The year 1970 was a memorable one. That's when Elvis Presley told a Las Vegas audience, "My mouth is so dry it feels like Bob Dylan spent the night in it."
At least that's what "The Elvis Atlas" (Henry Holt, $35) says, and I'm not inclined to argue with this fastidiously researched book by Michael Gray and Roger Osborne.In its 192 pages, "The Elvis Atlas" packs a concise history of American popular music and its roots - starting with the Indian nations' ancestors crossing the land bridge from Asia more than 30,000 years ago - a history of Presley's life and success, his decline and death and the multiple phenomena his death started.
By the way, Presley's life takes up quite a few more of the pages than the history of what went before.
Every bit of prose is accompanied by maps, maps, maps!
If you want to know the railroad routes that helped spread black work songs through the Appalachians, you'll find them here. There's a map of Memphis' Beale Street - the home of the blues - that shows what each address once housed and what's there today.
Creative iconography lets you know what tours Presley took by highway, rail or air. Want to find Elvis' high school or neighborhood? Just look here.
The book is daffy, but maybe only a touch of daffiness could produce such a remarkable piece of scholarship. (And despite any reservations I may express, it's a fascinating, must-have reference-trivia book for any rock 'n' roll fan.)
Subtitled "A Journey Through Elvis Presley's America," "The Elvis Atlas" has no trace of irony about Presley's exalted place in the pop firmament. He was, after all, an entertainer, engaged in the business of helping people have a good time, and not some kind of revolutionary or saint.
In light of that, does Presley deserve such dead-serious prose as "the shy, polite, God-fearing boy from Tennessee became a symbol of sexual license and rebellion for most of the world's youth"? That'll suck the rebellion and sexual license right out of you.
The section titles have a weight like "Dragnet's" to them. The Last Journey. Where Did Things Go Wrong? Death of a Public Idol. The Legend Lives On.
By now, we all know the Elvis phenomenon is bigger than Presley, his estate, his movies or his records. Rock critic Greil Marcus, through his book "Dead Elvis," suggested that a new wrinkle has been added to the mythic fabric every day since Presley died in 1977.
In a song called "Weeping Statues," rocker Graham Parker equated Elvis sightings with "crying" icons as glimpses into a deeper reality that forever changes those who have the experience.
Those of us who have hard heads see something of the crackpot in those who have that kind of devotion to Presley. We assume that it's their devotion that prompts the sightings and not the sightings that prompt the devotion.
For these Presley fans, "The Elvis Atlas" will become a guidebook to shrines.
Already in Indianapolis, Elvis' True Blue Fan Club is trying to keep Market Square Arena, the last building Elvis left on a tour, from being torn down for another basketball arena. (In "The Elvis Atlas," you'd find out that Presley played there on June 26, 1977, before 18,000 people.)
One fan was quoted as saying she didn't understand why city fathers would think of tearing down that arena because fans from all over the world know it was the last place Elvis played.
To which the non-Presley fan would probably say, "So?"
(Of course, the non-Presley fan with vision might say, "Hmm! What a moneymaking proposition if marketed properly!")
Near the end of the book, the authors passionately declare "forget the impersonators, the jump suits, the final years of decline, the gift shops and the guided tours of Graceland." Yet, the serious tone of their book will appeal more to the faithful who love these things than to those who recognize the cultural shift Presley unwittingly personified.
"It is only with the growing interval of years since his death that we are beginning to see Elvis as a serious historical figure with as much influence on the cultural life of his country as any other person this century," they write.
Of course, I agree. But doesn't being so serious about it put us in danger of returning to the world Presley delivered us from?
The grander purpose of Elvis was to bring some fun into an increasingly mechanized and conformist postwar world. He and his rock 'n' rolling contemporaries were the perfect response to a future that seemed to end in a fallout shelter.