Good god, that was a tough slog. Really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t HUGELY into parsing Elvis’s lyrics, and dying to hunt down obscure influences and references. With an emphasis on obscure!
Full disclosure - I have/had all of his albums through Goodbye Cruel World, and none after. His work and my tastes parted after that. Which is not to take ANYTHING away from an artist who chooses to expand and explore, rather than repeating the same formula. But I wasn’t particularly interested in his work with Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet, etc. The book has tons of material regarding his work after I stopped being a big fan. So while I found that interesting, I think the lack of a clear structure made it less interesting than it otherwise would be.
Heck it is tough to really figure out for sure how many times he’s been married, and how many kids he has (3 each, I believe). So you have to be content to just sorta absorb it to give a sense of his life, rather than a specific chronology.
Re: Cait - I think there is a place in the 600s where he refers to her somewhat more regularly over the course of 10 pages. Said she looked good wearing a bass. I think he previously said they were not married, but by this point I was frustrated enough at the obscure style that I skimmed a lot.
Spends a TON of time talking about his dad and his grandparents. Even if I would have been interested in that, the convoluted and obpaque writing put me off. He seems to wish to “namedrop” many MANY writers, musicians, and songs I had never heard of before, as influences on him, or his dad and grandpa. Could be useful if you wished to try to track them all down, but my mind glazed over somewhere around pages 2-300.
Like I said, back in the 70s-early 80s I was a BIG fan of Stiff, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Brinsley Schwaz, Ducks Deluxe, the Clash, Graham Parker, Jonathon Richman… My roommate and I were in a band playing that sort of music, bought albums the day they came out, and we’d pore over the albums late into the night. Fuck, my crazy roommate even organized our several thousand discs - not by alphabet, but by who produced/played with/and influenced who. Hell, saw Elvis and T-Bone play in a gym during the solo tour he mentions in (I think) a single sentence. But I found even that part of the book frustrating, uninformative, and unenlightening.
Many experiences/relationships are presented as isolated vignettes: all of a sudden there will be 5 pages about eating meeting David Bowie, with nothing before or after to put it into context.
The only mention I saw was to something like “some idiot named Eric” during early Stiff days.
He gives a lot of time/credit to the Attractions. So I learned more about Steve Nieve and the Thomas brothers than I knew before. But I could have found a lot of that out without wading through this.
I was really, really disappointed. If I didn’t consider myself such a fan, no way I would have finished it. Impressed me as very self indulgent.