Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Then there was a one-sided spat with Robert Hilburn from the LA Times, whose review of the opening night’s show – though largely positive – had attracted Elvis’s ire for its charges of the ‘predictability’ of the setlist. In response, Elvis had taken a few over-sensitive pot-shots at Hilburn from the stage during the five-night run. Clearly not a man to hold a grudge, Hilburn was brave enough to review the final show, and declared the entire five nights ‘one of the most memorable engagements ever in Los Angeles rock’.

  It was a tall claim, but true. The diversity of Elvis’s shows defied the predictability of standard rock convention, leaving virutally every other live act around looking tired and unadventurous. But then only an artist with an enormous repertoire of quality material and a loyal and willing audience could have pulled it off: over the entirety of the US tour, Elvis would play over 125 different songs in wildly differing formats.

  No matter how artistically fulfilling it would prove to be, however, Columbia had finally come to the conclusion that their new wave goose was not going to deliver any more gold records. They were also tired of throwing good money after bad in what they perceived as bizarre and commercially suicidal moves, like releasing two six-minute singles or playing five nights with two bands in tiny theatres. Elvis’s Spinning Songbook may have sown the seeds for the infinitely more hi-tech but equally chaotic, ironic and inventive rock shows of the ’90s, such as U2’s ‘Zooropa’ tour, but it was the end of the road for his record company.

  * * *

  After the highs of Los Angeles, everything else risked becoming anti-climatic. They played only three nights in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, and the sets were compressed and adapted accordingly. There was also a dearth of musical celebrities. Huey Lewis was a solid MC in San Francisco, but in Chicago it was left to members of the Chicago Bears NFL football team to spin the wheel. In New York, magician-cum-comedians Penn and Teller were co-MCs, and the show at the Broadway Theatre ended with Penn riling Elvis by shouting for Bruce Springsteen songs, calling Bruce ‘the greatest rock ’n’ roller the world has ever seen’. Elvis kicked him off stage and played ‘Pump It Up’ instead.

  However, there were numerous musical highlights: Cait played bass on ‘Poor Napoleon’ and added backing vocals to ‘Crimes Of Paris’; in Chicago, the Spinning Songbook threw up a nostalgic cover of ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’, while Elvis dedicated a new piano ballad called ‘The Last Time You Were Leaving’ to Cait; in Boston, there were solo versions of ‘Shipbuilding’ and ‘Tokyo Storm Warning’ and a rare outing for the superior King Of America out-take ‘Shoes Without Heels’.

  In New York, there were solo versions of ‘Party Girl’ and ‘You Little Fool’, covers of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ – dedicated to Columbia and Cait respectively, with very different motivations. The final three dates in Philadelphia saw Mitchell Froom depart and Benmont Tench take over keyboard duties in The Confederates. ‘King Horse’ got a one-off airing with The Attractions, while Elvis performed ‘Hoover Factory’ solo and ‘Shot With His Own Gun’ with Steve, neither of which were played anywhere else on tour.

  The budget didn’t stretch to bringing The Confederates over to Europe and anyway, their contribution was probably the least inventive of all the creative elements of the tour. It was just Elvis and The Attractions again, and left alone they finally began to fall apart. ‘My relationship with the band had now soured almost beyond repair,’10 Elvis admitted.

  At Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on 2 December, Elvis opened his solo set with a short story, called ‘How Joe Soap Got Into Everyone’. This followed on from the set in London on 28 November, where he had begun with a short story entitled ‘Getting Into Showbiz’. Both were pointed responses to the fact that Bruce Thomas had begun writing about his life on the road, extracts of which were being published in instalments in London’s Time Out magazine. These loose memoirs would eventually become a book called The Big Wheel, and the portayal of Elvis was not necessarily flattering. Thomas disparagingly called him ‘The Pod’ while also referring to a certain lack of thoroughness in aspects of his personal hygiene. ‘I knew what corns to tread on,’ he admits.

  When the tour ended in Liverpool on 9 December, Elvis quickly followed through on the decision he had made back in 1984. He took The Attractions out to dinner over Christmas and essentially told them their time was up, that he could no longer afford to keep them on salary and that he wanted a break from the responsibilities of being a band leader to do new things. In future, he envisaged occasional ad hoc projects, essentially using them as session musicians.

