Music: Last Stop on the Mystery Train

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He never did. Not really. His later stage shows were full of intentional self-parody; he took to telling audiences "this lip used to curl easier." Of late he made his entrance at concerts to the thundering strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra. He could still rock out when he wanted to cut loose with a fine, jagged version of Hound Dog, but he seemed increasingly bored with his music and more absorbed in the lavish trappings of his own celebrity.

In the first flush of his success, Elvis lived with the crazy vigor of a good ole boy who just had the whole world tucked snugly into the back pocket of his overalls. He surrounded himself with home-town cronies, kept them fed and cared for, dispensed lavish gifts. He gave away luxury cars—particularly the Cadillacs he doted on—like gumdrops. After a while, though, the cronies became heavies—bodyguards, procurers—and the gifts bribes to buy loyalty, or silence. He courted a girl, Priscilla Beaulieu, he had met during his Army hitch. He persuaded her father to let her come over from Germany to live and, when he got out of the Army, to go to school in Memphis. She was not yet 15 when they met. They got married when she was 21, and a year later, in 1968, they had a daughter. After that, Elvis spent a lot of time away from her until they divorced in 1973. Presley became reclusive, paranoid. He immured himself among roomfuls of flamboyant furniture in Graceland. He took up karate, amassed a vast collection of guns and police badges and, according to the trio of tattletale bodyguards, would travel not only with a brace of handguns but such heavy armaments as a Thompson submachine gun and an M-16 rifle.

Earlier, he had rented a Memphis movie theater and a roller rink for afterhours amusement. In recent years, his only forays out into the real world were concert tours that were carefully insulated. The routine was usually the same: private plane to private limo to back entrance of hotel to specially cleared elevator to penthouse suite; then, after a while, off to the concert, onto the stage, back to the hotel, then to the airport. Reality never intruded, except when the schedule faltered. In a 1972 documentary, Elvis on Tour, there is a quick scene of Elvis, stranded on an airport runway, waiting for the gangway of his private plane to roll out. He is caught in the glare of sunlight, and he looks up in the sky with startled curiosity, as if surveying an alien planet.

The world he left behind so quickly had still not quite recovered from the changes he brought down on it. In England, the punk rockers who are raising such a ruckus, spooking the music business and intimidating their elders, turn themselves out just like the Elvis of the '50s, in tight pants and defensive snarls. Their unadorned, assaultive music tries for the same fierce simplicity Elvis seemed to achieve so effortlessly. Back in Memphis, hysteria prevailed. Guards were posted outside the mausoleum to keep fans and fanatics from laying waste to the burial grounds. There were to be fresh shipments of Elvis records, re-releases of the old movies, TV retrospectives. Presley mourners talked about trying to reach his spirit through seances.