Complicated Shadows (23 page)

On 15 March, the ‘Armed Funk’ roadshow pulled into The Agora Club in Columbus, Ohio, half way between Cleveland and Cincinatti. The short, fifteen-song set had
been unremarkable, a distressingly routine feature of the tour. Afterwards, they returned to the Holiday Inn to discover that Stephen Stills and his band were also staying after playing a gig at
another venue in the city.

‘I remember seeing this other bus in the driveway of the hotel and the general feeling on our bus was – another group! Right!’, recalled Pete Thomas. ‘It would be like if
sailors had come into harbour and found another boat there, and they knew they were having a night off. “Oh, we’re bound to end up having a punch up with them.” And then finding
out who it was. Whoooah! It’s Stephen Stills! The old school.’
⁶

Stills was the kind of musical ‘dinosaur’ who ‘just seemed to typify a lot of the things I thought were wrong with American music’,
⁷
according to Elvis. He had been a member of Buffalo Springfield and, of course, Crobsy, Stills and Nash (and occasionally Young), one of Elvis’s favourite groups back in
the early ’70s. But times had changed, for both Elvis and Stills. Post-punk, his career had faltered and he was regarded by Elvis and the band as a burnt-out relic of a bygone age, ripe for
abuse.

Stills was with his manager Jim Lindersmith, percussionist Jim Lala, backing singer Bonnie Bramlett and other members of his party in the bar of the Holiday Inn when the Costello contingent
joined them. Pete and Steve didn’t stay long and it was left to Elvis and Bruce to continue the conversation with their fellow musicians. What had started as reasonably good-natured joshing
soon grew much nastier as the alcohol flowed.

‘I think we started it,’ says Bruce Thomas. ‘Steve Stills was being quite friendly, but we would just take exception to anybody. That was the way we did it.’ As Bruce and
Elvis trotted out their usual routine of anti-Amercian jibes that had been a feature of their US tours since the very beginning, Stills’ camp began to get agitated.

‘Stills said, “If you hate us so much, what are you doing in our country?”,’ recalls Thomas. ‘And Elvis said
something like,
“We’ve come to take your money and your women.” Then it just got worse. “What about our music?” “You haven’t got any good music.” “What about
James Brown?” “James Brown?” Bang! That’s pretty much how that one started. It was just us being obnoxious bastards.’

In this instance, being obnoxious bastards culminated in Elvis describing James Brown as ‘a jive-ass nigger’ and Ray Charles as ‘nothing but a blind, ignorant nigger’.
Before his final descent into these drunken bar-room taunts, Elvis had already responded to inquiries about his feelings on Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and other white artists with a volley of
obscenities. He would probably have said the same about Mozart, or Caruso, or John Lennon, had their names come up. It was not a considered argument.

Nevertheless, Stills was outraged and left the bar, but other members of his party stuck around, including Bonnie Bramlett. At some point during the ensuing squabble, in which Bramlett
reportedly told Elvis ‘that anybody that mean and hateful had to have a little bitty dick’, the argument became physical and Elvis dislocated his shoulder. He was so drunk he barely
noticed. ‘I only remembered that the thing had even taken place when I got back to my hotel room and discovered that my arm hurt somewhat,’
⁸
he later said.

The fracas was later described by the bartender as ‘just a lot of shoving’, and certainly it was a minor bout. The Attractions often had more physical bust-ups between themselves,
and there was no question of the following night’s show in Detroit not going ahead. As the tour moved on and the Elvis camp celebrated
Armed Forces
hitting the Billboard Top Ten in
America, the only remaining legacy of the incident appeared to be the fact that for a few days Elvis was wearing his arm in a sling when he wasn’t playing.

However, Bonnie Bramlett had other ideas, and once she decided to leak the story to the media it spread like bush-fire. Elvis opened the show at Rochester Auditorium on 24 March with ‘I
Stand Accused’, his only tacit acknowledgement that something might be amiss, but soon everyone could see that he was in real trouble. ‘By then it’s on the news and in the
papers,’ remembers Bruce
Thomas. ‘They’ve gone public with it and there’s death threats.’

