Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  Despite the talent on show, the concert was all about Orbison. ‘You could imagine Springsteen and Costello – seated near each other and playing their guitars – in a schoolroom somewhere, trying to please their favourite teacher as they nervously followed their notes,’ wrote Robert Hilburn in the LA Times. It was a stop-start affair, constantly interrupted by the demands of the TV cameras, and didn’t really explode until the show-stopping finale of ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’, but it was a memorable piece of fantasy fulfilment for all concerned.

  A few weeks later, Out Of Our Idiot slipped out almost unnoticed. Over the summer, Elvis had signed to Warner Brothers, the label that had funded both Radar and F-Beat in Britain, and which now owned his signature worldwide. It was a contract which gave him much more financial support and creative independence than he had enjoyed in his latter years with CBS. Fulfilling his final contractual obligation to Columbia, Out Of Our Idiot was essentially Volume II of Taking Liberties, a round-up of out-takes, B-sides and rarities from the years between 1979 and 1987.

  Notable for finding a suitable resting place for such gems as ‘Black Sails In The Sunset’, ‘The People’s Limousine’, ‘From Head To Toe’, ‘Shoes Without Heels’ and ‘So Young’, it was inevitably a hit-and-miss affair. ‘Out of Our Idiot is a remarkable testament to how bloody unremarkable Elvis Costello can be when he puts his mind to it,’ wrote Jon Wilde in Melody Maker. ‘[But] it is not without its gold foil moments.’ It may have failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic, but it did give Elvis the chance to confuse and confound with his ever-expanding list of aliases: the spine credited the album to ‘Various Artists’, while the pop-art cover heralded the likes of Napoleon Dynamite and The Royal Guard, The Emotional Toothpaste, The Confederates and The Coward Brothers. He even found room for Elvis Costello and The Attractions.

  His old band were busy earning an honest living after ten years’ service,37 but Elvis wasn’t especially inclined to look back. He had lined up a short tour of the southern states of America, Japan and Australia with The Confederates, kicking off on 5 November in Atlanta. He opened each show solo with ‘Red Shoes’ and played many of the subsequent songs alone, The Confederates joining him on the King Of America material and the numerous, often indistinguishable R&B covers.

  Over the course of the tour the new songs began to surface, mainly in the solo sections. ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ was a regular from the beginning, but by the time the tour reached Japan in mid-November, many more were dotted throughout the set. ‘God’s Comic’ arrived in Tokyo, alongside ‘Pads, Paws And Claws’, ‘Veronica’ and ‘Last Boat Leaving’. In Osaka on 24 November, ‘Miss MacBeth’ was also aired. In addition, the tour featured band versions of ‘Let Him Dangle’ and a reclaimed ‘That Day Is Done’.

  * * *

  Work finally began on Spike in Dublin in the spring of 1988, and would continue through much of the year. Even with a fistful of new songs played-in, Elvis deliberately hadn’t rushed into recording. He had continued writing into the new year, and in January and February of ’88 he had entered Eden Studios in London to lay down precise demos of most of the songs. Approaching the material with more care than ever before, a number of the tunes’ distinctive instrumental riffs and motifs were already established.

  Aside from the tracks already played live, he now had ‘Baby Plays Around’, ‘This Town’, ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’, ‘Satellite’, ‘Coal Train Robberies’ and ‘Put Your Big Toe In The Milk Of Human Kindness’, a sweet little song originally written for an unidentified Disney project but never used, and which Elvis had been playing in concert for a couple of years. One of Elvis’s most delightful side-steps, it would eventually turn up on Rob Wasserman’s Trios record.

  Just before work on the album began in earnest, Elvis found the time for a quick diversion. Returning from his holiday to Greenland the previous year, the cruise liner had stopped off at the Shetland Islands, and Elvis escaped into the Thule Bar in Lerwick for a Guinness. He found a couple of his own songs on the jukebox and – suitably smitten – asked if he could make an appearance at the annual folk festival the following year.

