Elvis would eventually be unhappy with the record, but Trust was a dazzlingly brilliant album in places, full of beautifully crafted, intelligent pop music. Although often latterly viewed as little more than a bridging point between the young, angry Elvis and the more sophisticated, humane incarnation of the mid-to-late ’80s, Trust had enough strong songs and outstanding lyrical invention to ensure it stood upright all on its own.
The first side in particular was full of magnificent group performances: ‘Lovers Walk’, ‘Pretty Words’, ‘Strict Time’, and ‘You’ll Never Be A Man’ all swung on teak-tough rhythmic hinges, as supple and sure as the up-beat Get Happy!! numbers had been hyperactive and confused. In striking contrast, Elvis sounded less certain of himself, more intimate, older.
However, after the back-to-back, miniature masterpieces of ‘Watch Your Step’ and ‘New Lace Sleeves’ that formed the emotional heart and musical peak of the record, things began to tail off: the ill-chosen single ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’, the oddly studied ‘Shot With His Own Gun’, the C&W pastiche of ‘Different Finger’, all smacked of a man skipping genres in an desperate attempt to keep himself interested, and the coherency of the album had all but evaporated by the ominous finale of ‘Big Sister’s Clothes’.
In many ways, Trust marked the end of something. It would be the last stand for the production team of Nick Lowe and Roger Bechirian, while the traditional Attractions stomp of songs like ‘Luxembourg’ and ‘Fish ’N’ Chip Paper’ was beginning to sound gauche and forced amid the more sophisticated material on show.
Nonetheless, at its best Trust showcased Elvis at his most darkly dramatic and The Attractions at their most restrained yet widescreen. The NME noted that Elvis now possessed a ‘highly compassionate, personally political voice’, concluding that ‘he is performing a vital task – the resuscitation of words, ideas, meanings that are in danger of being neglected or crushed by either cultural poverty or general boredom.’
In Melody Maker, Allan Jones also acknowledged the change in tone. ‘Costello’s vision is as fierce as ever, but the malice has gone; he can still rage but he no longer scolds.’ Comparing the album favourably to the ‘glib’ and ‘flippant wisecracks’ of Armed Forces, Jones said approvingly: ‘The points here are harder won, the observations more touching, tinged with a bruised humour, more human.’
Nevertheless, Trust ensured that the commercial decline hinted at with Get Happy!! continued apace. Without the aid of anything even approaching a hit single, the album scraped into the Top Ten in Britain at No. 9 and stalled at No. 28 on the Billboard charts in the States. The relative lack of success made Elvis stand back and question what he might have been doing wrong to encourage the decimation of his audience numbers. In particular, he had become increasingly disillusioned with his songwriting, and specifically his ability to express his current sense of disaffection and sadness through his own words and music. ‘I just wanted to sing other people’s songs,’5 he admitted, sensing they could articulate certain fundamentals he was struggling to grasp.
In the previous few months, Elvis had cut acoustic demo versions of several standards, including Cole Porter’s ‘Love For Sale’ and ‘Gloomy Sunday’. He had in mind an album of cover versions, to test himself as a singer and an interpreter of songs, a modern Sinatra or George Jones who could express universal emotions with his voice, rather than a writer of very personal and often obscurely coded preoccupations. Having already proved himself to be the finest songwriter among his peers, he now wanted to prove – to himself, as much as anybody – that he could be artlessly soulful as well as consciously clever.
Initially, the record was designed as ‘a collection of melancholy songs of many styles’,6 but Elvis soon found himself drawn to country ballads, the saddest of the sad. He had become obsessed with the genre: Trust had featured ‘Different Finger’, the most overt and traditional country song Elvis had ever written and recorded, and although the tour of the United Kingdom in March featured two new songs – ‘Human Hands’ and ‘Little Goody Two Shoes’, an early incarnation of what later became ‘Inch By Inch’, – far more significant were the number of country songs on show, as Elvis and The Attractions began playing-in some of the material short-listed for the record. The setlist was constantly refined and expanded to include old and new favourites.
Several songs were road-tested, some only once: ‘Colour Of The Blues’, Gram Parsons’ ‘How Much I Lied’, Loretta Lynn’s ‘He’s Got You’, Hank Williams’ ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’, Patsy Cline’s ‘Sweet Dreams’, Merle Haggard’s ‘Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down’. When they came off the tour at the beginning of April, the sifting process began, Elvis and the band rummaging through hundreds of records to find the songs they could make their own.
