbed the account "cultural genocide") and set a neurotically skewed example for subsequent biographers of major pop culture figures.

Goldman had clearly read too many Mickey Spillane novels, a problem that became even more noticeable in 1988 with his Beatle-bashing cause célèbre The Lives Of John Lennon. Quite aside from the American writer's rampant homophobia and sometimes strange grasp of the English landscape, not to mention his obsessive rendering of Lennon as a degenerate gay thug (peaking in uncorroborated allegations regarding Lennon's supposed affair with Brian Epstein and part in Stuart Sutcliffe's death), everyone sounds as though they are starring in one of those '50s British B-films that tries so desperately to appear hardboiled and 'American'.

Yet in a sense, Goldman was cleaving true to a long, if not exactly noble tradition. The first rock biogs were fansploitation pamphlets of meagre literary merit. An early-'60s profile of impresario Larry Parnes' latest teen sensation could be had for a mere 1/6d, containing 100 odd pages of prose written by a jobbing hack hamstrung by a clear hatred of teenagers and a 19-year-old subject whose only dramatic moment was breaking his guitar string at the Southampton Skiffle Contest in 1957.

Hunter Davies' official biography of The Beatles debuted in 1968, and is perhaps the earliest attempt to take rock'n'rollers seriously enough to justify a proper life-and-times, but it seems surprising that the flood of excellent rock and pop writing that starts in late-'60s periodicals does not immediately transfer to hardcovers. In the mid-'70s the king of the pop biographers was George Tremlett, who churned out short paperback lives of The Stones, Slade, Queen, Alvin Stardust and the Osmonds in a pulp style typical of his publishers Futura, home of WWII schlockster Leo Kessler and the Confessions... series of saucy shenanigans. Tremlett's works may be found in your local charity shop, providing more of an insight into the journalistic mores of the time than the actual subject.

The rock biography comes of age in the '80s, with Philip Norman's Olympian (if somewhat over-generous) Beatles overview, Shout!, emerging in 1981 as if to wrestle Goldman's Elvis for the soul of the genre. If anything, Norman's mid-'90s Buddy: The Biography of Buddy Holly is even better, placing the Lubbock lad in his era with objectivity and deft historical perspective. But for a biography that is almost wholly lacking in these attributes, you could do worse than to return to your nearest Oxfam in the hope of finding a battered '80s paperback of Full Moon by Keith Moon amanuensis Peter Dougal Butler, tweaked by credited co-authors Chris Trengove and Peter Lawrence to give that quintessential chirpy cheeky cockney style, albeit one that gives the reader a sense of being trapped in a bar by a vaguely psychotic Dick Van Dyke impersonator.

So far, the better rock biographies - Norman's Buddy Holly is the paradigm, though Rob Chapman's Syd Barrett tome, A Very Irregular Head, is a recent triumph - have been about the dead. With the laws of libel no longer applying, the truth (or, at least, a riot of wild-eyed mudslinging à la Goldman) will out. At the other extreme, the "Authorised" biography of a living legend is almost guaranteed to be tedious, and some of the best books about extant rockers - Jimmy McDonough's 2002 Neil Young biog, Shakey (which began as an "authorised" book, until disowned by its subject mid-project) and Johnny Rogan's legendary Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance - have resulted in an artist's fatwah against the author.

In the end, what truly matters - be it Nick Tosches' wonderful Jerry Lee Lewis book, Hellfire, or Godspeed: The Kurt Cobain Graphic - what truly matters is that the book does not insult the intelligence of the reader, be they fan, foe or casual charity shop browser.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Jun 11, 2010 9:11 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jun 17, 2009 10:52 pm
Posts: 1004
Location: Brighouse
I loved Last Train....I felt the excitement of the time .... disappointed with Careless Love....Guralnik didn't give him credit for anything after the army it seems....I was listening to great concerts and he was slating them....matter of opinion maybe....but it seemed to me he decided on the sub title of his book.....The Unmaking of Elvis Presley...and he made it all fit...having read this second one - I immedately went back and re-read Last Train...a lovely musical and social history of Memphis and the south at that time.......

_________________
Adventure before dementia.......so let's all dance like dingledodies!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Aug 18, 2010 11:30 pm 
Offline
Hawleytastic!
User avatar

Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2004 9:06 am
Posts: 4372
Location: SHEFFIELD
picked up a hardback copy of Careless Love from a 2nd hand shop in Chapel St Leonards, cost me 8 quid. (also got a box set of the first 3 Gene Vincent albums on cd for 6 quid) bargain.
just got Ginger Baker biography to finish then i'm on with Careless Love, although i'm tempted to read 'Last Train' again.

_________________
we're gonna rock this town, rock it all night long!

www.myspace.com/roamingson
www.facebook.com/roamingsonuk
www.facebook.com/marklyall


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 15 posts ] 

All times are UTC [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 22 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group