D is for Dilaudid

Pharmaceutical morphine in pill form. Elvis liked Dilaudid. He also liked Amytal, Quaaludes, Dexedrine, Biphetamine and Percodan, all pills and capsules prescribed to him by Dr George Nichopoulos — Dr Nick, to both Elvis and tabloid headline writers. 

Not that this meant Elvis was a junkie. Rather, as many fine minds have pointed out, he was a heavy user of pharmaceutical preparations — addicted not to ‘proscribed drugs’ but ‘prescribed drugs’. In the last two and a half years of Elvis’ life, Dr Nick wrote him scripts for 19,000 hits of the drugs he liked. ‘The worst case of indiscriminate oversubscribing I have ever seen in my investigations for the State of Tennessee’, said a local prosecutor on Geraldo Rivera’s 13 September, 1979 US TV report, The Elvis Cover-Up, which first exposed the extent and range of Elvis’ multiple drug abuse.

Yet… both the Board of Medical Examiners and the jury at a criminal trial cleared Nichopoulos of any wrong-doing. ‘He expended enormous efforts to keep drugs from Elvis and more than once saved his life,’ wrote Stanley Booth, Rolling Stones biographer, fellow Memphian and patient of Dr Nick’s, in a touching and vibrant essay for Mojo magazine. ‘The only people who understood that apparently were the jury who acquitted him.’ In the piece, Booth quoted Sun rockabilly Charlie Feathers: ‘It wasn’t drugs that killed Elvis, it was breakfast.’

Sam Phillips didn’t agree. For him, it was a broken heart that killed Elvis, only not a physical but a metaphorical one. ‘I’m talking about emotional entrapment. That’s deep stuff. And it’s serious stuff. And no matter what happens to you in this world, if you don’t make it your business to be happy, then you maybe have gained the whole world and lost your spirit and maybe even your damned soul.’

Fifteen years after Elvis’ death, in an interview with LIFE magazine, Nichopoulos, then still practising medicine in Memphis, said of Elvis: ‘I used to see him every day. When I’d get through at the office, I’d stop by at Graceland and see how he was doing. Now I find different ways to go home so I won’t be reminded.’



Next up Elvis and his tabloid life

C is for Costello
 
The other Elvis, who has never made studio recording of a Presley song. 

He has played them, live, though. As of autumn 2013, he has done Little Sister at more than forty-five shows. On at least one occasion, he introduced it as something by ‘an unknown singer from Tupelo, Mississippi’. He’s played (Marie’s The Name Of) His Latest Flame in at least forty-eight shows, dating back to 1983. Mystery Train, he’s done even more regularly, sixty-seven times since the first time in 1989, and with all kinds of other people and guests — Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Nick Lowe, The Lovell Sisters. (It's not the EP original, he performs, though, but the Band's partial rewrite of it — which goes some way to explaining the mystery of the mystery train which  In 2008, on TV, he did a version of Baby, Let’s Play House, in honour of Bill Clinton, an acknowledged Presley fan.


 
EC has also used some of the same musicians as EP. Guitarist James Burton, keyboard player Larry Knechtel, bassist Jerry Scheff and drummer Ron Tutt formed the Confederates, who appeared in live EC shows of the late 1980s and on 1987’s King Of America album. Scheff played on 1989’s Spike. Burton, Scheff and Knechtel appear on 1995’s Kojak Variety. And Tutt is on 1985’s The People’s Limousine which EC recorded under the pseudonym of the Coward Brothers (with T-Bone Burnett).


EC’s father, Ross MacManus (1927–2011), also performed many EP songs. As the singer with the Joe Loss band in the 1950s, Mr MacManus would cover whatever was a hit that week. He even recorded some EP songs, for cheap cover-version EPs for sale only in Woolworth’s stores (1909–2008).

Tomorrow Drugs and how not to take them.

B is for Blue

On the night Elvis was born, his father Vernon stepped out into the backyard and saw the skies were ringed in blue light. As a young boy, Elvis discovered that if he stared at the moon long enough, a blue ring would appear round it. Years later, he decided that blue was a colour with deep spiritual significance.

Blue was always there in his music. Not in the sense of ‘the blues’ but as in the colour ‘blue’. The flip side of his first single was Blue Moon Of Kentucky. He also recorded Blue Suede Shoes, Blue Christmas, Blue Moon, Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, Blue River, Blueberry Hill, A Mess Of Blues, Mean Woman Blues, Beach Boy Blues, Indescribably Blue, Milkcow Blues Boogie, Something Blue, Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues, Steamroller Blues and When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again. He cut GI Blues and Blue Hawaii — both of which are, of course, the title tracks of entire movies with the same name. And Moody Blue was the title track of his very last LP. In all, that’s nineteen ‘blue’ songs.

