All Gone to Look for America (46 page)

I get out of the trolley and walk around it – not as easy as it might be given that it lies literally on the wrong side of the tracks. The wind blows old
programmes
and out of date brochures around crevices in the concrete
understructure
. The glass doors are dirtied and verging on the opaque, the lobby within slowly decaying, the whole thing a spectacular monument to municipal folly and the American fad for the ‘next thing’ leaving the last decade’s
obsession
to slow decay. There is continual municipal speculation about finding a new use for it. But everyone I ask thinks they’ll probably just knock it down.

Along the railroad track a bit further on is a placard to mark the site of
long-gone
Poplar Street station from which John Luther ‘Casey’ Jones drove the
Cannonball Express for the last time on a cold morning in April 1929. Further down the line outside Vaughan, Mississippi, a faulty set of points left the train on a collision course with freight cars. Rather than jumping off to save his life, Casey stayed in the cab slowing the train to minimise the impact. He was the only fatal casualty. He remains America’s best-known hero of the railway era, but probably only because he died in a place where they valued any excuse to write a song and ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’ ensured his immortality. Some railway historians reckon he had been going too fast anyhow.

Just up the road is a more poignant if equally bleak memorial to another, rather more significant, American hero. At first glance it seems, as so often in America – a country that we think of as embodying the future – like stepping into a time warp to the 1960s: a drab, nondescript motel that looks eerily like the Universal Studios tour set from
Psycho.
The faded turquoise pillars outside support the sign that in big letters on a one-time illuminated sign proclaims ‘Lorraine Motel’, the latter word with each letter picked out in red on big white circles. The building itself is long and low, two stories with turquoise panels between the rooms, and net curtains pulled behind thin balconies. On every room save one.

On 6 April 1968 (April is a particularly cruel month in Memphis) civil rights leader Martin Luther King, at the height of his fame and the peak of the
campaign
for equality for American blacks, had come to Memphis to support black sanitation department workers striking for equal treatment. At just after 6:00 p.m. King went out onto the balcony of room 306 and was shot in the head. President Lyndon Johnson declared a day of national mourning but it was not enough to stop rioting engulfing more than 60 cities including Memphis where the National Guard were called out to impose order.

Two months later an escaped white convict called James Earl Ray, who had broken out of jail in Missouri a year before the assassination, was arrested travelling out of London’s Heathrow Airport under the name Ramon George Sneyd. He was extradited to the US, taken to Tennessee and charged with King’s murder. He pleaded guilty but later insisted he did so only to escape the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years, escaped briefly in 1977, but was recaptured and spent the rest of his life trying to withdraw his guilty plea, alleging conspiracies and demanding a retrial, to the extent that even King’s own son came round to supporting him. He died in 1998 aged 70, still in prison, still insisting on his innocence. No murder in American history other than that of President John F. Kennedy has been the subject of more suspicion and conspiracy theories, involving groups as disparate as white supremacists,
rival Black Power groups and the US government itself. With Barack Obama leading the Democrat race for the presidency as I write, it seems all at once poignant, symbolic and ominous.

As a powerful centre of black culture it was logical that Memphis would play an important role in that civil rights struggle, of which Obama’s rise is the most obvious, startling product. Next to the motel is the national Civil Rights Museum, a pointed memorial to decades of injustice, but which is not free from controversy, being considered by some blacks as more of a ‘gesture institution’ than a real apology. The unrest, of the 1960s and early seventies particularly, also played a role in bringing the city’s musical heyday to an end, as the conflict exposed, bled and eventually upended the melting pot that had created it.

And without the music there really isn’t much left of Memphis. The local visitors’ magazine recently challenged a group of travel writers to come up with the things that made Memphis
truly unique
(their italics). Apart from Graceland, their list included the following:

1. Chucalissa Archaeology Museum, where Spanish conquistador Hernando do Soto first spotted the Mississippi and called it Espiritu Santo. (Well, actually, even the museum admits nobody knows where that was but it must have been somewhere around here. They have a few pottery shards.)
   
