Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  * * *

  Armed Forces hit the album charts at No. 2, promoted by a poster campaign of Elvis with a shotgun in his mouth. It would stay in the charts for a further six months. Although happy enough to make a somewhat incongruous appearance as a ‘pop star’ on the children’s TV show Tiswas and turn up on local radio, the print media blackout was still in full effect, as Nick Kent discovered when he caught up with Elvis at Sheffield City Hall on 18 January, midway through his most extensive British tour to date. Kent found the band in ‘magnificent’ form after the damp squib of the Dominion shows, but his exaltation of ‘the real return of the prodigal’ didn’t help him get any nearer to an interview.

  The inter-band chemistry was as volatile as ever. Increasingly, violence seemed to surround the band, and when nerves and tempers frayed things often got physical. Elvis in particular was susceptible to blacking out and punching blindly when he was drunk, but they were all involved in fist fights with each other at some point. On this occasion, matters reached a head after the show in Cardiff on 27 January. Pete was good friends with Welsh singer and guitarist Andy Fairweather-Low, and they set up in the hotel room with amps and a little drum kit and started having a jam session through the night. ‘I wasn’t having this,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘So I knocked on the door and Pete said, “Oh, have you come to join us?” and smack! I bruised his ribs. The next morning Elvis found out. Pete was sitting there with a bottle of claret, red wine with his cornflakes, and Elvis dived over the breakfast table and whacked him again. “You’re fired”.’ As ever, Pete was re-instated before the next gig.

  By the end of the tour they were all exhausted. Jake had hastily arranged a final date at the Hammersmith Palais on 30 January, a sentimental return to his father’s old work place for Elvis and an attempt to atone for the Dominion shows a month earlier. Although Elvis was trying hard to meet the expectations of being both a critically acclaimed artist and a genuine pop star – a tightrope act which meant playing the singles as well as throwing new songs like ‘Opportunity’, Steve Nieve’s tender ‘Sad About Girls’ and rare live renditions of ‘Chemistry Class’ and ‘Two Little Hitlers’ into the set – there was no disguising the fact that both he and The Attractions were feeling the pace and the pressure. ‘Elvis and his boys are completely dead on their feet,’ fretted the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray. ‘Wiped out, drained. Trying to be dynamic but the starter won’t start.’

  Furthermore, the fatigue and the fame were beginning to make Elvis question himself and the motivations of his audience. ‘I saw people responding without any kind of understanding or consideration,’ he later said. ‘We’d play a set where we’d play brilliantly all night and then we’d do our hit single and people would go crazy. Yet they would be bewildered by the rest of what we were doing.’19

  Much of this was attributable to the unprecedented success of ‘Oliver’s Army’. Gaining radio exposure throughout January, the single was released in early February and climbed to No. 2 in the chart in March. ‘Oliver’s Army’ marked the pinnacle of Elvis’s ability to be all things to all people: a subversive, challenging songwriter who melded serious lyrics to insanely catchy pop hits and sold almost 500,000 singles in the process. It was reminsicent of nothing so much as Dylan in the mid-’60s.

  In his rather disheartened frame of mind, however, Elvis was aware that it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was able to take some solace from the fact that ‘we managed to get a pop record about militarism to No. 2,’20 but he was also aware that to this day, most people have no idea what the song is saying. ‘Of course, you could sing along with the chorus without ever thinking what it was about,’21 he admitted, sadly. Such things were beginning to trouble him.

  Ross MacManus in 1960, leading the Joe Loss Orchestra from the front.

  Embarking on a solo career in 1968.

  Credit: Liverpool Daily Post and Echo.

  (Centre) Nos. 15 and 16 Beaulieu Close, Twickenham Park. No. 16 (the top right flat) was home to Ross, Lilian and Declan from 1961-1970, and Ross continued living there after the break up of his marriage. No. 15 (the bottom right flat) was home to Declan, Mary and Matthew between 1975-76.

  Declan during his time at St Edmund’s RC school in Whitton, circa 1962. (Above, centre) Already displaying a talent for stealing the limelight.

  Courtesy of Brian Burke

  Rusty memorabilia. A poster from 1972 illustrating the band’s typical place in the pecking order.

