TWENTY-SEVEN
Mama Mae Axton walked me to the end of the gymnasium locker room, linking her arm through mine. The writer of “Heartbreak Hotel” turned the powdered cheek of her most confidential face to me with a scent of magnolia and peppermints.
“When you first came to America, the King put on a disguise and came to see you play. He wanted to check you out.”
If I broke eye contact at all it was to glance over Mae’s shoulder in an appeal to my band at the time. We were billed as Elvis Costello and His Confederates, among them, James Burton and Jerry Scheff, who had actually played with Elvis Presley.
Ten years earlier, when I’d first arrived in America, Elvis Presley had already been dead for three months, so if the King had put on a disguise to attend my show it truly would have been an exceptional occurrence.
It wasn’t very easy to know how to react to this statement. Mae obviously intended to pay me a compliment and I wasn’t about to be disrespectful or correct her on the history, so I nodded gravely, without asking the obvious question . . .
“What did he think of the show?”
The night before Elvis Presley died, we had played Swindon. Within a couple of days, the phone was ringing off the hook at the Stiff Records office. The awful news from Memphis had traveled around the world a little slower then, but it didn’t take long for the television stations to start looking for ways to extend the life of the story.
“Hey, here’s a guy in England called ‘Elvis.’ Let’s do a story on him.”
The decision for me to adopt the “Elvis” name had always seemed like a mad dare, a stunt conceived by my managers to grab people’s attention long enough for the songs to penetrate, as my good looks and animal magnetism were certainly not going to do the job. There were certainly people on the scene with more oxymoronic names than mine.
Now there was a man on the phone from America asking if I’d agree to be interviewed about my alias, offering a little free publicity if we’d help them squeeze a bit more novelty juice out of a tale that was already out of genuine tears. The hapless research assistant was sent away with a flea in his ear from my manager, chastising him for the selling of souvenirs at the graveside.
For all of the bravado in the Stiff Records HQ, there was a brief moment of doubt as to whether my flip and daredevil alias could actually survive while people were mounting candlelight vigils.
What would be the alternative? Adopt another taboo identity that sounded similar when spoken at speed and didn’t mess too much with the typography? Otis? Jesus?
Well, obviously that would be a little too loaded.
It was too late to turn back now, as we had a show to play in Dudley.
By 1984, The Attractions and I had missed most of the last trains to Memphis, Clarksdale, or anywhere else, and we’d run out of money and luck. We were also pulling in five different directions at once, and there were only four of us in the group.
I hated the record we’d just recorded but didn’t know how to stop the wheels from turning. I’d only held it all together because I didn’t know how to let it fall apart. So, I went out and played a run of solo concerts, singing anything I could remember and some things that I could not. Some nights I even sang Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away.”
The new songs that I’d butchered in the studio now fell under my hands quite easily. I rescued the four or five titles worth saving from Goodbye Cruel World, among them the erotic mirage of “Love Field” and “Worthless Thing,” a song that, among other things, contemplated people profiteering on the memory of Elvis Presley. The song contained this verse:
They commit blue murder down on Union Avenue
Then they sell you souvenir matches
Nightclubs full of grave robbers from Memphis, Tennessee
And Las Vegas body snatchers
I had met T Bone Burnett when he was opening those acoustic shows, and within a few nights we had assumed our roles as Henry and Howard, The Coward Brothers, appearing in the finale of each concert in the guise of an embittered sibling act on the comeback trail. We claimed to have written every song we performed and had been swindled out of our inheritance. Our opening number and theme song was “Ragged but Right.” Then we’d try to find the missing link between “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “(San Francisco) Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair.” It was all really just pretext for us to harmonize on songs from “She Thinks I Still Care” to “Baby’s in Black” and Bobby Charles’s “Tennessee Blues.”
