Travels with Barley (27 page)

In fact, after an exhaustive search of Elvis books (okay, true I didn't read them all seeing as how there are 482 titles, including a hairdo tell-all by Elvis's barber, on Amazon alone), the Web, and substantial newspaper and magazine databases, I could only find
three
skimpy beer references to Elvis. One was a decade-old
Los Angeles Times
profile of a dying Hollywood watering hole called the Formosa Café in which the writer asserted that “this, after all, is the bar where Elvis drank beer” without saying any more about it. A second appeared in a 1992
Sports Illustrated
account in which Elvis invited Harry Caray, the legendary Chicago Cubs baseball play-by-play announcer of whom Elvis was a fan, to Graceland and, according to the piece, “That night, Harry and Elvis shot the breeze, drank beer, and ate ribs.” (Alas,
which
beer wasn't mentioned.) The last was a piece on a pub crawl by a writer for RealBeer.com and included a reference to a Washington, D.C., bar (and, my luck, no longer in business) that had on tap what the bar called “Elvis's Favorite Beer—Schlitz.” But, as you can see, none of the above actually
proves
anything. Elvis also, as everybody pretty much knows, served his two-year army hitch in Germany, which is certainly a good place to learn to drink beer if you don't already know how to. But I could find a nary a reference to Elvis drinking either subsidized PX beer or fine German lager.

Anyway, it seemed to me, given Elvis's standing in American pop culture, this was a legitimate if not burning question for a wandering beer scribe to pose and if possible resolve. I wondered perhaps if the answer lay among artifacts at Graceland, which I confess I'd never visited but which for the entirely reasonable fee of $16.25 I certainly could and would. I didn't know that much about Graceland but what I did know made me think highly of it. One was that Elvis bought it for his momma, who promptly put in chicken coops and a vegetable patch even after Elvis had spent a fortune to remodel it, adding, among other accoutrements, a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Two: before he bought it, Elvis sought the advice of Liberace, which only increased the esteem of both Elvis and Liberace in my eyes.

Now, no, I'm not one of those Elvis People who build shrines to him in their basements. But the King was inarguably an American original with true talent who changed the American music landscape forever. As a child of the 1960s, I can vouch for the fact that Elvis was about the only rock/pop star you could talk to your parents about. My mother adored him, though mostly in his string-heavy ballad-crooning mode. My father, a bluegrass and country music fan who would grow apoplectic when we insisted that the Beatles could actually
sing
, abided conversations about Elvis and would even listen to “All Shook Up” because he knew Elvis to have once been a fine rockabilly and gospel singer. I always liked Elvis's personal style; there was always something homespun and vulnerable beneath that smooth swagger. I thought of him as basically a good hillbilly guy trying his best not to let fame and fortune kill him off. The only thing I held against Elvis is that he let fame and fortune win.

Of course, if it turned out he never drank beer that would be something else.

I checked into the Heartbreak Hotel, owned, not surprisingly, by Elvis Presley Enterprises and whose motto is “Sleep like the King for a night.” (Elvis has made much more money dead than he ever did alive.) Even the check-in was fun when I found out that I could, if I wanted to, stay in one of the four Themed Suites, the two most alluring choices being the Graceland Suite and the Burning Love Suite. The Graceland Suite, according to the literature, “gives guests the sense of living in their own diminutive Graceland Mansion with room designs inspired by Elvis's own living room, dining room, TV room, billiard room and ‘jungle' den.” The Burning Love Suite, on the other hand, “features a rich, romantic décor (lots of red). It is inspired by Elvis's 1972 hit record ‘Burning Love' and his status as a romantic idol.” No matter which I chose, I would still get the deluxe continental breakfast, the free HBO, and free in-house channel running continuous Elvis videos. The other fun thing, the smiling clerk behind the towering purple art deco desk told me, was that I could have one or two room keys but I would have to put down a deposit of $25 per key because, well, those keys, inscribed with “Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel,” sure were popular with Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel guests and had a tendency to go home with them—and, in fact, I should feel free to keep my key, which was a popular choice, and they would keep my $25 or $50, uh-huh?