  A detail of the handwritten lyrics for one of Declan’s earliest original compositions, ‘Sunflower Lancers’ Courtesy of Allan Mayes.

  A detail in Declan’s own handwriting of his original composition, ‘Dull Echoes’, written circa 1972.

  Courtesy of Allan Mayes.

  Scenes from Flip City: Declan in trademark dungarees at an open-air festival in Stepney, 1975.

  Dickie Faulkner, Ian Powling, Steve Hazelhurst, Declan MacManus, Mich Kent. Courtesy of Ken Smith and Steve Hazelhurst

  Playing at the Fitzrovia Festival, 1975

  Trying their very best to be The Band. Snapped in Nonsuch Park, Surrey, 1975.

  Courtesy of Ken Smith and Steve Hazelhurst

  Palgrave House, Cypress Avenue, Whitton. Declan and Mary’s marital home between 1976 and 1978, where he wrote many of his most enduring songs, including ‘Alison’.

  Declan marries Mary Burgoyne, 9 November 1974. Mich Kent is best man.

  Credit: Peter Brown

  Unleashed. Elvis leads The Attractions on their first tour of the UK in the summer of 1977.

  Credit: Starfile/Ian Dickson

  Elvis Costello

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  Pete Thomas

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  Bruce Thomas

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  Steve Nieve

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  LIVE STIFFS LIVE (l–r in all but top picture): Elvis, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis and Ian Dury prepare to do battle in the autumn of 1977.

  (Above) Bruce Thomas and Elvis: Lost in America. Credit: Roberta Bayley

  Bebe Buell in classic pose.

  Spending time with Elvis in Portland, Maine, immediately prior to the ‘Armed Funk’ tour, February 1979.

  Credit: Bob Gruen/Courtesy of Bebe Buell

  An accident waiting to happen: Sheffield, January 1979.

  Credit: Pennie Smith

  Chapter Six

  1979–80

  THE TOUR OF AMERICA WAS THEIR FOURTH in a little over a year: by its end, in mid-April, Elvis and The Attractions would have spent almost exactly half of the previous eighteen months in the States and Canada, criss-crossing the continent with an increasing sense of dislocation.

  Armed Forces had been well received in America. ‘Sunday’s Best’ was taken off the record and substituted with ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding’, a fair swap, and the momentum created with My Aim Is True and This Year’s Model was still gathering pace. Rolling Stone weighed in with a glowing review, while the Washington Post’s Eve Zibart concluded that ‘his third and most polished album, stakes out New Wave’s first major fiefdom in the United States’.

  Nonetheless, Elvis flew off to his newly-conquered territory to face the fifty-seven shows in sixty-eight days with some ambivalence, to say the least. He spent some time with Bebe Buell in Maine in the days before the opening show of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour in Seattle on 6 February, and she then accompanied him to California for a few days. When the tour set off into the hinterlands, Elvis arranged for Bebe to rejoin the convoy in New York at the end of March.

  Perhaps it was just as well that she didn’t follow the whole tour. She was not always the most popular member of the entourage, and her liasion with Elvis was often a topic which amused the band. ‘She was a super-groupie, obviously, a bit of an airhead,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Steve’s girlfriend once said, “You know what I really hate about you, Bebe, you’re blah blah blah,” this long tirade. Bebe turned around and said,
“You know, I like you because you’re so frank.” She was just indestructible.’

  Buell required a pretty thick skin. Not only was she subjected to the barbs of the band and the increasing hostility of Elvis’s management – who by now simply hated the relationship and delighted in spreading rumour and gossip about her, some of which she undoubtedly encouraged – but she was often on the receiving end of Elvis’s mood swings. No stranger to infidelity himself, he was less able to deal with suggestions that Buell may not have been entirely faithful, and the relationship fell prey to his dark moods. ‘He was pretty mean to her,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘There was lots of power play involved, humiliating people just to make them feel bad. Pretty dysfunctional. Whatever else went on, I think she genuinely had something for him, probably more than he did.’