We even ended up onstage at Gerde’s Folk City late one Greenwich Village evening, as all good bohemians do, and were later interviewed in character, live on CNN, by a bored and idling press corps, waiting for President Reagan to come out of his bolt-hole and make a public appearance during his summer holidays in California.
Otherwise, I’d think of those years in the mid-’80s as “The Land That Music Forgot.” A lot of the hit records of the time were not songs as I understood them, but shiny, open-ended sequences of music, mostly conjured up in the studio. I tried to go along with the plan for a while, but I felt like a blacksmith in a glass factory.
By the spring of 1983, I was writing songs every afternoon in a deserted office in Acton that F-Beat Records had just vacated. I’d installed a 4-track cassette recorder and an easel on which I painted the rear view of a burlesque dancer glimpsed through a theater drape next to an announcer’s large ribbon microphone. The title of the canvas was taken from the Hepburn and Tracy movie Pat and Mike. Sometimes, I took down this one-joke daub and put up a big sheet of A2 sketching paper on the easel onto which I copied couplets and half-finished verses from my notebooks. I was looking for the common thread in lines scribbled on the nightstand, sometimes without the benefit of any light. I’d become expert in writing in the dark, as even pausing to reach for the light switch could scare away the thought.
Similarly, I often stayed away from an instrument while a melody was forming in my head, humming wordlessly into any tape recorder or Dictaphone at hand, as to sit at the piano or pick up a guitar risked forcing something elusive into a familiar pattern of rhythm or harmony.
Among the shiny confections that I’d hacked out for Goodbye Cruel World was a less elegant, more brutal song titled “Home Truth.” It was about a couple mislaying the simple kindnesses that make life tolerable:
Is it my shirt or my toothpaste that is whiter than white
Is it the lies that I tell you or the lies that I might
It might have been the first song in the stack for King of America, but then my notebooks of that time were filled with these tarnished, exhausted views of love. They pictured a man provoking the misery until it became something that could not be easily turned off. If there was anything to be learned, it was that trust is the hardest of the graces to repair. The proposed titles alone read like a script: “Indoor Fireworks,” “King of Confidence,” “American Without Tears,” “Suffering Face,” “Brilliant Mistake,” “Having It All,” “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” “Blue Chair,” “Next Time Around,” “Sleep of the Just”—songs that were like aspirin for the ache and arnica for the bruise.
It took me nearly another ten years to finish writing about the misery I provoked and the darkness that could envelope two people once so brightly in love. That was a song called “You Tripped at Every Step” on Brutal Youth:
In another world of gin and cigarettes
Those cocktail cabinets put mud in your eye
Maybe that is why you find it hard to see me
And if you don’t believe me
Before you start to cry,
“Don’t ever leave me”
The title of the song could have just as easily been “I Tripped at Every Step,” and been found on the very last page of the King of America folio.
By late 1984, I was living alone in a mansion block apartment a few steps from Kensington Gardens, where I’d sailed a boat on the Round Pond as a child. Life was starting to resemble one of those coy ’60s American sex farces, in which a roguish bachelor bundles one of a rota of girlfriends down a laundry chute in borrowed pajamas to avoid the discovery of another sweetheart arriving in the uniform of an airline stewardess. I wrote letters, seducing different girls into believing whatever it was they wanted to believe and take from the desperate shreds of sincerity, my genuine longing, and improbable friendship. Then I wrote songs convincing myself that what I was doing was in pursuit of love, and not just good old-fashioned lust and greed and a couple of the other remaining deadly sins. And yet, incredibly, there was still one brief, thrilling moment in that fatal year when Mary and I stared into each other’s eyes and we might have tumbled back in, but I was too much of a coward and too proud to beg her to take me back, to take me down or to even take me in.
The rock and roll I wanted to play certainly required the brush, one for glue on it to paper over the cracks and another to address the snare drum. I was writing all my songs on a 1935 Martin 000-28. I wanted the acoustic guitar to be at the center of my next picture, because I was sick of yelling.
