“I don’t think that’s a particularly good line. I think it’s a lousy one, actually. I prefer the line before it, ‘With these vulgar fractions of the treble clef.’ That’s just my personal preference. The other one’s a bit of an untidy payoff, one of the worst lines on the record.”
“Seriously? I love it! It’s a line I’d use in a pub.”
“Well, yeah. I suppose you’re right...”
This exchange between Elvis Costello and journalist Timothy White appears in Musician magazine from October of 1983. The line Costello’s dismissing with characteristic insolence is “I wish you luck with a capital ‘F’,” from his song “Love Went Mad” on Punch The Clock. Like White, I loved the line, thought it was hilarious and spiky. I couldn’t imagine actually saying it, but I could imagine overhearing it, envious of the one who was so clever. That Costello liked his preceding line better disappointed me. At the time I was wrestling with Costello’s lyrics, moving, as so many of his admirers do, between cherishing his most incisive, cutting observations, and wrinkling my brow at his willfully obscure lines. “Vulgar fractions of the treble clef.” Huh? Wishing someone luck with a Fuck you—now that I got.
I wanted Costello to sing to me clearly about the heart, about teenage swooning and naked embarrassment. For a while I’d been wrestling with “Man Out of Time” from his previous album, Imperial Bedroom, a song I now link with a deep and disarming crush I had at the time. From a well-worn storyboard: she worked on the newspaper at her high school, the all-girl sister institution to the all-boy Catholic school I attended. We’d meet after school at a print shop in an industrial area in Silver Spring to work on layout, debate pica width, the sizes and quality of grainy black-and-white photos. She had red hair that fell casually and a vibrant, throaty laugh. Later in the spring, we were both among the editors selected to attend a journalism convention at Columbia University in New York City. We had adjoining rooms in a hotel, hung out in sweatpants and sweatshirts; there was 3 a.m. flirting, and sprawling, noisy Manhattan outside of our windows, the vast city echoing the enormity of my feelings for her and the din of my own inadequacies. The end of the semester meant the end of the time we’d spend together. I’d called her, we’d talked, but I hadn’t made a move, too shy and uncertain and, frankly, in the face of my own feelings. (“Let’s have some new clichés,” Samuel Goldwyn commanded.) The newness and urgency of that early crush are stoked every time I listen to “Man Out of Time.” Though the lyrics continue to stiff-arm me, the mid-paced melody’s grandeur and glorious, sorrowful changes narrate those dumbstruck days of confusion and all kinds of romantic doubt.
Costello himself was facing serious misgivings in the early 1980s. Lingering were the bruises left by his reckless 1979 confrontation with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in a Holiday Inn bar in Columbus, Ohio. The controversy of the fatuous remarks he made that night would follow him for years, despite numerous public apologies and sober regrets. His fame was infamous, and his songs were graphically evoking life, both at home and in hotels, marked by strife, cruelty, and drunken misbehavior. By the time he was writing the batch of songs for Imperial Bedroom, he was questioning his very identity. He’s since described “Man Out of Time,” a song that originated in profound despair, as the key song on that album. As he put it several years after the song’s release: “A picture of decay, corruption, and betrayal. At the time it all seemed to suit rather well.” Later, he clarified the unhappy picture:
It was being an ‘adult’ that was most of the problem. That and the fact that there seemed to be little time for ‘sober reflection.’ The public and private upheavals of the previous four or five years had heightened my already melancholy disposition.
I intend that most ‘private’ matters should remain that way, but when the opening track is called, ‘Beyond Belief,’ and the key song of a record is entitled, ‘Man Out of Time,’ you don’t have to be a detective or a psychiatrist to work out what is going on.
Disgusted, disenchanted and occasionally in love, ‘Man Out of Time’ was the product of a troubling dialogue with myself that continued through my more regretful moments.
Costello recalls looking at his reflection in the window of a Scandinavian tour bus in the dead of winter—this was probably in early 1981:
...without any idea who the hell I was supposed to be. I was trying to think or feel my way out of a defeated and exhausted frame of mind to something more glorious. This was resolved in song, one shivering, hungover morning in manicured gardens of a remote Scottish hotel. The house in which we were staying had played a very minor part in one of Britain’s most notorious political scandals, apparently serving briefly as a bolt-hole for one of the disgraced protagonists. I actually delighted at the thought of this sordid history; it suited my mood. I can’t say that the words and ideas that emerged from these experiences were exactly welcome news to some of the band members. Like I could give damn (1).