  Buell admits that the tour was ‘drug-fuelled, alcohol-fuelled and violent. Things got crazy’. During their increasingly frequent, high-octane arguments, she would disparagingly call him ‘Uncle Elvis’ or a little ‘Napoleon Coward’, much to his fury. ‘I’ve protected Elvis quite a bit and there are many things about him I will never reveal, but it was pretty horrible,’ she says. ‘He would wake me up at three in the morning from a sound sleep and accuse me of dreaming about somebody else. He became suspicious, paranoid, inquisitive. For example, I could always tell when he’d been going through my diaries. I could never find a hiding place which he couldn’t discover.’

  There were unprecedented amounts of alcohol and cocaine on the tour, and the mood in the camp was dark and jittery. Jake and Elvis seemed hell-bent on conquering America entirely on their own terms, and all the least pleasant aspects of the Riviera style of man management combined to create an atmosphere which wound up everyone, from journalists and photographers to the audience, the band and the crew.

  As if keen to remind America that it needed Elvis Costello more than he needed it, the antics were inflammatory from the start. The road crew wore army fatigues and the tour bus flaunted the legend: DESTINATION CAMP LEJEUNE, NC, home of the Marine Corps, the US crack military regiment. Anyone inclined to write this off as a humorous extension of the album title were swiftly set right. Tour manager Des Brown executed a fairly brutal reading of Jake’s desire to keep photographers and bootleggers out of gigs, while the press were treated with utter disdain by Riviera, alienating most of the writers who had been championing Elvis since he had first appeared in the States.

  None of this would have mattered too much if Elvis was producing the goods on stage. Instead, he seemed intent on extending the policy of non-co-operation to include his concerts. With homegrown hero Bruce Springsteen regularly playing sets clocking in at three hours, American audiences expected value for money. What they got on the opening night of the tour in Seattle was a monosyllabic Elvis playing a slight fifty-minute set and no encore, followed by ear-piercing feedback which sent the crowd scurrying from the hall.

  Outside, posters of Elvis were torn down and set alight. And it got worse. Rolling Stone writer Fred Schruers and New West’s Greil Marcus were in attendance for the show at Berkeley’s Community Theatre on the ninth: ‘Costello barely played forty minutes before lock-stepping offstage with no intention to return,’1 wrote Schruers, while Marcus commented that ‘the show was meant as an insult and performed as such, and people caught on.’2

  The audience were justifiably hostile, ripping seats out of the venue and later breaking windows in the tour bus. ‘They were jumping up and down in the balconies,’ said Marcus. ‘An hour later they were trying to break into the box office.’3 Backstage, Jake threatened to attack the writer if he went into print about the incident. ‘Jake’s just a little thug,’4 Marcus concluded. At the Fox Theatre in San Diego on the 13 February, Elvis played a mere eight songs before leaving the stage. Armed Forces may have been beginning to climb towards the Top 10 in the Billboard charts, but all was clearly not well.

  He was still managing to write through the chaos. At the Long Beach Arena on 14 February, Elvis previewed the beautiful country-soul ballad ‘Motel Matches’, and as the tour moved on he would add ‘Idle Hands’ – an early version of ‘Temptation’ – ‘Secondary Modern’, ‘B-Movie’ and a slow, lumbering version of ‘High Fidelity’ to the set.

  The show at the country-based Palomino Club in Los Angeles on 16 February also provided a welcome diversion, Elvis adding John McFee on pedal steel to take the chance to play some country songs. Elvis would finally record his duet of ‘Stranger In The House’ with George Jones in Nashville later in the tour, and at the Palamino the song made a rare appearance, alongside standards such as Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have To Go’ and Jones’ own ‘If I Put Them All Together (I’d Have You)’. This time Elvis relented and played an encore, although he resisted repeated calls for a second one.

  But it wasn’t long before the clouds scudded overhead again. In St Louis on 6 March, Elvis proved once again how effective he had grown at not just biting but amputating the hand that was attempting to feed him. Local radio station KSHE had been cherry-picked by Columbia to sponsor the show, but Elvis had heard through the grapevine that KSHE’s local rival – KADI – were playing Armed Forces more frequently. During the concert, he dedicated ‘Accidents Will Happen’ to ‘all the boys at KADI’ before playing a splenetic ‘Radio, Radio’ in honour of ‘all the local bastard radio stations that don’t play our songs – and to KSHE’.

