Elvis's America

“I found America hiding in a corner of my wallet.” - Elvis Costello, “B-Movie”

What's in a stage name? One thing that's become clear to me over the decades I've followed Elvis Costello's career is that when Stiff Records honcho Jake Riviera impulsively slapped the name of rock's most iconic star on the upstart singer/songwriter Declan MacManus, who'd been using the stage name D.P. Costello, Riviera was doing more than pulling an irreverent punk-rock prank. (A slightly morbid one, as it turned out: Costello's debut album, My Aim Is True, emblazoned all over with the fine-print slogan "Elvis Is King," was released in the U.K. less than a month before Presley's death, and in the U.S. a few months after.) Riviera was also both identifying a deep affinity in the young talent and, in a sense, mapping a path for him. As he's said for years in interviews and his memoir makes abundantly clear, Costello's love for American country and soul is deep-seated and abiding, and his recording career is also a testament to this affinity: from the Stax-soaked Get Happy!! to the straight-faced Nashville cover record Almost Blue, from the T Bone Burnett-guided Americana tour King of America (whose all-star roster of musicians included some members of Presley's old band) to the country-rock concept album The Delivery Man, recorded in Oxford, Miss., and containing the line, "In a certain light he looked like Elvis," from his collabs with everyone from Allen Toussaint to Carole King to Burt Bacharach—in short, Costello has burrowed deep into the soil of the music that inspired him.

His current project, a musical based on the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, is his most American project in a while, possibly ever. Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s blazing satire, which is still a startling watch, imagined Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a Presley-esque singer from Arkansas who’s whipped up by mass media and politicians into a quasi-messianic populist figure, until he falls spectacularly from grace. The new musical, with a book by Sarah Ruhl and music by Costello, is running at the Young Vic in London. Its topicality, in an age rife with the threat of resurgent homegrown fascism, may come to the States, though reviews have been mixed; not taking any chances, I’ll be flying over to catch it there in the coming weekend.

I’ve been eyeing the progress of A Face in the Crowd, which Elvis has been playing songs from at concerts since 2016, with special attention, not only for this American angle but with a more personal interest: I knew the only way I’d ever get the chance to interview this longtime idol was when he did something for the theater (as was the case with Randy Newman). Thankfully, I got the chance to catch up with him and Ruhl (and others involved in the production) during rehearsals in August and to write about it for the paper of record.

A lot of my interview with Elvis was, perhaps inevitably given the subject of the show, about America and American culture. At one point, I put it to him directly:

Starting with your stuntish stage name, throughout your career, America has been both a musical and a thematic subject for you—the promise of it, the raconteurs and the roustabouts, the language of it as well as the music. Was that part of the appeal of this material, or a way in for you?

Elvis: Can I explain with a picture? I don't really have a complicated theory. I’m showing you this secretly, right? This has to be a little bit off the record, okay? It hasn't been announced. (Elvis then showed me the packaging for a new boxed set, King of America and Other Realms, on his laptop, which has since been announced, so I think it's safe to break the embargo here.) There’s a six-CD set coming out in October that arcs from ’86 to ’24. Everything was recorded in America, except demos in London. It’s mostly my work with T Bone Burnett or related to that. There are records made in Louisiana, Mississippi, collaborations with people like Lucinda Williams and Ralph Stanley, songs I wrote for Johnny Cash.

 

These are all parts of just being an outsider. For whatever reason, that music sort of spoke to me, alongside Aretha Franklin and The Temptations. You could say the names of 10 big bands from the ’80s to the 2000s and I'd know the names of the bands, but I couldn't sing one of their songs. But I can sing you five Louvin Brothers songs. I don't know why, they just spoke to me, the way I suppose English musicians heard blues records or early rock ’n’ roll records coming from America, and they seemed like messages from Mars, and it made them excited.

American music expresses a lot of the heart and the danger and the darkness of the country. Again, I feel like that's in your work, but it's also in this.

