Here I've visited Sun Studios, a room the size of a garage where Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison all recorded their first hit singles. Did you know that U2 recorded 'Rattle and Hum' there? Also the Stax Museum, formerly Stax Records. (If you've ever seen 'The Commitments', well, basically in that film when they're talking about 'soul' music they're essentially talking about Stax music). Then there's the Memphis Rock & Soul Museum, which has (just as an example) the guitar Elvis took with him to Germany while serving in the US Army. Finally there is Graceland, which I trust needs no introduction...
At Sun Studios the tour guide showed us how the equipment is set up as it was when Elvis recorded 'That's All Right Mama' there in 1954. He (the tour guide, not Elvis) asked for silence and played the original radio broadcast over the speakers. In my tour group there was a well-built man of about seventy, with graying but still-prominent sideburns, and as the music started he broke down silently into tears. Maybe he went there every weekend. Maybe he'd waited all his life to be there.
In amongst all of the above it's essential to include the National Civil Rights Museum, erected around the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968. Stax Records was tightly bound up with the civil rights movement in a way that Motown, admittedly, wasn't. (Berry Gordy Jr didn't want Motown to release 'What's Going On' at all.) It's worth adding that there were white people, not just record label staff but writers and studio musicians, involved at all levels in Stax.
Beale St, which is where everything used to happen in the heyday of the blues pre-rock'n'roll, is nowadays the focal point of social life, or at least tourist life. It's rather like a miniature version of Bourbon St in New Orleans. In truth it's pretty trashy, but I found a club called Rum Boogie with a good blues band and a good plate of red beans & rice.
Memphis as a city is surprisingly upmarket, or at least the downtown area is. Realistically, I think this probably indicates that the authorities have been more successful than in other cities at keeping the poverty confined to the suburbs. Maybe I'm just cynical. But I really like this place and I'm definitely coming back here one day. All of a sudden Machu Picchu and the grand temple at Angkor Wat seem that little bit less important. I've been in Elvis Presley's kitchen. I'm all shook up.
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| Downtown Memphis, from the rooftop bar of the art deco Madison Hotel. |
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| Sun Studios. |
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| Stax |
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| Stax Studio A. This is where '(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay' and 'In The Midnight Hour' were recorded, among many others. |
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| A rotating exhibit of the 1972 Cadillac El Dorado, in peacock blue, driven by Issac Hayes. Fur-lined interior, external gold trimmings, plus TV and refrigerator in the back. Not many cars had TVs and fridges in 1972. This ride is pimped, y'all. |
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| Graceland from the outside |
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| Graceland from the inside. The 1970s were a brown decade. |
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| Graceland - the kitchen. Surprisingly modest. |
