Notes on Memphis
We arrived by taxi at the Hotel Indigo about 9 o’clock at night. We checked into the hotel, went upstairs, dropped our bags, and went back downstairs in search of a snack and a cocktail. The girl at the front desk sent us to the adjoining restaurant. The restaurant is styled like an old fashioned diner; their menu is heavily focused on breakfast, biscuits mostly. When we bumbled through the door we found the restaurant a line of smartly dressed couples waiting in line while a harried hostess communicated with unseen people downstairs.
Below the breakfast diner is a speakeasy-style bar with live music. We were underdressed but they let us in anyway. A 3-piece band was setting up, guitar, bass, and drums. They cranked out covers of Otis Redding hits. They played the best, hard driving, soulful cover of The Beatles “Come Together” I’ve ever heard. We had a couple of drinks, a little snack of spinach artichoke dip, and watched the solo bartender struggle to keep up with the crowd. We watched dapper men flirt with sassy ladies at the bar.A man and his date could see we were a little bewildered and took us under his wing, described the band we were about to see, explained the music scene in Memphis and how many of these young people in bands get their start playing in their church, then branch out to local gigs, sometimes finding success out in the larger world.
We stayed through the band’s entire set, finished our drinks, and went upstairs to flop into bed.
The Hotel Indigo is a retro-themed hipster hotel. The interior is decorated with the zoomy images of transistor radios, trying to capture a “music city” vibe. The lobby and rooms are decked out with cool looking but ultimately crappy furniture. The walls are covered with big, blurry, black and white photos of radio dials and neon signs. Graphic Americana. Look closely and you can see the seams peeling apart on everything. The investors probably didn’t set aside any funds for upkeep of their hipster palace.
In the morning I realized that our 9th floor room afforded us a north-facing view of downtown. Look to the right and east, the downtown buildings drop away quickly to the flat landscape of western Tennessee. Look left, and west, a clustered knot of high rise office buildings and hotels. The Mississippi River is hidden from view. Directly north, straight out the window, is a beautiful old brick building with five columns of paired windows. At the top of each column is an ornate cap of stone and tile, a circle incscribed within a half moon, with verticals and horizontals recapitulating the shape of the windows below. It’s the kind of decoration you’d never see at street level, it’s only visible from another building or from a great distance away.
The inside of the building is gutted, stripped down to the concrete. You can peer into the windows and see the sunrise on the other side of the building. Stripped of interior walls, the building is eerie, like an open tomb or the inside of a skull.
There are a lot of derelict buildings in downtown Memphis. I suspect many are victims of the pandemic. No amount of return-to-office-mandates will save commercial real estate. Building investors are struggling against a wave of convenience and lower cost. Companies heavily invested in real estate are going to find themselves at an economic and cultural disadvantage to those companies who broke their lease or opted for the hybrid approach. You can only swim upstream for a while.
The morning is cold. There was a recent snow storm here. There is icy evidence in the shadows of the tall buildings. The occasional sidewalk is still treacherous.
We came back to the diner, now open for breakfast with no evidence of live music below ground. I had excellent shrimp and grits, the best grits I ever had, coffee and orange juice. We got ourselves put together and waited for my cousin to arrive. My cousin is a mathematician, working at Mississippi State University. Being a brilliant mathematician, she is completely flummoxed by freeways, parking, and text messaging. She arrived safely, parked illegally across the street from the hotel.
We jaywalked over and hopped in her car, and drove to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The Stax museum is a wonderland of soul music. Each exhibit has a sound track. The museum is laid out as sort of a timeline of soul music history, beginning with a reassembled one-room church illustrating the history of gospel music and its place in music history.
The museum has incredible memorabilia, instruments, stage outfits, vinyl records, and even Isaac Haye’s 24 karat gold-detailed Cadillac. In the center of the museum is a recreation of the famous Stax recording studio. The original studio was repurposed from an old movie theater. The recreation is perfectly accurate, complete with the sloping floor. Standing in the recreated studio, you can look through a glass window onto the original recording console. The whole experience is pretty magical. I felt like I might hear a ghost tuning a guitar at any minute.
We returned to downtown Memphis and decided to visit the Peabody Hotel. We arrived just in time to snag a seat before the Duck March began.
