It didn’t necessarily mean that the songs were complicated in terms of their basic structure; they could all still be played on an acoustic guitar. But it did mean that Elvis wanted much more from the finished product. As with Spike, all the songs were written well before Elvis entered the studio, and the home demos for the album were more detailed than anything he had recorded before, his ideas illustrated with far greater precision.
The more harmonically involved numbers such as ‘Harpies Bizarre’, ‘All Grown Up’, ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ and ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ came to the studio with their instrumental parts already set in stone, while the string or brass arrangements had been worked out on a computer and played on keyboards. ‘Sweet Pear’ had a precise guitar solo that had been devised as part of the song, rather than as an improvisation.
Lyrically, his vision was equally individual. Elvis was drinking considerable amounts of alcohol around the time he wrote and recorded the album, and there was a certain bleakness in his world-view that filtered into the writing. ‘The Other Side Of Summer’, ‘Hurry Down Doomsday’, ‘How To Be Dumb’, ‘After The Fall’ and ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ were dense essays in personal or global decay, with more than a whiff of the apocalypse about them. They also stubbornly defied literal analysis. ‘Invasion Hit Parade’, for instance, touched on members of the Underground movement left stranded at the end of the Cold War, someone on a train finding fake limbs, and The Sex-O-Lettes: all the great pop themes, in other words. Even after a twenty-five-minute conversation in which Elvis outlined the song’s true meaning, Mitchell Froom was left none the wiser.
As a final pre-production flourish, Elvis had already sequenced the final running order of the record before he entered Ocean Way, an almost unheard of conceit. ‘I think Elvis struggles with his music but the struggle is private one,’ ponders Marc Ribot. ‘When he comes into the studio he works.’
The idea of using The Attractions on the new record had quickly and somewhat predictably hit a brick wall. Elvis claimed their participation was ‘scuppered by an unseemly legal squabble’ which centred on an argument over whether the band should receive royalties for playing on the record rather than a straight session fee. For The Attractions it was less about greed and more about being properly valued, while for Elvis it was a straightforward business decision. ‘It was a simple matter of I made an offer, the offer wasn’t enough, and so I got some people who would do the job,’4 he concluded.
In the end, the core band for what became Mighty Like A Rose was full of familiar faces. Having bade a fond farewell to his band of favoured American musicians in Barbados in April, in the absence of The Attractions Elvis found himself rounding them all up again. The group was much smaller than that used on Spike: Pete Thomas – firmly back in the fold – and Jim Keltner sharing drum duties, T-Bone Wolk and Jerry Scheff on bass, Larry Knetchel, Benmont Tench and Mitchell Froom on assorted keyboards, Marc Ribot and James Burton on guitar.
With Elvis asserting such close control over his music, recording was never likely to be an easy experience. Since Goodbye Cruel World, it had never been his custom to compromise or defer to a producer in the studio, and he was at his most assertive and ambitious on Mighty Like A Rose. He was always in charge, fiercely protective of his vision, and the musicians had far less room for improvisation and self-expression than there had been on Spike. ‘Mighty Like A Rose was a more tightly controlled record,’ admits Ribot. ‘He was actively studying arranging ideas and he wanted to hear them back. I have to say that I was highly sceptical, but one can’t and one shouldn’t get in the way of that process.’
With very few exceptions, all the basic tracks on the record were cut live, no matter how ambitious the arrangement. On ‘The Other Side Of Summer’, for instance, there were eleven musicians playing simultaneously, before Elvis double-tracked the entire song – in the same way that had given Billy Sherill such a blast on Almost Blue’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do?’ back in 1981 – to achieve the dense, Spector-esque effect, everything threatening to topple over at any point. As if that wasn’t enough, Elvis then added three separate vocal harmony lines over the basic melody, to the bemusement of Mitchell Froom and engineer Kevin Killen. ‘We were saying, “We can’t hear anything, there’s too much singing, we can’t pick out the words”,’ says Froom. ‘And Elvis said, “Oh really? I hear all that very clearly.” I think he hears music in such a way it’s almost like a hyper-ear.’
