Complicated Shadows (42 page)

This musical momento took the form of a two-week session at Blue Wave Studios in Barbados in April 1990, the band consisting of Jerry Scheff on bass, Jim Keltner on drums, Larry Knetchel on
keyboards, and James Burton on guitar. As planned, Pete Thomas and Marc Ribot flew in for the second week of recording, replacing Keltner and Burton.

Elvis arrived looking as though he were preparing for an Arctic expedition rather than the Caribbean, sporting a shaggy beard and long, woolly hair. He had grown it over the cold winter in
Ireland and kept it ‘once I realised how it infuriated people’,
²
a typically contrary motivation.

The album concept was as simple as ‘some of my favourite songs performed with some of my favourite musicians’,
³
which sounded like
something Sinatra might have written as a sleeve note back in the mid-’50s. There were blues and R&B tracks (‘Strange’, ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’,
‘Payday’, ‘Everybody’s Crying Mercy’, ‘Bama Lama Bama Loo’); country ballads (‘Must You Throw Dirt In My
Face’); soulful
numbers (‘Remove This Doubt’, ‘Please Stay’, ‘Running Out Of Fools’); standards (‘The Very Thought Of You’); and songs from the great pop
singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away’, Randy Newman’s ‘I’ve Been Wrong Before’, and Ray Davies’s ‘Days’) on the
record.
⁴¹

With Kevin Killen producing, the band cut through the material quickly. Most of the tracks were played loud and live, befitting a record which was clearly an exercise in fun and self-fulfilment
rather than anything particularly bold or exciting. Elvis had played most of the material during his solo gigs, or with The Confederates and The Rude 5 over the past few years, and it had rarely
shone. More often than not, it was performed with a kind of sturdy, uninspired deference. It was musician’s music, the kind that’s often more fun to play than to listen to. ‘We
just went in and had a ball on that album,’ admits Jerry Scheff. ‘I don’t think he ever expected it to sell a tremendous amount, it was just a labour of love.’

The recording in Barbados was completed in two weeks, whereupon backing vocals were added in London and the album was finished. However, Warners apparently saw little commercial appeal in the
often obscure cover material and in any case, with Elvis planning a ‘proper’ album release in the new year, they didn’t want too many albums flooding the market in a short space
of time. Over the next few years the record – eventually titled
Kojak Variety
– would become widely bootlegged before its release in 1995, but it was far from being a lost
classic.

His thirst to be a singer in a bar band sated, work started on the new record at Ocean Way in Hollywood in the summer. The leaps in Elvis’s interests and ambitions quickly made a mockery
of Mitchell Froom’s initial plan to make ‘a record where almost nothing happens’. On
Mighty Like A Rose,
everything happened, often all at once.

As a direct result of his curiousity about classical music, Elvis had taken a radically different approach to his newer compositions, often writing several overlapping
melodies for each piece of music. This, of course, was at the very core of orchestral music, but ran against the traditional, idiomatic rock or pop premise of a primary melody and perhaps a simple
harmony and little else.

‘He had bought a computer, and he started messing around with a lot of different melodic lines and counter melodies,’ says Mitchell Froom. ‘It was a new writing tool for him.
You could have an unlimited number of different lines going on. It would be orchestral, almost, and there was this very dense, complicated music arising.’

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
, making 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.