Elvis: I can see a connection between A Face in the Crowd and my song “Country Darkness.” Although that’s a story that alludes to a murder, it’s really more the title. It’s like, what’s within us that makes this come out? That’s why I’m resistant to the notion that this is an analogy, rather than…Budd wrote it, it’s right in the title: A Face in the Crowd. It’s not The Face of Lonesome. It’s what’s within us that we can be persuaded to desire, and the fact that we desire it means it’s within us in the first place, like original sin.

Costello alludes above to his resistance to seeing the new Face musical as an analogy to today, or to read Lonesome Rhodes, the title demagogue, as a facsimile of Trump. On that subject, though, Costello did share one juicy tidbit: When he appeared on the cover of Spy magazine in 1989, dressed as the Devil, the number on the business card he was holding up was apparently Donald Trump’s actual land line at the time. (Ruhl interjected to ask: “How did they have his home phone number?” Elvis replied: “He was always trying to get in the paper.”)

I pressed the point a bit more:

I just remember when there was an image of Trump drinking Coke from a wine glass a few years, a lot of folks thought of the line from “Brilliant Mistake”: “He thought he was the king of America/Where they drink Coca-Cola just like vintage wine.” And just the idea that America would have a king…

Elvis: I wrote this long essay for that boxed set, taking people through 40 years of music, and one of the things I said is the absurdity of that saying, “King of America.” And, for that matter, the title “Brilliant Mistake”—it’s kind of a glib two-word definition of the American experiment. It contains the brilliance and the mistake. That’s been what's so great about working in North America. I have far more friends in South than in the North, and all the work I’ve done is based on the riches of America. That’s not to say that no great records are made in any of the northern cities, because obviously—Chicago blues and Motown and Los Angeles. But the things I love, deep down, most of all, seem to be in places where, if you were going to draw lines and say, “Well, I don’t have to go there anymore, because I don’t agree with that”—that would mean I would never, ever go to Arkansas, which, by the way, is one of the three U.S. states I’ve never played. (Hawaii and North Dakota are the other two.*see comment below)

My last question on the subject opened him up a bit further:

Do you mind me asking, what is your status in the U.S.?

Elvis: I’m not a citizen. I’m the reason why they had a revolution: I pay taxes without representation. That’s my get-out-of-jail card every time anybody tells me, “You can’t say this, you’re an outsider.” I say, “Okay, you pay my tax bill then.”

But you've got a place in New York.

Elvis: Yeah, we live in New York, because my sons are American. My eldest son is Irish. He has his Irish passport because his mother was from Galway. But my family’s from the north, so we haven’t had a country for a long while. When we get the country back, I might go home.

Really?

Elvis: At least get a place. But only when we’re united. We should be. Maybe not in my lifetime. Definitely in my young sons’ lifetime. For sure. I really believe, and I hope. It’s actually better for everybody. I don’t think it’s a victory of one thing over another. It’s all the things that are afflicting America: prejudice and ignorance and dividing people with the same interests on the pretext of religious affiliations, which is, of course, like a lot of places in the world.

Here’s the thing my father taught me, one of the great things he taught me. He taught me two things—he wasn’t a very present father—but the first thing was, never look up to a note, always look down, which means, like a sports psychology thing, don’t try to get there, you’re there, and come down. The other thing was, in sport, there is a Northern Ireland football team and a Republic of Ireland team. That tells you that the working class is divided on sectarian grounds by power, by vested interests, and to never forget that they’re doing this to us. And never forget all the people that have reasons to hold onto power with that division, whehter it’s streets or one state or one town. You can apply that to communities in America. If you go to those places in so-called red states, you still meet people that are not signed up. It’s not a fanatical cult that has swept the nation. There’s still people saying, “No, I don’t agree with that.”

As I've written in this space before, Costello’s collision with punk and New Wave was in many ways a fruitful coincidence of timing that he made the most of, and he unquestionably left an indelible mark on that era (even if a good part of his career since has seen him trying to squirm out from under the mark that era left on him). In his bones he was a musical craftsman who would have thrived in any period—as no less than a personage than Carole King once said to him, “If you had begun in our generation of writers you’d be right there with us.” And in his heart, from the start, even before he was christened Elvis, he was always a kind of American without tears. And at least part of him has always been, like the subjects of his song “Kid About It," "singing the leaving of Liverpool/and turning into Americans.”