Elvis Is King

Costello's My Aim Is True

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• Publisher: Ecw Press Digital
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781770906600
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Before Elvis Costello was one of Rolling Stone's greatest artists of all time he was Declan P. McManus, an office drone with a dull suburban life and a side gig in a pub rock band. In 1976, under the guidance of legendary label Stiff Records, he transformed himself into the snarling, spectacled artist who defied the musical status quo to blaze the trail for a new kind of rock star with his debut album, My Aim Is True. Here Richard Crouse examines how the music of this arrestingly original album smashed the trends of the era to bridge the gap between punk and rock 'n' roll.

1

Glittering Childhood Wonder

According to Lillian MacManus, the first words to pass her son Declan’s lips were “Siameses,” “skin,” and “Mommy.” Not the random aping of sounds heard by the small child, but requests for Peggy Lee’s “The Siamese Cat Song” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Frank Sinatra. His first vocalizations were a reflection of an upbringing surrounded by music.

Lillian, who ran the record shop in Selfridges department store (“When it was a place of glittering, childhood wonder,” Elvis told Time Out, “and not the tacky tourist trap it seems like now”), and father Ross, a busy trumpeter and singer, welcomed Declan Patrick MacManus on August 25, 1954.

Best known for composing and singing “I’m a Secret Lemonade Drinker” for a R. White’s Lemonade TV ad — listen closely and you’ll hear a teenaged Declan singing backup — Ross performed constantly with the “British Glenn Miller,” the Joe Loss Orchestra. During the orchestra’s 14-year residency at the Hammersmith Palais and their Friday lunchtime radio show, Ross covered the big hits of the day. In 1963, the orchestra even shared the bill of the Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium with The Beatles and Marlene Dietrich, featuring her musical director, Burt Bacharach. “[Loss] would say, ‘If you want to be a star, go off to a record company and be a star,’” said Ross. “‘If you want to work every night and get weekly wages for as long as you want, stay with me — but don’t complain.’”

To keep up with the grueling weekly schedule of learning new tunes, Ross had a special device on his Decca Decalion stereo that played a record over and over while he sang along, studying the words and the nuances of the tunes. Declan also listened — “I learned all my vocal harmony off records of that era,” Costello told People Magazine — and often went to see his father play, especially when special guests like The Hollies sat in on the Friday radio show. “I remember how great the musicians were in Joe Loss’s band, how clever the arrangements were, so simple, with just the right amount of notes.”

“I knew the names of jazz musicians before I went to school,” he told The Observer. “[Dizzy] Gillespie, Charles Mingus. I really loved Peggy Lee; and that comes from a broadmindedness that was fostered in my household from an early age.”

By age 11, he (and everyone else) was a member of the Beatles Fan Club — the first record he owned was Please Please Me — although he wasn’t a bandwagon jumper. In the years to come, he was too young to be a mod, not interested in skinhead conformity, and, as biographer Tony Clayton-Lea wrote, “too wary of the more farcical elements of glam rock,” and so instead, he listened and absorbed everything.

“What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’” he told Esquire. “That was a great world, a very exciting time.” James Taylor and other singer-songwriters caught his ear for a time, but he soon tired of self-confessional lyrics. Tamla Motown and reggae were his preferred party sounds. “When I was a teenager,” he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, “I didn’t just listen to rock. I remember being smitten with some girl and listening to the Supremes and the Temptations doing ‘I’m Gonna Make You Love Me.’ But I also liked David Ackles. He didn’t sound to me like a kid. He sounded grown-up — there was [also] Percy Mayfield and Kurt Weill in there.”

By age 15, with all those influences swirling around in his head, he began writing his own material. In subsequent years, his restless musical spirit, fostered by his wandering ear, would manifest itself with wild career reinventions, writing and recording songs in various milieus, including country, jazz, soul, and classical.

