From the Primate Discourse interview, 22 January 2000:
WZ: 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'."
From an interview with Paul Cantin in Toronto, 2000, in support of LKY:
Zevon has serious misgivings about Presley's deification as an innovator, and included a ‘har-har-har' refrain in "Porcelain Monkey" as a tribute to the black blues singer Wynonie Harris. "It was to remind people there were other people other than Elvis," Zevon says.
And it turns out, in other rooms in Graceland, there are other Porcelain Monkeys. It wasn't just this one oddity; Elvis was a Collector!
I haven’t been able to find online photos of the other monkeys, but here are several views of “the” Porcelain Monkey, including one in a seasonal costume!
