01.28.2021
AMERICANA SIN LÁGRIMAS – PART FIVE
1984 – “Goodbye Cruel World”.
I’d taken to the road with just an acoustic guitar and to locate songs of which I’d lost possession in the studio. “Home Truth” was one in point.
Its first verse concluded.
“You still close your eyes when I kiss you
And I close them too
But we didn’t open them again, quite as wide as we should
This is where the Home Truth ends”
Most of the songs I was writing had a similar theme of one door closing and another opening, love looked at from a different point of view, without escape clauses, trapdoors or the disguises and evasions that tricky words can sometimes offer.
1985 – Somewhere above the Pacific Ocean.
On a flight from New Zealand to Tokyo, T Bone Burnett took out a sheaf of paper and wrote the titles of my latest songs:
“Indoor Fireworks”
“I’ll Wear It Proudly”
“Poisoned Rose”
“American Without Tears”
“I Hope You’re Happy Now”
“Our Little Angel”
and
“Sleep Of The Just”
These songs had been cut out from somewhere full of hurt. I set myself the task of speaking plainly with a simple carriage of a country ballad form or the kind of song I imagined Charlie Rich might one day sing.
Next to each song title T Bone wrote the names of the proposed band for each song with a fountain pen.
It might have been the gin I was drinking but the names alone made my head spin, among them, “Jim Keltner”, who I knew from records by John Lennon and Ry Cooder, “Earl Palmer”, who I knew played on Little Richard’s records before moving to Los Angeles and playing on countless Wrecking Crew sessions, “Ray Brown”, the jazz bassist with a long association with Oscar Peterson and the former husband of Ella Fitzgerald, who played with everyone from Charlie Parker to Frank Sinatra.
Then there was “James Burton”, best known for his early work with Ricky Nelson and as Elvis Presley’s guitar player for the last seven years of his life but to me, the Telecaster master who had lit up the records by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s “Hot Band”.
It looked both impressive and improbable on the page.
Over another gin and tonic, I said to T Bone, “So, you can just call them up and they’ll play on your record?”
I’d imagined this new record might be one side of acoustic songs recorded with this new cast of players and a second side of electric arrangements with the Attractions.
It just didn’t work out that way.
The opening session yielded six songs cut with three former members of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band – James Burton, bassist, Jerry Scheff and drummer Ronnie Tutt, pretty much put paid to that plan.
By the time we’d cut five more tunes with the two other line-ups there was little more for an understandably suspicious and disgruntled Attractions to record other than the most bitter song in the collection: “Suit Of Lights.”
By then I’d written and recorded, “Brilliant Mistake” which provided the album’s title: “King Of America” and the rest was misery.
1986 – Broadway Theatre, NYC.
A five-night stand on Great White Way, one show with the Attractions playing the songs from, “Blood & Chocolate”, the NYC debut of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook (with guest M.C.s Buster Poindexter and the team of Penn & Teller) and an evening with my accomplices from, “King Of America”.
There was an evening when I left both bands at the hotel ordering room service, while I played a solo set.
I was having a ball and finding brand new ways to lose money at the same time.
The “King Of America” ballads might not have made a viable set alone, so to these I added, “That’s How You Got Killed Before”, an opener written by Dave Bartholomew, Waylon Jennings’ “The Only Daddy That’ll Walk The Line” allowing James Burton to cut loose and a couple of Memphis songs from a group of tunes that I’d been circling for a few of years as studio warm-up numbers – “It Tears Me Up”, “Pouring Water On A Drowning Man” and Joe Tex’s “Tell Me Right Now”.
Then there was, “All These Things”, an Allen Toussaint song that I’d first learned from The Uniques recording on the Jin Label.
It would be thirty years before I returned to that song with the author at the piano at Piety Street Studio, New Orleans in 2005.
London – 1965.
I’d known Mose Allison’s arrangement of “Live The Life I Love” since buying Georgie Fame’s “Fast At Last” in 1965.
That E.P. introduced me to the songs of Lambert Hendricks and Ross, “Point Of No Return”, a Goffin/King song originally cut by Louis Jordan and The Tympany Five for Ray Charles’ Tangerine Records and a song he’d cut himself for Atlantic: “Get On The Right Track”.
It was down that track that I followed “Live The Life I Love” back to the Muddy Waters original Chess version, produced by the composer: Willie Dixon.
This was my thinking when we arranged Mose Allison’s “Your Mind Is On Vacation” to yield to Sonny Boy Williamson’s song, “Your Funeral And My Trial” just as it was only my own stricken conscience that would make me derail a perfectly fine Attractions set of New Wave faves with Charlie Rich’s song of atonement, “I’ll Make It All Up To You” back in 1984.
1990 – Hollywood, CA.
Some of the songs I’ve dreamed eventually made their way to the singers I’d imagined singing them.