Alone, Costello demoed “Man Out of Time” at Pathway Studios in London in August of 1981. At this point, he’s singing the song without really believing in it—or so it sounds, with the basic four-on-the-floor beat and kiddie Farfisa organ. Most demos are hesitant by nature, and Costello hasn’t returned to the song’s origin yet, changed; he’s somewhere between inspiration and effect. Three months later, at George Martin’s AIR Studios, he recorded two versions of the song with The Attractions, one a messy, noisy affair that found the band thrashing away tunelessly, Costello howling like a B-movie maniac, the musicians afraid or otherwise unwilling to face the song’s noxious beauty. “We were trying to beat the songs into submission,” Costello confessed.
They eventually worked out the elegantly sprawling arrangement that appears on Imperial Bedroom. The transformation from the band’s first attempt—snippets of which are included as the intro and outro of the album version—to the final result is striking. Rather than thrash the truth out of the song, the band members—Costello on guitar, Steve Nieve on piano and organ, Bruce Thomas on bass, and Pete Thomas on drums—carefully but powerfully evoke a sense of gaudy shame, Nieve’s twinkling grand piano offering an ironic and witty commentary on the fall-from-grace trope. They’ve slowed things down—the song needing a measured pace for the reckoning the sorry singer makes of himself and others. Played in stately 4/4 time, the song consists of three extended 21-bar verses, a five-bar bridge, and a six-bar chorus. (A middle-section, if as emotionally weighty as the rest, would’ve brought the whole thing down.) And somewhere during the sessions Costello found his melody, or it discovered him, in the achingly pretty lines he phrases as musical equivalents of rueful head shaking. As the band subdues things in the last verse, Costello drapes phrases onto the changes, sometimes pushing against the beat, sometimes surrendering, sometimes moving in between, following the movement between heart and head. He sings the words in ways that enact their deep and private meaning. For himself.
For me, and for many other listeners, the lyrics were baffling. The album came with a lyric sheet, though, obnoxiously, the words were printed en masse as a giant text block without punctuation. Years later, after I read commentary on the song and album, including Costello’s own, I was able to piece together the song’s cultural and site-specific details in such a way that evokes continental disgrace, desperation, scandal, regret. But it didn’t matter that the words were beyond my immediate comprehension. The song scored my intensely lived days anyway. “Great art can communicate before it is understood,” says T.S. Eliot. How can something I don’t understand come to mean so much? Can an ache and its balm be translated by the yearning stretch from F# to G# and back to E, even if the words among the notes are perplexing? Over the years, stray lines from the song would come to matter to me a great deal—“The high heel he used to be has been ground down”; “He’s got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge”; and, especially, “You drink yourself insensitive and hate yourself in the morning”—unwelcome sentiments I was recognizing in myself and in my behavior toward some people close to me but, at this vantage point, decades from hearing the song for the first time, I wonder if those lines have grown on me over time, over distance, have come to penetrate in a way they couldn’t have in my adolescence?
When I listen to “Man Out of Time” now, I’m possessed of the image of me and that girl stepping from the bus that brought us back home from that New York trip, a late afternoon in late spring with rain coming down in sheets. We said See ya in teenage nonchalance, forced on my part, and that was it. That utterly ordinary, extraordinary moment—the pained inability to name and express feeling and affection—is evoked by a song that has nothing to do with my experience, that I still don’t fully comprehend, written by an adult steeped in self-loathing, fumbling his way through public scandal and tarnished cultural history to find a way of interpreting his own louche and unhappy behavior in the public eye. On the other side of an ocean from me.
November, 1966. Sam Moore and Dave Prater are in the Stax Studio at 926 East McLemore Avenue, in Memphis. They’re running through an arrangement for a new song written by Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter, who are also guiding and arranging the session for which the Stax house band, Booker T. and The MGs, are poised.