2. Mud Island. (Exactly what it says on the label: a muddy sandbar in the Mississippi, with a bit of a park on it.)
   
3. Sun Studios. (The only tourist attraction that has to bribe people through its doors.)
   
4. The Lorraine Motel. (A monument to a murder, and possibly a miscarriage of justice.)
   
5. The Pyramid. (An empty sports arena awaiting demolition.)
   
6. The Peabody Hotel Ducks.
   

Okay, I have to give them the last one: if only on the grounds of trying. The Peabody itself is an architecturally nondescript 1920s monolith of plush luxury hotel rooms. Sometime back in the 1930s the general manager returned from a hunting trip with some live tame decoy ducks which began frolicking in the lobby fountain to the amusement of guests. The incident turned into a
tradition
of duck-keeping on the hotel’s top floor and a daily routine, worked up by a circus animal trainer, of taking them down in the lift and rolling out a red
carpet to the fountain for them to have a splash. This being Memphis someone decided the lobby band needed a musical accompaniment and broke into the ‘King Cotton March’.

Bear in mind that the ‘King Cotton March’ is remarkably similar to its
composer
John Philip Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell March’, which became globally famous as the theme tune to
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, and you can see why this bit of choreographed surreal circus has become such a hit. We Brits are
supposed
to love such meaningless traditionalised wackiness – look at the House of Lords – but I can’t help seeing this as less of an eccentricity and more of a marketing gimmick. Especially now that other Peabody hotels in Orlando, Florida, and Little Rock, Arkansas, have adopted the ‘tradition’. That’s right, folks, you can tell it’s a Peabody by the marching ducks, just like you can tell a McDonald’s by the golden arches.

The Memphis Peabody does have one other claim to fame: the fact that it was the setting for a crucial scene in John Grisham’s bestselling thriller
The Firm
. What they don’t boast of quite so much is that when it came to making the movie, they kept the name but chose another location for the shoot: one with a better view of the river than you can get from any of the Peabody’s rooms.

Where were we? Oh yes… there’s one more item on the list:

The Gibson Guitar Factory.

I also have to give them something here: there are few guitar makes more famous than the Gibson, and in particular the iconic Gibson Les Paul. Les himself, however, comes from Wisconsin where he was born in 1915, and was the man who designed and built – back in 1941 – perhaps the world’s first solid body electric guitar. In terms of men who changed the world, you’d have to put old Les – 92 in 2008 and still playing – right up there on the list. No less than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has paid him the following inimitable compliment: ‘We must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash little punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets.’

Les of course never had much to do with the guitar that bears his name. He simply signed a contract in 1950 that allowed them to use it. Apart from a minor tweak he had no input whatsoever in design. Les just sat back and took the
royalties
, while Gibson went on to sell the guitars all over the world. I should also point out that Gibson is in fact based in Nashville, Tennessee, not Memphis, and that the factory here is a recent addition. But they do make guitars and if factory tours are your thing… But I’d had enough at Harley Davidson.

Right now I’ve got other things on my mind, food for example. Deprived of my peanut-butter-banana heart-attack special, I’m going to try another local
treat that in the long term could probably be just as lethal but in the short term sounded a sight more tasty: ‘Memphis famous barbecue ribs.’ In Memphis uniquely ‘ribs’ are always pork, and the best were reputed to come from the Blues City Café, where else but on the corner of Beale Street. The tables are spartan, diner-style, the chefs behind the counter smiling round-faced black men who clearly enjoy their work, the waitress a sour-faced white girl who clearly hates hers. She takes my order with the thinnest-lipped smile I have ever seen on someone with even the remotest hope of getting a tip – perhaps it’s my accent. We Brits – our reputation goes before us. But within just a few minutes she comes back with a cold beer and the finest, largest plate of
melt-in-your
mouth pork ribs smothered in just slightly smoky spicy sauce it has ever been my good fortune to survive.

If you are used to counting either calories or cholesterol, you need not so much a pocket calculator as a Cray supercomputer in Memphis. Other delights on offer include the fattest ‘French fries’ I have ever seen, ‘southern fried catfish’, deep fried burgers (!!), much of it washed down – if you can call it that – with thick milkshakes. Some of the food, like my ribs, is undoubtedly genuinely delicious, but all of it – and I am no gym-going vegan health fanatic – is potentially as lethal as Glasgow’s very own deep-fried Mars bar. And I bet that as soon as they discover that on Beale Street, they’ll be adding barbecue sauce and claiming they invented it.

