Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  However, Bonnie Bramlett had other ideas, and once she decided to leak the story to the media it spread like bush-fire. Elvis opened the show at Rochester Auditorium on 24 March with ‘I Stand Accused’, his only tacit acknowledgement that something might be amiss, but soon everyone could see that he was in real trouble. ‘By then it’s on the news and in the papers,’ remembers Bruce Thomas. ‘They’ve gone public with it and there’s death threats.’

  By the time they hit New York a few days later, the death threats were being taken very seriously. Jake drafted in two armed policemen to look after Elvis around the clock as fears for his safety grew. Something clearly had to be done. The emergency press conference called at CBS headquarters in New York on 30 March was seen as a last chance to salvage something from the mess. Whether he was a racist or not – and once the dust had settled it was generally accepted that he was not – wasn’t really the issue, merely the catalyst. In reality, Elvis was dragged in front of the press not to atone for his comments about Ray Charles and James Brown, but to atone for his behaviour towards the press themselves, to be contrite and charming; to repent. Had he done so, he would have been let off the hook, and CBS would have been soothed.

  But typically, Elvis couldn’t allow himself to back down. He badly misjudged his approach, simply adding more confusion and resentment where there was already plenty.

  The fall-out was immense. Even as the press conference was taking place, in the same building executives from CBS were discussing how best to proceed with Elvis’s career. Reportedly, they even discussed dropping him from the label, but ultimately decided against it. However, neither did they opt to stand up and fight on behalf of their embattled artist, unprepared to endure the bad press and escalating costs of trying to get Elvis’s image back on track in America. Nor – on the strength of his performance with the press – were they convinced that Elvis would comply with the need for greater accessibility and charm required to win the media back over.

  The simplest option seemed to be to let him wither on the vine. Armed Forces had risen to No. 10 at the time of the incident and further progress was confidently expected, but by the end of April the album had left the Top 30 and was fading fast. Columbia declined to release a follow-up single to ‘Accidents Will Happen’, which had stalled at No. 101 in the singles charts. When Jake had suggested that CBS book New York’s Shea Stadium for Elvis after an estimated 250,000 people responded to a draw for free Costello tickets on the radio, the label hadn’t been interested. Days later, Riviera sent a truckload of shovels to CBS executives, with a caustic note attached: ‘If you really want to bury my act, I thought you could do with some more help.’

  There were still shows to do, and the band played on: 1 April was to have been the triumphant pinaccle of the tour, with Elvis playing three club dates in New York on the same day in an ‘April Fool’s Day Marathon’. Specially printed singles of ‘Talking In The Dark’ b/w ‘Wednesday Week’ were given to each audience member, all 1200 of whom had won tickets via a radio promotion.

  It was another of Jake’s bright ideas which merely became a considerable security headache under the prevailing circumstances. Again, Elvis didn’t make any specific allusion to the incident or its fall-out, but those reading between the lines found some clues. At the opening gig at the tiny Lone Star Club, he joked, ‘This playing three clubs in one night is someone’s idea of an April Fool, and I think I know who the fool is,’ before pointing to himself. Then again, he seemed more relaxed than he had been for some time, imbued, perhaps, with a sense of relief that the bubble had finally burst.

  The second gig at the Bottom Line was attended by Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, not to mention a gaggle of Rock Against Racism protesters, disappointed Elvis fans by any other name, sending a message to their man with placards reading ‘Kick Him Again, Bonn!’ and ‘Send Elvis Back To Computer School’. He started the show with ‘I Stand Accused’.

  There was no let up in security. Indeed, with death threats flying around, the sense of menace and paranoia had only increased. At the final show at Great Gilder-sleeves two extra bodyguards prowled the side of the stage, while Hells Angels were drafted in to back up tour manager Des Brown. Ever-present Rolling Stone scribe Fred Schruers reported that one badly beaten young fan was led bleeding onto the pavement, apparently having been set upon by about eleven members of the Costello entourage. The day ended at 3.30 a.m., and not a minute too soon.

