Complicated Shadows (27 page)

At the final show at the Palladium, Elvis had opened with a solo guitar version of Reszo Seress’s melancholic ballad ‘Gloomy Sunday’, a tune so bleak it was also known as the
‘Hungarian Suicide Song’. Made famous by Billie Holliday in 1941, it was a wilfully contrary choice, and one that was virtually ignored by a restless crowd eager for something easier to
digest. But it was another sure sign that Elvis was moving away from current pop conventions – and perhaps his core audience – towards the deeper, lasting values of jazz and
country.

There was a focused power, a new-found elegance in the music. Elvis himself did his best to match up, sporting a mean line in Al Capone chic: smart suits, shades, waistcoats, silk tie and
polished Italian shoes, a slightly more dapper version of his normal attire. He even agreed to be interviewed on the Tom Snyder talk show, his first
appearance on live
television in the US since the heady days of the
Saturday Night Live
stand-off in late 1977. The self-imposed media blackout still extended to all print mediums, but it was further
evidence of a slight thaw in the air.

In any case, Snyder was an easy ride, a lightweight talk show host who wasn’t going to delve too deep. He didn’t even allude to the events in Columbus, and in general Elvis was free
to exert the easy, if guarded, charm which could come naturally when he was so inclined. He dropped Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart into the short conversation, little hints of where his heart now
lay.

Despite the poise, the touring antics were often far from refined. With the exception of Bruce – who was merely drinking a lot – Elvis and The Attractions were still running wild on
a diet of alcohol, drugs and adrenalin. To cut costs, Jake had put Squeeze on the same bus, which only intensified the activities.

‘The first week or so was fantastic,’ says Chris Difford. ‘There were so many of us it was just like being men on a submarine, and we were all playing cards and getting on
really well. By the end of it we had to have security in the middle of the bus to keep us apart. There were a few occasions when bass guitars were flying around.’ There were other jittery
moments: following the show at New Orleans, the English Mugs gained a unique insight into some of the more arcane traditions in the American south, when the tour bus was stopped by the Ku Klux
Klan. ‘It was ten o’clock in the morning, and they had guns,’ recalls Difford. ‘Most of us were asleep and the bus driver just told us to keep our heads. The guy got off the
bus, he realised we were an English rock band and he let us through.’ First Rock Against Racism, now the Ku Klux Klan. Just what was it with Elvis and America?

According to press reports, Jake conformed to type by sparring with journalist Charley Crespo after the show at Providence on 4 February, but Elvis seemed more relaxed. He had put on weight and
appeared less up-tight, more intent on enjoying America than he had been previously. Always interested in good food and expensive wine, he
ensured that the culinary standards
were higher than the normal roadside café culture of most touring bands. He even took a
Good Food
guide book. ‘It would be Japanese meals all the time, we’d take a cab
sixty miles to go off to lunch together,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘And we polished off some good wine. I remember having a waiter literally weeping on the table because Elvis and I
ordered the last bottle of ’61 Haut Brion, whilst having very erudite conversations about social reform, Jeremy Bentham and William Blake. We weren’t idiots.’

* * *

By the time the tour ended in Toronto on 9 February,
Trust
was in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The American reviews had been strong:
Newsweek
’s Jim Miller proclaimed it an ‘extraordinary’ record, while Ken Tucker of
Rolling Stone
was frequently bowled over by the technical brilliance of
Costello’s phrasing and wordplay, although he added as a caveat that ‘[
Trust
] contains some of his very best work and some of his very worst – none of it readily
comprehensible, all of it shot through with surprising images and strikingly lovely music’.

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 they 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.