By the time they hit New York a few days later, the death threats were being taken very seriously. Jake drafted in two armed policemen to look after Elvis around the clock as fears for his
safety grew. Something clearly had to be done. The emergency press conference called at CBS headquarters in New York on 30 March was seen as a last chance to salvage something from the mess.
Whether he was a racist or not – and once the dust had settled it was generally accepted that he was not – wasn’t really the issue, merely the catalyst. In reality, Elvis was
dragged in front of the press not to atone for his comments about Ray Charles and James Brown, but to atone for his behaviour towards the press themselves, to be contrite and charming; to repent.
Had he done so, he would have been let off the hook, and CBS would have been soothed.

But typically, Elvis couldn’t allow himself to back down. He badly misjudged his approach, simply adding more confusion and resentment where there was already plenty.

The fall-out was immense. Even as the press conference was taking place, in the same building executives from CBS were discussing how best to proceed with Elvis’s career. Reportedly, they
even discussed dropping him from the label, but ultimately decided against it. However, neither did they opt to stand up and fight on behalf of their embattled artist, unprepared to endure the bad
press and escalating costs of trying to get Elvis’s image back on track in America. Nor – on the strength of his performance with the press – were they convinced that Elvis would
comply with the need for greater accessibility and charm required to win the media back over.

The simplest option seemed to be to let him wither on the vine.
Armed Forces
had risen to No. 10 at the time of the incident and further progress was confidently expected, but by the
end of April the album had left the Top 30 and was fading fast. Columbia declined to release a follow-up single to ‘Accidents Will Happen’, which had stalled at No. 101 in the singles
charts. When Jake had suggested that CBS book New York’s Shea Stadium for Elvis after
an estimated 250,000 people responded to a draw for free Costello tickets on the
radio, the label hadn’t been interested. Days later, Riviera sent a truckload of shovels to CBS executives, with a caustic note attached: ‘If you
really
want to bury my act, I
thought you could do with some more help.’

There were still shows to do, and the band played on: 1 April was to have been the triumphant pinaccle of the tour, with Elvis playing three club dates in New York on the same day in an
‘April Fool’s Day Marathon’. Specially printed singles of ‘Talking In The Dark’ b/w ‘Wednesday Week’ were given to each audience member, all 1200 of whom
had won tickets via a radio promotion.

It was another of Jake’s bright ideas which merely became a considerable security headache under the prevailing circumstances. Again, Elvis didn’t make any specific allusion to the
incident or its fall-out, but those reading between the lines found some clues. At the opening gig at the tiny Lone Star Club, he joked, ‘This playing three clubs in one night is
someone’s idea of an April Fool, and I think I know who the fool is,’ before pointing to himself. Then again, he seemed more relaxed than he had been for some time, imbued, perhaps,
with a sense of relief that the bubble had finally burst.

The second gig at the Bottom Line was attended by Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, not to mention a gaggle of Rock Against Racism protesters, disappointed Elvis fans by any other name, sending a
message to their man with placards reading ‘Kick Him Again, Bonn!’ and ‘Send Elvis Back To Computer School’. He started the show with ‘I Stand Accused’.

There was no let up in security. Indeed, with death threats flying around, the sense of menace and paranoia had only increased. At the final show at Great Gilder-sleeves two extra bodyguards
prowled the side of the stage, while Hells Angels were drafted in to back up tour manager Des Brown. Ever-present
Rolling Stone
scribe Fred Schruers reported that one badly beaten young
fan was led bleeding onto the pavement, apparently having been set upon by about eleven members of the Costello
entourage. The day ended at 3.30 a.m., and not a minute too
soon.

The tour finally limped to a close on 14 April at Rhode Island College in Providence, and all concerned were left to survey the wreckage. It was almost unfathomable. ‘We never really
recovered from that tour,’ admits Bruce Thomas. ‘Every time Elvis is doing something well, he kind of sabotages it. Even then that mechanism was at work, subconsciously sabotaging the
possibility of being a really big, A-League band. We were probably poised to be like Elton John or Bruce Springsteen.’

Elvis, it seems, had taken a look over to the other side and decided he didn’t want to go there after all.