By way of colour comparison, he didn’t record a single song with red, orange or purple in its title. In fact, the total his other colour-significant recordings is five. One black — Long Black Limousine; one yellow — The Yellow Rose Of Texas; one white — White Christmas; and two green — A Little Bit Of Green and The Green, Green Grass Of Home.

An article in the Rainbow Earth Dwelling Society Newsletter, as recorded by ‘Tubbs Gillis’ in Magical Blend magazine, reveals that Elvis believed he’d had a previous life on a blue planet orbiting a blue sun in the Pleiades Dogstar system.

In his essay, Elvis In Death, Nick Tosches wrote that, for some time before Elvis’ death, he’d thought of him not as a real person but as ‘an all-American demi-god who dwelt, enthroned between Superman and the Lone Ranger, in the blue heaven of the popular imagination’.
The colour of the pyjamas in which he died? Blue. As was the shirt and tie in which he was buried.

PS1 I just discovered there is an Elvis blue wine. That's right. Blue Christmas wine. Well, there is a picture of the label. Not sure if it's real or a joke. But sure of one thing. I wouldn't drink it. 

PS2 I just discovered there is an Elvis Blue - a South African singer born Jan Hoogendyk, in 1979 . . . More, not soon but in good time
 
Tomorrow The other Elvis (the C one)

I'm back . . . 

I've been with the King. I've been working on him, not with or for him but on him. Many, many years ago, back in the last century, I wrote a book on Elvis. It was a short and fast one. Fifty Elvis songs and their stories, making a mini-biography but focussed on the music. It came out, as Essential Elvis, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his death.

Earlier this year, I was asked if I was okay with it being republished, as an e-book. Of course, I said. Just let me have a quick look through it and make the necessary corrections. I already knew, for example, that, to my shame, I'd mis-spelled Ann Margaret's name. See, I did it again. It's actually Ann-Margret. (She's Chicago-raised but Swedish-born.)

So I started making the corrections and adding new bits and then more bits and even talked to some people — including the niece of the man who wrote Long Black Limousine, the song which Elvis recorded in his 1969 and which almost prefigured his own end. 

I found more and more and more and put it all in. All kinds of details. Corrections of dates. Stories about the songwriters. I found a lot of demos of the songs – which weren't around first time but have since emerged.

All in all, it became a bigger book. Almost twice the size.

It's out this Friday, from Rocket 88. Here is the cover. Buy one. Buy more. (Oh, and buy yourself a copy of my last book, Filthy English while you're about it.)

The original Essential Elvis also contained an A-Z of Elvis. It wasn't exactly padding in the original. More somewhere to put other thoughts and ideas which didn't fit into the song stories I told. It was more fun, more light-hearted, less reverent. And, so we took the decision to leave it out of the new edition.

So . . . I'm posting it here, on this blog, as an Elvis advent calendar. There will be one a day till Christmas. (Actually, given that there are 26 letters in the alphabet, it will, of course, run through to Boxing Day. At least. As Elvis' birthday is January 8, I might stretch it through till then.) And I begin with . . .

A is for Aaron

Elvis’ middle name, which his mother spelled as Aron on his birth certificate, and which was — rightly or wrongly — changed to Aaron on his gravestone.

More tomorrow Actually, more later today, as I started my A-Z Elvis calendar one day late so it coincided with the working week.

Yiddos! Yiddos! 

So, today, West Ham play Spurs at White Hart Lane. So, it's the first game between them since the debate about the (chanting) use of the words 'yid' and 'yiddo'. So, one thing I've not seen in all the discussion is anything about when and how 'yid' came to be used by Spurs fans. 

So?

So . . . I happened to be there, I think, around the very time it started. I wrote about it in my book on swearing, Filthy English. Here is the section . . . it's the end of a chapter on racial slurs and I've been discussing the reclaiming of nigger and paki by, well, people of african and south asian descent who chose to judo throw a racist word and declare themselves to be, well, niggers and pakis.

I first came across another reappropriation early in the morning of Wednesday, 9 May 1984. Very early. I was on a coach, one coach in a giant convoy of coaches – an invasion of coaches – which was snaking its way through the London dawn towards Dover. And from there to Ostend harbour, the medieval city of Bruges and, finally, the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht.

