In February 1976, Keith Richards arrived at Graceland uninvited. Not breaking in, not sneaking. He drove through the front gates, spoke to the guard, gave his name, and waited. He was told to wait. He waited. 15 minutes later, the guard came back and told him to come in. Keith Richards was 32 years old in February 1976.
The Rolling Stones were in the middle of the Black and Blue recording sessions. He was in Memphis for reasons that his own account, given in his 2010 autobiography Life, treats with characteristic vagueness. He was in the area. He was between things. He had been thinking about something. The something was Elvis.
Keith Richards had a complicated relationship with Elvis Presley. Not personal. They had met only once before, briefly, at an industry event, but musical, creative. The Rolling Stones had begun as a British blues act, a band that revered American blues and wanted to reproduce it faithfully. They had explicitly not wanted to be Elvis.
They had, in the early 1960s, positioned themselves as the alternative to the Elvis model, raw and honest, rather than polished and commercially manufactured. This positioning had been partly real and partly strategic. The real part, Keith Richards genuinely believed in 1962 that what Elvis was doing on film and on television was not the thing that had made him matter.
The strategic part, the Rolling Stones needed to be something other than Elvis. There was already an Elvis. By 1976, Keith Richards had been making music for 15 years. He had watched what happened to performers over 15 years. He had watched what time did to the relationship between a performer and their original impulse.
And he had started to think about Elvis differently. Not about the Las Vegas period, which he still found difficult. About the Sun Records period. About what Elvis had actually done in 1953 and 1954 and 1955. He described driving to Graceland in Life as an impulse. Something that felt necessary without having a clear justification.
He was led through the gates. He was escorted to the house. He was brought to a room and told Elvis would be with him shortly. Elvis came down. Keith described the meeting in Life with the compressed observational style that characterizes the whole book. Specific and unsentimental.
He said Elvis looked larger than he expected. Not fat. The word he used was substantial. Like someone who had been expanded by something. He said Elvis looked at him with recognition that was not exactly warmth, but was not coldness either. The recognition of two people who knew each other by reputation and were now calibrating the actual person against the reputation.
They talked for 2 hours. Keith did not reproduce the conversation in detail in Life. He described its shape. He described what it was about. It was about music. Specifically about the music that had been made at Sun in the early 1950s, about what had happened in that room and why it had happened and whether either of them fully understood it.
Keith wrote that Elvis was more analytical about the Sun period than he expected. More willing to dissect it. More curious about what had produced it. He wrote that Elvis had said something that he had been thinking about ever since. Elvis said that the Sun recording sounded like that because nobody involved knew it was going to matter.
That the specific quality the looseness, the feeling of something being discovered rather than performed came directly from the fact that there were no stakes. Nobody was trying to make history. Elvis said, “We were just playing.” Keith wrote that this was the most useful thing anyone had ever said to him about the Rolling Stones early recordings, about why those early recordings sounded like they did.
Because nobody was trying to make history. They were just playing. He wrote that he went back to the Black and Blue sessions with this in his head. That it changed something about how he approached the work. At the end of the visit, as Keith was leaving, Elvis said something that Keith recorded in life with the same compressed specificity.
He said, “Come back sometime.” Keith said he would. Elvis died the following year. In life, Keith Richards writes about Elvis with a directness that is unusual for him. A man who is rarely direct about admiration. He writes that Elvis was the reason he wanted to play guitar. Not a reason. The reason.
Before Elvis, Keith wrote, “There was nothing.” He did not elaborate. He did not need to. In February 1976, Keith Richards drove to Graceland on an impulse. He was let in. They talked for 2 hours about what had happened in a recording studio in Memphis 20 years earlier. About why it sounded like that.
About why the not knowing was the thing. Nobody was trying to make history. They were just playing. Keith Richards took that home. To the black and blues sessions. To the next 40 years of making music. And Elvis went back upstairs. To Graceland. 18 months from the end. Having said the truest thing he knew about the beginning.
