[A Pig at Large by Wilfrid: August 31, 2007]
So many songs. "I'm going to Graceland..."; "Long distance information..."; "Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue..."; "That's how I got to Memphis, that's how I got to Memphis...".
I knew I had to go one day. Heatwave or no heatwave.
I was playing that last number, the opening track on Solomon Burke's 2006 Nashville album. "If you love somebody enough you follow them wherever they go." I grew up loving this music: rock and roll, rhythm and blues, the blues, and as I got older, the crackling early country blues.
For all the cheeseburgers and forgotten words and ridiculous jumpsuits, Elvis Presley remains the single most important artist - okay, white artist - in popular music. In a few idle hours, he changed the world. I've been meaning to take this trip for ten years, and... hey, I don't two-step or wear a Stetson, but it'd be crazy not to take in Nashville too.
"That's what I like about the South..."
Connecting at Atlanta for the Memphis flight, an hour to spare: okay, so this is airport food, and not good, but look at that big old leg of fried chicken (salty!), biscuit, collards, mashed potatoes gravy. We are on our way.
Tucked into the south-eastern, Mississippi/Arkansas corner of the state, Memphis is a relatively small city - just over or under a million residents, depending how you count them. In a few days, I knew I wouldn't see much more than Beale Street and the music sights, and in fact you only need allocate three or four days to that project, unless you're an Elvis completist with a pompadour and crepe-soled shoes.
The Beale Street entertainment strip is short, scarcely three blocks. Beale is Bourbon Street's very diminutive second cousin. I'm told that even this constitutes a revival in its fortunes. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was a major shopping and leisure center for a widespread African American community. The Beale Street merchants, in fact, were a diverse group: Italian (there was a largely Italian foodmarket), Chinese, Jewish. You can make out a survivor in the picture above, A. Schwab's "dry goods" store. This is a rambling, two level treasure-house which piles high and sells cheap everything from vintage knickers to blues CDs to guns to candy to hot sauce.
The prices force the conclusion that the family has long owned the building, and there's a detailed, lovingly lettered family tree on view in a "museum" section upstairs, among the prehistoric meat grinders, not-for-sale child's toys, and other less identifiable jetsam. Other than souvenir shops - pigs, Elvis, ducks, hot sauce...
...there's not much to do down here except drink and dance (starting in mid-afternoon, finishing - as signs warn - by 3 am sharp). Some, maybe most, of the old music bars previously had different roles in the community.
The busiest block runs from a lively restaurant, Blues City Cafe, down to the Rum Boogie Cafe, where we settled in one evening to hear scorching, traditional electric blues. The ceiling hangs heavy with old guitars, signed and donated by passing celebs. After dark, the August heat still hits like a heavy blanket. If you need warmth in your bones, you can hang out under the stars and listen to bands playing everything from "Stormy Monday" to "Sweet Home Alabama" in open yards between the lounges. There's live music on a small bandstand in W.C. Handy Park every night.
Beale Street, by the way, like the French Quarter, positively encourages street-drinking and go-cups. An economical buzz can be derived by double-sizing yourself for around five dollars. Although popular dark beers - Sam Adams, Killians - are available, the tropical conditions demanded, I'm afraid, not a hoppy microbrew, but simple Bud served the best way: too cold to taste.
The fun extends further, walking away from the river, but devolves into branded options like the Hard Rock Cafe, a Coyote Ugly, and even a replica of the old French Quarter bar, Pat O'Briens. I danced to a soul band kicking old style Marvin Gaye and Earth, Wind & Fire numbers. I had a Big Ass beer too many watching a Beale Street regular channel a tic-perfect Cash-Orbison set. After a few nights, there wasn't much left but to settle down to the crowd-pleasing kitsch delivered by bluesman Preston Shannon at B.B. King's. Well, there was no cover, there was a table, there was room for my six-year old daughter to dance.
