Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  The record’s searing disgust comes from a colossal disappointment at what passes for real emotion. Or to put it another way, ‘Sometimes I almost feel/Just like a human being’. The desperate double-bluffs of male and female interaction are dealt with in bluntly honest fashion; insecurity and duplicity exist on both sides, but clearly what the singer is searching for throughout is something approximating genuine feeling rather than a pale imitation of the real thing. ‘A lot of the songs early on were more disappointed that anybody could fall for that cliché of romance or fashion or a cheap version of love,’3 he later said. ‘That’s a constant theme. I see right through imaginary gutter romance.’4

  He might have seen through it, but he was not immune to its appeal. Rachlis’s review uses ‘(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea’ as the prime example of the attraction-revulsion dynamic which exists in many of the songs. ‘Costello can describe Chelsea with such precision because he knows its splendours. If the disdain in his voice appears a little too measured it’s because it takes all of the singer’s resolve to resist Chelsea’s temptations.’

  * * *

  The UK and Irish tour began in Dublin on the eve of the album’s release. For most of March the band tore through roughly the same set as had been making America weak at the knees, before introducing slivers of the next record, already forming in Elvis’s mind. After Dublin came Belfast. This was Elvis’s first visit to the trouble-torn city, where he saw ‘mere boys, these children, walking around in battle fatigues carrying machine guns, knowing that the lads who got the least marks in the exam usually joined the army’.5 On the plane back to London, Elvis began working on his ideas for ‘Oliver’s Army’, using Oliver Cromwell’s brutal occupation of Ireland in the seventeenth century as a historical stepping stone which allowed him to examine England’s more recent imperialist past and Ireland’s continuing woes. Elvis later admitted to Time Out magazine that Cromwell had been portrayed as ‘the devil incarnate’ during his Catholic schooldays, and his legacy had obviously made a lasting impression. By the end of the tour he would be playing a tentative version of the song live.

  The tour was beset by problems, mainly due to the fact that Bruce Thomas had cut his hand while demonstrating – not very well, presumably – the correct ‘bar-room method’ of smashing a bottle following a gig at Rafter’s in Manchester on 6 April. ‘That was just me being pissed,’ he says. ‘Getting hold of a bottle and breaking it and finding it wasn’t made of sugar glass, it was made of extremely thick glass and it was sticking out.’ He needed eighteen stitches, although with the pain came the happy consequence of two weeks’ leave from their gruelling schedule.

  The constant travel and attention wasn’t necessarily doing Elvis much good either. His moods were becoming increasingly dark. Ken Smith recalls visiting Cypress Avenue and finding Elvis watching a documentary on the Third Reich, listening to heavy dub reggae with a guitar on his lap, controlling the volume with his foot. The trickle-down effect was obvious in the new songs he was writing: ‘Two Little Hitlers’, ‘Goon Squad’, ‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Oliver’s Army’. Already, he was toying with calling the new record Emotional Fascism.

  Nick Lowe deputised on bass for the remainder of the tour dates, with the result that the shows were understandably erratic. At Portsmouth’s Guildhall on 12 April, Lowe was delayed getting to the venue, and Elvis came on an hour late and played the first six songs solo with just electric guitar. He seized the opportunity to perform some new numbers, opening with a salvo of ‘Chemistry Class’, ‘Sunday’s Best’, ‘Big Boys’ and ‘Green Shirt’. By the final shows at London’s Roundhouse on 15 and 16 April, he was showcasing embryonic versions of two of his most significant new compositions: ‘Accident’s Will Happen’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’, accompanied only by Steve Nieve.

  With another US tour kicking off on 19 April – a mere three days after the end of the UK tour and only six weeks on from the end of the last American trip – Elvis was left without a bass player for the opening dates of his most important tour to date. The Attractions were no longer merely a backing band. With Elvis at the front, this was now a four-piece group with its own unique chemistry, and to remove one component part left a gaping hole.