There is some dispute as to the origins of “When Something is Wrong with My Baby,” one of the most powerfully persuasive love songs of its era. In Soulsville USA, Rob Bowman recounts that Porter crafted the lyrics:
...while he was married to a woman whom he had impregnated when they were both still in high school. ‘I was quite honestly miserable with her,’ sighs Porter. ‘There was no love there. In the early part of my career I would fantasize about a lot of the things that I would come up with for my lyrics. I was in bed one night feeling miserable. Big house and a big car, but I’m not in love and I’m not happy. I was fantasizing about what it would really be like to be in love. I got up out of bed and went downstairs and said, “If I was in love with somebody then the relationship should be such that if something is wrong with her, something is wrong with me.” It was about two o’clock in the morning and I wrote the whole song.’ Porter called Hayes at nine the next morning, sang it for him over the phone, and said. ‘Man, we got a smash.’
More recently, Robert Gordon, in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, notes that Hayes remembered the song’s genesis quite differently. “One day David and I were tired, went home, and David’s wife at the time, he sat in the easy chair, pondering and toiling, and she said, ‘What’s wrong? Is something wrong with my baby?’ David jumped up and he rang me. ‘I got it, I got it.’ Tired after a whole day’s work, he got that inspiration and fired me up, came to my house and we wrote “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.” Sam and Dave came in—another hit record!” Regardless of who’s telling the truth here, this song transcends its origins. And by the time Moore and Prater, fully rehearsed, got around to recording the song on November 15, 1966, they were inside of it, and the genesis of something so eternal was beside the point. Gathering with the band—Booker T. Jones on organ, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, and Al Jackson on drums; Hayes added piano and the Memphis Horns were there, too—Sam & Dave tell us that it doesn’t matter whether the song issued from fantasy or from reality, from loss or from gain—what matters is the story it tells.
“When Something is Wrong with My Baby” begins minimally, in an almost childlike way, with four strums from Cropper’s and Dunn’s guitars, the simplest of chimes. After a double-time figure from Dunn, the verse begins with quietly descending piano triplets from Hayes, a bar before Moore enters to sing in front of the Stax band at their most economical—which is saying something. Is it possible for a band to play notes and for those note to disappear, leaving behind only the traces of those notes to be recorded? That’s what it sounds like is happening in the studio on this day. The band’s playing, restrained to the point of nearly vanishing, is all Sam & Dave need—all that the story needs—to be heard; the Memphis Horns that acquiesce throughout never get showy because they don’t have to. (On occasion, I run to the liner notes to assure myself that, yes, Al Jackson does appear on this song, so subtle and unadorned is his playing; was he recorded behind camouflage?) Booker T. and the MGs knew in their collective heart that sometimes a band can get in the way. They get out of their own way on their quietly propulsive “Groovin’” from 1967 and still deliver a muscular performance—such were the enchanted physics at work at Stax Studio in the mid-1960s.
The story’s summed up in the song’s title, and essayed in the chorus: when something is wrong with my baby, something is wrong with me. This simple but vast discovery—that when your loved one is down, so will you be—I’d acted out before, dutifully, with other girls, with good intentions, but onstage, in front of footlights. Now when I listen to this song, I hear what I never heard, or couldn’t hear, during earlier years. When I rediscovered “When Something is Wrong with My Baby” after I’d been with Amy for a while, I thought: yes, this is love, helplessly. Moore and Prater, responding to Hayes and Porter, know and sing with deep gratitude. They address the song to an unknown other who might be doubting the relationship, because “she’s no good.” Sam & Dave respond, “she’s my woman and I know I’m her man.” Their confidence is palpable, and moving, and, as in all of their greatest performances, Moore and Prater sing as if they’re one man, navigating the conflicts and harmonies of pride, confidence, and endurance. (Never mind that their private lives were often in vivid conflict with romantic fidelity—see Moore’s account in the oral history written by Dave Marsh titled Sam and Dave: An Oral History.)