I set out to write “Indoor Fireworks” to be as plain and bleak as a Hank Williams song, and tried not to let the uncomfortable truth get lost in the cute detail. Yet I could not resist adding, “You were the spice of life, the gin in my vermouth,” and my spin on lines like “You’re the starch in my collar, / You’re the lace in my shoe,” from Buddy DeSylva’s “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” but then, gin was my poison and my best friend back then. It took until the last verse to get the language in balance with the feeling of loss:
It’s time to tell the truth
These things have to be faced
My fuse is burning out
And all that powder’s gone to waste
Don’t think for a moment, dear, that we’ll ever be through
I’ll build a bonfire of my dreams
And burn a broken effigy of me and you
Once I’d finished the song, I played it for anyone who would listen, get right up in their faces, just to test the impact of those lines.
T Bone brought me more into the company of other songwriters. We’d sit around late at night in a hotel room, passing the guitar. That was a brand-new ritual for me.
One such night, Peter Case sang his great song “I Shook His Hand,” then handed the guitar to Bob Neuwirth, who gave us “Annabelle Lee,” containing the elegant lines:
The old ladies sit in the shade and flutter their fans
All gathered together to gossip with a bunch of old colonels
And charm the swans from the ponds with lily-white hands
Then I asked T Bone to sing my favorite of his tunes, “Shake Yourself Loose,” the one with the chorus that ran:
I don’t know what hold that rounder downtown has on you
But keep on shaking, baby, ’til you shake yourself loose
Then Victoria Williams put us all to shame with just her opening lines of “Lights”:
The lights of the city looked so good
Almost like somebody thought they would
It was a dream of a song glimpsed through a picture window. I was biding my time. Then I played them “Indoor Fireworks.”
I didn’t doubt it for a second.
Of course, the real torture of love lost or lust found happens differently than in a song. The former happens much more thoughtlessly, the latter is often less elegant than in the words of romantic balladeers.
“I’ll Wear It Proudly” was an abject song about the fool that love makes of a man past his prime, and “Jack of All Parades” mocked the philanderer in the moment of surrender.
Musically, I tried to pitch “Poisoned Rose,” where Willie Nelson or Charlie Rich might have conceivably sung it in the vaudeville of my dreams, but I’m not sure either of them would have cared for a song about so toxic a desire.
T Bone and I were sitting on a plane above the Pacific, between Japan and Australia, when he laid out the cast of players for King of America. On stiff sheets of white card, he wrote in a meticulous hand the title of every song, followed by the name of each player in the proposed ensembles. I knew that T Bone liked to dream big, but I seriously doubted that some of these people would consent to play on one of my records.
Next to the title “Poisoned Rose,” he wrote, Drums—Earl Palmer.
Earl Palmer?
The same Earl Palmer who played on “Tutti Frutti”? The Earl Palmer who was one of the Wrecking Crew and had played on everything from the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” to “The Theme from Mission: Impossible” and “The Flintstones”?
We’re going to call that Earl Palmer?
“Sure,” T Bone said. “Earl will kill it.”
Then he wrote, Bass—Ray Brown.
“Ray Brown? Ah, come on now, you can’t be serious.”
The Ray Brown who had played with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and was once married to Ella Fitzgerald?
We could phone Ray Brown and he would take the call?
Frankly, I thought T Bone was high, and not just at thirty-eight thousand feet.
But of course, those gentlemen did agree to the session.
I was nervous at first, but T Bone sent out for a bottle of Glenlivet and that loosened things up just enough. Before we cut the take of “Poisoned Rose,” Ray Brown leaned into the microphone and said, “Nobody play any ideas.”
It is so easy to let ideas get in the way.
The first session was at Ocean Way Studios on Sunset Boulevard with members of the TCB Band: Ron Tutt on drums, bassist Jerry Scheff, and James Burton and his hot electric guitar.
Actually, I was most delighted to have James on the record because his playing had lit up the Gram Parsons albums GP and Grievous Angel, and he had been a member of Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band.