The kitchen sink production style came to charcterise the whole record. ‘Nothing,’ claimed Elvis, ‘seemed beyond the realm of the pop song.’5 When it worked, such an approach could be very effective: ‘So Like Candy’ was crammed with little instrumental details and motifs, teasing the tension from a terrific band performance. But good ideas and even songs sometimes got lost in a maze of the heavy-handed production and wilfully obtuse renditions of often simple songs.
‘How To Be Dumb’ was perhaps the most straightforward and musically familiar track on the record. A big, melodic number with Hammond organ stabs and sweeping grand piano aping the classic Steve Nieve style, lyrically it was a none-too-subtle riposte to Bruce Thomas, or the ‘funniest fucker in the world’, as Elvis chose to call him.
The Big Wheel had been published in 1990 and Bruce had sent a copy to Elvis as ‘a matter of courtesy’. He wasn’t best pleased. ‘I remember him singing ‘How To Be Dumb’,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘It was a cathartic experience. He came into the control room covered in sweat, and all I remember is being very relieved that the song wasn’t about me!’
Towards the end of the sessions, the Hollywood smog began messing with Elvis’s throat, and after a brief hiatus – which included a performance with Neil Young in the San Fernando Valley – he returned to England to complete the record in Westside Studios in the winter of 1990. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band flew over from New Orleans to play on ‘Sweet Pear’ and ‘Interlude’, while Elvis finished off the vocals and added strings and brass overdubs to the tapes. Fiachra Trench orchestrated ‘All Grown Up’, ‘Harpies Bizarre’ and ‘Georgie And Her Rival’, and although he was one of the best in the business, Elvis ached at the frustration of handing his lovingly prepared arrangements over to someone else.
While in London, there was also time to fit in some other business. A songwriting session with Paul McCartney at the beginning of December produced ‘three nice songs’, according to McCartney, probably including ‘Mistress And Maid’. Perhaps more significantly, on 8 December, Elvis and Cait saw the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter perform Brahms and a set of Scandinavian lieders at London’s Wigmore Hall. Elvis had first seen Von Otter perform in 1989, but it was this concert that finally made him swoon. ‘I was moved beyond words,’ he said. ‘I have haunting memories of that night.’6 She would stay in his mind for many years to come.
* * *
By the time Elvis returned to Ocean Way in the New Year to mix Mighty Like A Rose, he was essentially working on two projects. The previous year, he had agreed to compose the soundtrack music for Alan Bleasdale’s latest TV series, GBH, alongside avant-garde film composer Richard Harvey, scheduled for transmission on Channel Four in the summer of 1991. Elvis had acted for Bleasdale before, and the two shared similar, left-wing values. ‘They have an enormous amount of respect for each other,’ says Harvey. ‘And Alan really rates Elvis’s writing, which is a huge compliment.’
The idea for the collaboration had been made by the director, Robert Young, in 1990. Elvis was given scripts of the series and later rough-cut videos, developing character studies and working on mood pieces until he knew the raw material inside out. It was a bruising process, writing and recording music for eleven hours’ worth of television drama, turning around each ninety-minute episode in approximately ten days. Essentially, it was like scoring a full-length movie every week and a half.
Mostly, these frantic undertakings were done apart. Elvis sketched out musical themes while he was mixing Mighty Like A Rose, m
aking demos in the studio while Kevin Killen and Mitchell Froom were working in the control room. He was working extremely hard on what might be called musical literacy, struggling to put across his more sophisticated musical ideas without the aid of being able to read or write music. He would put his work onto cassettes or MIDI print-outs from his computer, trying as best he could to cut through his feelings of frustration to present the results as fluently as possible.
He would then send his work to Richard Harvey, or call him with outlines of what he wanted to do. ‘He would leave answerphone messages in some insomnia-fuelled frenzy,’ says Harvey. ‘The phone would click and I would have between twenty minutes and half an hour’s worth of ideas to work on; or we would have two-hour phone conversations. He almost drove me to a breakdown, it was eighteen to twenty-hour days.’