  The tour finally limped to a close on 14 April at Rhode Island College in Providence, and all concerned were left to survey the wreckage. It was almost unfathomable. ‘We never really recovered from that tour,’ admits Bruce Thomas. ‘Every time Elvis is doing something well, he kind of sabotages it. Even then that mechanism was at work, subconsciously sabotaging the possibility of being a really big, A-League band. We were probably poised to be like Elton John or Bruce Springsteen.’

  Elvis, it seems, had taken a look over to the other side and decided he didn’t want to go there after all.

  * * *

  In early May, as the aptly titled ‘Accidents Will Happen’ was released as the second UK single from Armed Forces, Elvis took stock of his life and his music. He was twenty-four, flirting with divorce and deeply unsatisfied with the way his career was panning out. ‘I decided, “That’s it! I’ve got to get a grip,”’ he recalled. ‘There’s something wrong. The mission has gone wrong somewhere.’9

  He had reluctantly parted from Bebe Buell at the end of the US tour, and wouldn’t see her again for over four years. Following the incident in Columbus, Elvis had been ‘driven deeper into cocaine and alcohol and despair’,10 according to Buell, and she had caught the brunt of it when the tour arrived in New York. She had arranged to meet up with Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall at Elvis’s show at the Bottom Line on 1 April, but had remained in her hotel room following a bitter row with Elvis in the bar of the Mayflower Hotel the previous night. He was suspicious of her persona and her lifestyle, and swung between helpless desire of her beauty and unpleasant contempt at what she supposedly represented. Consumed by guilt and self-loathing at the way he was behaving, Elvis was also convinced that some terrible harm was going to befall them both. Meanwhile, Bebe had fallen pregnant to Elvis three times in the previous six months, and each time had suffered a miscarriage. It was a mess, and one that both of them finally seemed resigned to walking away from.

  Breaking off all contact with Bebe Buell had been a prerequisite for his return to Mary, Matthew and the family home. By now, the Costellos had moved from Whitton to a small but infinitely more upmarket terraced property in St James Cottages in Richmond, just over the river from Twickenham. It had been bought largely on the proceeds of Linda Rondstadt’s recording of ‘Alison’ on her latest album, Living In The USA, for which Elvis had reportedly received around £30,000. As he later admitted, he was sniffy about Rondstadt’s syrupy treatment of his song, but he wasn’t too sniffy about the money.

  Early signs of Elvis and Mary’s marriage reconciliation included a short trip to France and the couple’s attendance at shows by the J. Geils Band in both Paris and London in mid-May. Later that month, Elvis, Mary and Matthew all took the train up to Liverpool for a trip home to see Lilian, taking the chance to play a little music at the same time. It had been a month without any live action, and it was a somewhat bruised and battered Attractions who made an impromptu appearance at a Radar Records party on 22 May, held on the Royal Iris ferry which travelled between Liverpool and Birkenhead.

  The headline acts were Clive Langer and The Boxes and The Yachts, both of whom were managed by Jake Riviera and signed to Radar. According to the NME, Elvis and the band looked ‘anaemic and unhealthy’ as they opened the proceedings with a six-song set which – aside from an opening ‘I Stand Accused’ – was all singles, but Elvis seemed in good humour and at ease with the small crowd.

  Following the nerves and neuroses of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour everything seemed slightly lacklustre, probably pleasantly so. The r
ising balloon of Elvis’s career had been pricked and the sense of urgency and momentum slowly leaked out. He needed time to recover, both physically and emotionally. It was the longest – indeed only – sustained break that Elvis and The Attractions had had from touring for almost exactly two years, and over the summer they all took time to regroup and recover from the largely self-inflicted mental and physical batterings that had been meted out in America.

  Occasionally, they would meet up to rehearse and demo new songs, slotting in a one-off recording session at Abbey Road in late May designed to yield a ‘stand-alone’ single before work began on the new album in the autumn. Elvis chose an obscure cover of ‘So Young’ by the Australian band Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons, backed with The Merseybeats’ ‘I Stand Accused’. However, the session at Abbey Road with Nick Lowe at the helm was ‘blighted by flying coffee cups and overwhelming blueness’,11 and the plan for a single was quietly shelved.

