Uncut, June 1997

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications — Armed Forces The full story of Elvis Costello's calamitous 1979 American tour Allan Jones From the outset, the Armed Forces tour of America seemed destined to draw fire, set tongues wagging. turn heads in its direction. Eyes, for a start, will have popped when they saw Costello and The Attractions rolling into town in their maroon-trimmed Silver Eagle tour bus, especially since the bus had "DESTINATION CAMP LEJEUNE" emblazoned across its front in letters a foot high. This was obviously just bloody-minded provocation. Camp LeJeune was the United States Marine Corps training camp in North Carolina, and no one will have been greatly amused by Costello's smirking, smart-arse declaration that this was where he was headed. This was March, 1979. America was only four years out of Vietnam, and memories of that dreadful debacle were still raw; rasping echoes of the conflict and its consequences still hung in the air. The country was in no mood for caustic reminders of its recent military disasters. Costello's manager, the famously truculent Jake Riviera, nevertheless, was ruthlessly determined to pursue the aggressively militaristic promotional campaign he had devised for Armed Forces in the UK and followed it through now by dressing the entire Costello road crew in Army fatigues, giving them the look of a marauding squad of renegade commandos. This might have seemed like a grand joke to Costello and his entourage. a bit of a lark, something to laugh at, wired, drunk, in desert motels and downtown bars as the tour dragged across the country. For less partisan observers, though, it was just another example of Riviera's belligerent insensitivity. There was another message being spelled out here, of course. "Nobody Fucks With The Marine Corps" was a popular military boast. The clear implication of the "Camp LeJeune" sign was that nobody better fuck with Costello and his people. either. The sign was a kind of mobile hands-off warning. a stark reminder to anyone even thinking about getting anywhere near them that they'd be better off keeping their distance. Fred Schruers made the connection vividly in a dramatic report on the tour for Rolling Stone. "A mixture of paranoia and arrogance," he wrote, "made the Armed Forces tour party as mean and as squirrelly as any platoon of marines trapped behind enemy lines." Schruers was not impressed by Riviera's confrontational tactics, predicted nothing but grief for Costello if he didn't ease up. "By turns petulant and rabid," he observed, reflecting upon the generally unhinged behaviour raging around him. "Elvis and his troops did not seem equal to the grand military metaphors of the promotional campaign that preceded them: they seemed, rather, to be conducting a messy police action bound to make doubters and even enemies out of his strongest American partisans." Given their highly-strung, combative mood, it came as no surprise to find Costello and his hyped-up wrecking crew quickly at war with the local civilian population. Hostilities broke out first in Seattle, where the audience reacted violently to Costello's appearance at the Paramount Theatre. The Attractions were by now geared up to scorching 50-minute sets, intense, concentrated hit-and-runs. This sort of show had become standard in England, punk had seen to that, where there had been a rapid stripping down of performances after the indulgent spectacles of the early Seventies. The crowd in Seattle, however, weren't used to this routine. They just thought they'd been short-changed, and there was bedlam when Costello refused to return to add anything more to what had already been said, which he was convinced had been enough. Roaring their disapproval, the audience refused to leave the theatre until the Costello road crew turned up the amps and produced a multi-decibel shriek that drove the irate masses into the street, where they made a bonfire out of torn-down concert posters. There were similar scenes further down the coast. at the Berkeley Community Centre. where Costello was in a bitter, recriminatory mood. Maybe he'd been incensed by The Clash, Who were playing San Francisco the same night and had plastered the Bay Area with posters that proclaimed them as "THE ONLY ENGLISH BAND THAT REALLY MATTERS". This would have been enough to infuriate Costello at the best of times, but does little to fully explain the tempestuous ferocity of his performance. He treated the Berkeley audience to a scourging 40-minute set and split, rejecting the clamourous demands for an encore. The audience was livid. They howled for more, and when they didn't get it they started ripping out seats and stoned The Attractions' tour bus. smashing windows. With the crowd turning really ugly. Costello and his then-girlfriend. Bebe Buell, were whisked through the backstage area and made a hasty, heads-down exit. Greil