Rehearsals at Nick Lowe’s Am-Pro Studios were hindered by the fact that Bruce Thomas had fallen ill with chicken pox. Lowe had taken Thomas’s place on 28 April for a TV special with George Jones in Los Angeles, where Elvis – looking pasty and slightly eccentric with a scarf tied around his neck, a wide-brimmed hat and shades – got to sing ‘Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down’, ‘He’s Got You’ and ‘Stranger In The House’ live on stage with his country hero. Pete Thomas’s old Chilli Willi partner Paul ‘Bassman’ Riley took up bass duties for rehearsals, and right up until the beginning of the Nashville sessions with Billy Sherill on 18 May, Bruce’s participation was in doubt. As a result, he wasn’t as fully prepared as he would have liked.
‘I had two huge vitamin shots, got on the plane and went to Nashville,’ he says. ‘I had difficulty remembering the songs, because there was the same bloody three chords in them only in a slightly different order. They were actually harder to remember than a complex song which had some personality.’
Bruce would never be convinced of the allure of country music, and from the start there seemed to be a number of people at cross purposes. Elvis had tried whittling down the songs he wanted to record before he went to America, but John McFee – now one of the Doobie Brothers, and who had been asked to play pedal steel and extra guitar to help bring a genuine country flavour to the sessions – recalls arriving in Nashville without a firm idea of what they were going to be doing.
‘We rehearsed quite a batch of songs, and I remember saying to Elvis, “Man, do we have this arrangement together enough?”. And the consensus was: when we get to Nashville, Billy Sherill – this great, classic country producer – will help us sort it out. He’ll be going, “Let’s see, in the first verse, Steve you do the piano fills, and then I guess the chorus will have John on the pedal steel . . .”, the type of things you do with country arrangements. Ironically, when we got to Nashville it turned out Billy Sherill was not a lot of help at all.’
Furthermore, Studio B – the legendary CBS studio where dozens of country classics like ‘Stand By Your Man’, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, as well as Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde were cut – was being renovated, meaning that they had to record in Studio A, which ‘could have been anywhere’.7
To add to the fraught atmosphere, a camera crew were recording the events for The South Bank Show, the British TV arts programme. Their presence leant a slightly schizophrenic air to the proceedings. ‘As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, it was, “Right – more drugs, where’s the fucking drinks?”,’8 recalled Elvis, who had been seduced by the allure of the music he was singing, letting the mythology of country iconography get to him. ‘I had to pull Elvis back and say, “Look, you’re going to be dead in six months and nobody’s going to tell you except me”,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘“You’d better fucking calm down. You’re losing the plot big time”.’ He looked terrible – overweight, his face pale and bloated and permanently hidden behind shades – and could often be heard eulogising Gram Parsons and Hank Williams, who had both died sad, drink-and-drug induced deaths in their twenties.
‘There’s an element of self-destruction evident in the sound of the voice,’ Elvis said of the songs th
ey were recording. ‘I don’t actually believe in the dying young thing, but at the same time I am inexorably drawn towards that, and certainly the songs that come from that area. I can’t work out whether I’m flirting with it or whether it’s starting to take me over.’9
More than once he talked about the need to drink alcohol in order to get under the skin of the songs – a classic piece of self-delusion if ever there was one – and he looked tired and unhappy, utterly drained of any enthusiasm for maintaining a pop career. ‘I think this business sucks you in eventually,’ he concluded sadly. ‘I’ve had the disturbing feeling that what I do is more based around the perversion of truth for quite a while.’10
If Elvis was seeking the truth from Billy Sherill, he was to be sorely disappointed. Sherill’s involvement had been the result of much arm twisting by CBS, who were allowing Elvis to record an album which many – including Sherill – viewed as an Englishman’s indulgence, a cultural holiday in music he didn’t really understand. Few people seemed to grasp the simple concept that Elvis merely wanted to sing some of his favourite country songs and put them on a record. Almost Blue was the fulfilment of a long, sincere and fondly held ambition, as well as being something of a gift – or perhaps an apology – to Mary, a huge country fan who was, according to Ken Smith, an even bigger George Jones nut than Elvis.
Instead, Billy Sherill seemed amused, suspicious and dismissive that an English ‘punk’ singer would want to come to Nashville and record faithful versions of songs which he considered old and unable to yield any new surprises. ‘I entered into the thing totally in the dark,’ he admitted. ‘I really wasn’t into him that much. I didn’t know what I could contribute.’11 One day in the control room, Sherill wheeled around and asked John McFee, ‘What the hell does this guy think he wants to make a country record for?’ ‘I kinda went, “Huh?! Well, actually he really loves country music”,’ says McFee. ‘“He’s totally sincere, I think he’s a great singer, and he wants to make a real country record”.’ But I thought that was kinda rude!’
It was almost immediately clear that what Elvis wanted to do was the direct opposite of what the producer was expecting, or willing to deliver. He had produced and written some of Nashville’s most enduring songs, among them Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ and Charlie Rich’s ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World’. As such, he was a man who had a tried and tested – and wildly successful – formula for producing hit records. In the eyes of The Attractions, however, his artistic sensibilities didn’t seem to stretch far beyond dollar signs and buying a new speedboat.
If Sherill was not particularly interested in Elvis and The Attractions’ crumpled cloth, neither were the band particularly enamoured with him. Although both Pete and Steve enjoyed country music, and Steve in particular relished the genre-style piano parts he was asked to bring to each song, Sherill’s manner was a marked departure from the genial enthusiasm of Nick Lowe. In general, the producer was distant and uncommunicative. He didn’t always make it into work every day and when he did he was inscrutable.
He became more animated when Elvis and The Attractions tore through an 100-mph trashing of Hank Williams’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’, after which he suggested that the band played the song again, exactly mirroring the first take, to give a full double-tracked performance. It was a novelty which amused both Sherill and The Attractions, but which did nothing for the music, as a disgruntled Elvis noted. ‘I think Billy Sherill double-bluffed us on that one,’ he said after the session. ‘He realised we were setting out to outrage him and so he deliberately went over the top.’12
Ironically, it was the one track that fitted into the producer’s preconceived idea of what he thought Elvis wanted. ‘I loved it,’ laughed Sherill, who seemed to be intent on simply making things fresh for himself. ‘I’ve heard that song since I was eight weeks old and it’s the only time I’ve ever heard it done that way. In fact, it’s what I thought he was going to do with all the songs.’13
The many frustrations and disappointments on both sides were exemplified in the attempt to get one of Elvis’s own recent compositions – ‘Tears Before Bedtime’ – up and running. The song was half-formed, the playing poor and the singing slack, and Sherill had little inclination to try and work any magic with it. Instead, he left the studio, insinuating – correctly, as it transpired – that it was not a country song and didn’t fit the mood of the record. Elvis was stymied. Reluctant to admit defeat or come down too hard on Sherill, he was caught between frustration at how badly things were turning out and a genuine and touching desire to ‘impress’ Sherill out of his nonchalance. He never did.
* * *
The sessions for Almost Blue ended on 29 May, after which it was a relatively quiet summer. The band played the festival circuit in Europe, with concerts in Ireland, Belgium and Sweden. At the end of July they played a one-off gig at the Metro Hotel in Aberdeen, intended to showcase Elvis and The Attractions’ country excursion in a true country environment. John McFee came along for the ride. The other concerts were more business-like. Elvis slipped some of the country material into the sets, but it was primarily the ‘traditional’ Attractions music which took precedence.
Come August, it was abundantly clear that Elvis’s self-imposed songwriting hiatus hadn’t lasted too long. He had started using the baby grand piano as his principal writing tool, searching for new melodic structures, relishing the fact that he was a comparative learner on the instrument and therefore by neccesity had to avoid the tried-and-tested compositional tricks and licks so easy to fall into on the guitar.
Now, he was taking the music he had been exposed to as a child – jazz, the popular standards of the ’30s and ’40s, even classical music – as inspiration for many of the new songs: Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra’s midnight albums Only The Lonely and In The Wee Small Hours, Miles Davis, Erik Satie and Debussy were key touchstones. The results were melodically ambitious pieces that included ‘The Long Honeymoon’ and ‘Boy With A Problem’, both of which he felt he was unable – or unwilling – to write lyrics for.