Over the sausage and cheese plate, one could reflect wistfully, but with no great resentment, that this precarious little entertainment district is a reconstruction of Beale Street, and a reconstruction on a small-scale too. It could be located in Las Vegas, minus the panhandlers, the winos making a buck selling CDs for the bands, the tourists smoking king-size cigarettes in the juke joints. At least this reconstruction is built on the original soil. The sausage and cheese plate, by the way, is a standard start to a Tennessee meal, and I ate more than one on this trip.
Mildly spiced smoked sausage, sliced and fried to bring out the fat. Hot green peppers. Unchallenging yellow-ish cheese. Crackers. The components don't vary, and the quality, in my experience, never soared. My daughter eschewed such exoticism for an honest plate of fried chick.
There are some quieter dining options, just around the corner from the strip on South Second Street. Automatic Slim's Tonga Club is heavily promoted, but the kitchen was inexplicably closed when we looked in one night. A Canadian restaurateur has opened an implausible northern hunting outpost, The Big Foot Lodge, a few doors down. The main attraction, other than the ineffable delights of poutine, is the "Sasquatch" - a four pound burger which is free, if consumed by one person - with all its trimmings - inside an hour. Devoted as I am to your entertainment, I decided I didn't need four pounds of ground beef for supper. I tried the deep-fried Cornish hen, which was startlingly unseasoned and unflavored. The BBQ nachos, on the other hand, were about as good as that dish can get.
Since we were pounding barbecue for lunch every day, evening alternatives to smoked meat were welcome. Hence The Flying Fish restaurant, hard by Big Foot. Brightly lit and heavily decked with fish-related signage, the Fish is set up like the local barbecue joints. You glance at the menu above the counter, shout your order, then take a little plastic gadget which buzzes when your number comes up and find a check-clothed table in the huge dining room.
Fried catfish was better than some I've had in the past: white and fluffy rather than grey and tired, and crunchily crumbed.
The oysters tasted like fifty cent oysters, which is just what they were.
Highest marks for goofiness, right down to the condiments.
I booked a room right across the street from the Flying Fish, at the grand Peabody Hotel, the best in town for some eighty years. "The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody Hotel," a historian once wrote, and the hotel is keen to remind you of its legendary past. There's a small museum with audio commentary on the mezzanine, and Bernard Lansky, who once dressed Elvis, still runs several clothing and souvenir concessions around the grand lobby. It is grand too, a soaring atrium decorated, I thought, with something of a Hispanic touch, all centered around the all-important ornamental pool and fountain. This is where the ducks come in.
The reason for all the duck insignias and memorabilia around this part of town is that the Peabody has long kept a small flock, which frolics daily in the lobby pool after a grand, even pompous ceremony called the Duck March, conducted before a large audience of residents and tourists by the formally attired Duck Master. The unwitting birds are shepherded from their rooftop night quarters down one of the elevators and across a red carpet to their day-time sanctuary.
After flashing your camera at the birds a hundred times, you can follow the Duck Master aloft to see the rooftop pool.
The original story - the hotel owner and pals got drunk on a hunting trip, let some ducks loose in the lobby overnight as a joke, and found them still happily splashing in the pool the next morning - is amusing, as is the March. But once is enough.
Other than music-related sight-seeing, the main daytime attraction seems to be Mud Island, a strip of land in the middle of the Mississippi reached by cable-car. Sitting on a bench by the river, warding off butterflies, makes a relaxing break, and it's picturesque. For exercise, you can follow a remarkably detailed miniature construction of the entire river, complete with town plans in miniature relief, from its sources in the north...
...until it splits into a hundred Delta rivulets and flows into a supposed Bay of Mexico.
You can walk a mile or so doing this, which sets you up for your mid-day slab of smoked ribs. But I was here for the musical history. Since my travelling companion was only six years old, I'd reduced the story of popular music to a simple mnemonic, which I drew for her on some hotel stationery. Blues (mainly black) + country (mainly white) = rock and roll (Elvis). I pointed out that we were enjoyed various versions of the blues around Beale Street, and promised much exposure to the country part of the equation when we reached Nashville.