At age 16, MacManus stepped in front of an audience for the first time, playing solo at the Crypt (also called the Lamplight Folk Club) in the basement of St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in Richmond. “If you played an acoustic guitar,” he later said, “you could basically get up there.”

That debut appearance was “traumatic … pretty crushing.” Playing a set of “sensitive teenage songs,” he noticed folk superstar, composer of “Dirty Old Town,” and father of the singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl, Ewan MacColl, in the audience. During “Winter Song,” MacColl’s head bowed and stayed that way for the rest of the set. “I’m sure he just nodded off.”

A move from London to Liverpool — home of his Beatles heroes — saw a shift toward American country–flavored rock. While his schoolmates listened to Brit rock like Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and Black Sabbath, he spun Grateful Dead on his turntable. Years later, in Vanity Fair’s “Elvis Picks the 500 Greatest Albums Ever,” he included four albums from this period: Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, Europe ’72, and Wake of the Flood.

Discovering an affinity for the Dead’s rootsy interpretation of songs like “Dire Wolf” and “Box of Rain,” he snapped up discs by The Byrds, Gram Parsons, Neil Young, and Van Morrison. All country roads, however, in those days, led to The Band’s Music from Big Pink.

“The Band were it for me,” Costello told The Face. “I thought they were the best. I liked them because they had beards … It appealed to me that they looked really ugly. And they weren’t boys. They were men, and all their songs seemed to be about the olden days, but they weren’t dressing up as cowboys. It wasn’t phoney.”

With Alan Mayes (a guitar player who shared Declan’s love of Crosby, Stills & Nash), David Jago, and Alan Brown, Declan began performing as Rusty, a four piece that vocalized their singer’s love of roots rock. Profoundly entranced by The Band, Declan introduced influences of his new heroes into his songs. “He had all the Americanized phrasing,” said Mayes. “He could sing like Robbie Robertson and Neil Young.” Rusty debuted on January 21, 1972, with Declan on guitar and singing — with instinctive harmony from Mayes — on 11 songs, including Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn)” and “I’ve Been Working” by Van Morrison. The night’s work earned the band £7, split four ways.

Jago and Brown soon left to go to college, leaving Mayes and MacManus to carry on as a duo. They played a mix of their turntable favorites as well as new songs by Declan, like “Warm House,” to mostly sparse crowds. Musicians came to see them, but Mayes reports that the only other people in the audience were “girlfriends or someone who was a friend of somebody [in the band]. There was no actual drawing power of people on the street.”

A job as a computer operator at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics firm in London gave him a chance to take all these musical influences and coalesce them into his own songs. At work, he had little to do except place tapes on giant old school IBM 360 computers and push the odd button. The monotony of the undemanding job freed up time to write songs.

“They weren’t very interesting,” he said to Q Magazine of the tunes. “It was quite funny, like anybody’s first steps at doing anything, but you wouldn’t want them put under the microscope ten years later. I can’t even remember a lot of it. I used to play in those clubs, or the British Legion in Birkenhead, or in libraries, anywhere they’d put something on for the night. So I’d be up there with my little sensitive teenage songs, which I don’t know now ’cause I can’t remember any of them. But I wrote from the start, from 15 onwards.”

2

A New Lowe

“Before pub rock, people used to think the ideal gig was somewhere like Guildford Civic where you could sit cross-legged and watch King Crimson pan across the stereo,” said future Still Records kingpin Jake Riviera. “But with [pub rocker bands] the Ducks, the Eggs and the Brinsleys, instead of sitting there reverently impressed, you could get fuckin’ legless and have a good time!”

The pub-rock revolution was a no-frills, denim-and-plaid-shirt movement bound and determined to bring a spark back into Britain’s moribund music scene, or an overblown period Stiff records co-owner Dave Robinson labeled “the Stone Age of English music.” As more than one commentator has pointed out, Led Zeppelin inadvertently remarked, loudly and proudly, on the moribund state of Brit rock when they named an album The Song Remains the Same.