  Following a predictably positive response, Elvis returned to play Whiteness County Hall on 28 April, Lerwick Garrison Theatre on the 29th and Whalsay Public Hall on the 30th as well as a handful of twenty-minute spots around Lerwick on 1 May. Most of the halls held a maximum of 200 people, and Elvis relished the intense atmosphere, performing solo sets which had little to do with traditional folk music, but which undeniably provided the highlights of the festival.

  It was in Shetland that Elvis realised beyond question that ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ was going to have a substantial and lasting impact. Loosely tugging on the hem of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters Of War’ (compare: ‘And I’ll stand o’er your grave ’til I’m sure that you’re dead’, with ‘I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down’) the song explicitly wished the demise of the current Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was bound to raise emotions. ‘I sang it in one place that was very brightly lit and I could see the audience quite clearly,’ Elvis recalled. ‘And all the way through there was one guy nodding away, applauding every line, and on the other side, there was another guy being physically restrained from getting up on stage and hitting me. He just fused, you could see it in his face. And I thought, “Well, I’ve really got a winner now!”.’9

  At the other end of the spectrum, the light-hearted hangover song ‘The Big Light’ became a kind of unofficial theme tune for the majority of the drink-happy festival-goers, while at the Children’s Concert on 1 May, Elvis played ‘Put Your Big Toe In The Milk Of Human Kindness’, ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ – coaxing high-pitched miaows from the youngsters – and an unidentified new song which ran: ‘Saw an iceberg go past my window/ Saw a whale on the starboard bow/Summer time above the Arctic circle/ And all the huskies go bow wow wow!’ It wouldn’t make the new album.

  Back in Dublin, Elvis and T-Bone Burnett adopted the same approach for Spike as they had with King Of America, but this time the landscape was much broader and the pre-production much more involved. Elvis’s music was becoming harmonically quite complex, and with a bigger budget to work with following his deal with Warners, he felt less inhibited, sensing a greater deal of freedom than he had at Columbia. ‘I had the blueprint of five albums in my head,’ he later admitted. ‘I seem to have elected to make all five at once.’10

  Tom Waits had become a big influence, and although nothing on the final record sounded much like Waits, the air of strangeness, rootsiness and lack of musical boundaries that had inhabited his recent records was clearly in the air when Spike was being made. Elvis imagined the songs as scenes from a film, each one requiring a different sense of location and lighting. The narrative for ‘Any King’s Shilling’, for instance, was set in the early 1900s, and Elvis consciously tailored the measured words and the ‘drawing room’ music to conjure up a turn-of-the-century idiom.

  Drawing up a wish-list of the best possible musicians, instruments and textures to suit this kind of approach was time-consuming, and the foundations for Spike took several weeks to build, with endless phone calls and scheduling problems. Elvis had also wanted to use The Attractions on some of the songs, an idea hampered by the fact that two-thirds of the band were effectively not speaking to him. He tried establishing contact but it came to nothing. ‘Elvis rang me up on Christmas Day, the time you reconcile with people, and I just said, “No, tell him I’m busy”,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘I was still angry about the way he had been with Steve.’ Steve was indeed still hurt, and also refused to get involved in a project where he was going to be just another session piano player. Pete Thomas, however, remained on better terms with Elvis, and would play on one track on the record.

  Having worked out what he wanted for each song, Elvis laid down most of the basic tracks in Windmill Lane with just a guitar and a sparse drum machine, often eschewing any kind of recognisable beat. On such a fluid base, he was then free to
add, subtract, and potter with each song as he pooled the resources of top-class musicians the world over.

  Back in May 1987, Elvis had recorded an Irish television broadcast with an assembled group of Irish folk musicians, which planted the seed of perhaps using traditional instruments on the new record. A year on at Windmill Lane, he recorded some of the few live ensemble performances on Spike, using local legends such as Christy Moore, Derek Bell, Davy Spillane, Donal Lunny and Steve Wickham on ‘Any King’s Shilling’, ‘Miss MacBeth’ and ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’.

  The sessions then moved to Southlake Studios in New Orleans for a week’s work. Having already messed around with a computer-generated gumbo rhythm for ‘Chewing Gum’, Elvis flew to Louisiana to record the real thing. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band added their deep Southern bottom-line not only to ‘Chewing Gum’, but also to ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’, ‘Stalin Malone’ and ‘Miss MacBeth’. It was intensive work. ‘We worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days for about six or seven days,’ said band leader Gregory Davis. ‘He knew what he wanted to do.’11 While in New Orleans, Elvis also coaxed celebrated arranger Allen Toussaint into adding a towering piano part to ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’. In this considered way, the intial song sketches began turning into full-blown paintings.

