Walking in Memphis

A very full day today in Memphis, topped off by watching the Memphis/Kansas game on Beale Street and now back in our hotel room.

We started our morning by getting back in the car and driving about 15 minutes to Elvis Presley Boulevard and Graceland. Graceland was Elvis Presley's home from 1958 until his death and claims to be the second-most visited private residence in the US after the White House. There's no question that it's a giant tourist attraction as we approach; the estate owns a huge plot of land across the street from Graceland's 13 acres containing multiple shops, restaurants, a hotel ("The Heartbreak Hotel", of course), a giant parking lot, and housing items like Elvis' converted 100 passenger jet (how they got that down Elvis Presley Boulevard, who knows).

We park in the lot ($8) which is quite empty, not surprisingly for a Monday morning. We have three tickets options for tours: Mansion (the low-end option), Platinum, and "VIP". We opt for the Mansion tour only, which still runs us close to $50 with a AAA discount. It's an audio tour; this is mandatory. Everyone is given headsets. Shortly afterwards, we board a shuttle which takes us... across the street and up a driveway to the front of Graceland. The "shuttle" trip takes about 1 minute.

We wait for a few minutes outside Graceland before a young man gives us the rules: No video or audio recording, no flash. Oh yeah, the house was built in 1939 and sold to Elvis in 1958. That is all of the Graceland-specific history we'll get on the tour; the rest of the tour consists of:

1. See how Elvis had the place decorated when he died in 1977;

2. See Elvis gold records and memorabilia;

3. Hear a few anecdotes on the audio tour, courtesy of Elvis and Lisa Marie. Outside of the young man at the front door, no other staff at Graceland will offer up any piece of information (nor do they seem to want you to ask). You either know it already because you're a big Elvis fan, or you hear it in the audio tour, or... that's it.

Not surprisingly, Elvis' decorating taste in the mid-70s turns out to be garish. [D: I want to give the guy a break, considering his decorating taste was frozen in 1977. But wow... a mirrored basement? Geometric-print carpet in the kitchen? Green shag carpet... on the walls??? Seriously, the picture on the left was BY FAR the most tasteful in the house. Enough said]. The house is also surprisingly small, although the external buildings -- converted into offices, rec space, a racquetball court, etc., add to the overall square footage.

The tour finally culminates in the "Meditation Garden", which now contains the graves of Elvis, his parents, and his paternal grandmother, who outlived her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. As we arrive at this mini-cemetery, it occurs to us that the house gives us no sense at all of who Elvis was or what he was like. Not that it's easy to get in touch with historic, almost mythical public figures, but being at his house as he left it in 1977, you might expect some sense of who he was or what he was like. Instead, it feels empty. Buddy Holly's small gravesite in that rural small-town cemetery 2 days ago was much more moving. Instead, milling past the graves, D and I can only remark that Vernon Presley (Elvis' Dad) signed the epitaph on Glady's grave, adding "BY: VERNON PRESLEY" at the bottom of the marker.

The tour over for us non-Platinum or VIP types, we avoid spending too much money in the multiple Graceland gift shops (that's right... there are several), get back in the car and head back to our hotel to drop off the car. We'll spend the rest of the day on foot, racking up 16,000 steps today.

After a quick lunch, we head down Union Street for Sun Studios. Sun is the spot where Sam Phillips discovered and produced loads of talented performers in the mid-to-late 1950s, including Elvis (his first recordings), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and countless lesser-known but talented performers. I'm wary of some reconstructed, non-authentic replica of the "original" Sun Studio, but lo and behold, the studio is basically intact. Memphis' spotty economic history allowed the studio to sit mostly vacant for decades (ever since Phillips moved Sun to a larger space a few blocks away in the late 1960s) before being turned into a lucrative tourist draw. Our tour guide, a young fellow named Slim who never removes his sunglasses, is engaging and knowledgeable -- a refreshing change from Graceland -- and even though the tour encompasses a grand total of 2 rooms (3 if you count the tiny original reception area) it lasts about 45 minutes and covers quite a bit of ground. D and I both enjoy it a great deal, and we stick around at the end to buy a few souvenirs in the shop/snack bar attached to the studio. We agree that Sun's legacy is helped by several great logos.