  It was delivered with all the coolness of a straightforward business decision. ‘We were never particularly friendly,’ Elvis later explained. ‘We didn’t spend lots of time together when we weren’t on the road. We were thrown together so much because we were touring, so you assumed there was a very strong bond. But what it really was was me and a really great group. It had to be my decision the way we went, because I was the mug out front.’11

  After almost ten years, the band took it very badly. ‘It did hurt,’ said Pete Thomas. ‘It really hurt, and I’m sure he knew it would.’12 Steve Nieve was the worst affected. Always the least bouyant member of the group, Steve had been badly hurt by the deterioration of the group’s spirit, and the fact that, musically, he had been made to feel superfluous to requirements for some time. The most innovative and often inspired member of The Attractions – and certainly the most instantly identifiable contributor – his sidelined role on Blood & Chocolate and the subsequent manner in which The Attractions were jettisoned was a hammer blow. ‘It was a shock,’ he later admitted. ‘It resulted in a depression that eventually caused me to take a long, hard look at myself and make some difficult changes.’13

  In the circumstances, The Attractions’ three-night last stand at the Royal Albert Hall between the 22–24 January was the last thing the pianist needed. Both Steve and Bruce felt strongly that Elvis was less than supportive in the way he responded to Nieve’s depression, a belief which played a significant part in the resentment that lingered over the ensuing years. Little wonder that the Albert Hall shows were some way short of peak performances. The Attractions knew their time was up and the manner in which the parting of the ways had been conducted left them playing with pent-up bitterness rather than the euphoria of a final fling.

  Thankfully, there was a chance for one final goodbye later in the year, a long-standing contractual obligation to play at the Glastonbury Festival on 20 June 1987. Elvis played the longer opening set solo, as if to delay the final showdown as long as possible. Los Lobos’s David Hidalgo came in on backing vocals on ‘American Without Tears’, while Elvis added a beatbox to a raucous ‘Pump It Up’, which also took in Prince’s ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.

  Then The Attractions appeared, bursting into ‘I Hope You’re Happy Now’, and this time they blazed. It was a short eleven-song set, savage in its intensity. Elvis seemed happy to veer off at tangents, morphing ‘Less Than Zero’ into ‘Twist And Shout’, while ‘You Belong To Me’ explicitly acknowledged its debt to ‘The Last Time’. It all ended with ‘Poor Napoleon’ sidestepping into a violent, improvised ‘Instant Karma’: ‘I’m sure it was suppposed to mean something at the time,’14 said Elvis, ruefully. And that was that. It would be their last concert together for over seven years. It was time to move on.

  PART THREE

  Having It All

  Chapter Eleven

  1987–89

  IN AN ATTEMPT TO ALLEVIATE THE TENSION and pressure of almost continual touring during the early years of his career, Elvis had visited a masseuse. ‘You’re all wound up, just relax,’ he was told. ‘It’s my job to get wound up,’ replied Elvis. Throughout the ’70s and first half of the ’80s there was a real sense that this was a man who was rarely happy within his own skin. But now, freed from the respo
nsibilities of being a band leader and settling into domesticity with Cait, the idea of living a life filled with tension and upheavals, and putting everybody else through the wringer in the process, seemed to have lost a substantial amount of its appeal. ‘He became really friendly and a completely different man, almost,’ says Bob Geldof. ‘I suppose it’s a function of age. We all change. But he became really overtly friendly and chatty and helpful. I [started to] like him as a person a lot.’

  As his ten-year relationships with both Columbia and The Attractions reached acrimonious ends, Elvis felt unfettered, free to write, record and perform in any style he wanted. It was the perfect opportunity to explore all the options before committing himself to making a record, and throughout the spring and summer of 1987, he continued playing and composing instinctively, with little agenda. Having released two magnificent records in the previous twelve months, he was in no hurry to return to the fray just yet.

