GASOLINE DREAMS: MEMPHIS

Reports of the death of Memphis are greatly exaggerated.

In recent years Memphis has received the same treatment as most great American cities: the heart is now hostage to corporate interests. Faux mid-century neon hangs over Beale St., and only tourists seem inclined to spend much time there. The old-timey record store sells only CDs. W.C. Handy's historic shotgun shack sits empty of visitors.

But a ride outside the small downtown core in any direction is more revealing. The same crumbling buildings and signs that stood here when I first came to play the legendary Antenna Club are still here, as easy to distinguish from their Beale St. abstractions as a farmer's daughter is from a bottle-blonde, treadmill-addicted beauty contestant. Small brick factories from the 1920s still stand, skeletonized. Houses are graceful, overgrown, lived in, many abandoned. Women in dirty housedresses walk their hot-combed, well-pressed children to school past memorial telephone poles studded with dozens of faded, crucified teddy bears.

This city is too poor to launder its past, and as a result the past lies in state in every direction beyond the downtown tourist district.

To the visitor, the commercially reimagined Beale St. has the same entertainment value as a bad Elvis impersonator: the original was so compelling that even its oddest mutation is worth a look. And there are signs that the reanimated heart of Memphis is itself on life support. Newly empty storefronts are common, turnover frequent.

Great cities, the centers of so much archetypal art and innovation of the last century, have proved as impossible to kill as the ideas born in them. Technology has mostly given us more efficient ways to access, recombine and distribute the powerful totems of America's last hundred years. Stream Blind Willie Johnson through your headphones alone late at night and his subtle sadness and holy rage remain completely intact. He can still affect you as though he were in the room. Instagram owes a debt to Eggleston.

It seems cities have an eternal soul, deeply connected to the sites of their golden ages. You can still find it wandering among the old bones of empty buildings, see its shadow behind gentrified facades and mythic adaptations. It survives every conqueror, every flood.

And while you can't put your arms around a memory, neither can you banish it completely.