This was a lot to throw at a guy who had just come from Woody's in Caruthersville, Missouri and who was also being bedazzled by the extremely red welcoming carpet he was standing on, not to mention the purple velour lounge chairs and the white and luxuriously curvy divans sitting invitingly in the lobby nearby. But I thought about the eyebrows that might get raised in the accounting office back in New York if I went for the $469.90 (plus tax!) Burning Love Suite, even though the picture of the super-King-sized bed did indicate it was large enough to accommodate me
and
my rental car, plus I'd never stayed in a room that had a shower with mirrors all the way around it. But I opted for the ordinary $109.95 room and told the smiling clerk that I would take just one key and would return it at the end of my stay, at which point they would return my $25 deposit, right?

“Of course, yes sir. Of course! Of course!” he said. (Let it be noted that the level of politeness at Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel was extremely high.)

I was not disappointed in my room choice, either; though my shower lacked mirrors of any kind, I had very fine pastel walls, very fine movie house carpet, very fine faux art deco furnishings, a lovely checked bedspread, and a very nice picture of Young Elvis above my bed. I turned on the TV and caught a couple of those free videos I had been promised, then went out for a jog past Graceland (though a swim in the hotel's heart-shaped pool was a tempting alternative on a day that was beastly hot).

Around happy hour, I wandered into the bar of the Heartbreak Hotel and found it small and distressingly deserted, which, it being Saturday night, I had not anticipated. So I settled onto a stool, hoping a beer drinker or two would arrive. I ordered a Heineken and struck up a conversation with the smiling and twenty-something waitperson whose name, in an unfathomable lapse, I forgot to scribble down. I think it was Mary.

I asked her the question that I was sure she got all the time: “So, when's the last time Elvis was here?”

She didn't miss a beat. “He comes in on Thursday nights,” she said. “He sits right where you're sitting.”

I told her of my beer quest and my conundrum of not being able to confirm, with absolute certainty, whether Elvis was a beer man. I wondered what she knew.

She smiled and said, “Have you seen him lately? I won't serve him anything but Bud Light.”

About that time some women customers came in looking for frozen drinks. Mary cranked up an amazingly noisy blender and got busy. A bit later a guy appeared, looked around for a place to sit, and settled at the bar a few seats down. He was of medium height, thin, with close-cropped hair and an earring in each ear. I heard him order a beer with a decidedly British accent. A British beer drinker in an Elvis bar portended a good turn of events.

I went over and introduced myself and told him what I was up to. He said his name was Danny Wills and that we could talk about beer but he thought his beer knowledge was “just common.” However, he'd love to talk about Elvis.

Wills explained that he was a milkman (yes, Britain still has milk trucks that deliver chilled pint bottles to your doorstep every morning) from the London enclave of Fulham. He described himself as a lifelong Elvis fan and said he was into the third day of his second pilgrimage to Graceland and vicinity. His overriding passion in life was collecting Elvis memorabilia—clothes, music, posters, figurines, beer steins, all Elvis-emblazoned—and he seemed, by description, to be doing a pretty good job of it. “Back home, I've got a spare bedroom upstairs that's pretty much full,” Wills said. “Now I'm filling up the garage. After that, I don't know what I'll do with it all.”

Since I'd lived in London and while there not detected any Elvis mania (though true, I wasn't looking for any), I asked him if other Brits shared his passion. “Are you kidding?” he said. “Elvis is huge in Britain—huge! In the course of the work I do—I have a lot of elderly customers, pensioners and the like—the number of people who want mementos is huge, just huge! These are people who know they're never going to come over here. Of course, I can't bring back something for everyone—I'd be broke.”

Wills said this trip he had two missions, besides visiting Graceland again. One was to fill in the last two songs missing from his otherwise complete Elvis discography of the 542 songs Elvis recorded. The other he'd already accomplished.

