Careless Love (Bookcassette(r) Edition)

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Summary: The unmitigated, Southern-gospel truth!
Review: Peter Guralnick lays out the life and times of Elvis Presley from the time he leaves the Army up until his death in 1977. As a fan, and a Southerner, I have always accepted Elvis's eccentricities and shortcomings. As a Southern woman, I was impressed by the way Guralnick portrayed Elvis, from his sexy, funky side to his serious, religious side. Any essential Elvis fan knows that he was multi-faceted, and that one part taken from the rest didn't amount to a hill of beans. It was the full packaging of Elvis Aaron Presley that his fans loved, regardless of whether he was in skin-tight jumpsuits showing off his gorgeous physique, or the tired, overweight 40ish Elvis forgetting his songs on stage. Guralnick speaks the unmitigated, Southern gospel truth, and this book should be read by every serious Elvis fan.

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Summary: Elvis Dead and Johnny Rivers doesn't look so good neither
Review: I really loved Last Train to Memphis and had been looking forward to this sequel for some time, but now I have mixed feelings. A major problem is that Elvis' life from 1958 to 1977 just isnt as interesting or dramatic as his initial rise to success. Mostly what we have here is a catalog of desultory and listless moviemaking, punctuated by an occasional recording session or concert that ignites the King's interest. To Guralnick's everlasting credit, he enjoys Elvis' music and its place in the American Pantheon, even when the music isn't all that good. This is the closest we have yet to an objective biography of Elvis Presley, but this half of the life did not merit an entire volume. And what is all this nonsense here on Amazon about Johnny Rivers? So what if he beat Elvis to the punch releasing Chuck Berry's Memphis? Does anyone whose last name is not Rivers really care anymore?

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Summary: Good so far
Review: Just want to comment on Johnny Rivers. It appears from the comments posted here that JR gathered up his 40 or so fans and had them post about the supposed inaccuracy over Memphis. While I don't know what happened, I must say that everyone surrounding Elvis has a different story. Charlie Hodge is quick to say that he never saw anything bad around Elvis. How true is that? I think the author has done a remarkable job of compiling his information. Maybe JR is just bitter that Michael Bolton has taken over his position as most annoying cover artist.

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Summary: The Pinnacle of rock and roll biography
Review: As a preface, I'm a fan of rock music and as Elvis was the personification of rock in the late fifities, I'm also a fan of his early pre-movie work. Taken together the two volumes are a masterwork of rock biography and should be the standard set for rock bios to come. This volume is a retelling of the long spiral down from his Army years to his last days. It's less sensational than the Goldman work of several years ago and more penetrating. Mr. Gurainick chronicles the change in his later years by showing how his changing attitudes affected his concert performances and set list. Some parts changed my views of the last years. Others confirmed some already held opinions Most importantly, when I finished the book, I had a sense of sadness at the waste of talent as poor judgments steer him from his 50's greatness to the mediocrity of his Hollywood and Vegas years. We really do see the "Unmaking" of the man portrayed in Last Train to Memphis.

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Summary: Careless Love: Fact or Fiction
Review: We the readers are totaly at the mercy of the author. Is the story accurate? Are the facts correct? Only Elvis knows for sure.

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Summary: BOOK INCLUDES INACCURATE INFO REGARDING ME
Review: Peter Guralnick's book "Careless Love - The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" stoops to sensationalism and makes inaccurate claims about me as it insinuates I intentionally released my first hit single "Memphis" as an attempt to steal the song from my friend Elvis Presley. I am outraged and hurt that Guralnick has placed certain events out of sequence and excluded information relevant to my close personal relationship with Elvis. Elvis and I were friends for years and I am personally offended the author has joined the ranks of writers who have tried to profit from Elvis' downfall by taking a cheap shot with information that WAS NOT ACCURATE. I was there, Peter Guralnick wasn't. My producer Lou Adler chose "Memphis" to be released, not me, only after the album, "Johnny Rivers Live at the Whisky a Go Go" had been released FIRST and was a success -- before any single was released! When my version of "Memphis" became successful, bar bands all over the country (including my own) had been playing it for years and I was an unknown, struggling musician, not some hot recording artist who raced out to cut it, as the book implied. Around June of 1963, Elvis and I jammed on the tune together and Elvis played his own cover of "Memphis" -- this was at least A YEAR prior to the release of the "Whisky a Go Go" album in May of '64. If Elvis had wanted to release it, he had plenty of time. I would have never intentionally released a single because ELVIS was thinking about it. Who in their right mind would have intentionally gone up against the biggest rock and roll star of that time. Also, in the book it states that once Elvis heard me cut the tune that "he didn't want to see (me) anymore." That is not true. I was always Elvis' friend, even his personal guest at many shows for years at the International Hotel in Las Vegas including his opening in 1969. He gave me his personal table, brought me and my guests backstage and on more than one occasion, introduced me to his audience and had me take a bow. Does that sound like someone who "didn't want to see me"? I trusted Guralnick and granted the author a lengthy personal interview in my home, told him many positive stores for hours about my relationship with Elvis (playing music, telling jokes and interesting stories) and he chose to believe people who were not even around, used vile language -- shocking words to sensationalize the story, and then BURIED my side of the story as a footnote in the back of the book. In my opinion, don't believe everything you read and I encourage other recordings artists and celebrities to be VERY careful as to whom they choose to trust their history.-- Johnny Rivers, March 1, 1999.