  He was spending much of his time in Dublin. Cait had a part in an Irish film called The Courier, and Elvis had allowed his arm to be twisted into writing much of the incidental music. Over the summer, the couple spent a few months in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street, and the first batch of new songs began to take shape.

  Elvis had performed ‘Any King’s Shilling’ throughout both The Confederates’ first UK tour in January and early February, and the short solo tour of American university halls he undertook with Nick Lowe in April.35 The song was a restrained, sincere narrative detailing his grandfather Pat’s experiences as an Irish-blooded British soldier in Ireland. ‘He fell in with a couple of brothers who – shortly before the 1916 Rising – warned him to keep his head down,’ Elvis recalled. ‘They were aware of what was gonna go down and didn’t want to see one of their own getting their head shot off.’1

  Following his return from the solo US tour in early May, Elvis went into Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin to make vocal, guitar and piano demos of more new material: ‘Let Him Dangle’ and ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ were two furious, Dylan-esque political broadsides; ‘Veronica’ and ‘Pads, Paws And Claws’, on the other hand, were playful pop songs, and the product of a significant new songwriting partnership.

  Paul McCartney was emerging from a period of serious underachievement and looking to both tighten up and simplify his songwriting again when he made contact with Elvis in early 1987. Loosely acquainted with each other in the manner of many musicians who become friendly through the occasional meeting in the studio or at gigs, the two were by no means close. McCartney’s need was unarguably the greater. He was readying to begin work on a new record, and looking for a collaborator who would push him further than he had recently been pushing himself. A rabid Beatles fan for more than twenty years and always keen to test himself against the best, Elvis wasn’t slow to accept the offer.

  News of the collaboration didn’t begin to filter out until July, but work began some months before that, kept under wraps in case the whole thing proved to be a disaster. Initially, the pair made no attempt at writing anything from scratch. Instead, they each played songs that they felt needed some work, letting the other make suggestions and criticisms. ‘There may not be too many people who say to him, “That’s boring, Elvis”,’2 said McCartney. Or, indeed, vice versa.

  In this manner, Paul finished up ‘Veronica’ and ‘Pads, Paws And Claws’ for Elvis, adding a couple of lyrical phrases and tightening the bridges. In the case of the latter, the notoriously disciplined ex-Beatle felt that Elvis hadn’t adequately explained the punning title, and so he helped pin down the song’s bridge. Elvis returned the favour by helping out with the words to McCartney’s ‘Back On My Feet’, before work began on their first genuine co-compositions: ‘Lovers That Never Were’, ‘So Like Candy’, ‘You Want Her Too’ and ‘My Brave Face’.

  It was a craftsman-like process, the two men throwing musical references at each other, trying to resist falling back on their usual compositional tricks and methodologies. In all, around eight original co-compositions came out of the opening pair of two or three-day writing sessions, and they continued to write sporadically through 1987 and beyond.36 ‘It was a workshop situation,’ said Elvis. ‘We would sit around with a couple of guitars, a piano and a tape recorder and throw ideas around, improvising until we got a structure. We worked very quickly, bouncing a lot of ideas off each other.’3

  The work was done ‘nose-to-nose’, in the manner of the early Lennon and McCartney compositions. And although Elvis repeatedly insisted in no uncertain terms that those who viewed him as a Lennon substitute – providing the bitter bite to balance McCartney’s notoriously sweet tooth – were being wildly over-simplistic, even McCartney acknowledged the similarities: ‘I can tell in Elvis’s whole stance, his whole attitude, his whole singing style,’ he said. ‘It’s all there, it’s all sort of John-ish.’4

  Elvis must have allowed himself to be just a little flattered. He wasn’t too old or experienced to be occasionally daunted by the reality of working with a real, live Beatle, but his natural self-possession ensured he more than held his own in the partnership. In the end, it was McCartney who reigned in their initial collaboration, fearing that Elvis’s typically head-on style might threaten to overpower him. ‘At one point, we were thinking, “Well, this might be the way to go, to do the whole album together”,’ he said. ‘But I started to feel that would be too much of Elvis. And I thought the critics would say, “Oh, they’re getting Elvis to prop up his ailing career”, you know?’5