Three years later, when we were playing the King of America songs at the Royal Albert Hall, Jim Keltner announced that he’d put George Harrison on the guest list, and he proved to be a man of taste. We posed for photos flanked by Keltner and Burton, but I didn’t mention having nearly bought George’s old Rickenbacker in Liverpool or press him on what he thought of the show.
The next day I asked my monitor engineer what The Quiet One had made of the evening from his vantage point in the wings.
“Oh, he spent most of the show wearing headphones plugged into the board, just listening to James Burton’s channel.”
Despite my stage name, I was a pretty selective Elvis Presley fan, loving the undeniable Sun sides, a few of his gospel records, the Leiber and Stoller song “Don’t,” and those later soulful gems from American Studios like “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds.”
Once work was under way, a few affectionate, eccentric Elvis stories did come out during a beer break: how he’d get bored rehearsing at Graceland and take the band up to his wardrobe and everyone would end up in fancy dress—someone in a cop uniform, someone else in a ten-gallon hat, and the gospel vocal quartet duded up like extras from Super Fly—or how he might order up a procession of his car collection and stand on the steps watching them roll by.
He was, after all, the King.
I once asked Jerry Scheff what people in the audience made of it when, later in his career, Elvis went into rambling introductions and fits of uncontrollable laughter. Did they laugh along with him? Did they get uncomfortable when it became clear that he was on some kind of medication?
Jerry said, “They saw what they came to see.”
Years later, I went to see the TCB Band perform live with a giant, projected image of Elvis. The Point Depot in Dublin was filled with fans from three ages of Elvis—from original Teds through Vegas fans in bopsuits to young rockabillies paying homage.
It might have been a P. T. Barnum–like stunt, but this was probably the first time Elvis Presley’s voice had ever been heard through a loud, modern PA system. I’m damn certain Colonel Tom Parker didn’t waste any money on amplification. The band still sounded wild, with the early tempo of “Mystery Train” and “C.C. Rider” on the edge of impossible. The fact that the band was playing live and Elvis was singing on film was a technical marvel and it created some weird, irresistible tension.
The footage shown was of a fit, commanding Elvis Presley in the very early ’70s, when he was still looking like Michelangelo’s “Hillbilly David.” He was thirty feet high and singing “Always on My Mind.”
By the time the show reached “American Trilogy,” any sense that this was a cheap magic trick had evaporated and it just felt terribly sad that the singer could not appear for an encore.
Back in 1985, the original schedule called for the TCB lineup to cut just three or four ballads, but I’d dashed off a couple of up-tempo tunes that were little more than a pretext to hear James tear off the kind of fast picking you’d hear on those live renditions of “Mystery Train” from the early ’70s.
We ended up with seven finished tracks in two days, upsetting the plan to have one side of the record with acoustic instruments and the other side played by The Attractions.
Understandably, The Attractions’ sessions for King of America were less good-humored and rather uneasy affairs. They all hated T Bone, seeing him as the provocateur. If we’d been making The Beach Boys Story, then T Bone would have been cast in Van Dyke Parks’s role, to my Brian. Hell, I even had a beard. A wildman drummer like Pete could have played Dennis Wilson, and Nieve would have effortlessly covered all the Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, and Bruce Johnston parts. It might sound like a crazy analogy, but it’s funny how Bruce Thomas and Mike Love have never been seen in the same room together.
Some of that tension and anger was probably making it into their performance of “Suit of Lights,” a song that was all about bitterness and obsolescence.
Early in 1985, I’d gone to a shabby social club in Harlesden to see my Dad perform. He didn’t often play in London, and I was initially glad that he had a gig so close to home, as he was putting in the same amount of miles behind the wheel as a long-distance lorry driver. I hadn’t seen him sing for a while, but he was still in full and wonderful voice. What had changed was the degree of respect that the audience felt they should pay any performer. They were pretty loud and medieval.
