The Electric City
Greetings from The Electric City.
I’m writing you tonight from Room 202 of the Lackawanna Station Hotel where, through the thin walls of my room, piped in Muzak like drones away like The Lawrence Welk Show.
The entire town has that feel, really: as if time forgot it sometime around 1957.
Truth is, it was more like 1946.
Scranton — nestled in the Lackawanna River Valley just 120 north of Philadelphia and west of New York — was born of the steel age. It’s prosperity was kept aloft — like the nearby cities of Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, and Carbondale — by anthracite coal mining. The post-WWII rise of oil and natural gas, though, ended the city’s boom. Until the arrival of fictional of Dunder Mifflin, the town was pretty much off the map.
Downstate in Philly, where I grew up, this region of northern and western Pennsylvania was best characterized by Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” or Billy Joel’s, “Allentown.” Like Syracuse, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Gary, Indiana; or any of another formerly abandoned hubs of industry, Scranton feel empty, wind-blown, and run-down. Best as I can tell from my brief time on the ground here, it’s the kind of town where Main Street is lined by red-brick and granite historic storefronts where hobby shops, billiards halls, and music shops once thrived and the wrecking ball now looms. It’s the kind of town where taverns outnumber cathedrals and half-way houses and counseling centers outnumber both.
Scranton is a shell of its former self.
Which makes it an appropriate venue, then, for my purposes here tomorrow.
At roughly 5:15 Monday night, the cable channel for which I work will be shooting a conversation between Senator Barack Obama and eight young Iraq War veterans. On Tuesday morning, we’ll decamp to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we’ll do the same with Senator Hillary Clinton. (Senator John McCain opted out of our show in favor of his trip to Iraq.) Our efforts will air this Thursday night, March 20 — the fifth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of the sovereign country of Iraq — at 6pm.
I met a few of these young veterans tonight. In fact, I met one, Herold Noel, at the Sundance Film Festival four years ago; Herold’s return from Iraq was included in director Patricia Axelrod’s “The Ground Truth.” he later went on to star in a documentary solely about his story called, “When I Came Home,” which went on to win an audience prize at The Tribeca Film Festival.
Herold and I had a few drinks tonight, getting better acquainted than we were able on the chilly rooftop interview in Park City. With a glass of Hennessy in one hand and a Heineken in another, Herold told me about driving an 18-wheel fuel truck in Iraq. Not surprisingly, he turned animated quickly.
“Dude, I was shot at. Pop! Pop! Pop! I got hit by an RPG. Boom! I closed my eyes and said, ‘Well, this is it.’ But I woke up in the back of a Humvee.”
“So you couldn’t get guys to slow down to refuel,” he said. “They knew they were tethered to a bomb. And man, I’d tricked that truck out; I could pump 300 gallons in five minutes. But still…”
“When it’s night there, it’s dark. I mean,” he said waving his hand in front of his face, “You can’t see nothin’.”
“One night, I was just guardin’ my truck. A Bradley let off a round in the the flash of the muzzle I saw an insurgent right there, man, his machine gun just right there in my face. So I just fell back and popped him.”
Herold’s harrowing tour notwithstanding, he came home to the same jobless future he left behind.
“I was livin’ in my car, man. No one would hire me! I mean, I drove a truck full of fuel up slippery mountain roads in Korea and I need to come back to America to take classes to drive on some God damned highway? Hell no.”
Worse, though, was the lack of support for veterans.
“I’ve had people say to me, ‘You’re stupid for fighting that war.’”
Which says nothing of his frustration with the Veteran’s Administration: overbooked, understaffed, insanely bureaucratic. There are currently about 400,000 pending disability claims in the VA, 83,000 of which pending six months or more.
There 1.6 million Herolds out there who fought (and keep fighting) in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at least one of ‘em — Herold Noel — is wondering, for what? Afghanistan? Ok, defensible. But the Pentagon now admits — quietly, after reviewing some 600,000 documents seized in in Iraq — that Saddam Hussein never had a connection to terrorism.
So… here I am in Anytown, USA, spending a few days with a few of America’s Finest. They served for something they thought was just. When they got home, they were treated like lepers. And now, they want answers.
So do I.
And so should you.
***
“Choose Or Lose Presents: Clinton & Obama Answer Young Veterans” premiers Thursday, March 20 at 6pm on MTV.
Serendipity, Baby
Brace yourself; the following story may blow your mind.