“What was it?” I wanted to know.

“You'll never guess what I bought today.”

“What?”

“An Elvis suit. You know, the white one. That gives me the full kit. When I was here three years ago, I got the belt.”

I recalled Elvis wearing a lot of flamboyant, rhinestone-studded jumpsuits toward the end of his career. I asked Wills why he had picked that one and where he got such a thing.

“I shop at a place on Elvis Presley Boulevard,” he said. As for the white suits, they were fairly easy to get and only cost a couple of hundred bucks, which he considered a bargain for such a treasure. He did plan to wear it once he got home, though it would mainly be for display to impress his Elvis-loving mates. “I can tell you exactly where I was when Elvis died,” Wills said. “It was August 16, 1977, and I was a long-distance lorry driver on the M1 [the principal freeway looping London] when it came on the BBC.”

I couldn't actually remember where I was when the King died so I steered the conversation to beer.

Wills said, “Oh, when I'm here I only drink Budweiser. I can't take any other American beer, I just can't. I can't, I can't, I can't. I find that Bud is the closest thing to English beer that I can find.”

I could only imagine Auggies III and IV being here and saying to the Beer Geeks: “See, we told you so!”

However, in all due deference to Wills's entirely valid Everyman opinion, I couldn't help but ask whether he was aware of the craft beer revolution in America or what his countryman, the beer writer Michael Jackson, had said about it? Wills said he wasn't aware of either but, then again, though he might drink the King of Beers and be fond of it, he was here mostly in search of the King of Rock 'n' Roll. With that, Wills drained his Bud, said good night, and went off for a dinner engagement.

I hung out a while longer at the bar but it seemed to have filled up with a lot of daiquiri-drinking Elvis People, many of whom I overheard say were headed after cocktails to Elvis Presley's Memphis Restaurant downtown. I decided I was giving the King enough of my money already and went off to look for some ribs and beer.

Graceland, which I toured on Sunday morning after a ninety-minute wait in line—a very reasonable wait, I might add, given that 700,000 pilgrims pass its gates each year—was a huge disappointment in my quest to determine whether Elvis drank beer. (It is a mystery that, as of this writing, I still haven't resolved.) There wasn't a beer clue anyplace, which in a way dulled what would have otherwise been my huge appreciation of the Jungle Room, Elvis's white-fur-covered bed, and the video testimonials of various luminous people that Elvis's movies weren't all that bad and Elvis wasn't actually such a bad actor.

But Memphis turned out to be a better than expected beer town, though I didn't find the Perfect Beer Joint there. Still, I found very good beer at several places, notably: the Flying Saucer, with 200 beers on the menu (it's part of a small, Texas-based chain); Gordon Biersch (also part of a large brewpub chain); and Bosco's, another brewpub chain with a nice beer selection. These were all recommended after I wandered on Sunday afternoon into a bar on Beale Street called the Tap Room. One sign outside read: “The Coldest, Cheapest Beer on Beale Street” while another declared the bar held “The World's Largest Antique Beer Can Collection.” The beer can collection, I would soon learn, had pretty much been hauled away in a recent makeover of the bar. No matter.

Inside, I found Phillip Morris, a long-haul truck driver just off a twelve-hour road trip from Indianapolis, sipping a Sam Adams and chatting with Lynne Hardin, the Tap Room's welcoming and nicely tattooed waitress. The exchange reminded me of another important social function of the beer joint: to pass on esoteric information of no interest to the larger world but of keen importance to those who seek such knowledge.

“I'm admiring your body art,” Morris said to Hardin, “and I was wondering where you got your tattoos? I don't want a real one. But, see, I have this neighbor and I hate the guy—just hate him. So as a lark, I thought I'd get a tattoo with his wife's name on my chest and go out and mow the lawn without my shirt on. You know—just to get a laugh.”

Hardin laughed. She said she used a place called the Ram's Shadow in Memphis but they only did the real thing, not fakes.

“Well, I don't want any body perforations,” Morris said.