Among the musical ideas that Elvis sent to Harvey were Mighty Like A Rose’s ‘Couldn’t Call It Unexpected’, which became part of the closing title theme of GBH, plus fragments that were later developed for The Juliet Letters. Harvey would pick the bones out of the music, then orchestrate it, often rearranging it substantially and adding textural material in the process.
Despite the long-distance working methods, it was a genuine collaboration and co-production. And although it was a fraught process for both men, recording the twenty-two instrumentals with a full orchestra in London between February and May 1991 made all the panic worth while. ‘To stand there and have fifty people play one of your tunes and it not accompany anything except pictures is about the most exciting experience I’ve had in the studio in a long while,’7 said Elvis.
He was rewarded in other ways. On 22 March 1992, Elvis and Richard Harvey won a BAFTA for Best Television Soundtrack for GBH. Elvis didn’t attend the ceremony, but he did repeat the collaboration in 1995 on Jake’s Progress, an eight-and-a-half-hour long TV drama written by Bleasdale for Channel Four. Elvis and Harvey again worked together on the score, although there was much more individual composition and less collaboration than there had been on GBH. Perhaps that was why it didn’t quite scale the same heights.
* * *
‘The Other Side Of Summer’ was released as a single on 2 April 1991, heralding the arrival of Mighty Like A Rose three weeks later. A deliberately over-the-top Beach Boys pastiche, the single reached No. 43 in the UK charts, a faintly disappointing result for one of his most commercial songs for years. In retrospect, the video of Elvis looking like a busker on Brighton beach may not have helped.
The album was a more unified affair than Spike, with stronger songwriting, but it was a dense and difficult record, undeniably burdened by the bleakness of the mood which inspired it. Elvis’s harsh, contrary singing in particular meant that many of the tenderest songs on the record – ‘All Grown Up’, ‘Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4’, ‘So Like Candy’ – failed to get the vocal performances that the richness of the music and melodies deserved.
This juxtaposition of grimness and beauty was deliberate, but the over-riding sensation was of melody and the song being sacrificed in a dizzying maze of vaulting and often misguided ambition. ‘You hear the further outreaches of his musical mind on it,’ admits Mitchell Froom. ‘I thought a few things were successful; maybe a few things were overdone.’ Just maybe. The opening five-song assault was amongst the most all-encompassing litany of social and cultural scepticism Elvis had ever recorded, but the production turned the songs into overstuffed sofas, uncomfortable, misshapen, the springs poking out all over the place.
Elsewhere, ‘After The Fall’ was simply dreary and depressing, ‘Georgie And Her Rival’ was far too busy, its bright pop melody lost in an avalanche of detail, while it was a struggle to hear how songwriters of the calibre of Elvis and Paul McCartney could have spent more than a solitary lunch break on ‘Playboy To A Man’. Fittingly, Elvis barked the vocal through a metal pipe.
Even when the album reached a kind of exhausted and very personal hopefulness on the trio of songs that ended the record, the gorgeous melody and genuine regret of ‘Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4’ was saddled with a circus-like arrangement which did the song few favours. All in all, there were far too many layers, too many curves. The end result wasn’t dazzling, just heavy, difficult and misconceived. Not a record for the faint-hearted.
There were plenty of favourable reviews, but generally (aside from Almost Blue) Mighty Like A Rose attracted the worst notices of Elvis’s career. The NME seemed to view the orchestral flourishes as a signal that this was some kind of follow-up to Imperial Bedroom, and measured it harshly against old glories. ‘Even the “good” tracks – a lamentable four out of thirteen – would pant with shame if forced to socialise with the bulk of his back catalogue,’ said Barbara Ellen. ‘The music for the most part is self-indulgent and sour, or lazy and glutinously sweet. Worst of all, it’s dull.’ The Independent struggled to find ‘crumbs of melodic comfort. It’s a case of too many cooks cluttering up nearly every song.’ The Times laced an utterly negative review with the preface that Elvis had swapped his ‘wimpish geek look in favour of a more organic, got-10p-for-a-cup-of-tea-mate image’.
