Complicated Shadows (39 page)

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.
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‘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.’
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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.

* * *

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.’
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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.

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,
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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!”.’
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