The whole Sun experience makes me want to dig my Sun Records box set out, but of course it's packed on a truck somewhere crossing the US, and I'll have to wait to hear the handful of Sun tracks on my iPod tomorrow during our next drive.

[D: Sun was awesome, one of my favorite stops so far. I really got goosebumps standing in that room where Johnny Cash and Elvis recorded, goosebumps that didn't come at all in Graceland. Plus, the folks at Sun (staff and visitors) were by far hipper, younger, and, frankly, thinner than the folks at Graceland. (There's a reason why they need a shuttle at Graceland just to get across the street.) At Sun, and while walking around downtown Memphis and interacting with Memphis locals, it occurs to me that for the first time on our trip, possibly even for the first time since we moved to California, I feel at home. Part of it is the weather -- there's that humidity that I wasn't really missing! -- and part of it is that Memphis, with its history, music and struggles to keep the inner city from falling into complete blight, reminds me a lot of the Philly I knew while growing up. The closer I look, the more I realize how much life there is in Memphis, and I found myself really rooting for the city to complete its revitalization. (Not to mention genuinely rooting for the Tigers to win... it was a sad, sad night.) I think Memphis gets short shrift. Particularly if you are a fan of blues, soul, R&B or early rock 'n' roll, you MUST come here. I don't know if we'll ever get back, but there's still a fair bit more to see (the STAX museum in particular).]

We cut over a few blocks to walk back to downtown Memphis on Beale Street; this takes us past a few Tennessee historical markers, including a few for Robert R. Church and his offspring. We'd never heard of Church before. Turns out, he was a very wealthy ex-slave (the first black millionaire in the South) who helped improve the city of Memphis at a time when segregation was rampant; his work was carried on by his descendants, including his son, a powerful Republican(!) leader in the days before the civil rights movement.

Speaking of which, our next major stop was the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is based in the former Lorraine Motel, the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April, 1968. It's very moving to stand outside the museum and look at the balcony where King was killed, marked by a wreath all of these years. D and I both spent quite a bit of time looking at the former motel, silently.

The 40th anniversary of his assassination was 3 days ago, so the museum has been busier than usual with visitors and media. The museum traces the history of the civil rights movement in the US from 1619 until MLK's murder; it does so with countless signs, placards, visual aides, multimedia pieces, and large items like a vintage coffee shop counter, a replica of a bombed-out bus, etc., culminating in the rooms King and his associates stayed in during his final days. In fact, while we only had 2 hours to spend at the museum, there was so much to read and look at on the walls that we easily could have spent 4-5 hours there trying to soak everything in. Most Americans of our age learn about the civil rights movement in high school history classes, and we get a highly abbreviated version at best. The real story is much longer, involves thousands of people, and was more violent than people our age generally realize. It wasn't just about President Johnson signing some bills, or the Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. the Board of Education. It was about millions of lives over hundreds of years. And -- seeing more than a few people wearing t-shirts juxtaposing Dr. King's image with that of Senator Barack Obama -- it's clear that many feel the civil rights struggle hasn't ended. D took a picture of this sticker affixed to a pole in front of the museum:
[D: A quick note about the Lorraine Motel. Having just come from Dealey Plaza, and having waxed philosophical about JFK's murder on and off for the past 24-hours, I assumed the Lorraine Motel would seem to have less of an impact. Totally the opposite. What you realize while you're staring at the balcony before Room 306 is that unlike JFK and RFK, who were essentially killed by crazy nut-jobs... no matter how much those nut-jobs and others have tried to assign deeper motive to those killings, MLK Jr. was killed out of pure hatred. Hatred for a man simply because he was a different color and wanted equal rights. It's not only moving, sad and horrifying... but it's shameful. Though many, including P, have pointed out that at the time of his death, King's influence was waning, and that if it had continued its decline he might have ended up like Jesse Jackson - somewhat marginalized - I can't help but think that this was the biggest loss of the '60s. As I watch people of all races interacting -- offering to take each others' pictures in front of the motel, walking side-by-side through the museum -- I take solace in the fact that, though civil rights issues clearly still exist, race relations have come a long way in large part because of what King did.]

After the museum, it was back to the hotel for a break, then on to dinner on Beale Street. Suffice to say, our day was a lot better than the Tigers'. Tomorrow, we're off to Nashville.