Marcus, the distinguished American critic, was at the concert and managed to persuade Jake Riviera to escort him backstage for a word with Costello. Costello promptly ignored him, turned his back and stalked off. At which point, Marcus later claimed, Jake turned on him and hissed: "If you quote me. I'll kick your ass." Marcus duly reported the encounter in New West magazine. "The only reason I wrote it was that Jake threatened to do me bodily injury if I did." Marcus subsequently informed Rolling Stone. "Jake's just a little thug," Marcus went on. "His commercial strategy has always been We don't need you,' and it's a perfectly decent strategy. The concert was meant as an insult and performed as such. and people caught on." The tour turned south, into Texas, still beleaguered, hounded by trouble and bad luck, Costello was hit by a stomach virus in Dallas. A week of shows was cancelled. There was, simultaneously, a growing disenchantment within the Costello camp with the way Columbia were promoting both the tour and the record, the feeling that the label wasn't flexing enough muscle to keep the momentum going flat-out. When a New York radio station received more than a quarter of a million calls for 1,200 free tickets they were raffling for a Costello concert in the city, Riviera had approached the record company for the financial backing to book Elvis into Shea Stadium. Columbia turned him down. Jake was typically furious. The next day, he sent a van-load of shovels to the Columbia office, addressed to its chief executives. There was a note, too. "If you really want to bury my act," it said, "I though you could do with some help..." There were more problems in St Louis, Missouri. Columbia had agreed with the city's premier FM radio station, KSHE, that they could sponsor Costello's concert at the Kiel Opera House. As part of the arrangement, KSHE would broadcast the show. Before he went on stage, Costello had learned that KSHE had only given his albums moderate exposure, while their main local rivals, KADI. had been pumping out his music on their wavelength. KSHE were therefore horrified when Costello dedicated his first encore, "Accidents Will Happen". to "all the boys at radio station KADI". The KSHE people were even more stunned when Costello went on to introduce "Radio Radio" with another unflattering broadside against their organisation. "Now I want to dedicate this song," he began, "to all the local bastard radio stations that don't play our songs ... and to KSHE!" The KSHE bureaucracy were furious. Costello's records were dropped completely from their playlists. Columbia were also irate. The label was worried about dropped sales for Armed Forces as a result of the KSHE ban. Apologies were demanded, and it was left to Alan Frey, the head of Costello's US management company, to placate the offended programme controllers at KSHE. After four days of smooth-talking persuasion, KSHE backed down and Costello's records went back on the air. By then, of course, Elvis was long gone from Missouri. He was heading north, now; through the gulping darkness of the great American night, which, in a town called Columbus, in the state of Ohio, would threaten to rise up and swallow him, bones, buttons, hair, temper and all. This is what you would have noticed most, if you'd been there: the desperate clutch of the dead, dry air. It is always the same in these places. The whistling hum of the air-conditioning; the dim lights, the dumb waiters: the hard luck stories at the bar; the dentural click of ice against glass as the drinks keep coming, round after round. It was the night of March 16, 1979, and The Attractions were in Columbus, an inconspicuous, medium-sized mid-western city on Highway 40, half-way between Cincinnati and Cleveland. The group had just played a dull, routine show in town and Costello and Attractions' bassist Bruce Thomas were back at the Holiday Inn, drinking. Costello wasn't drunk yet, but he was getting there. That night, Stephen Stills had also played a gig in Columbus. He was in the Holiday Inn bar now, too, with his manager, Jim Lindersmith, and various members of his band and road crew, including backing singer Bonnie Bramlett and Joe Lala, his percussionist. Stills had been a founder member of Buffalo Springfield, legends of West Coast rock in the mid-Sixties. He had gone on to form Crosby, Stills And Nash, whose winsome harmonies and melodic acoustic strumming had made them darlings of the Woodstock generation. With the subsequent addition of Stills' old Buffalo Springfield sparring partner, the maverick guitar brigand Neil Young, CSN&Y, as they became, went on to even greater fortune as one of the most popular American supergroups of the early Seventies. Since the demise of that band, however, Stills career had only spluttered along. beset by drug abuse and a general cantankerousness that made him increasingly difficult to work with. He