Just this past Sunday, Nada front man Jason Walsmith and I were sitting around his Beaverdale, Iowa, living room recovering from the previous night’s show and preparing for the next. We’re watching TV when he said, “Lemme’ show you this documentary.”
He surfed around his Tivo menu until he found Iowa Public Television’s “More Than A Game.” The film, “a look back at girls’ 6-on-6 basketball and what it meant to generations of young women who played it,” features a new song from my Des Moines rock star friends, “Play Like A Girl.”
Fast forward to Tuesday night. Chris and I are saddled up to the bar at The Dead Poet. We’re well into our second pint, and nearly done with our cheeseburgers. I’m scribbling all over the film’s outline, clarifying our respective assignments for the coming days (“Chris: Cut Davy. Ben: Script Pittsburgh”).
“Excuse me,” the gentleman next to us says. “Is that some sort of script?”
Please visit my “Making ‘Mister Rogers & Me’” blog for the exciting conclusion…
In The Roaring Traffic’s Boom (Day And Night)
Thirty (or so) years ago, my parent’s took Chris and me to a traveling production of “Annie” at Chicago’s Shubert Theater.
Two moments from that matinee stick with me to this day.
The first is the sheer terror I felt shrinking into my seat as Mrs. Hannigan screamed at the orphans, “You’re gonna clean this dump until it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building!”
The second is the absolute jubilant release I felt when Annie stood on top of Daddy Warbucks’ grand piano and belted “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.”
The latter (as I think I’ve said before) has influenced nearly every song I’ve ever written, if not my entire ethos. Despite a fair dose of dark, sleepless nights, the sun has always come out in the morning.
The former — the 1, 047 foot Art Deco skyscraper there at the intersection of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue — has returned to me in a new, special way of late.
On Monday, I moved into a new office in the southeast corner of 1515 Broadway. My windows overlook Times Square from twenty-nine stories. The New York Times clocktower stands to the south. The Chrysler Building is due east. The Empire State Building is in between.
I paused to take it all before leaving tonight. Everything was shining from up there in the sky. Everything felt manageable.
There, at the end of another twelve hour day on four hours of sleep, I thought, ‘Not bad for a kid from Iowa.’
I turned out the lights, stepped through the door, and walked home through the roaring traffic’s boom.
Paying My Rent Every Day In The Tower Of Song
I’m not sure this’ll make a ton of sense, but the weekend kinda’ f*cked my shit up a little bit.
As always, when we weren’t actually singing, Jason and I spent our time talking about songs, songwriting, and the music business.
We’re an odd pair in such conversations. Though he dabbles in politics and has made wise forays into integrated marketing (see also: Templeton Rye), Jason is and always has been a full-time musician. If I’m being honest with myself (which I’m loathe to be on this subject), I am a media executive who (sigh) dabbles in music.
Jason wants to crack the mainstream. I work for the mainstream. Jason craves infrastructure. I manage infrastructure. Jason wants job security. I want a tour bus.
Of course, we’re far more alike than not. We appreciate the same music: Ryan Adams, Wilco, The Jayhawks. And we share the same values: authenticity, integrity, simplicity, friends and family.
Still, I have a hunch we covet components of each other’s lives at least a little bit. I’d like to be a hometown hero who plays 200+ shows a year. Jason, I imagine, would like to live in New York.
I’ll admit, while I flew out to support the release of The Nadas sixth LP, “The Ghosts Inside These Halls,” my visit wasn’t entirely without agenda. I came bearing a CD full of demos and ten pages of lyrics, copies of which I gave to Jason, Mike,Jon and Josh. Not only was I enlisting these great singer/songwriters to help polish up a set of songs, I was lobbying my label chiefs to release my new record.
Driving around the airport (looking for the actual“Blue Lights,” as it ends up) playing my demos, Jason said, “I don’t know why you keep talking about quitting with songs like this. I hear a lot of growth here.”
“It’s not that I want to quit,” I said. “It’s that it’s getting harder to do both: be a corporate wanker and an aspiring rock star.”
We bid farewell to the spectacularly talented (and hilarious) Raining Jane sometime around 3AM Monday morning. By the time we’d stumbled shivering back to his house, there was barely enough time to brew a pot of coffee and head to the airport for my 5AM flight.
We paused just long enough to exchange a few woozy words.
“Your co-workers will never understand,” he said.