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Summary: An engrossing--and depressing--account of the King
Review: Though Amazon readers have the unique ability to pass out five-star reviews as if they were John Rockefeller dishing out dimes, Careless Love is certainly worthy of the high praise it has received. (Unfortunately, Mr. Rivers seems to have distracted some readers from the overall quality of Guralnick's book.) The last two hundreds pages alone are worth the cover price. Here, Guralnick's years of research and reportorial skills shine, as he tells of the true "unmaking" Elvis Presley. The author heightens the sadness by writing this as a tale of suspense: Even though we know exactly what is going to happen, Guralnick makes us hope that, yes, this time Elvis going to turn it around. The brief moments when Elvis revived interest in performing and recording serve only to make his extended periods of apathy all the more depressing. The only real criticism worth leveling at Guralnick is that the first third of the book occasionally gets bogged down in the details of this trip to the fairgrounds or that jaunt to Vegas--after a while, the escapades become indistinguishable from one another. Then again, after having read the entire book, one finds that that blurring is, in many ways, precisely the author's point; for much of the 1960s, Elvis was merely adrift, occupying his time with meaningless escapades and surrounding himself with jackals and sycophants. Even those who dislike, or claim to be uninterested in, Elvis Presley cannot help but be moved by Guralnick's excellent account.

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Summary: How much is fabrication?
Review: There is no doubt in my mind that Peter Guralnick is a skillful writer. There is likewise no doubt in my mind, after reading the paragraphs about Johnny Rivers and the song "Memphis" in his book, "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley", that he is also an unethical writer. Either Guralnick did not investigate the motive of his sources prior to presenting the "Memphis" incident, or he was aware of the glaring inaccuracies and chose to write the misleading account anyway. Perhaps he was attempting to elicit sympathy for poor, trusting Elvis. This is an amusing paradox, as Guralnick seems to have little difficulty in exploiting the memory of Elvis for his own gain. I urge anyone who feels they must read this book, to take everything that is presented as truth with a grain of salt. I know the Johnny Rivers/Memphis accusation is a falsehood, how many other bits of fabrication are contained within this supposedly non-fiction work?

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Summary: Interesting until the falsehoods about Johnny Rivers
Review: I trusted Mr. Guralnick with the first book " The Last Train to Memphis". But there seems to be some contradicting remarks concerning Johnny Rivers in the second one. Mr Guralnick needs to come clean and tell the truth on this one.

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Summary: Excellent, but with 2 criticisms
Review: The book was great, as was Volume 1. I only had two regrets about it. First, I wish that there had been a bit more of a "retrospective" view of Elvis' life at the end, including the author's own views as to what may be learned from Elvis' life. Instead, the book ends somewhat more abruptly than I had hoped, with his death occurring virtually on the last pages. Second, while the book has been (accurately) complimented for being scrupulously fair and non-judgmental, I would have like to see it be a bit MORE judgmental, so as to learn the author's views as to those who were really the "good guys" in his life (i.e. those who saw what was happening and tried to stop it) vs. the "bad guys" (i.e. those who were either oblivious or those did not care.). While I have some of my own views, I would be interested in the author's. As it was, it was like reading an excellent newspaper with no editorial page and no op-ed page!