► Tracing Presley’s old haunts in a Z4M
► Graceland, Sun Studios and a 338bhp straight-six
► And almost some Jailhouse Rock after a cops bust…
Cruising around Memphis in an M Roadster? Bliss. Until the cops opt for a little less conversation, a little more handcuffing
The fraying naugahyde benches have seen better days, the chipped tables and crockery too, but little else has changed. Fifty years ago, when his first big hit Heartbreak Hotel was standing proud at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, Elvis would sneak inside the Arcade restaurant through the back door and sit in the corner booth with his back to the other patrons.
Not that you’d know it today, unless you look closely. A tiny plaque on the wall is the only reminder that the oldest restaurant in Memphis was once frequented by its most famous resident.
We’re here to spend a day in Presley’s footsteps. After a breakfast fit for the king, where would the monarch himself go? Before 1956, there’s a good chance he would have cruised across town to Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios on 706 Union Avenue. Not in an M Roadster of course, although Elvis did later drive its ancestor, the gorgeous BMW 507, while stationed in Germany during his national service.
The throb of the 507’s V8 would fit right in with the sound of uncorked big blocks that drifts from the back end of every truck and into our hot Z4’s cabin at each stoplight. In contrast, the edgy strains of the 338bhp M3 mill wrongly suggest it won’t be happy trundling around urban Memphis, where there’s precious little opportunity to wind the thing up to anywhere near its 8000rpm red line. But huge reserves of torque mean that progress is fleet nonetheless. Only the brittle low-speed ride and sometimes tricky clutch action spoil the show. European cars are few and far between in this part of the world, but it’s the position of our Z4’s steering wheel that’s causing the most commotion.
‘Is dyou with the mail service? How you drive with yower steer’n wheel on the wrawng saaad?!! Don’t you loose controwel?!!” shrieks the perplexed lady in the Pontiac Sunfire. Tempting as it is to warn her that this US-built but UK-bound right hooker is actually some lethal home-brewed conversion and that, yes ma’am, she should keep her distance as I’m liable to veer across three lanes in some Columbine-on-wheels massacre, I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not really so surprising that awareness of right-hand drive is so low in a country as insular as the US; one 40-year-old hotel porter’s fascination with my description of London makes sense when he reveals he’s never left Memphis, let alone crossed the pond.
Elvis never felt like leaving either. Although actually born in Tupelo, south of Memphis, Elvis moved here when he was 13 as an average Joe, and left 29 years later as probably the most famous human on the planet.
The often-told story about Elvis paying to cut a record at Sun Studios for his mother’s birthday is nothing but an urban myth. Presley cut the disc for himself in late 1953 but had to pester Phillips for a further year before Sam would invest any of his own money in the 18-year-old. And according to our Sun guide, it wasn’t Phillips at all but his secretary, Marion Keisker, who discovered Elvis.
All three are long gone but, like the Arcade restaurant, Sun’s tiny two-room premises appears almost exactly as it did 50 years ago right down to the huge Ampex recording kit and primitive acoustic tiles on the roof and walls. The floor is chipped from the stand-up bass used on those early ’50s recordings, and on the floor in front of the engineer’s booth is a small black cross denoting where Elvis stood to belt out early numbers like Blue Moon of Kentucky and That’s Alright (Mama), which received so many requests following its first airing on WHBQ that it was played a further 13 times that night. Upstairs is the apartment that was once the home of Roy Orbison, who also got his big break here, along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.
This is more than just a museum, though: it’s a working studio that budding bands can hire for just $75 per hour, but the ludicrous dreams photographer Collins and I have of coming back that night to cut a CD are thwarted by our tour guide: they’re booked solid for two weeks.
It’s just as well perhaps, for while Stu is probably even more accomplished with a Les Paul than he is with a camera, I’m so awestruck that the meagre musical talent I possess evaporates. Sitting at a battered piano – complete with a large circular burn mark on one of the keys, the result of Jerry Lee getting careless with a cigar – I can’t string even a couple of chords together, although just feeling the well-worn keys and drifting back half a century to the very beginnings of rock ’n’ roll is a pleasure.
Elvis’s biggest hits, even the trailblazing Heartbreak Hotel, weren’t actually recorded here, Sam Phillips having sold Presley’s contract to RCA in 1956 for $35,000 to settle a lawsuit brought about after an episode years earlier when Sam had blatantly ripped off the Leiber and Stoller song Hound Dog, later made famous by Elvis. Changing the words to ‘you ain’t nothing but a bear cat’ somehow didn’t stop Phillips getting rumbled.
Just as there’s more to sun than Elvis, there’s more to Memphis than just Sun. After all, black performers had been singing – and recording – the blues for decades, following the lead of WC Handy and his Memphis Blues. You can visit Handy’s old house on Beale Street, one-time blues central and the place where greats such as BB King learnt and plied their trade. There have in recent years been huge injections of cash into this area but to be honest I’d rather have seen it before the Disneyfication. Today it’s cheesier than a fondue festival, all bright lights and shops full of tourist tat.
We don’t buy any tat, but we certainly are tourists, so we opt for beer and bait at BB King’s Blues Club (he has a chain of bar ’n’ grills), where the house band treats us to numbers from Elvis, BB King and Memphis’s other great studio, Stax, which gave us Isaac Hayes, Al Green and Wilson Pickett.
