Music: Last Stop on the Mystery Train

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He was found lying on the bathroom floor in the afternoon. All attempts to revive him failed. Presley had died of "cardiac arrythmia" —a severely irregular heartbeat—brought about by "undetermined causes." Doctors said there was "no evidence of any illegal drug use," although a new book co-authored by three former Presley bodyguards maintains that "E" consumed uppers, downers and a variety of narcotic cough medicines, all obtained by prescription. He also was wrestling halfheartedly with a fearful weight problem and was suffering from a variety of other ailments like hypertension, eye trouble and a twisted colon.

So the legend goes: nothing kills America's culture heroes as quickly and surely as success. Presley burnt himself out, as if on schedule. He had been thirsty for glory. Born in Tupelo, Miss., he was an only child whose parents scraped along on odd jobs until the family moved to Memphis when Elvis was 13. He was fanatically and unabashedly devoted to his mother. He was buried near her after the kind of awful, agonized public wake that attended the passing of Rudolph Valentino and Judy Garland. Eighty thousand fans jammed the street outside his Memphis mansion, Graceland, hoping for a view of the body; 30,000 were admitted to the house. Dozens swooned, cried, keened and passed out from the heat outside the mansion gates. Two people were killed when a drunken driver plowed into the crowd. After the funeral at Graceland, a cortege of 16 white Cadillacs led a slow procession down Elvis Presley Boulevard to the cemetery. There the lawn was banked with some 2,200 floral tributes — an imperial crown of golden mums, hortisculptured hound-dogs and guitars, sunflowers in wine bottles. Memphis ran out of flowers; reinforcements were sent in from California and Colorado.

Rock stars—all Presley stepkids in one way or another—paid him tribute. "I am very sad," said Rod Stewart. "His death is a great loss to rock 'n' roll." Said Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys: "His music was a great inspiration to us. His personality was a great inspiration to us. He was a fine gentleman." Meanwhile, radio stations canceled regular programming and even commercials to play lengthy homage to the fallen king. In Boston a fan lent his own Presley collection to fill the gaps in one station's library. Outside the Las Vegas Hilton, the flag was lowered to half-mast. Instant cottage industries in Elvis T-shirts blossomed. Stores everywhere sold out of Presley records, as if one spin on the turntable would keep him alive forever.

In a sense, of course, it will. Presley was not, as he has so often been called, "the father of rock 'n' roll," but he was the first to consolidate all its divergent roots into a single, surly, hard-driving style. Rock had its origins deep in rhythm and blues, which, in a time of strict musical segregation, was black music all the way. Presley gave rock and blues a gloss of country-and-western and a rockabilly beat, but he preserved the undertones of insinuating sexuality, accentuated rock's and blues' rough edges of danger from the sharp beat to the streetwise lyrics. "It was like a giant wedding ceremony," Marion Keisker said later, "like two feuding clans who had been brought together by marriage."