Although my Dad did enough to win them over, it broke my heart to see him playing for people who barely knew the difference between actual singing and karaoke. Most of the club turns were by now using bombastic, synthetic backing tracks on tape, while the singers who still called on the talents of sometimes indifferent musicians could end up sounding less commanding.
Just like my grandfather before him, my Dad was steadily being made redundant by the shift in technology. I carried a bitter feeling away from that night and wrote a song about the blood-sport aspect of the performing life. The first verse described my father singing as a fight broke out outside:
I thought I heard “The Working Man’s Blues”
He went to work that night and wasted his breath
Outside there was a public execution
Inside he died a thousand deaths
I didn’t see any more decorum or decency in high society than I did “down among the wines and spirits,” as my Dad would call it—when your name was printed just above that of the liquor licensee at the bottom of the bill. That’s where we all start out, and that is where I suspect I shall return, and none of this that I am telling you about will matter then.
The final verse of “Suit of Lights” was written in anticipation of that moment when:
I went to work that night and wasted my breath
Outside they’re painting tar on somebody
It’s the closest to a work of art that they will ever be
King of America might have been a much graver and more uncompromising record if it had included all the ballads that I originally wrote, but I doubt anyone would have listened to it willingly. T Bone produced the album with a weightless, caring touch. He knew when to let the light and air in and when to pick up the pace.
When I reluctantly consented to a record company request to record a cover song to ease this more acoustic sound over to the radio stations, I proceeded to contract laryngitis on the day of the session, rendering a version of “Don’t Let Be Me Misunderstood” as unrecognizable as my voice. T Bone still managed to make a great record out of it.
Brother Henry knew just when to introduce an instrumental counterpoint to the narrative, whether it was Jo-El Sonnier’s French melodeon on “American Without Tears,” T-Bone Wolk articulating the bass line I’d written for “Jack of All Parades,” or my own mandolin part on “Little Palaces.” The recording was truthful and intimate, centered on my singing and my vintage Martin, with the players falling back behind the story and only stepping forward for the solos.
The Confederates lineup of Jim Keltner, Jerry Scheff, Mitchell Froom, and James Burton made their debut at Beverly Theatre and went on to play many storming shows, from Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa to the Royal Albert Hall, and all the way to the Shellharbour Workers’ Club in Wollongong, New South Wales. When our man on the keys, Mitchell Froom, had to go back to his production duties, Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stepped in, and later still, the former Eggs Over Easy piano player Austin de Lone took his place.
I knew that singing one King of America ballad after another was probably not going to make a coherent show, so I added works by America’s greatest philosophers and magicians: Allen Toussaint, Mose Allison, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Dan Penn.
We opened almost every evening with the Dave Bartholomew tune “That’s How You Got Killed Before.” We liked playing that song so much that we made it into our signature tune and played it again in the finale.
It was tempting to call songs like Waylon Jennings’s “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” and Merle Haggard’s “The Bottle Let Me Down” just to hear James Burton tear off a mind-bending guitar solo, but the James Carr hit “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man” and the Penn–Oldham number “It Tears Me Up” were right there on the same borderline between the end of love and the beginning of obsession as “Indoor Fireworks” and “I’ll Wear It Proudly.”
