Every square inch of Graceland Too was covered in Elvis memorabilia. The Holly Springs attraction had Elvis piled on every surface. The King dripped from the ceilings and was plastered across every wall. The collection never stopped growing, and no two tours with the museum’s live-in curator, Elvis mega-fan Paul MacLeod, were alike. His intense patter might include off-color jokes, snippets of his favorite songs, some obscure bit of trivia about Presley, or a personal story from one of the 120 Elvis concerts he claimed to have attended. He might rant about the price of a gallon of paint. On one of his better days, when his false teeth weren’t slipping too much, MacLeod could cram every bit of that into his opening paragraph.
Outsider art and the Elvis devotee
Tragically, this one-of-a-kind, 24-hour roadside attraction is no more. The museum that never closed went dark forever after MacLeod died in 2014. The enormous collection was sold at auction shortly thereafter. Still, some sense of what the full Paul MacLeod experience was like can be gleaned from the Jeffrey Jensen and Geoffrey Shrewsbury documentary The Rise and Fall of Graceland Too. Clips of the still-unreleased film will be on display at Crosstown Arts Wednesday, September 23rd, as part of the Gonerfest-sponsored exhibit, “No Brag Pure Fact: the Art Of Graceland Too.”
“No Brag Pure Fact,” is named for one of MacLeod’s more endearing and frequently deployed catchphrases. The exhibit also includes some of his notebooks and examples of his Elvis-themed outsider artwork.
