A King's Demise.

Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown, 767 pp., $27.95)

Five years ago Peter Guralnick had considerable success with the lively Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, which broke off when Elvis began his military service in Germany in 1958. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, his second and final volume, is, by comparison, rather like some flatulent and cheesy corpse bobbing up from the bottom of a fen.

Indeed, Careless Love is more exhumation than biography. Guralnick, after eleven years' research, feels compelled to catalogue every song from every studio session (most were failures), while updating us on the day- to-day status of Elvis's eight or nine live-in flunkies, not to mention his women and whatever his drug du jour might have been.

The terrible downward arc of Elvis's character from Germany on is desperate and sad (oh, that pathetic film career), despite an occasional good show in Vegas, and, of course, his fans' indiscriminating love. Guralnick seems insecure here, as he was not with the terrific upward arc of Volume One. He seems to wonder (as well he should) whether Elvis was worth it after all. "This is where the leap of faith comes in: At some point you simply have to believe that by immersing yourself in the subject you have earned your own perspective."

As the legend goes, pop-music visionaries had long been expecting a rock messiah to appear. There was all this cool black music (gospel, R&B, whatever) that young post-war white folk had been exposed to on the radio in the unsegregated privacy of their own homes. What this audience needed was a white singer with black sensibilities-enter Elvis, who had been brought up near Shake Rag, the ghetto of Tupelo, Mississippi. He was in the right place at the right time, and his rise could indeed be called meteoric-especially since meteors don't rise at all, they crash, albeit after extravagant pyrotechnic displays.

Elvis was a pedestrian guitarist. He didn't write his own songs (and later he would be jealous of the Beatles for that reason among others). He had no acting talent (all you could say about his ludicrous films was that they made a certain amount of money because their production values were so cheap). What then, exactly, was Elvis the king of?

Well, let's face it, he had an extraordinary look. His hair was aerodynamic (he used three different oils on it), and it said, in effect, "World War II is over, we're done with honoring soldiers and all that crew-cut regimentation." His eyes could reverse menopause in women. And his upper lip folded into a perfect sneer of contempt for anything adult or institutional. (But only when he was onstage-offstage Elvis became a modest, bashful young gentleman who admired Nixon.) Elvis was super-hyper by nature (much more so after being given his first amphetamines by his sergeant while on maneuvers), and it did seem that his stage performance consisted of setting the male orgasm to music. White Fifties parents were put off by Elvis, but at least he wasn't black.

Elvis also had a rather gayish attitude when it came to clothing design. He was for teenagers what Liberace was to older women (his own mother among them)-with the gayness so obvious in Liberace much repressed (we're talking about Tennessee in the 1950s, not the most appropriate era or venue for coming out). But your major indicators of homosexuality were always present in Elvis: weak father, strong mother, feminine self- absorption, a love for women that featured cuddling more than actual sex (and anyhow it was hard to fetch out an orgasm after X-number of uppers).

As Sun Records exec Marion Keisker said, "He [Elvis] was like a mirror . . . whatever you were looking for, you were going to find it in him. . . . He had all the intricacy of the very simple." Even if you wanted him to be a Greek hero, Elvis could oblige. Like Orpheus and the women of Thrace, savage teen girls at a 1955 concert in Jacksonville shredded his clothes and left him hanging semi-nude from the top of a stadium shower stall.

But, as you learn from Careless Love, there would never have been an Elvis of this magnitude had there not also been a Col. Tom Parker, who managed the Presley empire from 1955 until some time long after Elvis's death. "The Colonel 'slept, ate and breathed Elvis.'" More than that, Parker knew about television and was one of the first to recognize the potential of pay-per-view. Easily the most intriguing aspect of either Guralnick volume is the long relationship between the young pop idol and this strange, boorish, indefatigable, and brilliant publicity man.

I was a child of the Presley era, but I don't think I heard any song of his through while paying anything like full attention. I presumed, first of all-given his strange name-that he was engaged in a parody. And if Elvis couldn't take himself seriously, why should I? Reading Careless Love, downbeat and serious as it is, only underscored my original assessment. As Elvis said of himself, "People will come from miles around to see a freak."

Mr. Mano is the author most recently of The Fergus Dialogues (International Scholars Press).