At 11am every morning, the Peabody Hotel duckmaster heads upstairs to the rooftop duck palace to collect 5 North American mallards. There is one male (a drake) and four females (hens). The ducks waddle from their palace, across the rooftop deck, to the elevator and down to the lobby. When they arrive they are greeted by a crowd of onlookers. The ducks then march down a red carpet, up a small staircase, and into the grand marble fountain in the center of the lobby. All the while the duckmaster tells tales of the ducks and their history at the Peabody. At 5pm the ducks, and their duckmaster, march back upstairs to their palace where they rest and nest for the night.
The next morning my wife went for a run along the waterfront of the mighty Mississippi which left me free to find a coffee shop and a little quiet time to write. The Crazy Gander coffee shop is just around the corner from the hotel. The shop is bright and cheery with a big roll-up garage style door, yellow upholstered furniture, and big leafy plants everywhere. The shop was run by two cute college-age kids with lilting Tennessee accents.
We were on our way to Graceland this morning. My cousin met us again in her favorite illegal parking spot and we drove off to find Graceland. If you remember Graceland as a stately southern mansion surrounded by trees, you are correct. But today, Graceland is a giant complex of museum exhibits, dining, and event spaces. When you arrive you park in a giant lot across the highway from the historic home and enter the complex through a white iron gate, modeled after the gates in front of the house. The main entrance and ticketing area sits beneath giant, swooping signage reading “Welcome to Graceland” in bold yellow cursive. Once you have your tickets you are herded into a small theater to watch a short film about Elvis’ career. Then they load you into a shuttle bus to leave the mega-complex and visit the historic family home.
My wife, cousin, and I brought the average age of the tour group down to about 68. The little shuttle bus zipped through the dedicated intersection which serves the museum complex, across the 4 lane road and through the white gates. We gathered on the front porch of the house for a brief lecture on how we were to behave once inside. Take all the pictures you want, but no video or audio recording. None. No sir. None.
Of course, as we filed in through the screen door in the main entryway, a Boomer-dad waltzed in with his phone up in front of his face, shooting video the entire time. One of the guides, another older man, was not having it and yelled at Boomer dad to stop shooting and to delete the video. They do not mess around at Graceland.
The home is at once more modest and more absurd than I expected. It’s not small, but after years of McMansions littering the nation’s suburbs, it doesn’t seem big either. In most respects the house is pretty tasteful, if a little opulent. My grandparents would have regarded the parlor and dining room as perfectly nice. The kitchen, though cavernous and carpeted, looks like a 70s kitchen. Dark wood, dark colors, These parts of the house are a quick tour through my parent’s world. Things don’t get really Elvis until you see the living room.
Giant sitting chairs with giant ash trays on huge pedestals crouch on deep green shag carpet. Plants grow everywhere, and a now-defunct waterfall is dramatically lit against one wall. Down a mirrored stairway to the basement, we are led into the eye-popping yellow and black bar and lounge with the infamous three televisions mounted into the wall. I recall hearing about the three TVs and that it was excessive. Three TVs? That’s too many! Now we are surrounded by screens all the time. Elvis was prescient.
We were led up the back stairs, green carpet foreshadowing that we would emerge near the grotto of a living room. We strolled outside to see Elvis’s father’s home office which belongs in an episode of Mad Men. We saw the racquet ball court, which was clearly just an ancillary man-cave to supplement the grotto and the lounge. Then we were led up to the swimming pool and meditation garden.
The meditation garden holds the tombs of Elvis, his parents, and Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis’ and his daughter’s graves are covered in small offerings and mementos. The graves surround a small fountain. A brick wall, fitted with stained glass windows curves around this sacred space, shielding it from the neighbors.
We were directed to the carport to await our return shuttle. Now is our appointed time to take our selfies in front of the house. Back aboard the shuttle, we were carted back to giant museum complex to gawk at memorabilia, a collection of outlandish automobiles, and Elvis’ old military uniforms. I stood near a bright red MG convertible, watching a video screen high up on the wall over the exhibition space. Home movies of snow at Graceland. Elvis’s mother Gladys arriving home in a snow-covered-land-yacht of a car. An old woman on a motorized scooter barked at me to get out of the way so she could snap a picture of the MG and buzz off to the next exhibit.
The whole experience of Graceland left me melancholy. It felt like a funeral. There were only nice things to say about Elvis. Nothing said about his untimely death or the entertainment industry that devoured him.On our way out of Graceland, we stopped at the faux 50s diner named after Gladys. We all got peanut butter and banana sandwiches, as you should, and sat in a hollowed out Cadillac to eat.