Monkey on my back

I hope you have all stopped in to visit Cup Of Joe Powell today to see his shout out to Tits McGee's photos of her trip to Graceland.

I commented to Joe that I would post a little trivia about the monkey in the picture. Or, more accurately, trivia about a song that Warren Zevon wrote about said monkey.

Mr. Z talked about writing the homage to the King's porcelain primate on his website. Here's what he said...

I was writing a song with one of my oldest and best friends and most frequent collaborators Jorge Calderón. And we were working on a different song. Actually, a kind of violent and terrible song. Too terrible to talk about now. And I noticed on his songwriting notebook as we sat on the sofa of suffering in my apartment, working, he had a postcard that turned out to be from Graceland - of the TV room, with the porcelain monkey sitting on the coffee table with the, you know, the onyx eyes. And that inspired us. I said, "What's that?" And he said, "That's Elvis' porcelain monkey." And then we had to spend the next week or two writing the song. Jorge and I talk all the time. You know, almost every day. And I called Jorge last night and his daughter -- his grown daughter was there, he wasn't. And she said, "You know, a friend of mine just came from a trip to Memphis and she said to me, ‘You know, I went to Graceland?' ‘Yeah.' ‘And the most striking thing I saw in the whole place was this porcelain monkey of Elvis'."

So, there you go.