  Armed Forces was dropped from KSHE’s playlist with a resounding thud. ‘I am upset and shocked that a performer would behave in such an unprofessional manner,’ KSHE’s executive vice-president Sheely Grafman told the local press, as Columbia engineered frantic diplomatic manouevres to smooth things over. As Rolling Stone’s Fred Schruers later remarked, Elvis seemed ‘bound to make doubters and enemies out of his strongest American partisans’.5 Then the wheels really came off.

  On 15 March, the ‘Armed Funk’ roadshow pulled into The Agora Club in Columbus, Ohio, half way between Cleveland and Cincinatti. The short, fifteen-song set had been unremarkable, a distressingly routine feature of the tour. Afterwards, they returned to the Holiday Inn to discover that Stephen Stills and his band were also staying after playing a gig at another venue in the city.

  ‘I remember seeing this other bus in the driveway of the hotel and the general feeling on our bus was – another group! Right!’, recalled Pete Thomas. ‘It would be like if sailors had come into harbour and found another boat there, and they knew they were having a night off. “Oh, we’re bound to end up having a punch up with them.” And then finding out who it was. Whoooah! It’s Stephen Stills! The old school.’6

  Stills was the kind of musical ‘dinosaur’ who ‘just seemed to typify a lot of the things I thought were wrong with American music’,7 according to Elvis. He had been a member of Buffalo Springfield and, of course, Crobsy, Stills and Nash (and occasionally Young), one of Elvis’s favourite groups back in the early ’70s. But times had changed, for both Elvis and Stills. Post-punk, his career had faltered and he was regarded by Elvis and the band as a burnt-out relic of a bygone age, ripe for abuse.

  Stills was with his manager Jim Lindersmith, percussionist Jim Lala, backing singer Bonnie Bramlett and other members of his party in the bar of the Holiday Inn when the Costello contingent joined them. Pete and Steve didn’t stay long and it was left to Elvis and Bruce to continue the conversation with their fellow musicians. What had started as reasonably good-natured joshing soon grew much nastier as the alcohol flowed.

  ‘I think we started it,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Steve Stills was being quite friendly, but we would just take exception to anybody. That was the way we did it.’ As Bruce and Elvis trotted out their usual routine of anti-Amercian jibes that had been a feature of their US tours since the very beginning, Stills’ camp began to get agitated.

  ‘Stills said, “If you hate us so much, what are you doing in our country?”,’ recalls Thomas. ‘And Elvis said something like, “We’ve come to take your money and your women.” Then it just g
ot worse. “What about our music?” “You haven’t got any good music.” “What about James Brown?” “James Brown?” Bang! That’s pretty much how that one started. It was just us being obnoxious bastards.’

  In this instance, being obnoxious bastards culminated in Elvis describing James Brown as ‘a jive-ass nigger’ and Ray Charles as ‘nothing but a blind, ignorant nigger’. Before his final descent into these drunken bar-room taunts, Elvis had already responded to inquiries about his feelings on Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and other white artists with a volley of obscenities. He would probably have said the same about Mozart, or Caruso, or John Lennon, had their names come up. It was not a considered argument.

  Nevertheless, Stills was outraged and left the bar, but other members of his party stuck around, including Bonnie Bramlett. At some point during the ensuing squabble, in which Bramlett reportedly told Elvis ‘that anybody that mean and hateful had to have a little bitty dick’, the argument became physical and Elvis dislocated his shoulder. He was so drunk he barely noticed. ‘I only remembered that the thing had even taken place when I got back to my hotel room and discovered that my arm hurt somewhat,’8 he later said.

  The fracas was later described by the bartender as ‘just a lot of shoving’, and certainly it was a minor bout. The Attractions often had more physical bust-ups between themselves, and there was no question of the following night’s show in Detroit not going ahead. As the tour moved on and the Elvis camp celebrated Armed Forces hitting the Billboard Top Ten in America, the only remaining legacy of the incident appeared to be the fact that for a few days Elvis was wearing his arm in a sling when he wasn’t playing.