“I’m not even sure I do,” I replied.
I was out cold from the moment I hit seat #5C on Northwest Flight #314, until the flight attendant asked me to remove my headphones (which were blaring Allison Krause and Robert Plant’s version of John Prine’s “Killing The Blues” on a loop all the way from Des Moines to New York) and return my seat to its upright position.
My first daylight memory was of the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 5000 feet: the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge. Wall Street’s glass, concrete and stone was pink in the bright, morning light. I looked westward as we dipped beneath the skyline. Raining Jane’s “Wyoming Sky” rang in my ears.
You can hold your breath
And count to ten
It won’t escape you
Distance will break you
Tell your story lies and glory
Under the ashes
History passes us by
Like Wyoming sky
I was melancholy all day, struggling through my corporate day job like a young robin finding its legs. At home, the bittersweet became overwhelming. I choked back tears as Leonard Cohen accepted his Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction statuette by reciting the lyrics to his seminal “The Tower Song.” I recorded it a few years ago, and tonight, it struck a chord that rang deeper and truer than ever before.
Well my friends are gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day
Oh in the tower of songI was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the great beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the tower of songNow you can say that Ive grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
You see, I hear these funny voices
In the tower of songI see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We’ll never have to lose it againNow I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
There moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the tower of song
I was finally forced to submit. My 36-hour day was not going to resolve itself; I had to surrender. And so I did, tucking myself in to the same perfectly sad melody I’d been singing all day.
Somebody said they saw me
Swinging the world by the tail
Bouncing over the white cloud
Killing the blues
Raining Jane: On Any Given Sunday
Forget that the music industry doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing with itself. Between MySpace, iTunes, ProTools, Twitter, YouTube and the rest, bands don’t need major labels anyway. They’re doin’ it for themselves.
In some strange way, 2008 may as well be 1908, or 1808. America’s highways are packed with minstrels and troubadours: folk-rock, prog-metal, pop-fusion, and everything in between. And on any given Sunday, you’ll find them at clubs like The Vogue in Indianapolis, Indiana, The Little Bear in Evergreen, Colorado, or The Rhythm Room in Phoenix, Arizona.
Or AK’s in Beaverdale, Iowa, where this Sunday night finds Los Angeles’ Raining Jane.
The catch isn’t that they’re four women, or four talented, multi-instrumentalist women, or four beautiful, talented, multi-instrumentalist women — it’s their voices: ethereal, cohesive, concerted and confident.
The quartet ping-pongs from the sacred to the profane effortlessly — from the pensive “Wyoming Skies” to the hilarious “Big Girl,” to the minor-chord kiss off of “Desperate Sails” — all tossed off with a wink, a joke, and harmonies like nobody’s business.
Heck, they do “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and — more than just making it work — kill it.
That they shared the stage with me and elevated “Dear Elizabeth” to goose bumps and nose bleeds is, well, gravy. More like chocolate syrup, or caramel. Whichever.
Or that they took to Nada front man Jason Walsmith’s “Blue Lights” and — with a cello, cajone and buttery harmonies — transformed it into some sort of nostalgic lament.
Or that all six of us winged a version of “California Stars” then transitioned effortlessly into U2′s “All I Want Is You” and back into “California Stars” including two cello solos and an a capella finale.
The thing is this, the music industry may be fucked, but the music — as long has super-capable, super-engaging bands like Raining Jane are tearing up the highways — the music will be just fine.
Close Your Eyes And Start To See
The last time I stood in front of a thousand people with a guitar in my hands and sang, I’d rehearsed.
I’ll be honest: I regretted the ambition of my scheduled 36-hour, New York to Des Moines trip the instant my clock radio sounded at 3:45 Saturday morning. A cold drizzle was falling on Tenth Avenue, and the forecast wasn’t much better where I was headed. My beautiful wife and our down comforter seemed a far more desirable option than a cold cab to Newark followed by two regional jets.
Like most adventures, though, the first few steps are the hardest. Once I was out of bed, out the door and in a cab, it was on. With just a change of undies and a fistful of demos from my forthcoming CD, I was off to celebrate the release of my pals, The Nadas, new CD, “The Ghosts Inside These Halls.”