“One of the things that had happened with music at that time,” says writer Richard Balls, “was that a lot of groups had become distanced from their audiences. Particularly with prog rock, which was this bombastic style of music, which had increasingly been playing bigger and bigger instruments and bigger and bigger venues, but audiences physically were getting further away from the stage. You had these huge stage shows and it was all about the show of the whole thing. The dynamic between the group and the audience had become lost at that time. A lot of bands had lost contact with their audiences.”

Costello keenly felt the disconnect between artist and audience. Offsetting his arty lyrics with a driving rock-and-roll rhythm, he must have been familiar with a popular saying at the time: “Fuck art. Let’s dance.” “People started thinking critic-wise instead of ‘Can you dance to it?’ or ‘Is it going to make my girlfriend weak at the knees?’” said Costello to Mark Kidel of Observer Magazine. “They would be busy asking, ‘Is it art?’ forgetting that rock was never meant to be dissected, let alone included as a subject for O-level examinations, but heard on car radios and juke boxes, or bopped to at a Saturday evening disco.”

“The big labels in London didn’t have a clue,” says author and musician Will Birch of the shift in youth culture away from the bloated excesses of ’70s rock, “except for a few execs such as Andrew Lauder at UA, Nigel Grainge at Phonogram, maybe Dan Loggins at CBS, Richard Williams [and] Muff Winwood at Island. People like Dave Dee at Warners were lovely old-school music biz types, but they were not hip to the trip. EMI, Decca, forget it. [Dr.] Feelgood had a real hard time getting a deal, and in 1974 they were the most exciting live act in the world.”

“The size of some of the labels meant they had the turning circle of an oil tanker,” says Richard Balls. “First of all, some of the record labels in the mid ’70s weren’t interested in what was happening at a grass-roots level, but even if they were interested and they had actually been aware of what was going on, they were probably too big, too unwieldy, and too up-their-own-asses at that point to do anything about it anyway.”

Dozens of back-to-basics bands said screw you to the cock rock of Zeppelin, The Who, the Rolling Stones, and their ilk and turned to a stripped-down brand of music to hoist pints to. “It was a slight turning-of-the-back to the mainstream,” said A Howlin’ Wind: Pub Rock and the Birth of New Wave author John Blaney. “Led Zeppelin, prog, bubblegum bands like Sweet, Gary Glitter, all those people … there were quite a small clique of people who didn’t like that and they were looking for something else and they happened to find it in these pubs in London.”

Before pub rock, Blaney explains, the pub scene was dead. “There was something going on,” he says, “but it was crap.

That’s not fair. In London, it would have been basically Irish show bands, and actually some of those Irish show bands were bloody good. They just played the pop songs of the day. They would have looked at whatever was in the Top Ten, and they would have replicated it and done it very well. Or it was jazz. Three old blokes playing to a handful of punters who were rather disinterested — more interested in the warm beer than the hot jazz. Or maybe a bit of folk. A couple of guys with Aran sweaters doing old English folk songs. It certainly wasn’t a very exciting musical scene. It was all rather dull and boring, which is why people got so excited when these bands like Kilburn and the High Roads started playing in pubs. Can you imagine walking into your local pub and Ian Dury being there? What the fuck is that? This looks interesting. It’s more interesting than the two old blokes they had on last week. That’s going to get people excited. It would get me excited.

Pubs had tended to be places where people just went to drink and smoke. They were havens to masculinity in a way. You could go t...

Table of contents

• Elvis is King
• Introduction
• 1: Glittering Childhood Wonder
• 2: A New Lowe
• 3: If It Ain’t Stiff
• 4: Jimmied Up at Pathway Studio
• 5: New Name, New Look
• 6: Songs of Revenge and Guilt
• 7: Buy the Fucking Record
• 8: Prince Charmless
• 9: Elvis Is King
• Notes
• Selected Sources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright