Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  It was one of two blossoming relationships which would help hammer the final nail in the The Attractions’ coffin. Although singer and band would stagger around in a fog of confusion and resentment for over two years, working together occasionally in a pretence of unity, it would never be the same again.

  With a divorce already pending, Elvis wasn’t sure if he could afford to keep a band who received royalties from the records on top of a yearly retainer which kept them on-call and permanently available to him. It was an expensive business. His disaffection with the group was also taking on an increasingly personal edge. Elvis now felt protective of his feelings for Cait and wary of The Attraction’s response. He withdrew, severing the few remaining emotional and fraternal ties with the group in the process.

  T-Bone Burnett became his closest musical ally. Almost as soon as The Pogues tour had finished, Elvis went back out with T-Bone in tow. They played all over Europe between 9 November and 9 December, finding time to write an Everly-esque tribute called ‘The People’s Limousine’ together as they rode through Italy.

  The concerts were becoming mammoth undertakings, ever-changing and veering wildly in mood and content from night to night and song to song. At London’s Royal Festival Hall on 3 December, Elvis played over forty numbers, including a beautiful new piano ballad called ‘Having It All’, written for Julien Temple’s film Absolute Beginners but never used. Mid-set, The Coward Brothers re-united – one last time, folks, until the next time – for a rag-bag of country covers and ’60s classics. Many of the stronger songs from Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World in particular were transformed in their simple guitar and piano arrangements, while Elvis’s singing was deeper, more emotionally resonant than ever before.

  Captivated by his friend’s solo shows, T-Bone encouraged Elvis to record his next album using his voice and the acoustic guitar as the primary textures, allowing the tenderness in his music to shine through relatively unadorned. ‘I [knew] how to write songs already,’ said Elvis. ‘What I learned from T-Bone was when to leave them alone.’11 After the over-cooked debacle of Goodbye Cruel World, he needed little persuading.

  Seeking a sound palette to complement the mood of the new songs, in January 1985 the two men flew to Hollywood to make some trial recordings. A veteran of the Los Angeles session scene, this was Burnett’s patch, and Elvis allowed himself to be lead towards the A-list session men at Sound Factory: bassist David Miner and drummer Ron Tutt, previously of Elvis Presley’s ’70s band, known to all as the TCB Band – ‘Taking Care of Business’.

  The first item on the agenda was to cut The Coward Brothers’ ‘The People’s Limousine’, to be released as a one-off single later in the year. The sessions were quick, light-hearted, and recorded live, a world away from the laborious and fractious atmosphere of Goodbye Cruel World. As a B-side they knocked off Leon Payne’s classic ‘They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me’, with high, keening harmonies and twinkling mandolin. ‘It was very cool, feel-good stuff,’ Ron Tutt recalls, and it became the blueprint for the way the next record would come together.

  While in Los Angeles, Elvis also took the opportunity to record some rough demos of his new songs with just voice and guitar at Sunset Sound. These included ‘Poisoned Rose’, ‘Indoor Fireworks’, ‘American Without Tears’ and ‘Suffering Face’. The songs were musically straightforward but very strong, radically different in style and approach to those on the last two records, with the emphasis placed firmly on naked, emotional honesty. ‘I started thinking more about the songs and much less about the records,’ said Elvis. ‘It became clear to me that I had to write very, very simple songs. It just seemed a lot easier for me to say something straight out.’12

  Elvis drank a lot of whiskey during the session, and the next morning another new song – ‘The Big Light’ – popped out of the empty bottle, complaining of suffering ‘a hangover with a personality’. However, despite the ragged nature of the demos, he returned to Britian convinced he had found a template that would give him an escape route from the cul-de-sac he and The Attractions had backed themselves into.

  Satisfied, he turned his mind to more personal concerns. Following the autumn tour, Jake Riviera had informed Pogues manager Frank Murray that Elvis would be interested in producing the band. This was partly down to a genuine enthusiasm for the music, which dovetailed neatly with his regained enthusiasm for roots music, acoustic instruments and raw energy; it was also undoubtedly a way of spending more time with Cait.

  Their relationship intensified in the studio. ‘They’d come in together and leave together, that was on-going,’ says The Pogues sound engineer, Paul Scully. Their blossoming and very tactile romance may have been the focus of a certain amount of ridicule – often affectionate, sometimes with a harder edge – from the band, but by and large it didn’t get in the way of the recording process. ‘Elvis was extremely professional and certainly commited to the project the whole time,’ says the session engineer Nick Robbins. ‘[Although] the occasional evening may have been spent chasing Cait around the studio!’

  Initially, Elvis was only meant to be producing two songs: ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’ and ‘Sally MacLennane’, intended for a single. However, the sessions at Elephant Studios in Wapping, east London, stretched on through January and beyond as Elvis agreed to produce the whole album. He was hands-on, supplying equipment, adding acoustic guitar to the backing tracks, altering Cait’s bass part, and suggesting changes in instrumentation and song structure. The Pogues were in many ways tyros in the recording process, and they were impressed by Elvis’s ability to augment the songs without adding layers of production effects or tampering with the unique style and balance of the band.

  It was clear, however, that the album wouldn’t be completed in one sitting. The Pogues had dates booked throughout 1985 and Elvis was often hopping on to planes to hook up with them as they toured Europe throughout April and into May and June. ‘He would just turn up in places,’ says Philip Chevron, who had now joined The Pogues on banjo and guitar. ‘We would play Kenmare in Ireland and he’d be there with rough mixes of the album. He and Cait were an item, so that kind of gave him licence to turn up anywhere. He became literally part of the entourage then.’

  The record – now titled Rum, Sodomy & The Lash – was happily pieced together between the scattered tour dates. ‘It was a great, sort of fresh time,’ says Paul Scully. ‘There were some great musical ideas going down, and I seem to remember Elvis having a big input.’ Indeed, he even played some of the bass parts on the record, which some of the band construed as him showing off to Cait. Nobody seemed to mind.

  While The Pogues were becoming Elvis’s new gang, The Attractions had been busy twiddling their thumbs. ‘He still hadn’t decided whether he wanted to split the band up or not,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘We were all on wages doing nothing.’ Although Elvis seemed determined to break out of the age-old album-tour-album-tour cycle which he had rigidly and exhaustively adhered to since the middle of 1977, he was keeping his options open. He wasn’t yet ready to completely sever his links with his old band.

  Following the hard lessons of working with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, Elvis had brought back Nick Lowe for a one-off session with The Attractions at Eden Studios towards the end of 1984. They’d attempted versions of ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’ and Sam Cooke’s smokey ‘Get Yourself Another Fool’, but while it was a distinct improvement on the Goodbye Cruel World material, the old spark proved difficult to locate.

  It was some months before Elvis coralled the band again for a concert at Logan Hall in London on 9 March, a benefit for the miners involved in a long and bitter industrial dispute with the Conservative government. The set included pointed, politically motivated versions of ‘Big Sister’s Clothes’, The Beat’s ‘Stand Down, Margaret’, ‘Oliver’s Army’, ‘Shipbuilding’, and ‘All You Thought Of Was Betrayal’ – a very early blueprint for ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’.

  It would be the last Attractions concert
appearance for well over a year. When the call came for Elvis to play at Live Aid on 13 July, he performed alone, stepping on stage at Wembley Stadium with just an acoustic guitar and a scraggy beard for company. Introducing an ‘old northern English folk song’, he played a sing-along rendition of one of the most famous songs in the world. ‘I remember beforehand saying to him, “Fine, do anything”,’ recalls Live Aid organiser Bob Geldof. ‘And then when he did ‘All You Need Is Love’, it was fucking great. He has such great taste, it was a really wonderful moment.’ With lyrical prompts scribbled on his hand, Elvis’s pared down version of The Beatles’ classic was a deliberately ironic choice. ‘I thought it was entirely appropriate,’ said Elvis. ‘Because [love] is transparently not all we need.’13

  Nobody had to tell that to The Attractions. A few days earlier, at T-Bone Burnett’s solo show at the Duke of York Theatre on 7 July, a member of Elvis’s road crew finally let slip to the band that they were pencilled in to play on only a section of the new record. Steve Nieve in particular was extremely upset at the news, not to mention the manner in which it had been delivered. He had always seen Elvis and The Attractions less as a singer-plus-hired-help, and more as a unit, like The Rolling Stones. The insensitive and somewhat underhand way in which they were now being sidelined hurt him badly, and at the Duke of York he drunkenly and publicly harangued Elvis about the plans. It looked increasingly like a band entering its death throes.

  * * *

  Recording for King Of America began in Los Angeles in July, 1985 immediately after Live Aid. It was a piecemeal affair, spread out through the summer and autumn; Elvis wasn’t using the same band for all the sessions, and anyway, he was reluctant to spend large amounts of concentrated time in Los Angeles, a city he remained far from fond of.

  The identity of the record had formed during Elvis’s solo tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan in June and early July. Again, T-Bone Burnett was supporting, in every sense. ‘There was a tremendous amount of planning that went into that record,’ said Burnett. ‘We had pages and pages of production notes.’14 On the long flights to and from the Far East, he and Elvis had started scheduling sessions for the album, drawing up lists of musicians, tailoring the musical line-up to suit the specific needs of each song.

  Elvis had already demo-ed most of the new material, and the tour was a chance to play-in the songs and settle on their arrangements. Nine of King Of America’s thirteen original songs featured, and each one indicated beyond any dissent that Elvis had found a new lease of life in his writing. Lyrically, Cait was proving an inspiration. ‘Jack Of All Parades’ and ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’, in particular, were unabashed declarations of love for his new girlfriend. Elvis was a romantic at heart, and having spent so long looking for the real thing, he was finally allowing himself to admit in his songs that he might just have found it. Always an incessant chatterer on the telephone, he reportedly spent a total of almost $5000 on daily telephone calls to Cait while he was in Australia. On one occasion, they co-wrote ‘Lovable’.

  The first session for the album took place at Ocean Way studios, with T-Bone Burnett and Larry Hirsch co-producing with Elvis. They started with what became the core band on the record: Ron Tutt on drums, Jerry Scheff on bass and James Burton on guitar, all of whom had been members of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band in the ’70s. Burton had also worked with Gram Parsons, a particularly seductive addition to his CV.

  If he was initially nervous and probably a little sceptical about playing with a band consisting entirely of session men with such mainstream – if stellar – pedigrees, the laid-back virtuosity of the musicians soon put Elvis at ease. The four-piece quickly settled in, cutting finished versions of ‘Our Little Angel’, ‘The Big Light’ and ‘American Without Tears’ in the first few hours of recording.

  The musicians were quick to pick up on the song’s needs and generous in putting aside any tendencies to show off their musical prowess, instead simply and selflessly serving the nuances of each number. ‘He told me that when we first got together on King Of America he was sort of waiting for us to have an attitude about it,’ admits Jerry Scheff. ‘And none of us did, although he did say that there was one thing that got him: when we got through playing the first really high intensity song [‘The Big Light’] he was really out of breath when he finished, and I told him, “Yeah, well even the ballads were like that with Elvis Presley!”.’

  In response, Elvis was eager to be as inclusive as possible. In direct contrast to his method of working with The Attractions, he took time to explain what each song meant and to play them through on the guitar for each of the musicians, in order that they could gain a real feel for what he was singing about and the intimacy he was searching for.

  Nonetheless, Elvis was still in charge. He had learned the folly of compromise on Goodbye Cruel World, and despite initial nerves and a few misgivings, his natural self-assurance and controlling streak came to the fore. ‘In the studio he kept control of everything,’ says Scheff. ‘It was very much his deal and his visions.’ By the second day ‘Glitter Gulch’ and ‘Shoes Without Heels’ were finished, while they had knocked together strong rehearsal arrangements of a handful of the other tracks as well. Almost half the album was recorded in the first three days.