Fours woozy hours later, the welcome committee was out en force at Des Moines International Airport; Beaverdale Main Street Initiative Executive Director Stephanie Walsmith (to whom Nada front man Jason Walsmith is lucky enough to be wed, and who is one hell of a singer herself — have a listen to track seven of “Heartland” or track four of “Ghosts”) and her staff, sons Mitchell and Roan, were waiting at the edge of the terminal.
Jason and the band were still en route from the previous night’s show in Sioux City, so the four of us roped Authentic Records photographesse Mandy Miller into lunch at Aguilla Real (Des Moines is, of course, well known for its authentic Mexican cuisine). After a plate of rice, beans and chipotles, I surrendered to a deep, dreamless sleep at Chateau Walsmith — until I was woken by the booming spectre of my Brother In Arms, Jason.
Quick refresher: I met Jason at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. MTV News had hired him to shoot photos and DV. But we didn’t bond over work; not that work anyway. No, I took to Jason after just a few minutes over chips, salsa, and Tecate at the Mexican joint behind our hotel. Sure, David Schwimmer and Keanu Reeves were hyping their indie films down the snowy street, but Jason and I had better things to discuss: Iowa, and rock ‘n roll. It was like a scene from “Pretty In Pink” or something, sans the whole Jake dynamic. “You too!?! Oh my gosh, me too!!!” We had a lot in common. Before I knew it, I’d made a record and hit the road with ‘em.
Before long, then, he had me out the door, downtown, and loading in the band. (Rock stars are good like that; they’re aces at finding some star-struck lackey to lug their gear.) Upstairs at People’s, The Nadas are setting up while I tap away at my Blackberry: Ian’s unloading cymbals, Luke’s rolling road cases, Ross is stringing his electric, Jason and Mike shooting the shit. Jason walks over.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” he says, “But Mike just suggested you play a few songs before Raining Jane. You wanna’?”
Now, I won’t front. I always hope my pals will haul me on stage for a backing vocal, hand clap or tamborine. But open? For their big CD release? In front of a thousand people? Not only was my Martin 1000 miles east, not only did I not have so much as a .83 Dunlop pick, I hadn’t strummed my guitar in over a week.
Naturally, nary a second passes before I responded, “Sure.”
Then I began to sweat.
So I snagged Mike’s Gibson, repaired to the green room, and immediately began drilling a five-song set. To my ears, my voice sounded unsteady, and my playing sounded worse. To my hands, the guitar felt foreign, the pick brittle and coarse. For an hour I paced the room alone, then met the ladies of Raining Jane and began to prattle nervously. Jason and Stephanie came in, and assuaged my anxiety by approximately 1% when they began drilling a duet they were performing in just a few minutes as well.
“It’s rock and roll,” I reminded myself… then continued prattling nervously.
Fast forward an hour. I am standing alone in front of a thousand blank faces with nothing but a guitar between us. And I begin.
It’s impossible to argue
It’s impossible to scream
Hold your breath and you begin to breathe
Close your eyes and start to see
The crowd is apathetic — there is literally a pair of women just inches from the front of the stage with their backs turned me — but it doesn’t matter. This is it. This is what it feels like.
I dive into the chorus.
Yeah I’ve given up on the daydream
I’ve given up on the coast
I’ve given up on you, baby
I’ve given up, given up the ghost
Afterwards, in an adrenaline-fueled afterglow, Jason — cool as a cucumber as he takes his hometown stage to triumphantly release his sixth studio release — hip-hop hugs me.
“That was a pretty good set for someone who says he never plays.”
I smile, and settle into the compliment.
‘Giving up the ghost?’ I think to myself. ‘Yeah right.’
People’s (Des Moines, Iowa)
Giving Up The Ghost
Milk & Honey
Breathe In
Harder To Believe
Wonderwall
With The Nadas & Raining Jane
Outside, It’s America
Frankly, I’m surprised shit isn’t tossed at that thing more often.
Military Island — a red, white and blue neon-stiped, brush-steel box — sits astride a wedge-shaped slab of concrete between at 43d Street between Seventh and Broadway. It is, quite literally, The Crossroads of the World. There are no fences, no barricades, no sentries or guards. It’s exposed to pedestrian traffic, and never more than a few feet from the street.
So frankly, I’m surprised it took so long.
* * *
I heard the helicopters as I slipped out of my dreams, and crawled from my bed But even though I caught something about an explosion on NPR as I brewed the morning coffee, I didn’t put it together. These days, an explosion isn’t much of a headline.
