THE GREAT GHOSTS OF ROCK’N’ROLL

Part 2 

"I am an optimist about eternity,” Lennon had once declared. “I believe in life after death. I believe that death is not an end but a beginning."

The Maharishi had told the Beatles so. Just before they followed their guru to India, Brian Epstein fatally OD’d, and they held a séance. Though the Fab Four had no luck contacting their manager, John was undiscouraged. 

Later, when moving into New York’s Dakota, he and Yoko held a séance for the late great residents there. Among them was Boris Karloff. Though the Lennons had no luck with the Frankenstein and the Mummy himself, they were warmly greeted by actor Robert Ryan’s wife, Jessie, who had just slipped the mortal coil. 

The Dakota’s uncanny reputation had climaxed in 1968 when Roman Polanski shot Rosemary’s Baby there on the 7^th Floor. The Lennon’s future floor. Thirteen years later, Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, saw Rosemary herself – Mia Farrow – emerge from the building; he took this as an auspicious sign. A few days before, a journalist was interviewing John upstairs when a car backfired like a gunshot on the street below. “Another murder on the Rue Morgue!” cracked the psychic star.

Lennon’s idol was the King himself. Elvis too had always gravitated to things otherworldly. His twin, Jesse Garon, had been stillborn, and Elvis believed that he taken his brother’s soul. Later, his guru, Larry Geller – who was also his hairdresser – put Elvis back in touch with Jesse. 

By this time, his twin wasn’t the only spirit in Elvis’s life. After the passing of his beloved mother, Gladys, in ’58, he saw her ghost outside her bedroom in Graceland and broke into tears. 

Like Lennon, the King was a firm believer in the hereafter. And, like Morrison, he got off on visiting graveyards. Funeral parlors, too. “His fascination with corpses was downright terrifying,’ said his Man Friday, Sonny West. Sonny recalled how his boss took him to Memphis mortuaries, explaining embalming and cosmetic procedures on the clients. 

Though Elvis abhorred autopsies, he received a full one himself: he was buried without organs or brain in a 900-pound copper coffin. Later, two fans, convinced that the King had already risen, raided his mausoleum, expecting to find it empty. For safekeeping, Elvis and his mother were then moved from the Forest Hill Cemetery to the Meditation Garden in Graceland. 

Since then, Elvis’s ghost has been even more sociable then Lennon’s, Morrison’s, or any of the other immortal rockers. Among other places, he has been spotted in the Las Vegas Hilton, in the Heartbreak Hotel, and in Nashville’s old RCA studio where he recorded his Heartbreak hit in 1956. 

Of all the stars, only Jim Morrison sang Cancel my subscription to the resurrection. The others knew better and continue to rock, now harmonizing with him:

The dead are newborn awakening. Gently they sigh in rapt funeral amazement.