By now the weather was turning colder again and the drizzle was as
incessant
as ever, making me wonder if I’ve somehow become a rain god, as Douglas Adams would have put it, dragging a wave of atmospheric depression and
persistent
precipitation in my wake. Now I know why Marc Cohn’s lyric has him touching down in the Land of the Delta blues in the middle of the pouring rain. Maybe this weather is more common than I’d thought. Cohn may have been ‘blue as a boy can be’, but I don’t even have a first-class ticket.

Time to pay Memphis’s music scene a final visit. I wander out onto Beale, stopping briefly to cross the street to the bizarre anomaly that is A. Schwab’s ‘variety store’: est. 1876, motto:
If you can’t find it at A. Schwab’s, you don’t need it
. Well, it might have been true in 1876 and maybe for half a century or more afterwards, but nowadays it ought to read ‘If you can find it at A. Schwab’s you probably don’t need it’. Bare boards, goods piled in cardboard boxes, Schwab’s looks wholly unreconstructed: a place to pick up a pair of overalls, a mop, an odd button or some out of date underwear. By which I mean underwear that is past its sell-by date: long johns or fleecy knickers. Schwab’s is so
unreconstructed
that you just know somebody has gone to an awful lot of trouble
to unreconstruct it: almost certainly the same somebody who orders in the mojo candles and the Beale Street souvenirs that you can’t help suspecting sell more than the knickers. Schwab’s nearly closed in the 1970s when Memphis was at its lowest ebb and just beginning to rethink itself. It might have been better if it had closed; it would certainly have been more honest. The
conservationists
succeeded, however, in preserving it, right down to the ‘nickel candy machines’, which will still spit out a (very small) piece of gum in exchange for a five-cent coin. It’s still owned by a Schwab – third generation which in US terms makes them almost a historic dynasty – but again I couldn’t help feeling he was, like the shop, preserved for the tourist industry rather than for any more practical purpose.

Back outside I crossed the road to the first bar with a band playing a little place called The Blues Hall with a long wooden counter and a small quartet knocking out a few passable tunes on acoustic instruments at the end. It was only when a door opened in what I had thought was the wall and I was blown away by a replacement wall of sound that I realised where I really was: back in the Rum Boogie Café. The Blues Hall, it turned out, was effectively the same place as the Rum Boogie next door, linked by internal doors. What looked like a series of independent bars competing with one another in a vibrant music scene, I was beginning to realise, is really just a rock’n’roll theme park.

A conversation with the barman in The Blues Hall revealed that they have been joined at the hip for years. Or what seems like years. The Rum Boogie has in any case only been going since 1985, so in part answer to my earlier question, if its collection of signed guitars is in any way genuine, it can only be because the owners have collected them rather than been given them in homage to any legendary reputation. Carl Perkins, incredibly enough, may still have been going strong in 1985, but both Elvis and Sid Vicious had plucked their last string years earlier.

More than a slight disillusionment has crept into my mood here that even a couple more beers and a more than adequate standard of music – in both bars – can’t quite compensate for. I feel surprisingly sorry for Memphis. It’s a city that’s outgrown itself, in the way a wild but winsome teenager might settle down to become a boring middle-aged suburbanite. It’s worse than what happened to Elvis as he became a podgy ballad-crooning travesty of the
weasel-hipped
rock’n’roller: as if he’d survived and gone on to be a sad old man stripped of the glories of his past and then in his declining years some nostalgia wave had swept back to buy him a nice new rocking chair and say, ‘Never mind, granddad, you’re a national icon now.’

Memphis has been saved from total decay at the cost of its heart and soul. It has suffered the same wasting disease as so many other American cities and not even such shiny nostalgic prosthetics as ‘the trolley’ can substitute for the loss of vibrancy and purpose. On top of this, like a replica rhinestone cowboy’s cape, its musical history has been dusted down and Disneyfied, Beale Street resurrected as Mickey Mouse’s Main Street. The music is still here but it’s being played rather than made. Memphis has become a tribute act to itself. If that isn’t enough to give you the blues, I don’t know what is.