By the time the coach retraced its route, almost twenty-four sleepless hours later, there had been a fatal stabbing, some violent scuffles and a 1–1 draw between Spurs and Anderlecht in the first leg of the UEFA Cup Final. On our return, as we disembarked from the ferry at Dover, we would be greeted by a dozen or so reporters, a flash of bulbs and a predictability of questions. That was nearly a day in the future, though. That would be the final stages of the ritualistic sequence of events for English football followers venturing to European away games in the 1980s: long coach journey, drink, more drink, fear, anger, confused local citizens, drink, boring match, violence, drink, long coach journey, home, hangover, work.

But, for now, in the grubby London dawn, hope and anticipation were still trumping memory, knowledge and bitter experience. For everyone on the coach apart from me, that is. They were actual fans. I was merely working. I was there on the coach to write about the experience of being on the coach. I was doing the leg-work for a piece about travelling with football fans, at a time when travelling English football fans were ‘the scourge of Europe’, a ‘blight on the beautiful game’, ‘a rabble of hooligans’ etc. That was no mere loudmouthing editorialising either. A year later, in another suburb of Brussels, at another European final, thirty-nine Juventus fans would be killed.

No-one on the coach was interested in me, not in the slightest. They were interested in being together. They were a group, a small crowd. They sang, they chanted – in dawn’s early light. They were teenagers, mostly. All boys, of course.

Polite mostly, not at all hooligany and, I soon discovered, nearly all Jewish. I probably would have figured that out anyway, for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that my own sons are half-Jewish. But I didn’t need to. The chants did it for me. This was their favourite: If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap.) If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap. Pause.) Yiddooos! Yiddooos!

I’d not heard it before. I had to stifle my giggles. I knew that none of them were Israelis. I could hear that in their London accents. The Israel thing was part joke, part identification with something powerful that was theirs – and not, say, Arsenal fans’. Tottenham was a ‘Jewish club’ and they were set on making that clear – with the assertive brittleness you’d expect of minority group teenagers.

How long Spurs has been a ‘Jewish club’ – and why – has never really been that clear. It only gets the most passing of mentions in Hunter Davies’ 1972 book on the club, The Glory Game. Even then, it’s half in code. Davies is talking to Morris Keston, a ‘Hanger-on’ as he disparagingly refers to the club’s wealthy fan. Why do so many of the Hangers-on seem to be from the rag trade? he asks, somewhat disingenuously. ‘There’s always been a big following amongst Jewish people in the East End for clubs like Tottenham and Arsenal,’ replies Keston.

Not just a Tottenham thing, then. There’s no further reference to the subject in either the 1985 or 1990 editions, either. My guess is simply that it’s the nearest club to Stamford Hill. And that its fans’ self-conscious Jewishness only started to emerge around the time I found myself sitting on a smelly coach to Belgium.
This ‘yiddoos’ thing was interesting. I’d never heard it used by Jews before, only by racists and other teams’ fans. This was the most glorious, self-conscious act of reappropriation. As rappers and hip-hoppers would take over nigger, as Coloured People and People of Colour and homosexual academia would construct (and deconstruct) queer theory, so these teenage Jewish boys had taken an insult and turned it, made a double agent of it. It was as if gypsies took to calling themselves gypos.†

Over the next few years, all Tottenham fans, not just the Jewish ones, took to calling themselves yiddoos or yids. When Jurgen Klinsmann joined the club, they chanted ‘Jurgen was a German but now he’s a Jew’, to the tune of the Sherman brothers’ Mary Poppins song, ‘Chim Chim Cheree’. Other European clubs in Europe – Bayern Munich, FK Austria Wien and AS Roma, for example – are similarly ‘Jewish’, for various historical and cultural reasons. Fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax wear red Stars of David and spread giant blue and white Israeli flags across their terraces. These Spurs’ fans chants and songs were never mentioned by commentators or football writers but you could hear the chants at every game. Why didn’t they mention it? Because it would mean using the word ‘yid’ or ‘yiddo’. They worried – probably rightly – that just saying it or writing it would inevitably draw them into uncomfortable areas.

This reappropriation unsettled the racist mind, of course. Slowly, over time, other fans stopped calling them Tottenham yids. Not because they didn’t still think of them that way and not because the word’s meaning had changed but because the word’s association had changed. The thought may have remained the same but the word itself had been flipped, like a pancake. What had been bad had been made good. There’s no power left in an insult when the person you’re trying to insult has ironized it into a proud self-description. At least, you’d think so. But it’s not so. Chelsea fans have long chanted: ‘Gas a Jew, Jew Jew, put him in the oven, cook him through.’ There is also a story that when Manchester City fans sang a song about foreskins, Spurs fans pulled out their penises and waved them at the Mancunians. Other fans, West Ham fans, in particular, still talk (and chant) about Tottenham yids. And their voices and hearts are still filled with hatred. As with nigger, it’s the thought that counts, not the word.