It wasn’t until I was just a few feet from the northwest entrance of my office, there on 44th & Broadway, that I connected the dots: helicopters, satellite trucks, canine patrols, barricades, police tape.
‘Oh!’ I thought. ‘The bombing was here.’
This afternoon, I passed the recruitment center on my way to the subway. The front window was shattered. The door was bent from its frame. But Uncle Sam was still there, pointing evil-eyed from his perch. “I want you!” The building was ringed in police tape and blue uniforms. Tourists stopped, gawked, and snapped photos on their cell phones. Otherwise, though, the city pulsed onward.
Times Square bomb threats began just two days after September 11, 2001, moments after we’d wrapped our first news meeting. I’ll never forget racing down twentynine flights of stairs, stuck behind two of my heavier set colleagues waiting to hear the rumble of the building’s collapse and thinking, ‘If I die because these guys are out of shape…”
It doesn’t take much to rattle our nerves there: thunder, the rumble of a truck, a backfire. A few sirens are really all it takes to raise my alert.
It’s a change, to be sure, but it doesn’t change how I approach life. I don’t avoid the subways any more than I avoided traveling in the Middle East a few months ago. And not because I buy any of that “If I don’t do such and such then the terrorists have won.” No, I look at it a bit more broadly than that; it’s not black and white. I mean, some of culture’s greatest heros have been rebels: Han Solo, Guy Fawkes, Neo. It’s really just a question of perspective. I mean, Rumsfeld and Saddam where pretty tight when we needed help with Iran.
And so we walk on, not because anyone has won, but because we’ve all lost. Whether the explosion was caused by a bonafide “terrorist,” or just some deadbeat doesn’t even matter. With a thousand channels, 60° Februarys, four dollar gallons of gas and three trillion dollar war bills, I’m pretty sure it isn’t a question of whether, but when.
As the sun set on Manhattan, I received an email from a colleague in Connecticut.
“I hope everything is well in NYC!”
‘Just another day in the big city,’ I thought.
I logged off, pulled on my coat, and rode the elevator to the lobby. I dialed up U2 as I stepped into the fray. I sang beneath my breath as I turned west from the mash up of lights and crowds and chaos, “Outside, it’s America.”
Waiting At Graceland (First In Line) – MP3
“I ran down Elvis Presley Boulevard beneath a sky bruised purple and gray and orange at the edges,” I scribbled in a journal entry dated October 21, 1996. “It’s the type of sky that removes roofs indescriminently.”
“It’s rumbling now, waiting to break, I’m sure, just as I step from the tour bus to the property — or shortly thereafter, when I resume my 670 mile trip north.”
Twelve years and thousands of miles later, that last-minute pilgrimage to Graceland makes better sense to me. I can see now that, like me, Elvis was also trying to fill “that God-shaped whole.” He didn’t know it, though. And he didn’t have the support structure, or wherewithal to figure out that all the adoration, adderall and applause in the world isn’t gonna’ fix what was broken. Nothing can do that but time, something that Elvis didn’t have enough of.
In the moment, though — sitting on my bed there at The Heartbreak Hotel — I had nothing but time. I was 24-years-old. I’d lived in New York a little more than a year. I’d already released a record here, played shows (including one at Cafe Sin-e, legendary thanks Jeff Buckley), and was just about to start a new job at MTV.
I was going for the big time.
And so — watching local news as Heaven itself split open and tossed thunderbolts towards the Memphis skyline — I wrote this song: “Waiting At Graceland (First In Line).” In it, I imagined my backyard as a posthumous shrine. In it, I imagined myself as The King.
I performed the song for years, but never recorded it. Until now.
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Waiting At Graceland (First In Line)
When I die please burn my body
Put my ashes in tiny capsules
Take me with a square meal twice a day
Save all my things and have a raffle
With cotton candy and nickel tickets
And all the rides and games along the midway
I’m going for the big time, larger than the huge
Save my wrinkled pages, be sure to bronze my shoes
I’ll be home on Tuesday morning I was
Thinking you could use a little time
So I’m waiting here at Graceland first in line
Build a place to store my trophies
Something modest, seven stories
Each to store a portion of my life
Charge admission to everybody
Except the young, they’re so aware
They love the way the lawn is strewn with lights
CHORUS
Pave the yard with golden concrete
Park my bike out by the tree
Post a little plaque that says something nice
Rope off the den and build a steeple
A little church for all the people
Who didn’t really like me in my life
CHORUS
Going To Graceland
“It always rains when I’m at Graceland.”