  The songs were generally strong, but more might reasonably have been expected. Only a couple of tracks came anywhere near the best of either musician’s previous output. ‘That Day Is Done’ was a gorgeous, gospel-flavoured track with a moving lyric which detailed the funeral of Elvis’s much-loved grandmother, while ‘So Like Candy’ was a moody, minor-key rummage through the everyday detritus left by a departed lover, who just happened to share the name of Bebe Buell’s nom de plume. Of the rest, ‘You Want Her Too’ was a clever, somewhat Beatles-esque angel-and-devil duet, while ‘My Brave Face’ and ‘Veronica’ were the most commercial things either had written for some time.

  The collaboration later came unstuck, however, when Elvis and McCartney took the songs into the studio in 1988 to attempt a co-production for McCartney’s Flowers In The Dirt album. The two men had profoundly differing ideas about how the songs should be produced: Elvis wanted their recordings of ‘So Like Candy’, ‘My Brave Face’, ‘You Want Her Too’, ‘Don’t Be Careless Love’ and ‘That Day Is Done’ to remain raw and edgy, while McCartney insisted on a terribly over-produced, consciously ‘modern’ sound.

  It was an uneasy combination, and Mitchell Froom – increasingly in demand as a producer – was parachuted in to find some common ground. ‘I think they had had a falling out,’ he says, although that’s probably over-stating the case a little. However, there were clearly strong disagreements on either side. ‘Paul has a clever way of side-stepping confrontation by making jokes, like “Well, you can never trust anything he says because he hates effects!”,’ said Elvis. ‘Rather than disagreeing with you, your argument is devalued before it’s started. After a while that made the production rather redundant.’6

  Much of what Elvis contributed in the studio was scrubbed when Flowers In The Dirt finally appeared in July 1989. His vocals remained on the duet of ‘You Want Her Too’ and his background vocals and keyboards could be heard on ‘My Brave Face’ and ‘That Day Is Done’, but he was quite justifiably disappointed at the way some of the tracks ended up sounding, especially the latter, which all but ruined a terrific song by miring it in a preposterous, lurching production: ‘[Paul] sort of gave them a more highly polished sound which obviously was what he heard in them,’7 said Elvis, with uncharacteristic diplomacy. Those who heard the unvarnished joie de vivre of Elvis and Paul’s widely bootlegged acoustic demos reduced to formulaic mediocrity on Flowers In The Dirt could be forgiven for being a little less charitable.

  * * *
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br />   Elvis lay low over the summer of 1987. He briefly broke cover for The Attractions’ belated swan song at Glastonbury on 20 June, but just as quickly vanished again. His time was taken up with writing in Dublin, as well as embarking on a cruise ship holiday with Cait to Greenland, where the vast Arctic expanses inspired a new song called ‘God’s Comic’. ‘Thoughts occur to you out there about the comedy of what we call civilization,’ he said. ‘It reminds you how puny we are.’8

  It was a good time to disappear. In early July, the disastrous Straight To Hell was released to generally savage reviews. ‘The film “began as a joke” and was written in three days,’ ran The Times’ review. ‘It is hard to see how they used even that much time on it.’ In the US, The Record simply called it ‘an abysmally bad B-movie’, and there was little disagreement from the rest of the critics, or indeed the public. It quickly sank without a trace.

  In his retreat, Elvis was increasingly growing into the role of accepted elder statesman, welcomed into the pantheon of A-list rock stars. Now aged thirty-three, he had grown friendly with U2, while back in January Van Morrison had slipped on stage with The Confederates in London, duetting with Elvis on ‘Jackie Wilson Said’, ‘Help Me’ and Ray Charles’ ‘What Would I Do’.

  On 30 September, it was the charms of Roy Orbison which tempted Elvis back on stage. T-Bone Burnett had organised a televised tribute to The Big O entitled ‘A Black And White Night’, to be filmed at the Cocoanut Grove Club at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. For the occasion, Elvis tailored ‘The Comedians’ into a dramatic ballad specifically for Orbison, and played guitar, keyboards and harmonica as part of a backing band which included Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and k.d. lang.