was now muddling through a forlorn middle-ground, his music of no reasonable interest to anyone apart from die-hard nostalgists for a wiped-out era. Bramlett, meanwhile, was a hard-bitten former Ikette who had enjoyed some success as one half of Delaney & Bonnie, a husband-and-wife white soul act that had been briefly fashionable at the drag end of the Sixties. Following her divorce from Delaney and the collapse of their group, she had struggled through an undistinguished solo career and ended up a bedraggled alcoholic. Rehabilitated now, she had joined Stills for an appearance at the Havana Jam, two months earlier. Together, Stills and Bramlett will have represented everything that Costello despised about American rock — its self-indulgence, its corpulence and slothfulness, its abject worthlessness. When he accepted an invitation to join the Stills entourage for a drink, Costello must have known that he was tempting the devil. The trouble started when a local fan started pestering Costello about his attitude towards America and Americans. "We hate you." Costello snarled. "We just come here for the money. We're the original white boys and you're the colonials." This was an example of a heavy-handed line in provocation that had been patented by Jake and which had since become familiar to anyone who'd come across the Riviera-Costello circle during one of their more intolerant ranting moods. Most people, finding either Jake or Elvis on course for this kind of volcanic verbal onslaught, very sensibly kept their heads down until the storm blew itself out and conditions returned to normal. What you didn't do was show any visible sign of being upset. This only encouraged them. Stills and his party unfortunately fell for the whole routine and became immediately defensive. At which point, Costello upped the tempo and apparently dismissed the entire American nation as "just a bunch of flea-bitten greasers and niggers." This was bound to cause the uproar Costello was looking for, and of course it did. One account of the incident has a member of Stills' crew grabbing Costello by the scruff of the neck and telling him in no uncertain terms to keep his mouth shut, of which there was by now no chance. Costello had gone too far to back down. According to a report in the Random Notes pages of Rolling Stone, Costello now turned his attention to Joe Lala and called him "a greaser spic." Stills is then supposed to have grabbed Costello and given him a good shaking before storming out of the bar, angry and disgusted, with Bruce Thomas yelling "Fuck off, steel nose!" after him — the latter remark being an ill-concealed reference to the surgery Stills was alleged to have undergone to repair his nose after a lengthy addiction to cocaine. The argument now centred around music. with Costello badmouthing most American acts he could think of, including Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Bramlett accused him of stealing and plundering from America's rich heritage of black music. citing James Brown and Ray Charles specifically. Costello then contemptuously dismissing James Brown as "a jive-ass nigger". This was insensible on Costello's part, and even in the depths of his staggering drunkenness he should have known that he was pushing it too hard, too far. But he blundered on, the hole he was digging for himself getting deeper and darker with every ill-considered remark. "All right, you son of a bitch," Bramlett demanded, incensed, "what do you think of Ray Charles?" "He's nothing but an ignorant, blind nigger." Costello seethed venomously, beyond legitimate defence now, mischief turning to malice, a litany of brutal abuse. Bramlett was appalled, and told him to keep his damned opinions to himself. "Fuck Ray Charles." Costello allegedly roared, "fuck niggers. and fuck you!" This was too much for Bramlett. "Don't put the tongue on Ray Charles," she yelled, taking a swipe at Costello that according to one report dumped him arse-over-shoulder onto the carpet. Costello would later contend that Bramlett's punch was wild, didn't connect, that he was, in fact, set upon by no less than five of Stills road crew who beat him to the floor, at which point a full-scale brawl broke out. When the warring factions were eventually separated. the Stills party was hustled out of the hotel to their waiting tour bus while Costello stumbled to his room nursing an injured shoulder. The next day, the Armed Forces tour moved on to Cleveland, where Costello turned up at a concert by country singer Nicolette Larsen with his arm in a sling; the result, he told fans, laughing it off, of a bust-up over a drink with Bonnie Bramlett. This was typical of his immediate reaction to the fracas in Columbus. which he seems not to have taken terribly seriously. Talking to people he knew about what had just happened, Costello was determined to play it down, make light of the entire event. The photographer