Many of the reviews in Britain made much of the dramatic change in Elvis’s appearance, used as apparent evidence of a general loss of focus or a sign of rock star megalomania. ‘I apparently let some people down who didn’t want me to change my image,’ mused Elvis. ‘I’d successfully buried the geek guy for good. But it’s my life and my body, and if I want to fuck myself up and have a beard and wear my hair long, that’s my business. I have my own reasons for that change of image – some of them personal, some of them just damn wilful.’8
Even Warner Brothers, generally supportive in the early part of their working relationship, were somewhat dismayed by his change in his appearance. Executives from the record company began dismissing Mighty Like A Rose as the ‘beard record’.
There was undoubtedly a degree of myth-breaking in the new image. ‘Quite rightly, he invented a look [in the past] that a whole lot of people wanted to copy, but the problem is that the mask can turn on you and strangle you after a while,’ says Marc Ribot. ‘It’s good to break it, and if it pisses people off, well, fuck ’em.’ However, the fuss created over the new image was in reality something of a smokescreen. Elvis wasn’t the first man in musical history with a very clear and identifiable image to have shunned the barber. Ask The Beatles. If people were having trouble relating to the man with the beard and the long hair, it was principally because Elvis had released an album that was almost impossible to warm to. Far from burying the ‘geek guy’, it was the long-haired Elvis incarnation who took on the status of an imposter – and eventually got buried instead.
He rehearsed in California through May in preparation for the ‘Come Back In A Million Years’ tour, breaking cover for a TV appearance on Saturday Night Live in New York on 18 May, where he performed ‘So Like Candy’ and ‘The Other Side Of Summer’. Then it was on to the rest of America.
There was a rigidity about the shows, largely unanimated affairs focusing on material from Spike and Mighty Like A Rose, with a smattering of the ‘Barbados’ covers thrown in. Elvis usually opened with a contemplative take on ‘Accidents Will Happen’, backed by a truncated Rude 5 featuring Pete Thomas, Larry Knetchel, Jerry Scheff and Marc Ribot, but there was a limited and generally predictable display of old Attractions material. Only the occasional inclusion of ‘Suit Of Lights’, ‘Watch Your Step’, ‘New Lace Sleeves’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head’ could have been considered surprises, while for some reason, ‘The Other Side Of Summer’ had been transformed into an uptempo waltz, sacrificing most of its melody in the process.
Yet there was a darkness and anger in the performances that hadn’t been heard for some time. Ironically, despite the beard, the baggy suits and the dearth of old material, there was more here that bore comparison with the withering disgust of the younger Elvis Costello than might have met the eye. Only this time it was global, ra
ther than personal.
Five dates into the tour Elvis was already apologising for the hoarseness of his voice, and when he came to tape a show for MTV’s Unplugged programme on 3 June he was in even poorer vocal shape, with the result that a mere twenty-four minutes of the set was eventually broadcast. By the time he reached New York’s Madison Square Gardens on 22 June, however, he seemed to be back-firing on something approaching all cylinders. Stephen Holden from the New York Times found the music ‘richly fleshed out and at moments even operatic. If Costello’s world view is still forbiddingly gloomy, his music has expanded into something much larger than post-punk minimalism.’
It was when the tour reached Europe in July that the battle really commenced. Mighty Like A Rose had managed a respectable No. 5 placing in the charts in Britain, but it had not sold terribly well and had already had something of a critical savaging. Following a near-fifteen-year run of critical adulation in his homeland, the time seemed ripe for some extra scores to be settled.
Even before it came to reviewing the music, there was already resentment in the air. It was the first time that The Rude 5 had performed in Britain, and there seemed to be some residual animosity about the fact that The Attractions weren’t there, as if this new, classical-loving Costello was somehow looking down upon his past and the band that did so much to create it. This basic hostility may not have been helped by the relative paucity of old songs in the set, and fact that GBH – featuring Elvis and Richard Harvey’s classical score – was airing on Channel Four as the tour progressed. Furthermore, Elvis’s ragged appearance and weight gain were almost constantly referred to: ‘Long-haired, bearded bum’; ‘eccentric uncle’; and ‘Elvis Costello these days resembles a continent’ were just some of the jibes.
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