Complicated Shadows (22 page)

LIVE STIFFS LIVE
(l–r in all but top picture):
Elvis, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis and Ian Dury prepare to do battle in the autumn of 1977.

Bebe Buell in classic pose.

Spending time with Elvis in Portland, Maine, immediately prior to the ‘Armed Funk’ tour, February 1979.
Credit: Bob Gruen/Courtesy of Bebe Buell

An accident waiting to happen: Sheffield, January 1979.
Credit: Pennie Smith

THE TOUR OF
A
MERICA WAS THEIR FOURTH
in a little over a year: by its end, in mid-April, Elvis and The Attractions would have
spent almost exactly half of the previous eighteen months in the States and Canada, criss-crossing the continent with an increasing sense of dislocation.

Armed Forces
had been well received in America. ‘Sunday’s Best’ was taken off the record and substituted with ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love
& Understanding’, a fair swap, and the momentum created with
My Aim Is True
and
This Year’s Model
was still gathering pace.
Rolling Stone
weighed in with
a glowing review, while the
Washington Post’s
Eve Zibart concluded that ‘his third and most polished album, stakes out New Wave’s first major fiefdom in the United
States’.

Nonetheless, Elvis flew off to his newly-conquered territory to face the fifty-seven shows in sixty-eight days with some ambivalence, to say the least. He spent some time with Bebe Buell in
Maine in the days before the opening show of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour in Seattle on 6 February, and she then accompanied him to California for a few days. When the tour set off into the
hinterlands, Elvis arranged for Bebe to rejoin the convoy in New York at the end of March.

Perhaps it was just as well that she didn’t follow the whole tour. She was not always the most popular member of the entourage, and her liasion with Elvis was often a
topic which amused the band. ‘She was a super-groupie, obviously, a bit of an airhead,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Steve’s girlfriend once said, “You know what
I really hate about you, Bebe, you’re blah blah blah,” this long tirade. Bebe turned around and said, “You know, I like you because you’re so frank.” She was just
indestructible.’

Buell required a pretty thick skin. Not only was she subjected to the barbs of the band and the increasing hostility of Elvis’s management – who by now simply hated the relationship
and delighted in spreading rumour and gossip about her, some of which she undoubtedly encouraged – but she was often on the receiving end of Elvis’s mood swings. No stranger to
infidelity himself, he was less able to deal with suggestions that Buell may not have been entirely faithful, and the relationship fell prey to his dark moods. ‘He was pretty mean to
her,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘There was lots of power play involved, humiliating people just to make them feel bad. Pretty dysfunctional. Whatever else went on, I think she genuinely had
something for him, probably more than he did.’

Buell admits that the tour was ‘drug-fuelled, alcohol-fuelled and violent. Things got crazy’. During their increasingly frequent, high-octane arguments, she would disparagingly call
him ‘Uncle Elvis’ or a little ‘Napoleon Coward’, much to his fury. ‘I’ve protected Elvis quite a bit and there are many things about him I will never reveal, but
it was pretty horrible,’ she says. ‘He would wake me up at three in the morning from a sound sleep and accuse me of dreaming about somebody else. He became suspicious, paranoid,
inquisitive. For example, I could always tell when he’d been going through my diaries. I could never find a hiding place which he couldn’t discover.’

There were unprecedented amounts of alcohol and cocaine on the tour, and the mood in the camp was dark and jittery. Jake and Elvis seemed hell-bent on conquering America entirely on their own
terms, and all the least pleasant aspects of the Riviera style of man management combined to create an atmosphere which wound up everyone, from journalists and photographers to the audience, the
band and the crew.

As if keen to remind America that it needed Elvis Costello more than he needed it, the antics were inflammatory from the start. The road crew wore army fatigues and the
tour bus flaunted the legend: DESTINATION CAMP LEJEUNE, NC, home of the Marine Corps, the US crack military regiment. Anyone inclined to write this off as a humorous extension of the album title
were swiftly set right. Tour manager Des Brown executed a fairly brutal reading of Jake’s desire to keep photographers and bootleggers out of gigs, while the press were treated with utter
disdain by Riviera, alienating most of the writers who had been championing Elvis since he had first appeared in the States.

None of this would have mattered too much if Elvis was producing the goods on stage. Instead, he seemed intent on extending the policy of non-co-operation to include his concerts. With homegrown
hero Bruce Springsteen regularly playing sets clocking in at three hours, American audiences expected value for money. What they got on the opening night of the tour in Seattle was a monosyllabic
Elvis playing a slight fifty-minute set and no encore, followed by ear-piercing feedback which sent the crowd scurrying from the hall.

Outside, posters of Elvis were torn down and set alight. And it got worse.
Rolling Stone
writer Fred Schruers and
New West’s
Greil Marcus were in attendance for the show
at Berkeley’s Community Theatre on the ninth: ‘Costello barely played forty minutes before lock-stepping offstage with no intention to return,’
¹
wrote Schruers, while Marcus commented that ‘the show was meant as an insult and performed as such, and people caught on.’
²

The audience were justifiably hostile, ripping seats out of the venue and later breaking windows in the tour bus. ‘They were jumping up and down in the balconies,’ said Marcus.
‘An hour later they were trying to break into the box office.’
³
Backstage, Jake threatened to attack the writer if he went into print
about the incident. ‘Jake’s just a little thug,’
⁴
Marcus concluded. At the Fox Theatre in San Diego on the 13 February, Elvis played
a mere eight songs before leaving the stage.
Armed Forces
may have been beginning
to climb towards the Top 10 in the Billboard charts, but all was clearly not
well.

He was still managing to write through the chaos. At the Long Beach Arena on 14 February, Elvis previewed the beautiful country-soul ballad ‘Motel Matches’, and as the tour moved on
he would add ‘Idle Hands’ – an early version of ‘Temptation’ – ‘Secondary Modern’, ‘B-Movie’ and a slow, lumbering version of ‘High
Fidelity’ to the set.

The show at the country-based Palomino Club in Los Angeles on 16 February also provided a welcome diversion, Elvis adding John McFee on pedal steel to take the chance to play some country songs.
Elvis would finally record his duet of ‘Stranger In The House’ with George Jones in Nashville later in the tour, and at the Palamino the song made a rare appearance, alongside standards
such as Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have To Go’ and Jones’ own ‘If I Put Them All Together (I’d Have You)’. This time Elvis relented and played an encore,
although he resisted repeated calls for a second one.

But it wasn’t long before the clouds scudded overhead again. In St Louis on 6 March, Elvis proved once again how effective he had grown at not just biting but amputating the hand that was
attempting to feed him. Local radio station KSHE had been cherry-picked by Columbia to sponsor the show, but Elvis had heard through the grapevine that KSHE’s local rival – KADI –
were playing
Armed Forces
more frequently. During the concert, he dedicated ‘Accidents Will Happen’ to ‘all the boys at KADI’ before playing a splenetic
‘Radio, Radio’ in honour of ‘all the local bastard radio stations that don’t play our songs – and to KSHE’.

Armed Forces
was dropped from KSHE’s playlist with a resounding thud. ‘I am upset and shocked that a performer would behave in such an unprofessional manner,’
KSHE’s executive vice-president Sheely Grafman told the local press, as Columbia engineered frantic diplomatic manouevres to smooth things over. As
Rolling Stone
’s Fred
Schruers later remarked, Elvis seemed ‘bound to make doubters and enemies out of his strongest American partisans’.
⁵
Then the wheels
really came off.