The Fall of The King

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Maybe what was wrong was the music. Simple as that. Because Presley, in the proudest sense, was a simple man, and the music was always his glory, his animating spirit, his means, even at his bleary end, of temporary transcendence. And the music had been compromised, so stunted that his soul just shut down. Maybe part of his heart died when Gladys passed, or maybe he just lost heart. But his life also started to drift as the music spun out of control. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had wrapped him so tight in a skein of interwoven business and publishing deals that he had little creative room to move. "We're caught in a trap," he sings with devastating intensity in Suspicious Minds, one of the great tunes of the later years, sounding like a lifer who has the keys to his own cell but has lost them somewhere in the dark that frightens him so.

In the end, of course, the dark overwhelmed him. Careless Love, a chronicle of shadows and sadness, is no sentimental epitaph. It is the fine and careful measure of a pilgrim traveler who was never sure what he wanted, gave too much of what he got, and had to say Amen before he could even be sure the Lord was listening.