† Well, maybe not quite. ‘Gypsy’ is a result of a misplacing of that group’s origins in Egypt rather than India. Yid is, at least, a Jewish word. Similar to the German Jude, it’s derived ultimately from Judah (or Yehuda), the three-thousand-year-old name for the mountainous area which runs along one edge of the Dead Sea south from Jerusalem towards the Sinai desert. It was the bit ruled over by King David. The northern section is now usually referred to as the West Bank. It was Jews who first called themselves yids. Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, says they pronounced it to rhyme with ‘need’, though. Only racists rhymed it with ‘did’.


So . . ? 

Elvis sings the blues
 
Last week I was on the radio, Resonance FM, talking about Elvis. You can hear the show here.

As some of you may know, I wrote a book about him and his songs, Essential Elvis. Originally published in 1997, the twentieth anniversary of his death, it's being reissued later this year as an ebook, by Rocket 88, in a revised, corrected and (slightly) expanded version. (Which obviously I should be working on right now rather than this blog post.)

The radio show was an hour long and focused exclusively on something I turned up while writing the book. Elvis's taste in colour. He was a blue man. Not a blues man — though he sung some of those too. A blue man. In life: his father said the night sky was ringed with blue the night his son was born; Elvis believed that the colour blue had deep spiritual significance for him. In death: he was wearing blue pyjamas that night. After death: he was buried in a blue shirt and tie.

In song. He recorded just two songs with green in the title and one each with black, yellow and white. So five is the sum total of those coloured songs. But blue songs . . . he cut nineteen of those. That boy really could sing the blues.

I played pretty much all of them on the radio. Here's the full list. (The version of Blue Christmas I played was not the original but the one he sang at his 1968 comeback special, the one where he tells guitarist Scotty Moore to 'play it dirty'. On a Christmas song.)

English sleeve for actual 'Elvis sings the blues' album, 1983

1. Blue Moon Of Kentucky
2. Blue Moon
3. Milkcow Blues Boogie
4. Blue Suede Shoes
5. When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again
6. Mean Woman Blues
7. Blueberry Hill
8. Blue Christmas
9. A Mess Of Blues
10. GI Blues
11. Blue Hawaii
12. Beach Boy Blues
13. Something Blue
14. Blue River
15. Indescribably Blue
16. Steamroller Blues
17. Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues
18. Moody Blue
19. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

You can listen to them all right . . . here.

German sleeve for actual 'Elvis sings the blues' album, 1983

Next up A little trip to Tooting, I think

The greatest song in the world ever . . . today
 
Number four: Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie Harris
 
As you possibly know, I’m not a big lyrics man. Or rather I am a big lyrics man. So, having grown up on a mix of musical theatre (parental taste) and metaphysical poetry (schooling), I just thought most pop lyrics were just rubbish.

Not the ones that most people think of as rubbish. To me, Little Richard — or at least his writers, notably Dorothy LaBostrie — was true poetry. Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom — even Andrew Marvell or Dorothy Fields would have struggled to find such an evocation of the human soul.

What got me was the stuff people said had good lyrics. Hard as it to imagine now, once upon a time, in the days when Hal David was writing the wondrous I Say A Little Prayer, people, grown-up people with jobs, beards even, would pay serious attention to the lyrics of, say, King Crimson.

Yet here I’ve chosen a song whose true glory is its words. Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie ‘Mr Blues’ Harris — 1940s R&B star, big influence on Elvis. At one time, he had two Cadillacs all for himself, each with its own chauffeur.


The tune is fine, if hackneyed. The playing is joyous — but you wouldn’t expect anything else of a band put together by Johnny Otis.

But those lyrics. A tight story told over three verses, it’s a startling narrative — a song about alcoholism and para-violence, framed as a comedy. 

It is one of the best pop lyrics ever written. It’s coherent, it develops rather than repeats. Some things to notice along the way . . .

* The beat and mood is established in the first two words, ‘now’ followed by ‘just’. A weak, barely vocalised sound followed by a strong emphasised one which finishes on both a sibilant and a plosive. The set-up of the whole song is there. A light feint then a killer blow. Tragedy as comedy.

* The rhymes are mostly masculine ones but nor are they — as is almost invariably the case in rap — so obvious you want to slap them with a ready-floured haddock. They are certain, confident, assertive — and could be heard in the loudest juke joint.