* * *

In early May, as the aptly titled ‘Accidents Will Happen’ was released as the second UK single from
Armed Forces
, Elvis took stock of his life and his
music. He was twenty-four, flirting with divorce and deeply unsatisfied with the way his career was panning out. ‘I decided, “That’s it! I’ve got to get a
grip,”’ he recalled. ‘There’s something wrong. The mission has gone wrong somewhere.’
⁹

He had reluctantly parted from Bebe Buell at the end of the US tour, and wouldn’t see her again for over four years. Following the incident in Columbus, Elvis had been ‘driven deeper
into cocaine and alcohol and despair’,
¹⁰
according to Buell, and she had caught the brunt of it when the tour arrived in New York. She had
arranged to meet up with Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall at Elvis’s show at the Bottom Line on 1 April, but had remained in her hotel room following a bitter row with Elvis in the bar of the
Mayflower Hotel the previous night. He was suspicious of her persona and her lifestyle, and swung between helpless desire of her beauty and unpleasant contempt at what she supposedly represented.
Consumed by guilt and self-loathing at the way he was behaving, Elvis was also convinced that some terrible harm was going to befall them both. Meanwhile, Bebe had fallen pregnant to Elvis three
times in the previous six months, and each time had
suffered a miscarriage. It was a mess, and one that both of them finally seemed resigned to walking away from.

Breaking off all contact with Bebe Buell had been a prerequisite for his return to Mary, Matthew and the family home. By now, the Costellos had moved from Whitton to a small but infinitely more
upmarket terraced property in St James Cottages in Richmond, just over the river from Twickenham. It had been bought largely on the proceeds of Linda Rondstadt’s recording of
‘Alison’ on her latest album,
Living In The USA
, for which Elvis had reportedly received around £30,000. As he later admitted, he was sniffy about Rondstadt’s
syrupy treatment of his song, but he wasn’t too sniffy about the money.

Early signs of Elvis and Mary’s marriage reconciliation included a short trip to France and the couple’s attendance at shows by the J. Geils Band in both Paris and London in mid-May.
Later that month, Elvis, Mary and Matthew all took the train up to Liverpool for a trip home to see Lilian, taking the chance to play a little music at the same time. It had been a month without
any live action, and it was a somewhat bruised and battered Attractions who made an impromptu appearance at a Radar Records party on 22 May, held on the Royal Iris ferry which travelled between
Liverpool and Birkenhead.

The headline acts were Clive Langer and The Boxes and The Yachts, both of whom were managed by Jake Riviera and signed to Radar. According to the
NME
, Elvis and the band looked
‘anaemic and unhealthy’ as they opened the proceedings with a six-song set which – aside from an opening ‘I Stand Accused’ – was all singles, but Elvis seemed in
good humour and at ease with the small crowd.

Following the nerves and neuroses of the ‘Armed Funk’ tour everything seemed slightly lacklustre, probably pleasantly so. The rising balloon of Elvis’s career had been pricked
and the sense of urgency and momentum slowly leaked out. He needed time to recover, both physically and emotionally. It was the longest – indeed only – sustained break that Elvis and
The Attractions had had from touring for almost exactly two years, and over the summer they all took time to regroup and recover from the largely
self-inflicted mental and
physical batterings that had been meted out in America.

Occasionally, they would meet up to rehearse and demo new songs, slotting in a one-off recording session at Abbey Road in late May designed to yield a ‘stand-alone’ single before
work began on the new album in the autumn. Elvis chose an obscure cover of ‘So Young’ by the Australian band Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons, backed with The Merseybeats’ ‘I Stand
Accused’. However, the session at Abbey Road with Nick Lowe at the helm was ‘blighted by flying coffee cups and overwhelming blueness’,
¹¹
and the plan for a single was quietly shelved.

There was the occasional festival appearance in Europe and five Scandinavian dates in late summer, but everyone had other things to do: The Attractions recorded a surprisingly poor
‘solo’ record with Roger Bechirian, a forgettable affair released as
Mad About The Wrong Boy
in September 1980, while Elvis produced the debut album by British ska group The
Specials at TW Studios throughout June.

He kept it simple, using what he had learned from Nick Lowe: trying not to get in the way of a great live band, while at the same time doing all he could to get the best performances down on
tape. He also brought the more specialised Attractions recording ‘method’ to the project. ‘The main thing I remember is him sitting behind the desk and falling off his
chair,’ said chief-Special Jerry Dammers. ‘Everyone was pissed. We spent most of the time in the pub over the road and then we used to work during closing time, which was between four
and six in the afternoon.’
¹²