Peter Guralnick > Quotes

“He constructed a shell to hide his aloneness, and it hardened on his back. I know of no sadder story.”
― Peter Guralnick

“pure plasticity in an informational age that required a protean hero.”
― Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

“Which to me means that one must respect not just the story but the way in which it develops; judging the past by the standards of the present sheds little light on understanding, it represents no more than the I-told-you-sos of history.”
― Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

“Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old. You see, from the honky tonks you got such a mixture of all different types of music, and I think what happened is that when Elvis busted through, it enabled all these other groups that had been going along more or less the same avenue—I’m sure there were hundreds of them—to tighten up and focus on what was going to be popular. If they had a steel guitar they dropped it. The weepers and slow country ballads pretty much went out of their repertoire. And what you had left was country-orientated boogie music.”
― Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians

“That was Elvis’ mark—he conveyed his spirituality without being able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in his simplicity.”
― Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

“Rick contacted me about the session, but he didn't know who in hell was coming in. I said, "Who you got?" He said, "Aretha Franklin." I said, "Boy, you better get your damn shoes on. You getting someone who can sing." Even the Memphis guys didn't really know who in the hell she was. I said, "Man, this woman gonna knock you out." They're all going, "Big deal!" When she come in there and sit down at the piano and hit that first chord, everybody was just like little bees just buzzing around the queen. You could tell by the way she hit the piano the gig was up. It was, "Let's get down to serious business." That first chord she hit was nothing we'd been demoing, and nothing none of them cats in Memphis had been, either. We'd just been dumb-dumb playing, but this was the real thing. That's the prettiest session picture I can ever remember. If I'd had a camera, I'd have a great film of that session, because I can still see it in my mind's eye, just how it was - Spooner on the organ, Moman playing guitar, Aretha at the piano - it was beautiful, better than any session I've ever seen, and I seen a bunch of 'em.'

Spooner Oldham, the weedy keyboard player who is most known for never playing the same licks twice and who is ordinarily the most reticent of men, speaks in similar superlatives. 'I was hired to play keyboards. She was gonna stand up in front of the microphone and sing. She was showing us this song she had brought down there with her, she hit that magic chord when Wexler was going up the little steps to the control room, and I just stopped. I said, "Now, look, I'm not trying to cop out or nothing. I know I was hired to play piano, but I wish you'd let her play that thing, and I could get on organ and electric." And that's the way it was. It was a good, honest move, and one of the best things I ever done - and I didn't do nothing.”
― Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom

“He felt a new serenity in his life. To the guys it seemed more like madness, and they felt increasingly alienated, resentful, bewildered, and angry all at once. Elvis appeared to be leaving them with his almost daily visions, his tales of going off in a spaceship, his delusions of being able to turn the sprinkler system of the Bel Air Country Club golf course behind the house on and off with his thoughts, his conviction that he could cure them of everything from the common cold to more serious aches and pains by his healing powers. To Marty he announced that a bird’s song had turned into the voice of Christ, and under other circumstances they might have been tempted to commit him to a doctor’s care, but reason told them that he would come out of this obsession, too, just as he had come out of all of his other momentary impulses and infatuations.”
― Peter Guralnick, Careless Love (Enhanced Edition): The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

“and, in place of the body movements, wiggling his little finger lasciviously in a move that sent his audience into paroxysms of ecstasy.”
― Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis (Enhanced Edition): The Rise of Elvis Presley

“He would return again and again to the same themes over the years, with different details and different emphases, but always with the same underlying message: the inherent nobility not so much of man as of FREEDOM, and the implied responsibility - no, the OBLIGATION - for each of us to be as different as our individuated natures allowed us to be. To be different, in Sam's words, IN THE EXTREME.”
― Peter Guralnick

“Dr. Dick McCool, director of Electroconvulsive Therapy at Gartly-Ramsay,”
― Peter Guralnick, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll