The Grace of Graceland

Lisa came to town this past weekend and we had a chance to go to Memphis and Graceland. She's wanted to go for awhile and I've always had a certain interest in it too. My relationship with the King has been a mixed bag. When I was young I knew of him like I knew of Frank Sinatra. He was someone all the adults were talking about. He took four years off from recording in the mid-sixties which is about the time I was becoming aware of life outside my back yard. I think this always seemed to make him feel like a geezer to me. I remember In The Ghetto as a kind of comeback hit. I never really got a proper perspective on his enormity. I remember having a weird response on the day I found out he had died. Even though he wasn't from my era he was the last great icon of America. There were a few (like Frank) before but I don't believe there were any after. Like most musical trends he belonged to my parents so he was uncool, but there was no denying he touched me in ways I didn't even know. As I've gotten older I've lightened up on my opinion of him. It still sways between classic cheese and appreciation for a white boy that made it safe for the kids to love the "dangerous" black R&B that was there but ignored. Plus there were some great songs.

I wasn't sure what to expect at Graceland. From everything I had heard it was small and tacky. I was preparing for big pink haired women with turtle shell glasses and guys in wife beaters with scraggly beards. I really am a sucker for a good cliché. What Lisa and I found was that and more. There were those people, there were young guys in front of us from Germany, there were families and everything between those three groups. It's definitely a commercialized atmoshpere but no worse than other similarly themed museums.

The house is surprisingly small with a touch of tackiness, but if memory serves what place wasn't a little tacky in the seventies. One of the things that caught me by surprise was the ordinariness of it. Most of the furniture could have been in my family's home. It might have been expensive but it didn't seem like the stuff of a legendary recording artist. My biggest problem with it all was the crowded tour. There was probably about twenty people in our group and it was like pushing through the biggest house I myself have ever been in. I mean that's how modest this place is. It really didn't seem much bigger than my cousin's old split level. The grounds were decent but just 13 acres.

Lisa and I both agreed it was well worth the trip, there was all manner of interesting paraphernalia. His gold and platinum records alone were stunning. It was both what I had heard it was and more. I didn't find it tacky or corny but an interesting glimpse into a history that I was too young to pay attention to at the time. It was like a piece of my history too.