4.8 • 61.5K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Malcolm’s habit of reading footnotes leads him to the psychologist Alan Elms, which leads him to the one song Elvis couldn’t sing. We revisit this 2018 episode as part of our encore music series.
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0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
0:02.0 | Pushkin. |
0:15.0 | To introduce this episode, I just want to relate how random my journey to it was. I was reading a book. I can't even |
0:23.7 | remember what it was. And in a footnote, I always read the footnotes. The author said the |
0:28.5 | psychologist whose work she was referring to had done a very strange paper once about Elvis. |
0:34.8 | At which point, I stopped reading the book and looked up the very strange paper about |
0:39.0 | Elvis. It was by Alan Elms. It was amazing. So immediately I go to the next question. Was Alan |
0:45.7 | Elms still alive? Yes, living in Davis, California. Next step, I got to go see him. So I immediately |
0:52.0 | fly to San Francisco, rent a car, but the rental agency |
0:55.8 | is out of all cars except for a bright canary yellow Chevy Corvette, which I take happily, |
1:02.2 | but then halfway to Davis, driving at speeds that are very, very far from legal, I start |
1:07.1 | thinking, what's this guy going to think of me if I show up in a bright canary |
1:11.8 | yellow corvette? He's a brilliant psychologist. I don't want him prejudging me. So I park it |
1:17.7 | around the corner, walk to his house, and spend a lovely afternoon with him. Sadly, he was |
1:24.0 | feeling poorly at the time and didn't speak well enough for me to use a tape of his |
1:27.9 | interview. But my spontaneous journey set the correct tone, I think, for this whole episode, |
1:33.9 | which is that it was intended to be a caper, a grand caper, in which many crazy, unexpected |
1:40.4 | things happen. And, as you will discover, so it was. By the way, the thing that Alan |
1:47.2 | Elms and I talked the most about was not actually his Elvis paper. It was another even more |
1:52.0 | genius thing he once wrote about the Wizard of Oz, which I promise you that I will get to |
1:57.2 | one day here, revisionist history. Join me for a walk-down revisionist history, |
2:03.7 | Memory Lane. |
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