  To fill it, Jake called John Ciambotti, Clover’s bassist, and asked him to help out for a few dates, starting with the opening show at Minneapolis State Theater on 19 April. ‘I had one day’s rehearsal,’ he says. ‘I had these charts plastered to the side of my amp, and Elvis saw me looking at the stuff during rehearsal and he said, “What’s this, then?” And I said, “Those are my charts.” And he just took them off the amp and threw them away. “Don’t worry about the notes, just throw the shapes.” We had a ball. The band was so loud and the crowd was so loud that nobody cared.’

  By now the Costello camp had gained a reputation for some seriously wild behaviour. ‘I think I slept about four or five hours in the whole time I was with them,’ says Ciambotti. ‘You couldn’t sleep because there was always something happening. I was wasted when I got home. I laid on the beach for about a week just recovering.’

  With no one in any doubt anymore that they were going to make it, Elvis and The Attractions found they could pretty much help themselves to whatever they wanted. There were increasing amounts of cocaine flying around, a somewhat guilty secret at the time. Cocaine represented the bloated excess that punk supposedly despised; it was the Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles drug, not the British punk drug. What they should have been doing was drinking cider and taking speed – and certainly, they all used amphetamine – but they also had a more sophisticated palate. ‘We did have standards,’ says Bruce Thomas, who rejoined the tour before the end of April. ‘Expensive tastes. And all of a sudden, it’s more a problem of how much you can bear to take.’

  As well as the excess, a sense of collective schizophrenia soon took hold. There developed a distinct sense of an American Elvis and The Attractions and a British Elvis and The Attractions, and moving from one to the other took a couple of days to adjust. In the States, they were treated with the type of peculiarly American regard for celebrity which was very much at odds with the traditional British method of keeping people ‘in their place’. ‘We had a whole different persona,’ says Thomas. ‘You know what the Americans are like: the glossiness, it’s a presentational thing. You had to be a bit more humble in England and a bit more flash in America.’

  Jake was an integral factor in making sure Elvis played up to his designated role. He certainly encouraged the mood of intimidation, paranoia and anti-Americanism which began to surround the Costello camp, the ‘creeping threat’ which Elvis was documenting so vividly in his new songs. ‘Jake was a bit of a cartoon character, the classic bully thing,’ says Bruce Thomas. If there were reporters around he could be especially antagonistic. ‘There were just a lot of people wanting a piece of the action,’ recalls John Ciambotti. ‘Jake would do his Jake thing and everybody would sit back and watch the show. It was very funny, actually.’

  Not everybody thought so. Some of the tactics were shockingly heavy-handed. At the show in Milwaukee, contemporaneous press reports alleged that the road crew beat up a photographer during the performance and Creem’s Patrick Goldstein was later subjected to an attempted physical assault from Jake and a successful verbal one from Elvis. Goldstein labelled Riviera ‘a serious candidate for most despicable character of the decade’.

  It was all leading them towards the outer limits of acceptable behaviour. They found they could get away with pretty much anything at all. Aside from the violence, there were plenty of women. The relentless nature of the touring and the countless opportunities which fame was putting in the way of these four young men – albeit, two of whom were married – meant that yielding to temptation was virtually inevitable. On the second US tour, Charles Shaar Murray had observed that Steve Nieve was ‘knocking down enough pussy these last six weeks to make Warren Beatty and Phil Lynott feel inadequate’,6 and the standard cliché of promiscuous, som
etimes loutish rock star behaviour had enveloped them all.

  ‘Some horrible things went on,’ admits Bruce Thomas. ‘One of the members of the band – not me or Elvis – after having his way with a young lady, cut all her hair off, left her naked in a hotel corridor with a business card stuck between the cheeks of her bottom. I mean, that’s pretty hard. That’s Led Zeppelin.’

  Almost pathologically immune to clichés in song, in reality Elvis was as susceptible as the next man, and he embraced what life had to offer with equal enthusiasm in every department. A short way into the tour he wrote ‘Party Girl’, a romantic, considered ode to an American art student who had sparked Elvis’s curiousity on-the-road, perhaps because it was one extremely rare occasion where the promise of desire hadn’t been fulfilled30. He previewed the song in Boston on 4 May. ‘Goon Squad’, ‘Two Little Hitlers’ and ‘Accidents Will Happen’ were also making appearances.