The chords are fairly simple, and the melody embellishes what’s left uncomplicated in the arrangement. Moore begins the song alone, somewhat tentatively, and offers the title as a statement, a sales pitch; we don’t have to believe him. I didn’t. And then Prater enters to sing the two-line bridge, a characteristic, gruffly sung refinement of his partner’s message— We’ve been through so much together / We stand as one, and that’s what makes it better—and the two, in touching unison, bring us to the chorus. The stirring changes in the bridge and the return to C for the chorus crack a code: now as they sing the title, it means something impossibly profound, as if the song has somehow aged and matured in one minute. It’s not a Hallmark sentiment—not what an affected child says. On the well-worn path of verse/ bridge/chorus, Hayes and Porter, as warmly and knowingly translated by the masters Sam & Dave, clarify the breadth and maturity, the value and empathy, of an adult relationship. It takes one minute and twenty-three seconds in the song before an epiphany glows; it took me years to turn toward that radiance, where, with me, having arrived on her own rocky terms, was Amy. “Oh, you just wouldn’t understand,” Sam & Dave sing. They’re singing to the doubters, but as I listen they’re singing to me, the naive kid from years ago.
In the early 1990s, Elvis Costello wrote “Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone,” a prideful paean to independence written (like “When Something is Wrong with My Baby”) in 6/8 time, and offered it to Moore. The song was seemingly well-suited for him, but he passed(2). “It’s easy to theorize songs for people, but they don’t always work out. For instance, I wrote “Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone” for Sam Moore, but he didn’t take it,” Costello admitted to Laura Emerick. “Now when I think about it, the song has too many words.” He added, knowingly: “Sometimes lyrics can get in the way of expression.” Indeed. The greatest line in “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” might occur in the second bridge, a wordless “Oh oh oh oh” from Sam Moore, crying and comprehending.
Peter Handke, from his essay “The Jukebox”:
In listening to a jukebox he was never beside himself, or feverish, or dreamy, as he otherwise was with music that affected him—even strictly classical music, and the seemingly rapturous music of earlier, preceding eras. The dangerous part about listening to music, someone had once told him, was the propensity it had to make one perceive something that remained to be done as already done. The jukebox sound of his early years, on the other hand, literally caused him to collect himself, and awakened, or activated, his images of what might be possible and encouraged him to contemplate them.
It’s the late 1980s, and Handke’s writing about his experiences writing about (or more accurately, not writing about) an essay on jukeboxes, those beloved, magical “music boxes” of his adolescence that signaled mystery and clarity alike. Writing in the distancing third-person, meandering among writer’s block, ennui, aimless traveling across eastern Europe, and sundry distractions, Handke navigates the irrational and substantial pleasures created in a tavern by a gleaming machine loaded with scratchy vinyl.
A bit later in the essay he describes a transcendent experience commencing with “the measured, positively ceremonial act of ‘going to push the buttons’.” It’s late winter, somewhere in the past; he’s in a jukebox café, reading, trying to work, but the jukebox has other plans. He writes:
This cafe was in a rather untypical location for such places, at the edge of the city park, and its glass display cases with pastries and its marble-topped tables were also incongruous. The box was playing, but he was waiting as usual for the songs he had selected; only then was it right. Suddenly, after the pause between records, which, along with those noises—clicking, a whirring sound of searching back and forth through the belly of the device, snapping, swinging into place, a crackle before the first measure—constituted the essence of the jukebox, as it were, a kind of music came swelling out of the depths that made him experience, for the first time in his life, and later only in moments of love, what is technically referred to as “levitation,” and which he himself, more than a quarter of a century later, would call—what? “epiphany”? “ecstasy”? “fusing with the world”? Or thus: “That—this song, this sound—is now me; with these voices; these harmonies, I have become, as never before in life, who I am: as this song is, so am I, complete”? (As usual there was an expression for it, but as usual it was not quite the same thing. He became one with the music.”)
A jukebox can narrate an evening, a long afternoon, or a moment, playing songs we choose, songs that we’re surprised by, songs that we’re ready to listen to again and again, or that we’re unwilling to hear. Of the many jukeboxes in front of which I’ve levitated—at Delilah’s in Chicago; at the International in New York City; the one at Millie & Al’s in Adam’s Morgan, Washington, D.C., that inexplicably played for free one long fantastic night in the 1980s; the one at the late, lamented Lakeside Lounge in the East Village stocked by the matchless James “The Hound” Marshall—I have perhaps the greatest affection for the jukebox that glowed in the Union Bar and Grill in Athens, Ohio.
