When Frank Sinatra hosted the Welcome Home Elvis television special in the Spring of 1960, he was trying to maintain a measure of hip with teenagers by rubbing a little Elvis on him. The show was a cynical showbiz exercise for which Elvis received $100,000 for ten minutes’ singing, but now we can see this moment as a meeting of the two largest icons in American popular culture on the compromised ground that made their stories so fascinating and resonant. Of the two though, Elvis’s story and myth is the larger one, the quintessential American story of somebody who started out with nothing and, with luck, talent, determination and good manners, became big enough to lose everything that mattered and still have enough cash to buy this year’s Caddy. Elvis is such a prominent figure that Peter Guralnick has bestowed on him the ultimate tribute-a two volume biography. Multivolume studies have generally been reserved for presidents, but in last Train to Memphis and the how Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, Elvis’ life receives the sort of detailed scrutiny and rigorous attention usually paid to heads of state to see what made them the people that changed the world.

Careless Love begins in Germany with Elvis at war, and if people didn’t already know the end of his story, this episode would hint that it isn’t going to turn out well. Elvis was already so large that his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was able to negotiate some of the terms of his enlistment, one of which was Private Elvis lived in a house off-base with his father, grandmother and a few buddies from Memphis.

Elvis was a good soldier and showed skill as a scoul, but he didn’t lead the army life, eating grandmother’s home cooking instead of C-Rations, and spending nights partying with strippers instead of playing cards with the guys in the barracks. If anyone didn’t already know, this sort of indulgence characterizes the second half of Elvis’ life.

Of course, everyone does know Elvis’ story, so it may seem like the only thing left to do is deal with the apocryphal stories. In Careless Love, Guralnick settles some of them by dishing the dirt, though in a researched, respectful, understated way. In gentler language, he says, Yes, Elvis had an affair with Ann- Margret; no, he wasn’t loaded when he met President Nixon, or no more so than usual; and yes, he really did do all those drugs. In fact, if Elvis’ life is viewed simply as a scorecard of self-defilements-as it too often is-his life is pretty pathetic, but Guralnick doesn’t revel in the tabloid, and his achievement as a writer is in the way he suggests another way to see Elvis.

He was, Guralnick shows, more of an artist than many assume him to be. He was so embarrassed by the poor songs selected for his movies that he would back away from the microphone during takes, and during a session of non-soundtrack material, he smashed the acetates of weak material chosen for him by throwing them against the wall one by one. He surprised almost everybody he dealt with when making the 1968 Comeback Special and the Elvis In Memphis album by being a far more intelligent, committed and soulful artist than they ever imagined. He felt trapped by the Colonel’s insistence on only recording material by writers who would cut Elvis and the colonel in on the publishing royalties, and he felt underappreciated by the Colonel, who insisted that what people wanted }Vas Elvis, and what he sang or did didn’t really matter. History shows there was a lot of truth in the Colonel’s beliefs, but aesthetics are on the side of Elvis.

History does more than just second-guess Elvis though; in Careless Love, it heightens the drama. Audiences for tragedies in ancient Greece knew how the stories ended, and this knowledge made every attempt by the hero to do the right thing more painful or poignant, and Careless Love works the same way. Guralnick makes us care enough about Elvis for the book to feel like King Lear set in Memphis, so readers feel the uneasy emotions that accompany watching a good man experience a slow, painful slide while clinging to values we admire all the way down. Elvis did what seemed like the right things, the things we would probably do too, and unintentionally built a cage for himself in the process. The happy times, particularly 1968- 69 and the triumphs of the television special, Elvis in Memphis, and his return to live performance in Las Vegas, seem bittersweet because the audience knows they won’t last. Rather than being the beginnings of an escape, they’re the last proud leap of a salmon fighting the hook before it’s reeled in for good. Careless Love has received near-universal critical raves, which is often a signal that the reviewed object will be as valuable and pleasant as dental surgery, but that isn’t the case here. Although the story is tragic, the book is an easy read because Peter Guralnick’s touch is light, letting the fascinating day to day details carry the book and trusting the story to be dramatic without a stack of dark adjectives and grim, foreboding sentences. Elvis’ Sun labelmate Jerry Lee Lewis is also the subject of a new biography written with an even lighter, almost nonexistent, hand.

The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee is written as if the ghost writer were paid extra for adverbs, but that can hardly be complaint in a book chiefly written by Jerry Lee’s sister, Linda Gail Lewis. Lewis’ life doesn’t have the classic dramatic arc Elvis’ had because rather than becoming an archetype, Jerry Lee became Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster, a figure of tall tale whose legendary stories just might be true, but whose life is too unique to be seen as a version of our stories. Linda Gail provides a little insight, but more than anything else, she delivers this Jerry Lee. Linda Gail is not only Jerry Lee’s sister, but she toured with him, recorded with him and was a part of his stage show, so she doesn’t simply tell Jerry Lee’s story from the family’s point of view; she tells it from the perspective of someone who knows Jerry Lee about as well as any woman can. Not surprisingly, Linda Gail has some stories to tell. She saw nights when local punks who wanted to test “The Killer” ended up carried out after Jerry Lee took a leg he broke off his piano stool to them, and she saw the night John Lennon crawled across the dressing room to pay homage to Jerry Lee. She saw his army of women, those he married and those he didn’t, and she saw all the excesses and isn’t afraid to refer to them, though in a gentle, reserved way that neither entirely confirms nor denies the myths.

Insider books like this one and the books written on Elvis by members of the Memphis Mafia are awkward books because their existence is made possible by their intimacy with the subject, an intimacy they’re exploiting in their books. For us, that look behind the scenes is appealing, even if there is something unseemly about the possible betrayal the books represent, provides. In the case of Linda Gail Lewis and The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee, it’s hard to fault her because, well, she’s a Lewis, and judging by what she reveals about her own life, she might be as entertainingly crazy as Jerry Lee, and there’s nothing to do but cut her slack.