  T-Bone Burnett played a vital role in the production of the record, guiding, directing and experimenting with sounds and styles, participating in a very musical way without actually playing a note. He also picked the band: aside from the TCB group, the other principal players on King Of America were drummer Mickey Curry, bassist T-Bone Wolk, pianist Tom Canning and organ and piano player Mitchell Froom. ‘T-Bone is one of the best at putting the right people together,’ says Ron Tutt, and the casting was indeed immaculate throughout. Burnett saved his coup de grace for the jazz-country torch song ‘Poisoned Rose’, for which he had hand-picked a majestic rhythm section: Earl Palmer on drums, a stalwart of the early Little Richard and Fats Domino singles, and Ray Brown on string bass, who had been married to Ella Fitzgerald and played in her band, as well as with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

  Elvis wasn’t easily scared, but he later admitted that it took the opening – and drinking – of a bottle of Glenlivet whisky halfway through the session to calm his nervous voice and find the sound he was searching for. ‘We started, and it really wasn’t very good, because I found out later that Elvis was intimidated by Ray Brown’s presence, in particular,’ recalls Mitchell Froom. ‘Then finally, Ray took the lead and everybody fell in after him. When we finished that track he sort of gave his nod of approval and we felt we were OK.’ Once ‘Poisoned Rose’ was through, the well-refreshed ensemble then cut ‘Eisenhower Blues’, a loose R&B jam and the only other song recorded with that stellar line-up.

  Over the next few sessions, Elvis captured much of the rest of the record with James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Mitchell Froom and Jim Keltner, the line-up who would later tour as The Confederates. Each of them added their own personal, subtle additions to the songs: Burton’s tender, picked guitar lines on ‘Indoor Fireworks’; Scheff’s shimmering, impossibly high bass intro on ‘I’ll Wear It Proudly’; Froom’s ghostly organ floating through ‘Sleep Of The Just’; and Keltner’s mean, slap-happy drumming on ‘Lovable’, where Los Lobos’s David Hidalgo joined in on harmonies for good measure.

  The Attractions burst into this companionable creative hive in mid-August, about two-thirds of the way through the King Of America sessions. Originally, the plan had been for Elvis to record half the record with the US musicians, then ship in The Attractions to complete the rest of the album, playing on the tracks most suited to their style.

  However, it became clear that the reality would be somewhat different. The band arrived to find that Elvis had some new playmates. Cait was present on many occasions, and Elvis and T-Bone were thick as thieves: having bonded on the road and in the studio, they now enjoyed the shared sense of humour and musical repartee that Elvis and the band had los
t. It immediately became something of an Us vs Them scenario. Always protective when it came to sharing the spotlight with other musicians, The Attractions were wary, tense and very probably dismissive of what looked like a Californian mutual appreciation society, far removed from the raucous sessions of old in London.

  Meanwhile, Elvis felt personally renewed by his relationship with Cait and creatively excited by the music he was making. He swiftly came to the conclusion that the resentful presence of his old group was casting a dark cloud over proceedings, and that the classic ‘Attractions sound’ would simply unbalance the reflective tenor of the rest of the record. ‘The Attractions had got to a point that many bands get to: they get the chords, they start to work out what they’re going to do and they’re almost over-familiar with the way someone writes,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘The American musicians were much more subtle in general. Which was the idea.’

  Eventually, The Attractions got the call to go to the studio on 21 August. Unsure of their role and mightily pissed off with Elvis, they were ‘jumpy and paranoid and generally edgy’,15 and their initial attempts at ‘Brilliant Mistake’ – a song Elvis had set aside specifically for The Attractions to open the album with – were particularly lame. Eventually, they got acceptable versions of ‘Suit Of Lights’ and the throwaway out-take ‘Baby’s Got A Brand New Hairdo’, but the mood was irreconcilably grim. ‘I think [the situation] put them on edge and made them defensive and hostile,’ Elvis said. ‘Which made me defensive and hostile. The sessions were a disaster.’16