In 1961, singer Patsy Cline was emerging from a lengthy commercial dry spell, difficult now to imagine of a gifted, iconic artist made preternaturally timeless and influential via her early, tragic death. Since the mid-1950s she’d been releasing singles on the Pasadena-based Four Star Records label, but, with the exception of “Walking After Midnight” and its flipside, “Poor Man’s Roses (Or a Rich Man’s Gold),” released in 1957, none had charted on either the Billboard Country or Pop charts. In 1961 her fortunes changed, thanks to two suddenly popular singles, the Hank Cochran / Harlan Howard–penned “I Fall to Pieces” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” which peaked on the Country chart at numbers one and two, respectively. Cline, frustrated but single-mindedly devoted to her craft and career, and signed now to Decca Records, had agreed to stray from her beloved honky-tonk toward the more pop-leaning, commercially viable “Nashville Sound” in the hands of producer Owen Bradley and Nashville’s “A-Team” of ace studio musicians. If you were near a transistor radio in the early months of 1962 and heard “She’s Got You,” Cline’s follow-up to “Crazy,” you recognized the harmonies of The Jordanaires from Elvis’s recent hits, though you probably wouldn’t have known their name. Their sweetly decorous tones over the simple, two-chord opening, the twinkling piano, announce a wholesome song, one that’s hopeful at keeping loss and grief at arm’s length.
And then Cline begins to sing. Though, really, she’s continuing to sing the song she was introduced to in her kitchen a week earlier. Eager to be the one to compose (and to cash in on) Cline’s next single, Cochran called her excitedly after he’d written the song, inspired by the melancholy image of old photos in his desk in his writing studio and composed in ten minutes. After stopping at a liquor store for Cline, he hurried to her house on the west side of Nashville and assured her with confidence that he’d written a big one. According to Ellis Nassour, Cochran and Cline sat in her kitchen, opened the bottle, and by the time Cochran played the simple, devastating song and Cline learned it, the two were helpless with tears. There’s an image: Hank Cochran and Patsy Cline weeping under the kitchen light, a guitar, a drained bottle, an eternal song echoing off linoleum floors and the icebox.
Cline phoned Bradley and sang “She’s Got You” to him down the line. The producer knew at once that it was a score, and ushered her into the studio the next week. On December 17, supported by The Jordanaires, Harold Bradley on bass, Floyd Cramer on piano, Murrey “Buddy” Harman on drums, Walter Haynes on steel guitar, Randy Hughes on acoustic guitar, Grady Martin on electric guitar, Bob Moore on acoustic bass, and Bill Pursell on organ, Cline recorded “She’s Got You” over three hours at the Quonset Hut Studio at 804 16th Avenue South in Nashville. That’s a lot of musicians creating music that I have to remind myself is actually there. All I hear is Patsy, her throaty contralto so resonant that the affecting leap to the word “different” in each verse—the song’s highest note and the bruising discovery around which the song turns—feels willed against will, unavoidable, enormous. In under three minutes, cherished mementoes, warmed by affection and sentiment—a clutch of photographs, a stack of 45s, a class ring—are forlornly recognized as things, simply, paltry stand-ins for the passions the giver is now giving elsewhere.
Cline’s biography has been shared often: her father abandoned the family when she was in high school; her devotion to singing and her art bore her through a meager upbringing, an unhappy first marriage, a devastating automobile accident that nearly killed her, commercial pitfalls, and vexed recording sessions. “She was a hurt individual, a great cut-up on the outside but hurting on the inside.” So observed Lightnin’ Chance, the venerable mid-century Nashville session bass player, to Nassour. “Some of it went back to her childhood when her father deserted the family. We got into this minutely, talking in the back of those cars, go- ing from date to date. The secret behind Patsy was how she lived every note and word of her songs.” Chance recalls recording “A Church, a Courtroom, and Then Good-bye,” an early Cline side. “There was a line—it’s the only one I remember—that told how she hated the sight of that courtroom where man-made laws pushed God’s law aside. You could feel the hate and bitterness, her own experiences. Patsy had a story to tell, and nobody ever knew what it was. If there were parallels in her music, she had a way of identifying with them.”