Like Sun, Stax is now a museum and major tourist attraction. But for many tourists the only building that matters is a mock plantation house on Elvis Presley Boulevard, a large dual carriageway running due south from Memphis. In an era where celebrities hide behind gates and guards of equal stature it’s surprising to find a modest wall is all that separated Elvis from his public, who could have watched him ride his horse around the grounds and hoon about in a go-kart with Lisa Marie, his only child.
Preserved just as Elvis left it almost three decades ago, the interior of Graceland is a strange mix of taste and excess. We can’t look upstairs – that’s where the King departed this mortal coil, in the throne room with his trousers round his ankles. But with one room sporting an indoor waterfall and a shag pile carpet on the ceiling, there’s plenty to keep you amused, and it’s pleasing to find that there’s no need to rush. Staff are happy to let you spend as much time as you wish in each room and also outside in the Meditation Garden. Here, laying before us are three generations of the Presley family including Elvis himself – a strangely moving sight.
Elvis was passionate about cars and there’s all sorts of stuff in his automotive museum, from the expected Cadillacs to some strange off-road buggies, VW Beetle-engined trikes and two examples of the fabulous Stutz Blackhawk, an incredible ’70s GT that married a Pontiac Grand Prix chassis with a bizarre Modenese coachbuilt body. There’s even a Ferrari: a mid-’70s Esprit-shaped 308 GT4, one of the least desirable of Enzo’s machines. Elvis bought his second hand and fitted wire wheels, the tightwad.
With nearly 100bhp extra at our disposal we could have dusted Elvis in his Dino – and that’s exactly how we’re going to have to drive if we’re to make it in time to catch our plane, which is 550 miles away in South Carolina. We’ve already spent too long in Memphis, but we’ve one more stop to make on the way home. Pulling up alongside the tiny white-painted shotgun shack built by Vernon Presley in the leafy outskirts of Tupelo is a surprisingly humbling experience. There’s no glitz or glamour here, just a simple gift shop and a 1939 Plymouth, just like Vernon’s.
The whole place is tasteful, respectful and incredibly calm – the three things our tyre-smoking exit from Tupelo is not. We’re done with loafing along; I uncork the quad pipes, treat Mississippi to the sound of the M3 engine at full chat and start working through the six gears and breaking a few laws. The M’s hydraulic steering doesn’t have the precision of a Boxster’s but it’s a welcome improvement on the regular Z4’s, as is the tighter body control, and we’re soon scything up I78 through Alabama to the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Like its predecessor, there’s more than a hint of TVR to the M’s character; what a shame that there’s little to suggest that’s the case. You need to be in the know to spot the pipes, bonnet V and tweaked front bumper.
With 160 miles still to go and a shrinking chance of arriving on time, I’m somehow resisting the titanic urge to give the 3.2-litre six its head and test out the 155mph limiter, but apparently I’m still not being circumspect enough. By about 40mph. One moment my mirrors are clear, the next they’re so full of Douglasville Police Department’s Officer Crosley that I’m convinced he’s going to drive straight over the top of us.
Turns out he’d stashed himself at the side of the road where he’d clocked us doing 103mph in a 65 and has been flogging the knackers out of his Crown Victoria for the last three miles trying to catch up. Oh dear. I have one of those ‘maybe it’s not me, maybe he’s just trying to get past’ moments. I’m a glass half full kind of bloke, but this time it’s bone dry.
We pull over and I try and get out of the M Roadster to alert him to the fact that we’re in a right-hand drive car. Bad move, prompting lots of screaming that I should get back inside. When he reaches the car it’s far worse than I could have imagined. He decides to skip the licence and registration entré, opting to go straight for the main course: the cuffs.
Except that he does exactly what I tried to warn him not to: goes to the wrong side and attempts to cuff Stu instead. Cries of ‘But I haven’t even got a steering wheel!’ from an exasperated photographer result in embarrassment and even more steam from the officer’s ears. I know what’s coming so don’t even bother with the bullshit and stick my arms behind my back obligingly before being spun round and told the less than welcome news: ‘You’re going to jail, buddy, for reckless driving.’
Bundled into the back of the cruiser, I’m not sure which is more painful: the metal digging into my wrists, the stupid seating position or the incessant ads for some steak house being piped through the radio and into my left lug.
Once inside Douglasville’s Police HQ I’m handcuffed to a wall while Crosley disappears, but I’m oddly reassured when I look down to see the restraints are made by Watts of England. The plain white walls are decorated with the numbers of Jackie Brown-style bail bondsmen we can call and in the corner a young kid is holding up a board with his name on and having some nice portraits taken.
An hour later I’m out and relieved twice over: first for not having to stay the night in a cell, and second of $486 for the privilege. Having discovered from Collins that we’re British and sensibly deducing that bailing me for a court appearance a month later would result in me absconding, Crosley has commuted the charge from reckless driving to speeding, tailgating and an erratic lane change. Golly, thanks officer.
An interesting experience; not exactly cheap but certainly not wasted. And it occurred to me that for all the hip wiggling, lip curling, hair grease and lock-your-daughters-up image, Presley wasn’t much of a delinquent at all. He loved his mum, he didn’t try to dodge the draft and he even offered his services to President Nixon in the fight against illegal drugs (as opposed to the equally addictive and dangerous legal ones he was quaffing several times a day). I mean, how rock ’n’ roll is that?
The M Roadster, on the other hand, is fast, loud and – when it wants to be – more than a little uncouth. It rocks.