  There was the occasional festival appearance in Europe and five Scandinavian dates in late summer, but everyone had other things to do: The Attractions recorded a surprisingly poor ‘solo’ record with Roger Bechirian, a forgettable affair released as Mad About The Wrong Boy in September 1980, while Elvis produced the debut album by British ska group The Specials at TW Studios throughout June.

  He kept it simple, using what he had learned from Nick Lowe: trying not to get in the way of a great live band, while at the same time doing all he could to get the best performances down on tape. He also brought the more specialised Attractions recording ‘method’ to the project. ‘The main thing I remember is him sitting behind the desk and falling off his chair,’ said chief-Special Jerry Dammers. ‘Everyone was pissed. We spent most of the time in the pub over the road and then we used to work during closing time, which was between four and six in the afternoon.’12

  When not in the pub with The Specials, Elvis was demo-ing fleshed-out versions of his own new material. Usually, he would bring his songs to the band and play them through on the guitar, letting the arrangement develop organically between the four of them. However, for many of the new demos he went into tiny eight-track studios like Archipelago in Pimlico and played all the instruments himself, producing sometimes eccentric versions of ‘Black And White World’, ‘Riot Act’, ‘Five Gears In Reverse’, ‘Love For Tender’, ‘King Horse’, ‘New Amsterdam’ and ‘Men Called Uncle’.

  He had grown to hate Armed Forces, the slickness, the preconception, and was casting around for a solution. However, the answer didn’t lie in the solo demos. Although he enjoyed the process, and the tender ‘New Amsterdam’ would eventually make the final cut, they were a little too idiosyncratic to be seen as potential tracks for a new album.

  When The Attractions joined Elvis in September and October to rehearse and begin taping the new songs in trial sessions at Eden Studios, his frustration grew. Most of the new record was written, but both he and band were well aware that the material was not coming together the way they wanted it to. Having had little time or energy on the US tour to do anything to the new songs except learn them and play them in a similar style to Armed Forces, when Elvis brought the tracks back home and played them live and in the studio, he found they sounded thin, lacklustre, and derivative.

  ‘We sounded like The Jags,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘Bad Elvis and The Attractions impersonators, basically, who played everything fast and in eights.’ Elvis was equally unhappy with the ‘wretched’13 performances. The classic Attractions sound had been worked to death, with the organ pushing to the front and lots of tremolo guitar. Their initial attempt at ‘B-Movie’ sounded like a desperate attempt to rewrite ‘Oliver’s Army’. They were becoming a parody of themselves.

  The solution presented itself one afternoon over a few post-rehearsal drinks. ‘We went to the pub and said, “What are we gonna do?”,’ recalled Elvis. ‘Why don’t we try playing some of these songs slower, and use more rhythmic accompaniment, instead of these tricky, nervy kind of backings.’14

  He had always been up-front about the way in which he used other songs as launchpads for his own material; by the time he had mixed in his own ideas and added The Attractions, it was normally nigh on impossible to trace a link back to his original inspiration. This time, Elvis moved away from the clean, European line of the Bowie and Abba records which had previously dominated his turntable, and instead immersed himself in the soul music he had loved as a teenager. Perhaps the answer to hs troubles lay in the grooves of the classic songs of Stax, Atlantic and Motown?

  Elvis raided his own record collection and spent a further £50 on classic soul singles from Rock On record shop in Camden Town. Then he distributed tapes to the band, making sure everyone was getting into the same feel and musical frame of mind. ‘Elvis dug out Motown Chartbusters: Volume III and said, “Listen to this, get this dynamic in your head, this is where we’re going this time,”’ recalls Bruce Thomas.

  It was probably not meant as an overt apology to the black acts he had bad-mouthed in Columbus, but subconsciously it seemed to acknowledge that there was room for a little more warmth and emotion, a little more vulnerability in his music. Nor was it meant to be a direct case of adopting a wholesale genre or sound – that would just be flirting with another kind of parody – rather it was an attempt to tap into the freshness and vitality at the heart of ’60s soul music to bring the new songs, and probably Elvis as well, alive again.