I willfully ignored them. The jukebox at the Union often played Cline’s greatest hits album, and I was often there to hear. The perpetually lurid low-red glow of my beloved bar shadowed a nightly blend of graduate students, townies, and misfits, and my friends and I would close the joint Thursdays through Sundays. I was 350 miles away from my college girlfriend and, loosened by the distance, began a relationship with N., a fellow grad student, borne of attraction, the bunker mentality of new, scared M.A. candidates, and, mostly, booze. That I was cheating on my long-term girlfriend was rarely acknowledged directly, and, besides, the pleasure of waking up in a different girl’s bed—the indulgences of newness—were too intense and fun for me to care much. This tale already smacks of banality, so I’ll flash forward: in Columbus, Ohio, on a long beery evening with friends, N. entwined her hand into mine as we weaved up High Street; one day at school I walked in to the graduate students’ office to see her wearing my dad’s vintage sweater that she’d borrowed from my closet without telling me; one too many private and meaningful glances across the bar. These were intimacies I didn’t want, and which I courted in a reckless, juvenile way. By the time the quarter ended, I’d pulled away, and I returned to my girlfriend in Maryland to spend Christmas, hopeful to wish away the messiness of the previous few months. When I returned to Athens, obnoxiously cool toward N., and was again holed up in the Union, a buddy told me that over the break she’d confessed to him of her nights soaking in her tub, while she played “She’s Got You” on her stereo over and over again, thinking of me and what could’ve been. When I heard this, I shrugged. I knew the song, of course—we all knew it by then, and loved it every night it played along with Van and Jerry Lee and the Beatles and Sly and so many others now lost to the vapors—but I hadn’t lived it. Even now I try to let myself off the hook: I was unwilling to hear the song’s truths, so cavalier was I to the woman and to what she was feeling.
The “You” in the song is a direct address; Cline’s singing to the man who left her. How that narrows the gap between the two of them! He’s not a “He,” distant and mythic, she’s looking at him—is he in one of the photographs? Is she gazing at him across a bar as the jukebox plays, the way N. gazed at me? Are they the only two in the room? Is she singing to him, their heartbreaking nearness made palpable? Elvis Costello (who now seems a Greek chorus in this essay on bafflement, clarity, and malice) recorded “She’s Got You” twice in 1981 during the Nashville recording sessions for his Almost Blue album; he also performed it live that year on a George Jones HBO special. Costello changed the song’s pronouns, singing “He’s Got You.” Had I heard his version during these messy years, even the switch to the culpable male perspective wouldn’t have landed, so committed was I to drunkenly avoiding my responsibilities. Hank Cochran was tuned in: a year after Cline’s death he wrote “A-11” (Buck Owens recorded it for his Together Again / My Heart Skips A Beat album in 1964) a tune where the singer begs the guy up at the jukebox not to select A-11. “This used to be our favorite spot,” he laments to his shot glass and whomever will listen. “And when she was here it was heaven. It was here she told me that she loved me. And she always played A-11.”
Someone hearing “She’s Got You” in the Union the night before I did, or the following night, or last week, listened, or didn’t, allowed the song in, or resisted it. Sometimes we hear songs in bars that, after Handke, move us so intensely that we feel loved, or that we’re in love; sometimes we hear songs that bring us back so cruelly to life that we cover our ears, or talk loudly to strangers or ourselves to cover the noise. Sometimes we hear a song that means everything to those in the world with heartache, and nothing to the sour, childish ones who refuse to hear it. When I listen to “She’s Got You” now, I am utterly, absurdly moved. The marriage of the simple melody and arrangement and Cline’s wide, adult voice, the controlled loveliness of her cry, dissolves me, and I’m again witness to the transformative power in art. In my early-20s I was too ungenerous, though hardly immune to sentiment. (Please don’t read the poems I wrote then.) My shrug at the knowledge that N. had spent much of her time away from me unhappy was posturing on my part, as, no doubt, the weeping in a bathtub listening to Pasty was, in some measure, dramatic on her part. Mine was a pose that deflected the song, sent it elsewhere, beyond my range of hearing, to the outer limits of wisdom. I was unwilling to step in the shoes of another.