I’d met two GI brides one afternoon in Las Vegas, about a year or so earlier. They were on a gambling spree and a little tipsy, so they spilt out their life stories to me in the way that people are inclined to do when they unexpectedly hear an English accent far from home. One of them even recalled her seduction, forty-five years earlier. Although I changed the names to protect the innocent, I put it all in the second verse of “American Without Tears”:
By a bicycle factory as they sounded the siren
And returned into the dance hall
She knew he was the one
Though he wasn’t tall or handsome
She laughed when he told her
“I’m the Sheriff of Nottingham and this is ‘Little John’”
For everything I thought I knew about America, you could say the opposite was the truth. It was the most wanton place and the most prohibitive, both seductive and prim. For every brash sales pitch and disposable thrill there was decency and strange, deep traditions that European clichés about America often overlooked. The blueprints and cues for all the King of America songs were to be found in Nashville, Memphis, or New Orleans. By then, I’d been to Columbia Studios on Music Row, Sea-Saint Sounds in New Orleans, seen the rubble that was then the Stax Studio in Memphis. I’d even gone to visit Hitsville, long after Motown fled Detroit for California, and found a small blue and white building that I’d imagined must be a magnificent palace when listening to “Bernadette” for the tenth time straight at the age of thirteen.
Inside was a compact box filled with primitive gadgetry set in a chance arrangement of angles that could make nine people sound like a symphony. I’d lost my heart or my reason over some of those songs.
Now I’d made a name for myself long enough to want to abandon it and most of the tricks I’d walked in with.
I wrote the first of these songs just after I turned thirty, a little late for the impetuousness of youth but rather too soon for a midlife crisis, although when it came to Terence Donovan’s cover shot for King of America I went to Bermans, the theatrical costumiers, and hired a splendid crown with paste jewels which was enough to make idiots think I’d lost my head.
• • •
“BRILLIANT MISTAKE” and “American Without Tears” were songs about being deluded or imagining a life in exile—better a stranger in your own hometown than a stranger to your own better nature. In the last verse of “American Without Tears,” I mentioned my Papa’s travels to America in a song for the first time, then I switched from the tale of those GI brides to my own misadventures and found how little I had to say in my own defense.
Now I’m in America and running from you
Like my grandfather before me walked the streets of New York
And I think of all the women I pretend mean more than you
When I open my mouth and I can’t seem to talk
Now it was a year later and I was back on the train from Liverpool to London with a sheet of paper on the table before me filling up fast with the same three words, repeated over and over.
“I Want You.”
I’d done all those cruel, irrational things people do to test their power, to test their limits, to seek revenge. Those things had served me well, so I suppose it served me right to be on the receiving end for once. I wasn’t halfway to Nuneaton before I completed the song and the sting was pulled out of the skin.
Singing that song night after night might have seemed like a punishment to some people, but in the end it just became a play I had to perform.
I think it was Othello.
I had notebooks filling up with new songs to add to those that had not been captured in Hollywood. While the resentments still ran high with The Attractions, I booked Olympic Studios, where The Rolling Stones had cut “Come On” and Jimi Hendrix made Are You Experienced?
We set up using stage monitors and played almost at concert volume, so no subtlety was possible and no quarter could be given. Somehow, Nick Lowe wrestled Blood & Chocolate out of this willfulness.
I finally got a rendition of “I Hope You’re Happy Now” to match the absurdity of the fatal affair it described; a macabre fairy tale based on my childhood in Olympia, called “Battered Old Bird”; and a psychedelic travelogue called “Tokyo Storm Warning.”
The rest of the songs were like the blurred and unfortunate Polaroids that people used to keep to document their worst desires and unhappy love affairs before we had the blessing of phone cameras.
“Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head” sees a man confirmed in his unworthiness. The accompaniment really required a hammer dulcimer accompaniment but all I had at hand was an old open-tuned guitar that I hit with spoons.
I worked up the second or third drafts of songs, written more intimately for King of America—“Next Time Round” and “Crimes of Paris”—that were amplified and roughed up by the deliberately crude Olympic sound.
Not all of the songs were freshly inflicted wounds. “Poor Napoleon” was the theme song for an earlier short story that concluded:
That night they sat across a tavern table.
The candles had burnt down for so many furtive lovers that the bottle on each table had its own macabre and melted sculpture. Inch picked at the soft edges of the flow and listened hard.
Both Port and Starboard lights were blazing bright as she told him, “I think I am in love.”