Dusty Springfield recorded, “Just A Memory”, Chet Baker sang and played “Almost Blue” in his last concerts and the one song not written by Roy Orbison that was performed in his “Black & White Special” television special was the song I’d written for him, “The Comedians”.
Other times, writing songs for another to sing is a little like cutting a suit of clothes from looking at photographs of your client.
The arms end up too long or pants hanging an inch or two from the shoes.
“Why Can’t A Man Stand Alone” was originally written for Sam Moore but he needed less words and more music to take flight.
I thought I’d tailor made a tune for a blue sophisticate in “Upon A Veil Of Midnight Blue” which I wrote for Charles Brown, after his early ‘90s comeback at the Cinegrill at the Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood, where he’d held sway in the late ‘40s as part of “Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers”.
The song seemed like it might suit Charles like olives in a martini glass.
One verse picked its way through a tangle of rhymes and reason…
“You find your tongue is tied
You’re words escape and hide
But she’s so patient and kind
She’s prepared to read your mind
That’s all very well ’til you find
Because of the wine you drank
Your mind is just a blank”
Which Charles boiled down to the essentials,
“I find it hard to think when I drink”
We agreed to publish his revision as a co-write and I held on to the original to sing for myself.
There’s a photo from that night, taken in the lobby of Roosevelt Hotel, standing between Charles Brown – magnificent in his captain’s cap – and Bonnie Raitt – one of the hosts of that gala evening – I looked like someone who had snuck into the proceedings wearing a black priest’s coat and someone else’s beard.
Making up the quartet, his head thrown back in laughter, one of the many notable of the audience members who had come to pay witness to Charles Brown’s return engagement, a giant of man.
It was Willie Dixon.
A couple of years earlier, T Bone Burnett produced Willie’s album, “Hidden Charms”.
Given that he wrote, codified or produced half of the Chess catalogue, providing the rocket fuel for the Beat Boom, The Blues Boom and what came to be known as the British Invasion, Willie Dixon had not been the featured artist on that many records.
The album was named from Wille’s song, “Hidden Charms”, cut first by Charles Clark with “The Willie Dixon Band” on the wonderfully named, Artistic record label.
The song was then covered by Howlin’ Wolf in 1963 with a young Hubert Sumlin on guitar.
In the last ten years of his life, Hubert’s manager and companion, Toni-Ann brought him to our shows and we got a chance to play together on a handful of occasions, once at a Howlin’ Wolf salute on 42nd St. with a swinging band that included Levon Helm and Jimmy Vivino with myself and David Johanson as guest singers.
One of my favourite afternoons was sitting on my tour bus in Memphis, watching Hubert watch his younger self playing “Shake For Me” with Wolf on a recently re-issued DVD of “The American Folk-Blues Tour” – a package show for which we must be grateful to German television producers for capturing film footage of these artists at the time when American networks rarely pointed a camera at the riches under their noses.
The final time Hubert played with The Imposters was probably Hubert’s last concert. He went down to Arkansas for a festival date a couple of days later after which his health failed him.
On that night in New Jersey, despite having to play sitting down with an oxygen tank at his side, there was nothing hidden, not his heart, not his humour and none of his charms.
To be continued……
1) YOUR MIND IS ON VACATION/YOUR FUNERAL MY TRIAL – Elvis Costello & His Confederates (“Live On Broadway”)
2) THAT’S HOW YOU GOT KILLED BEFORE – The Dirty Dozen Bass Band with Elvis Costello from “The New Orleans Album”
3) THE MONKEY – Dave Bartholomew
4) MONKEY TO MAN – Elvis Costello & The Imposters from “The Delivery Man”
5) I’LL WEAR IT PROUDLY – Elvis Costello from “King Of America”
6) IN ANOTHER ROOM – Elvis Costello & The Imposters from “The Clarksdale Sessions”
7) POURING WATER ON A DROWNING MAN – Elvis Costello from “Blood & Chocolate”
8) IT TEARS ME UP – Elvis Costello & His Confederate (“Live On Broadway”)
9) DO RIGHT WOMAN – Aretha Franklin from “I Never Loved A Man”
10) THAT’S NOT THE PART OF HIM YOU’RE LEAVING – Elvis Costello from “National Ransom”
11) TELL ME RIGHT NOW – Elvis Costello from “Blood & Chocolate”
12) THE DARK END OF THE STREET – Elvis Costello & The Imposters – “The Clarksdale Sessions”
13) ALL THESE THINGS – The Uniques from “Golden Hits”
14) SITTIN’ & THINKIN’ – Charlie Rich from “The Fabulous Charlie Rich”
15) THERE WON’T BE ANYMORE – Elvis Costello & The Attractions – “Almost Blue”
16) FEEL LIKE GOING HOME (Demo) – Charlie Rich from “The Essential Charlie Rich”
17) I’LL MAKE IT ALL UP TO YOU – Jerry Lee Lewis from “Original Golden Vol.2”
18) I WONDER HOW SHE KNOWS – Charles Brown – from “Someone To Love”