On March 23, 1962, a year before her death, Cline performed “She’s Got You,” along with “Crazy,” for the Grand Ole Opry, of which she’d been a member for two years. Sponsored by Pet Milk, her performance was recorded at WSM’s Studio B in Nashville. Played live, the song retained a hint of Cline’s honky tonk past; it’s still pop, but rustic and spunky around the edges, Marvin Hughes’s piano galloping relative to Floyd Cramer’s restrained playing in the studio. And Patsy responds. She’s filmed from the waist up, wearing what I think is a brocade dress with a stiff, stylish collar, belted at the waist; her hair is sprayed firmly in place, her eyebrows are starkly painted, her lips are full, and she’s sporting the glittery headband she often wore after her car accident to help relieve the pressure of intense headaches. Her hands are held decorously in front of her, one wrist ringed with a bracelet, the other with an incongruous black watch. She moves, but barely, swaying to the song’s beat and despondency. The performance is superb, riveting really, given the unhappy foreknowledge of her imminent canonization. Her trademark “sobbing” catches in the phrase “The only thing new” are so moving as to reveal everything that her polite, affected television face masks. Perhaps because she was born one month after my mother, I feel a rebuke in Cline’s singing in this performance, some lesson that I’d boyishly scorned. She sings the song’s greatest lines—lines that could’ve been said by anyone in time reckoning with the unwanted burdens of memory—carefully, as if she’s struck by their profound simplicity, their old newness, every time: I’ve got your memories, or do they have me?
Picture a black-and-white Bill Owens photograph from one of his suburbia books. I’m an early teenager at a local garage sale, minding my younger brother, doing all I can to behave dutifully when all I really want to do is duck under this table and leaf through the cardboard box of thick, heavy Playboys I’ve spied. But I remain in charge, find myself at a table stacked with old albums, and, flipping through, am quickly caught short by the mod avocado- and forest-green colors of the cover of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man. I knew and loved the Blues Brothers’ hit from a couple years back, and I dig the striking Stax logo and the skinny suits and porkpie hats that Sam & Dave are rocking on the front and back covers. I speak the song titles aloud: Broke Down Piece Of Man; The Good Runs The Bad Away; Rich Kind Of Poverty; I’ve Seen What Loneliness Can Do . . . Pull back, a wideshot: a skinny kid, muttering something, surrounded by the sunny cast-offs of suburban idyll. He’ll buy that record for a quarter, take it home, play it on the family stereo, and, past the roadblocks of scratches and skips, will begin to mouth along to sounds, words, ideas, truths beyond his ken, adult stuff that, while the impossibly tight and funky groove of the album will forever delight and keep him moving, will stop him in his tracks one day, when he’s ready to listen.
Notes
(1) Within a few years, Costello would break up his band The Attractions...for the first time.
(2) “Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone” eventually appeared on Costello’s 1996 collection of songs written for other artists, All This Useless Beauty.
Elvis Costello and The Attractions, “Man Out of Time,” Imperial Bedroom, July 2, 1982; single, July 30.
Sam & Dave, “When Something is Wrong with My Baby,” Double Dynamite, December, 1966; single, January 3, 1967.
Patsy Cline, “She’s Got You,” EP and single, January 10, 1962.
Some passages in this essay appeared in earlier form at No Such Thing As Was.
“Elvis Costello: A Man Out of Time Beats the Clock,” Timothy White, Musician, (October 1983).
“A picture of decay...”, Elvis Costello, liner notes, Girls+£÷Girls=$&Girls (Demon, 1989).
“It was being an ‘adult’ that was most of the problem...,” Costello, liner notes, Imperial Bedroom (Rhino, 2002).
Rob Bowman, Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records (Schirmer Books, 1987).
Robert Gordon, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Sam Moore and Dave Marsh, Sam and Dave: An Oral History (Avon Books, 1998).
Laura Emerick, “Elvis, Big Stars Create another ‘Spectacle’,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 6, 2009.
Peter Handke, The Jukebox & Other Essays On Storytelling (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994).
Ellis Nassour, Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (Chicago Review Press, 2008).
Costello’s version of “She’s Got You” (as “He’s Got You”) appears on the mammoth bonus disc of the Almost Blue (Rhino, 2004).
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Milo Bauman.