“I wanted to rescue Elvis Presley from the dreary bondage of myth, from the oppressive aftershock of cultural significance,” Guralnick wrote in Last Train to Memphis his first goal, he said, was “to allow the characters to breathe their own air.” In both books, he has realized that remarkable ambition. “Elvis Presley performed existential acts which helped to liberate an entire generation,” Guralnick wrote in a 1968 review of the comeback special, but that is not the language of his biography.

So then he beat the time, and that wasn’t allowed either.” Then he was singing at the table, and that wasn’t allowed either. The countless people Guralnick has spoken to tell Presley’s tale in the cadences of real talk, in words you can instantly distinguish from stilted memoir excerpts-thus, forty years after that night in Munich, the regret and revulsion felt by a German woman who was there haven’t dimmed: “He began to sing, and one of his bodyguards said that he should stop-he should know that he is not allowed to sing it is forbidden.

“Almost from the moment he arrived,” Guralnick writes, “the band started playing Elvis Presley songs and did their best to coax their famous guest up onstage.” But the hand of Presley’s canny manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who always knew the value of keeping his asset under wraps, reached even across the Atlantic. Now Elvis is in the Army in West Germany, surrounded by a retinue of paid pals from Memphis as one night, in mufti, he enters a seamy Munich strip club called the Moulin Rouge. The first, the celebrated Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, took the story to the fall of 1958, closing with the death of Elvis’s beloved mother, Gladys.

There’s an awful match for this moment early on in Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second and last volume of what is now a twelve-hundred-page Presley biography. The only thing I moved was my little finger.” They said, ‘Man, he’s gotta be crazy.’ So, the police came out and filmed the show, so I couldn’t move. It was 1956, he remembered, in the midst of the national scandal over his celebration of his own body: “The police filmed a show one time in Florida, ’cause, uh, the PTA, the YMCA, or somebody thought I was… something. In a signal moment during the jam sessions that highlighted Elvis Presley’s 1968 TV comeback special-the most explosive music of his life-he told a funny story.

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