Real Life Rock Top 10: December 6, 2024
Three versions of Elvis, two versions of Percival Everett, and a visit to the dentist
1. Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough, From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir (Random House). As Elvis Presley’s sole heir, Lisa Marie married and divorced the musician and actor Danny Keough, the singer Michael Jackson, the Elvis-obsessed actor Nicolas Cage, for whom she must have been the ultimate souvenir, and the guitarist Michael Lockwood. In 2003, at thirty-five, she released her first album, To Whom It May Concern (EMI International), followed two years later by Now What (Capitol). Both supposedly made the top ten; her 2012 Storm & Grace (Universal Republic), made with the A-list producer T Bone Burnett, received good but unconvincing reviews and was listed at #45. None of the records communicated as much as her strange 2012 duet release of Elvis’s 1954 “I Love You Because,” where she offered an accompaniment so intimidated it felt as if she were more afraid of her own voice than her father’s ghost. Still the mistress of Graceland, she died in 2023 at fifty-four, but that record was a kind of precursor. Here, her oldest daughter, the actress Riley Keough (who’s done her best work as the entrepreneurial prostitute in the 2020 Zola—traveling with a black stripper and throwing out black speech so convincingly some heard her following Elvis doing the same on his Sun singles—and in the title role in the 2023 Amazon series Daisy Jones and the Six, playing the Stevie Nicks role in a version of the Fleetwood Mac soap opera), now in charge of Graceland herself, has completed the memoir her mother was attempting when she died, adding her own, clearer, hard-boiled voice. It’s a devastating testament, across Lisa Marie witnessing her father’s death, through alcoholism (“Sometimes I’d walk into my Mom’s bedroom,” Keough writes, “and find her sitting on the floor alone, drunk, listening to her father’s music, crying. But she’d never talk about it, or listen to his music sober”), Scientology, heroin, and the suicide of her second child, Keough’s brother. It is a rich book on its own terms, with two passages that say more than a library, or a trash heap, of most other Elvis books. First there is Keough: “Sometimes when I watch videos of Elvis performing, I think about the fact that if he hadn’t done exactly what he did in exactly that moment in time—if he hadn’t walked into the right building, recorded the right song, danced the way he did in front of the right person—there would be no Elvis Presley. We probably would have lived somewhere in Mississippi.
“I didn’t even finish high school in this version of my life, so I can’t imagine where I’d be in that one. My great-grandfather drove trucks, maybe we would have carried on that tradition. Maybe we would have made furniture in Tupelo.
“My mom would have ended up in jail for sure.”
And then Lisa Marie: “Twice a year after he died, I’d dream about my father . . . In the dreams, he and I would be together in my room. I’m in my hamburger bed, and he’s in the chair. We’re close and connected, talking. Suddenly, I get panicked and say, ‘Wait! You have to stop this, Daddy! You have to wait! You’re going to OD, you’re going to have a heart attack. Daddy! You’re going to die! It’s going to happen.’
“And in the dream, my dad looks at me so calmly, so knowingly, smiles, and says, ‘Darlin’, it’s already happened.’”