  All the new material was to a certain extent a reflection of life on the road. ‘Even on the bus while we were touring Elvis could write songs,’ says John Ciambotti. ‘He was so prolific, he could write a song while watching a movie. It was just an amazing thing to be around.’ Nick Lowe, supporting on the tour with Rockpile, also recalls Elvis’s ability to rise above the madness and create something memorable: ‘I couldn’t believe that in the midst of this mayhem – and it really was mayhem on these tours – he could come up with such wonderful, soulful songs. He just seemed to be getting better and better.’7

  In May, a few of Elvis’s off-the-cuff quotes appeared in a profile in Newsweek magazine, laying down his no-nonsense manifesto. ‘I’m a menace. I’m up for a fight. I’m here to corrupt America’s youth, but my visa will probably run out before I get to do it.’ Despite his bravado, many of the halls were half empty. The venues were mostly 2000-capacity theatres and halls instead of the 600-seater clubs he had played on the previous tour, and it was only in the major cities that they were guaranteed anything close to a capacity crowd. By the end of the month the contradictory pressures exacted by the odd combination of adoration and indifference were beginning to show.

  At the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica on 30 May, the strain was all too apparent, as Elvis wielded his guitar like a weapon above his head and kicked over amps before storming off-stage. ‘A lot of things were going on that left me confused,’ he said. ‘I began to worry that it was all too phoney, that people had just convinced themselves that we were the thing to see this week.’8

  If Elvis was worried about being flavour of the month then the audience at the Hollywood High in Los Angeles on 4 June, 1978 would have done little to ease his concerns. The more he seemingly strove to discourage admiration, the more it descended upon him. Middle-of-the-road queen Linda Rondstadt was in attendance, and so was Bebe Buell.

  Buell was almost twenty-five when she first saw Elvis Costello. A glamourous American model and Playboy centrefold, Buell was also gaining a well-deserved reputation as a companion to rock ’n’ roll royalty, who had enjoyed intimate relationships and flings with Steve Tyler – the father of her baby daughter, Liv, a little under twelve months old at the time – as well as Todd Rundgren, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and most recently Rod Stewart. At the Hollywood High, Buell watched a band at the peak of its powers, although her interest was focused entirely upon Elvis: ‘I thought he was absolutely beautiful,’ she says. ‘But that’s my Arthur Miller complex.’

  The show opened with just Elvis and Steve, previewing an emotionally rich, open-throated ‘Accidents Will Happen’, capturing perhaps the most enduringly affecting version of the song in this earliest incarnation. Then the Thomas’s joined the party, crashing into a high-octane ‘Mystery Dance’. Already, the mixture of intensity and musical sophistication on show clearly set Elvis and The Attractions apart from any of their new wave contemporaries. A tender rendition of ‘Alison’ alerted the watching Rondstadt to the potential of Elvis’s songs to cross over to a more mainstream market, although she was probably less sure of the razor-backed gallop through ‘Lipstick Vogue’ which the band cooked up immediately afterwards. The beautiful ‘Party Girl’ was also performed, debunking later suggestions that it had been written with Bebe Buell in mind.

  After the show, Elvis was introduced to Bebe at the Whisky-A-Go-Go club, and was dazzled. The old MacManus trait of flirting with the prettiest girl, of taking on a challenge, seemed to kick into gear. The two immediately hit it off, arranging to rendezvous the following day. They kept the date, and Buell persuaded Elvis to smoke pot, a drug which he had never used before, ‘and we just drove around all day laughing’.9

  The couple met again before Elvis and the band flew to San Francisco for the final date of the tour on 7 June. The surly anti-pop star and the model-groupie actually had far more in common than their one-dimensional public images might have suggested. They were both obsessed with music, and had recently spilt from their respective long-term partners, Mary and Todd Rundgren. Furthermore, they both had small children, and enjoyed a good time. When Bebe asked Elvis if he was married, he ‘swore up and down that they were legally separated,’ she says. ‘He even used the word “legally”.’