Elvis, of course, didn't create rock and roll single-handedly. Hank Williams sounded like a rocker as early as 1947. But perhaps only Elvis could have reached a sudden worldwide audience with it. It's diverting to think of what might have happened if he'd never walked into the diner next door to the Sun studio, or if Sam Phillips had barred him permanently after his execrable attempt at "Harbor Lights". Johnny Cash might have stayed pure country, Jerry Lee Lewis remained a difficult and eccentric country sideman, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, further north, enduring as R&B novelty acts. Elvis made them all a phenomenon.
Hard by Beale Street, the Memphis Rock and Soul Museum, part of the Smithsonian, does a decent job with the story in modern museum style - i.e. educational narrative. And it quite rightly gives the other local legend, Stax, equal time with Sun. The main theme of the introductory video is indeed the fusion of local black and white roots music styles. It emphasizes the presence of near-destitute white sharecroppers selling their souls to the company stores, alongside rural black farm workers. From Elvis's ability to straddle black and white musical stylings, to an apotheosis of color-blindness among the Stax songwriters and sidemen, it's a a glowing and heart-warming account.
Of course, history itself is less sentimental and includes racism, intolerance, unfair contracts and rip-offs. But the Museum accentuates the positive stylishly, and the galleries take you from reconstructions of rural lifestyles right through to Presley's and Cash's guitars and jackets (and Isaac Hayes' glimmering thongs), with some good jukeboxes along the way. If the Museum was surprisingly good, Sun Studio surpasses itself. The guide books are right. There is something truly uncanny about finding this low-rise ramshackle building on the outskirts of downtown, and wandering into the carefully preserved studio where Sam Phillips presided over history.
Although it's a working studio, Sun is nevertheless a tourist attraction. There remains something real and modest about it, right down to the lunch-counter next door which doubles as a small and unfussy souvenir store. It should be seen before Graceland which is, in contrast, a sophisticated merchandising machine. Tours, which can and probably should be booked ahead run with military precision. Festooned with audio gear, you are bussed to the house, then back down to a series of ancillary museums which run along the other side of the highway, each and every one exited via huge and costly stores selling everything Elvis.
Well, not quite everything. You can pick up a copy of Peter Guralnick's definitive Last Train to Memphis everywhere. This is his superb biography of Elvis, from birth to army. There is, of course, a second volume - Careless Love - which tells the miserable tale of Presley's descent, enabled by the greed and indifference of a wretched crew of hangers-on, into prescription-drug psychosis and artistic lethargy. I didn't see that book for sale.
I hadn't realised Elvis didn't build the house. It was built, and indeed named "Graceland" by a local physician, and Elvis picked it up for a song in his early twenties. Preserved like a snapshot, it's the home of a little boy who still loved play. Room after room was dedicated to games, sports, music, television, every form of leisure. The style is famously garish, but to be fair it's a characteristic flashily-colored style of the 1960s, early 1970s. Some of my aunts and uncles would have built Graceland, if they'd had the money. You emerge from the final halls of gold records and videos of his great '70s "comeback" shows into the memorial garden. Elvis, and his parents who always remained with him, are buried here. The week before had been the thirtieth anniversary of his death. The path back to the bus is lined with floral tributes from all over the world; and I mean from everywhere. Dead at forty-two. Yes, it's still sad. But then we went to look at the car collection.
"I've a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland."
Anyway, if anything can fill the emptiness, surely a Huey burger can. This was my final fling in Memphis, surfeited with barbecue and beer and memories and the beat. Huey's, a smoky music pub, has been around a while, and its burger was touted to me as an especially greasy and gross version. I think I got the order wrong. I am a purist when it comes to burgers, and order my Huey with some cheese and lettuce. It looked kind of ashamed, like a nudey Huey.
I am sure I should have added bacon, tomato and all the works for the full effect. I couldn't deny, though, that it had the characteristic old fat flavor of a much-used griddle. I'd had fun, but I was done with Beale Street. Sign your name and move on.
Next week: Why are these people pretending they ever were cowboys? The Pink Pig goes to Nashville.
A frew related links:
Peabody Hotel and duck sanctuary
Huey's: note apparently unironic "heart healthy" menu