Inch started to stir from his chair, like an actor feigning surprise as his name is awarded a prize, when the real identity of her lover hurled him back down hard. In the dizzy guilt of giving herself to another man, she didn’t even notice his disappointment.
He waited his turn in her bed.
The affair lasted less time than their friendship and ruined it entirely. They met in raw afternoons as the rain beat down outside. She always suspected that he was withholding something from her. Her retaliations were both petty and wounding.
She would remove those silk stockings that so beguiled him, complaining that they were too expensive to be ruined in the rashness of the act. He imagined that she was saving them for another, more favored, lover.
At the death, they sat on separate beds in an airport hotel as he prepared to leave town. Country music played on the radio in the wall. Inch was lost in remorse at his adultery. She damned him for it. “You never seem more married than when you listen to that maudlin stuff.”
Most morbid and concentrated of all of these performances was a single six-minute take of “I Want You,” in which every instrument was gradually switched off until the only thing heard was the sound of the band bleeding into my vocal microphone and the title line repeated until it dissolved.
For the introduction, Nick spliced on a verse of a lullaby recorded with a Gibson Century of Progress, a guitar with an early plastic fingerboard, the production of which had to be abandoned after it was discovered that the substance was highly flammable. It seemed an appropriate legend for any guitar accompanying that song, although I doubt my fingers would have ever been fleet enough to cause it to burst into flames.
I painted another daub for the cover of the record: a tyrant with a face resembling a cold pork chop in a tricorn hat, screaming at a broken chocolate bar full of blood or Turkish delight, it was hard to tell. After all, I wasn’t that adept with the brush. The title of the painting and my alias for the record was Napoleon Dynamite, a name that I thought sounded like a calypso singer from the early ’50s and which I dreamed up long before anyone purloined the identity in Hollywood.
As if my intention could not be any clearer, all of the credits on the record sleeve were printed in Esperanto.
It was the last album made with The Attractions as such. We put our names on a couple of other record jackets in the ’90s, but despite containing many good songs and some vivid performances, those records really could have been made by anyone, and sometimes they were. The band dismantled on a Somerset afternoon after a cameo appearance at the end of a headlining solo set at the Glastonbury Festival of 1987.
I’d already played almost an entire show when The Attractions appeared unannounced for the last ten songs of the set, closing with a version of “Poor Napoleon” in the chaos of which we improvised an epitaph of “Instant Karma.”
A couple of months later, I was in the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The room was dressed with an art deco set design for the filming of Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, but if you looked at the wallpaper in the shabby rooms backstage, you could see various layers of decor from its more glamorous and go-go past.
Despite the intervention of Sammy Davis Jr. and others who sought to maintain and restore the place to it glories, the venue had been in steady decline since Robert Kennedy had been assassinated there while walking through the kitchen at a fund-raiser in 1968. The place never really recovered from the association with that terrible event, but the showroom had once hosted the Oscars and been the haunt of Gable and Lombard and Errol Flynn.
Right now, about the biggest rock and roll star in the world was backstage with a pair of Walkman headphones jammed on his head, eyes fixed on chord charts, taking in the cues and odd bars of the Roy Orbison songs that memory rendered rather differently.
Bruce Springsteen had written that beautiful line “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely” in “Thunder Road,” so he was a perfect fit for one of the “Friends” on the show, but despite the massive recent success of “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce seemed determined not to upstage the star and to just be part of the band.
A photographer from Rolling Stone wanted to take a picture of just me, Bruce, and Roy. I declined, saying, “What are we, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Why don’t you want James Burton in the picture? For crying out loud, he played with Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson. Why wouldn’t you want Bonnie Raitt in the photograph?”
It seemed disrespectful to everyone who had pitched in to play for Roy and sing in the background group. No one was there seeking the spotlight. The fellow looked puzzled, but placed Bruce and me at Roy’s feet and assembled everyone else at his shoulder. All of the gentlemen of the orchestra, the TCB Band members, James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Ron Tutt, and pianist Glen D. Hardin, Bruce, his Walkman, and me, and the background vocalists Steven Soles, J. D. Souther, and Jackson Browne were sharing one small dressing room, while Jennifer Warnes, Bonnie Raitt, and k.d. lang could have just about swung a cat in their tiny cubicle.