‘The Long Honeymoon’ had started as an abstract piano piece, which Elvis had demo-ed in the spring as an instrumental. With typical fearlessness, he had sent the somewhat rambling demo to the legendary Sinatra lyricist Sammy Cahn in the hope of interesting him in a collaboration. A bewildered Cahn eventually responded but politely declined, unable to find a suitably coherent melodic structure to work on, so Elvis tightened the song’s structure himself and added his own pointed words, about a decaying marriage and an absent husband.
For ‘Boy With A Problem’, Elvis looked closer to home for help, borrowing the talents of Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford, who took Elvis’s unfinished draft lyric and rewrote the bulk of the song. ‘He accepted it, just changed one or two lines,’ says Difford. ‘There was one line I had which he threw out: “I won’t bore you with the problem/I’ve got all the snow but no toboggan.” He thought it was a reference to cocaine.’ Elvis’s sensitivity to the line may have been down to the fact that he was cleaning up his own act at the time, and at some point between the summer of 1981 and the spring of 1982 he would stop taking drugs, apparently for good. Still, Difford denies that there was anything personal or knowing in the lyric. ‘It was about a boy who had snow and no toboggan!’
On 21 and 22 August Elvis crept into Pathway Studios to cut full demos of some other new songs: ‘Shabby Doll’, ‘You Little Fool’, ‘Town Cryer’ and ‘Man Out Of Time’. The chorus line of the latter had come to Elvis as a rhetorical question on a suitably dramatic moonlit night on the tour bus in Sweden. The remainder of the song had been written in a Scottish country house hotel outside Aberdeen, where he had been staying in preparation for the gig at the Metro Hotel and which reminded him of ‘a scene for a scandal in fiction or in the newspapers. A picture of decay, corruption and betrayal.’14
Elvis had clearly got the thirst for interpretation out of his system with the recording
of Almost Blue. At least many critics hoped so. His country record was released in October 1981 and received by far the harshest critiques of his career. Not all of them were justified, but it was true that Almost Blue was a mis-step; above all, The Attractions were ill-used, neutered almost throughout, a crackling A-league band reduced to second-rate country session men. It sounded like they were sleepwalking through most of the material, so palpable was the confusion and lack of enthusiam. Only the closing ‘How Much I Lied’, laced with Steve’s distinctive piano motif, hinted at the riches that a great beat group playing classic country songs in their own style could unearth.
Meanwhile, after the rich, multi-faceted vocal expressions of Trust, Elvis often sounded one-dimensional, melodramatic and shrill, his voice overwhelmed by the material. Sometimes, such as on ‘I’m Your Toy’, the record’s standout ballad, he succeeded in pulling the genuine torment of both song and singer out into the open, but it was a rare jewel.
There was little invention in the arrangements. Billy Sherill had added his requisite Nashville fairy dust to proceedings: harps, strings and the Nashville Edition vocal group sugared ‘Sweet Dreams’, ‘Good Year For The Roses’ and several other tracks, papering the cracks of some ragged performances, but even at a little over half an hour, Almost Blue dragged. The melancholy that Elvis was searching for proved elusive, and instead the album merely sounded funereal and oppressive. Even the up-tempo numbers like ‘Honey Hush’ and ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ were lumbering rather than fleet of foot.
Almost Blue was a difficult record to love. Nonetheless, it provided Elvis with one of his best-loved and widely known songs: ‘Good Year For The Roses’ became an unlikely UK hit single in November, rising to No. 6 in the charts. Billy Sherill proved that – whatever else – he still knew how to produce a Top 10 country song. The success of ‘Good Year For The Roses’ also provided an interesting statistic: for all his undoubted and celebrated prowess as one of Britain’s finest songwriters, two of Elvis’s three Top Ten UK hit singles to date have been achieved with cover versions, while a disproportionately high number of his other Top 40 singles – ‘I Wanna Be Loved’, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, and ‘She’, his first Top 20 hit for over fifteen years – were also covers. His initial and brief spurt of singles success notwithstanding, it seemed there was something inherently and stubbornly obtuse in Elvis’s music which prevented enduring commercial returns, at least in the ever-fickle singles market.
Complicated Shadows Page 19