  For two people with extremely active sex lives, the early stages of their relationship were surprisingly demure. They didn’t sleep together, and kissed only once before Elvis had to go back to the UK. Nonetheless, Bebe Buell claims she was already smitten. ‘It was an immediate, head-over-heels slam dunk,’ she says today. She already believed that she was in love, but Elvis, it seems, had simply decided that he did want to go to Chelsea after all.

  * * *

  He returned to Britain to find himself a pop star. This Year’s Model had peaked at No. 4 in the album charts, while the current single, ‘Pump It Up’, would reach No. 24, ensuring another Top Of The Pops performance. However, his marriage was in disarray. ‘I had left the family home and was living a totally wilful life with little sense of gravity,’ he later admitted. ‘I destroyed any possibility of trust and reconciliation in my marriage.’10

  Elvis moved into Steve Nieve’s fifth-floor flat at 48 Queen’s Gate Terrace in Kensington while Mary and Matthew remained in Whitton. The couple were separated but not entirely estranged, and there was still a certain amount of rather fraught to-ing and fro-ing involved. ‘It was very stormy,’ recalls Steve Hazelhurst, who remained on friendly terms with Mary. ‘She went through quite a bad period. All the stories about him were coming out.’

  In mitigation for his almost continual absences, Elvis’s utterly back-breaking schedule showed no signs of letting up. The European tour kicked off on 12 June, a mere four days after the end of the US tour. Hitting the continent for the first time, Elvis and The Attractions took in dates in France, Switzerland, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. The shows followed the same template as the recent American tour, sprints through My Aim Is True and This Year’s Model with a handful of new songs thrown in.

  At the Roskilde Festival appearance in Denmark on 2 July, Elvis and The Attractions debuted the first full band rendition of ‘Oliver’s Army’. At the time, no one had any inkling of the song’s future stature. ‘I wasn’t particularly aware that that was going to be our anthemic song,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Some of them I thought were pretty good songs, like ‘Big Tears’, were never big songs. It’s hard to tell.’ At this stage, Elvis had ‘Oliver’s Army’ pencilled in as a potential B-side, nothing more.

  For the remainder of July, The Attractions took a short and well-deserved rest to reconnect with their nervous systems. Elvis was restless and had little inclination to settle, and after a brief attempt at reconciliation in Bermuda with Mary, he flew on to America to indulge in a little country music vacation at Columbia’s expense.

  His first stop was New York’s Lone Star Café on 25 July, guesting with Delbert McLinton on three songs, including a version of Tampa Red’s ‘Don’t You Lie To Me,’ an old Flip City cover learned from Chuck Berry. From New York he flew on to Nashville, ostensibly to record a version of
‘Stranger In The House’ with his hero George Jones. Jones was making a duets album for CBS and had been persuaded by the label to extend an invitation to his ‘new wave’ labelmate in order to drag a few new fans into the country section of the record shops.

  ‘George Jones didn’t show, which was a bit disappointing,’11 said Elvis, although his reputation as a heavy drinker and his nickname of ‘No Show’ ensured that the singer’s non-appearance wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone. The session – recorded under the auspices of legendary country producer Billy Sherill – was rescheduled for another time, but Elvis did get the chance to meet Bruce Springsteen, another icon from the old days. ‘Elvis said that Bruce had been trying to get the sound of My Aim Is True on his records,’ recalls Ken Smith. ‘“How d’you get the sound on that?” You know, Pathway Studios! Elvis found that quite funny.’

  Throughout this period, Elvis had been keeping in touch with Bebe Buell via letter and telephone. Less than two weeks after returning from the American tour in June, he had re-established contact, sending a letter to a mutual accquaintance at Columbia, who passed it on to Bebe. He claimed she was ‘haunting’ him. Then came a deluge. ‘We had hours and hours and hours of telephone conversations,’ says Buell. ‘He wrote me in excess of twenty letters. The man was the master letter-writer, pages and pages of his passion. He swept me off my feet, he was very good at his seduction.’ As their connection and rapport developed, Elvis invited Bebe to come to London, preferably to coincide with his twenty-fourth birthday on 25 August. With a week to spare, and a ticket in her pocket paid for by Elvis, she duly set off to be with her suitor.