Then Tom Waits arrived to play his Vox Continental.
For those of you familiar with the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, I felt that we were all trapped in a Third Class cabin of an ocean liner and just needed to send out for two more hard-boiled eggs.
At rehearsals, I’d pitched in a little harmonica and organ where needed, but had been temporarily recruited as rhythm guitar player with the TCB Band. Playing those rhythm parts was no small responsibility, as at least one of Roy’s biggest bolero tunes, “Running Scared,” starts with just the pulse of one guitar before building to a massive crescendo. If you took the opening bars too fast, the vocal line would be impossible. It did seem unlikely that such a gently spoken man could deliver the passionate top notes of “It’s Over” or any of the other songs, but Roy did it time and time again throughout rehearsals.
The show itself was a very extended affair, as it was being captured on film rather than video, requiring that the cameras be reloaded at regular intervals. That Roy had the stamina and concentration to perform for nearly three hours makes the standard of the edited show all the more remarkable. Hardly a week goes by without someone telling me that they’ve seen a rerun of that show and how much it means to them.
Roy paid me the huge compliment of performing “The Comedians” that night. It was the only number performed on A Black and White Night that did not come from the immortal Orbison catalog of ’50s and ’60s hits.
“The Comedians” was a song that I had written with the dream of him singing it while I was working on songs for Goodbye Cruel World in my own personal Brill Building–style office in Acton, back in 1984. Not really needing another ballad, I’d outsmarted myself by rearranging the number in a tricky time signature and a faster tempo, losing both the rather oblique lyrics and the drama of the melody in the process. When T Bone Burnett asked if I had a song for Roy’s Mystery Girl album, I returned the tune to its original bolero rhythm and completely rewrote the lyrics, making it the kind of tragic story that Roy often wrote for himself. Indeed, Roy sang the song as if it were his very own work.
My first encounter of his performance was a dub mix of just Roy’s voice and the Van Dyke Parks string arrangement. Van Dyke’s orchestration underscored every line of a surreal story in which a faithless girl persuades her lover to take a ride alone on a Ferris wheel, waiting until he is suspended in the stationary carriage before departing the scene with another man. I think this melodrama was partly inspired by watching Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which contains a nightmarish carousel scene.
By the third hour of the Black and White Night filming, everything in the room was revolving. We’d drunk our fill of cocktails in the short breaks and I’d even switched into dark glasses to cover my tracks, which the editorial continuity tactfully ignored. As the goodwill of seven o’clock turned into the slightly impatient entitlement of eleven, we still had plenty of numbers to play. Roy continued to wring the drama out of each song, “The Comedians” being among them. It was even more thrilling to sit behind him and hear Roy wind through the modulations that took the melody to the very edge of my vocal range and hear him hit that final note, strong and true.
The party finally reached a giddy conclusion at about one a.m., and everyone made their way home or to their hotels.
Sometime around dawn, the walls of my room began to shake. My first half-conscious thought was that I was on a plane that had hit turbulence. In the next instant, I was standing in a doorframe, as someone had once told me to do during an earthquake.
The second jolt was more obvious. People hurried down the fire stairs and out into the back patio of the hotel, where breakfast tables were hastily set, slightly away from the windows, just in case they shattered and rained down in shards.
People strolled out casually into the unwelcome sunlight, trying to look unruffled, affecting the air that they always took breakfast at this unholy hour, despite the fact that they were clutching their wallets, their address books, their passports, and the keys to getaway cars.
As the aftershocks sent visible ripples through the concrete parapet at the poolside, I ordered a glass of orange juice, a cup of strong coffee, and waited for the end to come.