Thus began my journal entry (the old fashioned paper kind) on Monday, October 21, 1996. The dateline was Memphis, Tennessee.
Just thirty-six hours earlier, I’d hatched a half-baked (actually, I was really baked), last-minute plan to squander the weekend prior to my start date at MTV News on some sort of spiritual journey, a symbolic mile marker, I imagined, on the road trip of life.
The place had always held some sort of mythic, magnetic sway over me. Elvis’ music never meant much to me, but his myth did. I’d visited once after college (listening to Willie Nelson’s cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” the whole way), and found the whole thing a tad undewhelming, almost laughable.
I’d recently read Peter Peter Guralnick’s, “Last Train to Memphis.” But it was still before my full-on Elvis obsession kicked in: before building a shrine in my apartment, and digging into the dark side of his story though books like Goldman’s “Elvis: The Last 24 Hours” or Whitmer’s “The Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley.”
Nah, I was just killing time with what I figured was a cool, pop culture road trip; a little something to tell my friends about. A life experience. And adventure. Like the time I drove from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Darwin, Minnesota, to see The World’s Largest Ball of Twine only to find it was in storage — but that’s another story for another time.
The itinerary came together quickly. Motivated by an empty apartment (my brother was out of town), and a broken heart (the woman I’d been dating had just broken up with me), I called Amtrak and booked a seat on the Empire Builder. My plan was to ride the rails north to Albany, then west to Chicago where I’d rent a car and follow the Mississippi south. Somewhere in the darkness between Rochester and Cleveland, though, it dawned on me that I could hop out in Toledo (where my father then lived), grab breakfast, then cut a diagonal from there.
Twenty-four hours later, it was over. With just a porcelain bust and Sun Studios mug to show for my efforts, I was already headed north. I scribbled in my journal as the train barrelled down the tracks.
Graceland is some 700 miles to my south, now, but still so vivid. What an amazing place, a global pop culture crossroads. What brings people there, like deer to a salt lick for their ceramic busts, imitation sunglasses, license plates, t-shirts, thimbles, coasters, cards, and collectors spoons?
It’s the dream, I think.
The dream of coming from nothing, and streak like a meteor across a bland landscape with shimmy and shake and soul overflowing like dripping wax. The dream being known by everyone on a first name basis. The dream of having a jet named after your daughter, a mansion in your twenties, and a boulevard when you finally — tragically (and with no official explanation from your estate) — die.
There is so much sanitization there. I only saw one bloated Elvis, towards the end of the tour (approaching the melancholy-soaked Meditation Garden). Every other photo of him was rosy-cheeked and youthful, like Walt Disney himself is behind the entire operation. Human tour guides have been replaced by an “acoustic guide” audio tour to assure, I suppose, that only one, unified biography of the man reach the adoring, tour bus riding fans. It makes for an especially odd tour, silent, not from reverence or museum etiquette, but intimate, headphone narration. I turned off the headset in the living room to listen, grinning as the faux-country accented narrator whispered into dozens of ears personally, and simultaneously.
This time, though, I noticed the absence of Elvis’ stillborn twin, Jesse Garon. And I noticed a tension, an unease, a half-smile in every photo of this working class, Tupelo family so overwhelmed by wealth and fame.
And as we departed the estate on the shuttle bus, I noticed a plaque with copyright restrictions posted right there on the front lawn.
“Copyright Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.,” it read. “All Rights Reserved.”
His fans seemed awed there, but unsure as to why. Don’t they see the lie? The homogenization of The King? Or do they too aspire to four televisions and a racquetball court out back?
It’s tough to say. I’m not sure most of us know, or have thought it through. It’s almost as if people go to Graceland just because it’s there, like Wall Drug, or Reptile Gardens, or South of the Border. But make no mistake, Graceland is a shrine, complete with a car dealership next door and a Shoney’s across the street.
I’m not sure what I found there. A little bit of me, I guess: the crooning, the cravings, the bouffant, the bee-sting lipped lover, the innocent, and good son. Maybe that’s whey we’re all there. Elvis is a mirror on all of us, and Graceland is some sort of cross-cultural living room — a rest stop between Heaven and Las Vegas.
Tune in tomorrow to read the the story behind my song, “Waiting At Graceland (First in Line),” and download the MP3.