* The use of language is consistent and demotic. A big failing of all kinds of lyrics is that words are chosen to makes rhymes rather than fitting the tone of the song. Even Sondheim makes this mistake. By his own admission, the line ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel’ (in West Side Story’s I Feel Pretty) is quite unlikely to have come from the young and uneducated Maria. (In fact, he wanted to take it out but his collaborators wouldn’t have it. He still blushes when he hears it. He was right, of course. But so were his collaborators. It’s a wonderfully life-affirming line — its buoyancy a warning of the tragedy coming her way.)

* There is only one word that wouldn’t be familiar to contemporary six year old. That is ‘spree’ and, even then, I think context makes its meaning clear. Unless, of course, you mondogreen it and think it is some kind of transport mode. Making things that simple really isn’t simple.

* The metaphors are smart. ‘Two cherries in a glass of buttermilk’: accurate, evocative, suitably revolting and very, very funny. Improved, too, by the fact that the rhyme is with ‘silk’ which as a high-toned partner to ‘buttermilk’, gets a good uptown-downtown thing going.

* It doesn’t read — let alone sound — like poetry. Just like someone with a gift for words, smart-talking his way through the sad realisation that he will never change his girl, that things are over between them, that . . . well . . .

* The final word is ‘death’ — after that there is just a repeat of the chorus. It is rhymed with ‘breath’.

Here you go, all the way, from first to last . . .

Now just because you’re pretty
And you think you’re mighty wise
You told me that you love me
Then you roll those big brown eyes
When I saw you last week
Your eyes were turning black
Go find the guy that beat you up
Ask him to take you back

Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me
I can tell you’ve been out on a spree
It’s plain that you’re lyin’
When you say that you’ve been cryin’
Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me

Now I used to spend my money
To make you look real sweet
I wanted to be proud of you
When we walk down the street
Now don’t ask me to dress you up
In satin and in silk
Your eyes look like a two cherries
In a glass of buttermilk

Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me
I can tell that you been out on a spree
It’s plain that you’re lyin’
When you say that you've been cryin’
Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me

Now I guess our little romance
Has finally simmered down
You should join the circus
You’d make a real good clown
Your eyes look like a roadmap
I’m scared to smell your breath
You’d better shut your peepers
Before you bleed to death.

And here is the track . . . I couldn't get it to embed for some reason so here is a link . . . Bloodshot Eyes.


 
It’s said Wynonie Harris knew whereof he sang here, too, liking to take a glass or two of hot whisky before he stepped onstage. When it came to treating women, though, he was more like the song’s villain than its singer. He told Tan magazine: ‘The women who really know also know part of my secret. We can laugh about it together for they know how women can get stirred up by a man who seems cruel, ornery, vulgar and arrogant. I’ve had them to take enough pills to kill a horse, follow me from town to town in Cadillacs, give me money and fight another like crazy. It’s all because I deal in sex  . . .

‘I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long green stuff in their pocketbooks. You find them mostly down south. As a matter of fact, I like all kinds of women, regardless of what colour they are or what size and shape they may have. Just so long as they’re breathing, that’s me.’

Ralph Bass, his A&R man: ‘He always had a broad. Shit, man, he didn’t have any respect. He’d walk up and insult a woman right in front of her man. He’d say: Hey, bitch, what you doin’ here, whore? And call ’em all kindsa names.’

Now, I say it’s a song by Wynonie Harris but that is not quite right. His was the big hit on the US R&B charts (1951) and a top favourite in Jamaica. There’s a bouncy version by Millie, the My Boy Lollipop girl — the gender is switched and so ‘drink’ is rhymed with ‘wink’.

It wasn’t written by Harris, though, but by the man who first recorded it, Hank Penny, a banjo-playing Western Swinger. The piano tinkles and the steel guitar swishes. It’s fun but it’s not Wynonie — of whom his producer Henry Glover said ‘This man was a concept. Hell, he was too much.’

Both Penny and Harris were on the same label, King, based in Cincinnati and James Brown’s long-time home. The idea for Harris to cut it came from King’s foul-mouthed, abusive, near-blind Jewish owner Syd Nathan. He knew, deep in his heart, that everyone had the same problems, that there was no such thing as black or white alcoholism or para-violence. It was all the same thing. Everyone shared the pain. And Syd could make money out of it.

Plus A little something else for you. Here you will a quite fascinating pair of interviews with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. If you don't know who they — or the 2000 year old man — are, you should. And will if you listen to these podcasts.