  Much of the leg-work was done over the summer in Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood. It was here that most of the basic component instruments of bass, drums and guitars were added by a core of musicians who had worked on King Of America: Jerry Scheff, T-Bone Wolk, Jim Keltner and Mitchell Froom, plus Confederates’ Benmont Tench and Tom Waits’s guitarist and percussionist, Marc Ribot and Michael Blair respectively.

  Almost always, each musician worked alone to the existing backing track, adding their contributions in isolation. It was a world away from the live fireworks of King Of America and Blood & Chocolate and perhaps closer in technique – if not in feel – to the building-block method used five years earlier by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. ‘I didn’t see other musicians on that record,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘Some of it was done with a drum machine to begin with and then the musicians played over.’

  It was a strange way of working, and couldn’t help but make for a somewhat stilted final product. But although many of the songs had been written with close attention to detail, each musician was given a degree of freedom to express themselves.

  ‘Chewing Gum’ – having already been roughed up by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band – was further shaped by Marc Ribot’s distinctively skewed guitar playing. ‘The basic technique would be that I would jump into it like it was a playpen or a sandbox and splash around and see what I could come up with,’ says Ribot. What he came up with sounded like an iron bar in a tumble dryer. On ‘Veronica’, Mitchell Froom was given free reign with a keyboard-type instrument called the chamberlain, conjuring up the distinctive, Beatle-esque trumpet line which distinguished the final track. Elvis liked the results so much he encouraged Froom to add chamberlain parts to several other songs. It was a hive of creativity and exemplary musicianship. ‘I was somewhat awed by the whole thing,’ admits Ribot. ‘T-Bone Burnett was hanging around and Roger McGuinn was putting down a guitar track and there was Elvis just looking like Elvis. I thought, “Wow!”.’ On one occasion, Elvis played a version of ‘Satellite’ to Burt Bacharach, who was working in the same studio complex.

  Perhaps the heart of the record lay in Michael Blair’s idiosyncratic contributions. Tom Waits’ percussionist had been one of the first names on the list for the record, and his palette of weird textures and details were an essential part of the album’s off-kilter sound. Sometimes it was a metal pipe, a ‘Martian dog-bark’ or an Oldsmobile hubcap, sometimes a parade drum or a simple glockenspiel, but Blair was hard to miss.

  He also gifted the record its title. Originally called Pantomime Evil, the idea of calling it Spike: The Beloved Entertainer came to Elvis during the mixing stages as he listened to the eccentric percussive sounds that ran through the record. ‘I listened to the whole album by homing in on Blair’s percussion and it just jumped out,’ said Elvis. ‘I thought, Spike Jones! That’s it.’12 38

  The record was almost finished by the time Elvis left Hollywood and flew back to London to add some final overdubs. Paul McCartney was in AIR Studios working on Flowers In The Dirt and added bass to ‘Veronica’ and ‘This Town’, while Chrissie Hynde sang harmony vocals on ‘Satellite’. Elvis added his own contributions as he saw fit: sometimes just vocals, but also layers of guitars and occasionally piano or bass or more eccentric nuances like mandolin or melodica. Spike was then mixed carefully and attentively in Ocean Way in Hollywood, with close consideration given to the individual parts played by each of the thirty-two musicians involved.

  Once the album was finished, Elvis popped into Wessex Studios in London for a quick, self-produced session with Pete Thomas and Nick Lowe, knocking off four covers for B-sides to the singles. Typically, they were the very antithesis of Spike: loud, crude and cut in a day.

  * * *

  Increasingly, Elvis was tiring of traditional forms of rock music. His instrumental work on The Courier had been largely either ignored or maligned, but it was an interesting and significant experiment. Its strings and saxophones marked the first staging post for ideas and approaches which bore fruit on Spike and several subsequent albums.