  In the studio, this working method rapidly refined itself until the band were playing each new Elvis song in the style of a soul classic, using it as a template for the mood and rhythm before letting the new song burst through. ‘I was literally taking the songs and saying, “OK, what song are we going to play this like?”,’ said Elvis. ‘Each song I could go through and tell you which band we were being: Al Green on one, The Four Tops on another.’15 To which he might have added The Supremes, Martha and The Vandellas, Booker T and The MG’s, Garnet Mimms, Eddie Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Betty Everett, Curtis Mayfield and – on ‘Human Touch’ – his more recent collaborators, The Specials. ‘We were actually listening to those records to get us in the mood before we put a track down,’ says Bechirian. ‘And suddenly the whole feel of it changed.’

  This approach met head on with the traditional Attractions wallop to make some wildly exciting music, with the loose punch and swagger that Elvis was searching for. On some songs – such as ‘Love For Tender’, ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Secondary Modern’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Clowntime Is Over’ – the debt was more overt than on others, but each and every song felt the benefit in approach if not always directly in style.

  By this point in the proceedings they had tired of Eden Studios in London and decamped to Phonogram’s studio complex in Wisseloord, in Holland. Situated in the forest, away from the traumas and temptations of working in the middle of a city, the change of scenery was initially refreshing, but it soon became apparent that the hard personal lessons of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour hadn’t been learned.

  For the first time they began drinking in the studio, and soon the sessions took on an edge of frantic desperation. ‘It was pretty wild,’ admitted Nick Lowe. ‘It was just like you had your foot flat down on the accelerator. Swallowing life down, guzzling it down.’16 Literally. At one point Jake flew over to Holland to confront Elvis and the group after they had run up a bar bill worth thousands of pounds, whilst, according to Roger Bechirian, ‘everything was a cocaine haze’.

  Matters swiftly reached the point of emotional meltdown, particularly for Steve Nieve. ‘You would have him slamming the piano lid down: “I’m not playing any more of this goddamn monkey music”,’ says Bruce Thomas. The general pace of life and the increasing excess was a major contributing factor in the organist’s unhappiness. He was still only twenty-one, a little more introverted than the rest of the band, and creatively had pushed himself hardest to explore the outer limits of his capabilities. At one point he broke down, sobbing over the piano, simply burnt out.

  There were
also musical problems. On Elvis’s first two records with The Attractions, the tracks had been played-in on tour and most of the arrangements set in stone by the time they went into the studio. This time around, the songs were being pushed and pulled into different shapes with the tape running and very little time for reflection. This was exactly what Elvis wanted: disillusioned with the studied smoothness of Armed Forces, he was trying to capture the music as it spilled out, with as little forethought as possible. So having written ‘Possession’ in a Dutch taxi after drunkenly ‘falling in love’ with a waitress in a bar in Hilversum, it seemed logical that The Attractions should learn and record it the same night. It was the kind of ‘method’ which could yield sometimes stunning results, but it was a stress-filled way of working for everybody.

  There were other issues. Pete Thomas was unhappy about his drum sound, while Bruce Thomas ‘hated’ his bass sound. ‘The whole thing was just an endless catalogue of “I don’t like this”, “I don’t like that”,’ says Bechirian. ‘It wasn’t pleasant at all. You could see the seams coming apart at that point.’ The band argued over the merits of recording the Sam and Dave ballad ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’, Bruce Thomas insisting it was one of the worst songs Sam and Dave ever did and it would never be a hit in a million years. He was proved quite spectacularly wrong.

  Meanwhile, behind the producer’s console and in as bad shape as Elvis and the band, Nick Lowe was obsessed with prising a 1950’s-style reverb sound out of Phonogram’s state-of-the-art studio, often putting Elvis in the booth designed for recording string instruments to keep his vocals raw. ‘[The studio] was extremely Euro,’ Lowe recalled. ‘It was like trying to make a record as the Eurovision song contest was going on all around you.’17