Roberta Bayley, who had known Costello since 1977 when she did a photo-session with him during the recording of This Year's Model, clearly remembers hearing about the incident within 24 hours, from Elvis himself. He described it as a simple bar brawl, an insult match." she later recalled. "He just said, 'I had a fight in the bar last night with these obnoxious people.' No big deal." For the first few days. at least, after the fracas in Columbus. Costello might well have believed that he'd got away with it, that there would be no public repercussions; that he wouldn't have to answer for what he'd said during his poisonous tirade, that his remarks wouldn't rebound on him in the most terrible way. If this was the case, Costello had reckoned without Bonnie Bramlett, who certainly wasn't prepared to forget what had been said, what had gone down in those awful drunken minutes in the Columbus Holiday Inn. What Costello didn't know, as the Armed Forces tour swung towards Boston and New York, was that this vengeful woman had already been calling virtually every newspaper, wire service and magazine on the East Coast, giving them explicit details of his outburst, branding him a racist and a bigot and demanding retribution. Costello didn't know it then, but there was going to be hell itself to pay for what he'd said. The first posters appeared in New York the week after the debacle in Columbus. "ARMED FORCES' LAND IN NY!!!" they shrieked. "WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ELVIS COSTELLO WEEKEND?" they wanted to know. There were two dates stencilled beneath a portrait of a typically brooding Costello: "MARCH 31/THE PALLADIUM. APRIL 1/NOWHERE..." The poster campaign was part of the graphic overture to what would soon become known as the "April Fool's Day Marathon". It was Jake's idea, of course, and the plan. as usual, was outrageous: six gigs in three days. starting with a concert at the Capitol in Passaic, New Jersey. backed-up by two shows the next night at the Palladium in New York, followed on Sunday, April 1, with three New York club dates. beginning at six that evening at the Lone Star Cafe, moving on for a performance at nine at the Bottom Line, and ending with a midnight appearance at downtown club called the Great Gildersleeves. Jake had devised this unprecedented blitz as the grandstanding climax of the Armed Forces tour. It was essentially a massive publicity binge, intended to overwhelm New York, capture the city's imagination like nothing else in recent memory and grab every available headline for Costello. If it hadn't been for what had just happened in the bleak precincts of Ohio, Riviera might even have pulled it off, securing Elvis' future celebrity. By the time Costello arrived in New York, however, the full story of the Columbus brawl was already breaking. The New York press was less concerned with where, when and how often Costello was going to be playing that weekend than they were with what he was supposed to have said two weeks earlier to Bonnie Bramlett. The first published accounts of the Columbus incident had appeared in New York's Village Voice and Rolling Stone. These had been followed by reports in People magazine and national and local newspapers. From these, Costello had emerged as a sinister bigot. The East Coast media was outraged by Costello's fiercely disparaging comments about America generally, and James Brown and Ray Charles specifically. By the end of March, they were whipping themselves up into a frenzy of liberal indignation, demanding explanation, public apologies and retractions of what they had already decided were Costello's racist views. "It was just incredible," recalls Kurt Loder, at the time a senior writer on Rolling Stone. "When I first heard about what was supposed to have happened, it just sounded like a really put-up job. I couldn't imagine that Elvis would ever genuinely think that Ray Charles was a blind, ignorant nigger, but there were people, you know, who wanted to lynch the guy. "I don't think anyone really believed all the stuff that was coming out. I don't think anyone really believed that Elvis hated niggers, blind or otherwise, but because of the attitude he'd had previously towards the press, he really set himself up. He should've known that if he said anything out of line, it was going to get blown up into a really big thing and that they'd really go for him. Which, of course. they did, and it hit him real hard. Because of who he was and this real hands-off attitude he had, there were some people, definitely, who were ready to push him on this one. Remainder of text to come. Uncut, No. 1, June 1997 Allan Jones documents the 1979 US tour. Images Cover and contents page. Page scans. Photo by Gus Stewart. Photo by Pennie Smith. Photo by Pennie Smith. Photo by Chuck Pulin. Photo by Chuck Pulin. Jake Riviera photo by Barry Plummer.

External links

• Uncut.co.uk
• Wikipedia: Uncut