  The broader sweeps of his most recent recordings and the array of musicians he had met and played with had opened Elvis’s mind to the almost limitless possibilities of music and melody, and he became determined to explore the outer reaches of his creativity. His tastes were typically diverse: he was listening to a lot of jazz – Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Henry Threadgill – the Bulgarian vocal group Balkana, Haitian guitar music, but increasingly in the late ’80s it was classical music that demanded his attentions.

  Elvis had had a passing interest in classical music since the early ’80s, and had been known to drop Shostakovich, Sibeluis, Satie, Messian, Debussy, Bach and Stravinsky into interviews. Disillusioned with the routine predictability of rock concerts – excluding his own, naturally – he and Cait began attending classical concerts. The biggest eye-opener was a performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle at the Royal Festival Hall in January 1989. The Financial Times called it ‘one of the best performances of anything I have seen anywhere’, and Elvis was similarly captivated, given little option but to acknowledge the immense power of this music as a live, emotional entity, rather than something remote and scholarly. ‘I knew absolutely nothing about the piece,’ he admitted, ‘but I found it overwhelming. Very physical.’13

  Later the same month, Elvis saw some of the Brodsky Quartet’s series of five concerts at the South Bank and The Barbican in London, in which they performed all of the Shostakovich quartets. It was the beginning of a love affair with the Brodsky Quartet which took nearly three years to fully blossom. Viola player Paul Cassidy, cellist Jacqueline Thomas, and violinists Michael Thomas and Ian Belton had formed the group in 1972 as students in Manchester, naming themselves in honour of their mentor Rudolf Brodsky. They had a reputation for pioneering collaborations and taking on challenging commissions, spanning the fields of classical, jazz, pop and opera. And they tended to play standing up, a unique calling card for a classical quartet.

  Between 1989 and 1991, Elvis would make several trips to see them. ‘He [came to] something like twenty of our concerts,’ says Paul Cassidy. ‘He’d turn up in Paris, he’d turn up in Dublin, he’d turn up in Manchester, over a two-year period. So we knew that this was serious. Our friends would come backstage and say, “My God, I was sitting next to Elvis Costello”, and we’d say, “Yeah, sure”.’

  Elvis would remain only a distant admirer of the Brodsky Quartet until late 1991, when a meeting between the two parties was finally engineered, but for those two years classical music became his primary fascination. Once he had developed a taste for it, Elvis began to submerge himself i
n the music, with the intention of finding out exactly how it hung together from the inside out.

  * * *

  Spike was released on Valentine’s Day 1989, a warped little love letter. Elvis was determined to give the record all the help he could. With a new album on a new record label following a recording silence of two and a half years, there was an unprecedented media assualt. He was a fixture on television, radio and in magazines and newspapers throughout February and March, happily explaining the songs and often picking up his guitar to play a few selections: several radio studios throughout the land rang to the cheery ‘String ’em up!’ refrain of ‘Let Him Dangle’. In general, Elvis was genial and charming, a world away from the surly and combative interviewee of old.

  It was all in aid of a strange, oddly aloof record, easy to admire but difficult to love. It was only possible to be an ‘angry young man’ for so long without descending into self-parody, and Elvis had ensured that his music kept abreast of his life. He admitted with surprise that he was finally happy – he had reached an unprecedented degree of peace and stability in his private life, and his writing had changed accordingly. Almost every song on Spike was a third-person narrative, Elvis standing back and observing the sad, emotionally hamstrung protagonists in ‘Chewing Gum’ and ‘Satellite’, or playing an easily identifiable dramatic role in ‘God’s Comic’ and ‘Any King’s Shilling’: ‘I’m more into observing illusions taking their toll on other people,’14 he later said, rather than – as before – spending much of his time wrestling with the toll they took on himself.

  As a result, there was a distance, a coolness at the heart of the record. The changing personas and lack of musical coherence from track to track meant that Spike was often more technically impressive than emotionally resonant, almost a sampler, rather than a unified album. And some of the tracks fell short. ‘This Town’ was over-cooked and melodically patchy, the lumpy ‘Let Him Dangle’ bordered on the banal, while ‘Chewing Gum’ and ‘Stalin Malone’ were rhythmically interesting but hardly worked as songs.