July 27, 2016 • 36 mins
How does genius emerge? An exploration of different types of innovation—through the lens of Elvis Costello’s extraordinary song “Deportee,” once utterly forgettable and then, through time and iteration, a work of beauty and genius.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In nineteen eighty four, Elvis Costello released his ninth album,
Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out,
because I bought every Elvis Costello album back then the
week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
music you listen to at ages nineteen and twenty is
the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness.
(00:38):
If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll
see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in nineteen
eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened
to it right away. And this episode is about one
song on that album. It's called the Deportees Club. I
still have it on vinyl. It goes like this, Oh God,
(01:10):
it's awful. My name is Malcolm Blavo. Welcome to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood. This week, I
(01:30):
want to go back to Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty four.
I should say you don't have to know anything about
Elvis Costello or even like his music to be interested
in this story. I'm not talking about Deportees Club as
a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding
how creativity works, and I've chosen Depotees Club as my
(01:53):
case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed
with it and maybe, hopefully you will be two once
you're finished. Depote's Club is the second to last song
on the B side of Goodbye World. The album cover
is a picture of a little mountaintop with two trees
(02:13):
on it, with Costello and his band members in various
strange poses. It's all very eighties. The record was produced
by two legends of the British music scene at the time,
Clive Langer and Alan win Stanley. You've probably heard some
of their work. They did records with Madness, Lloyd Cole,
David Bowie, virtually all of the great English new wave
(02:33):
hit songs of the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties.
Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley were the guys behind the curtain.
I don't know if you've ever heard come On Eileen
by Dexy's Midnight Runners. Come On Eileen. Oh, I swear
what he means at this moment you mean everything.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you could make that
out that song. Langer and win Stanley Clive Langer knows
Elvis Costello. Of course they would bump into each other
in the way that people in a small world always
bump into each other, and new wave music in the
nineteen eighties was a small world. At one point, Langer
(03:15):
has his own band and he was doing a show
in a riverboat on the river Mersey. Costello calls him
up and.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
He said, oh, I'll come up and play a few
songs before you go on.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That's Langer. We met at a pub on Lawston Road
in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery, with close
cropped white hair and oversized glasses and the kind of
graciousness that only the English seemed to possess. An absolutely
delightful person. My father is English and all older, charming
Englishman remind me of my father.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
We had some tea. It was all very civilized. Okay,
back to Elvis Costello. He came up and played all
his best songs. I mean it's his you know Alison
and Everything.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Song, Allison Costello's first big hit.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Oh then I had to go on and do my
first ever show with the same lineup, and we weren't
as good, you know, so I don't know. I didn't
know quite how to take that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
If you detect a little bit of friction in that,
you're not wrong. Alvis Costello is a genius, and like
a lot of geniuses, he has a really strong personality.
A few years pass and Costello's record label decides they
want to broaden his commercial appeal. He has a fanatical
following among those who know New Way music, but the
(04:41):
label wants a big commercial hit, so they turned to
the hit makers Langer and win Stanley, and the two
of them produce a record for Costello called Punch the Clock,
which has a number of absolutely exquisite songs, including Shipbuilding,
which Langer co wrote with Elvis Costello.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Isis worth the news culture shoes? Fine?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
You collaborate on Punch the Clock?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:16):
And you like that album?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Yes? He doesn't, and he doesn't know.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Why is he unhappy with it?
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think it was just too commercial at that time,
and he wanted to write something simpler, more live more.
You know, he's more of a purist than I am.
So I was brought up with psychedelic pop in the
mid sixties, so I was kind of like, Oh, we
can do this, we can do that you know, and
he's like, oh, I want it to sound real and
(05:46):
black pop dinner or something, you know. But and when
you get that right, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I want to hear a little bit more about Punch
the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an
impact on the way the record turned out.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Not so much. On Punch the Clock we didn't have tension.
We had tension later, which I'll talk to you about
what we did have. When we did the playback of
Punch the Clock, he got quite drunk and played it
back really loud.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Of course they did, and how much would you kill
to a bit in the room with.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Him, and he kind of freaked out, said it's all rubbish,
it's terrible, it's terrible, and I was like, I had to,
you know, calm him down a bit and we all
carry it on.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
When the time comes to make the next album, Castello
turns to Langer and win Stanley again, only this time.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
The first thing he said is that I want to
call it Goodbye Corl World. I think it's going to
be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band,
so he was confiding in me.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
They do a first run through recording all the songs live.
Langer is the producer, the one who's supposed to be
running the show, but immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically
takes over.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Because he's quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and
you know, lovely, but you can sort of barge in
and start changing th hims, you know. So I remember saying,
thanks for letting me be here to listen to you
and make your record, you know, but I don't think
it should go like that. Shouldn't be like this, you know.
(07:20):
So it was a bit a bit of a standoff.
I think he went out and bought a half bottler.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
June and I asked Langer and why Costello said this
was going to be his last album. It's not like
he was an old man ready to retire.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
He wasn't even thirty. It was just that he'd had
a lot on his back, you know, he'd been through
a lot. I don't know if he wanted to carry
on playing the game at that point.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
The result is disastrous. I hate it. Goodbye cruel World.
When I first heard it, and remember I'm a massive
Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did
a television variety show called Spectacle.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Ladies, and gentleman, will you please wag him to the stage.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I want to live to Nick Lo, And in the
episode where he interviews Nick Low and Richard Thompson, the
camera pans the audience and twice you see me grinning
madly as I said. I'm a massive Elvis Costello fan,
and believe me when I say goodbye. Cruel world was unlistenable,
especially Deporte's Club. It was angry and loud and upsetting.
(08:33):
And I'm not the only one who feels that way.
In nineteen ninety five, the album is re released by
Raiko Disc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in the liner notes, congratulations,
you've just purchased our worst album. You have to kind
(08:53):
of admire as honesty. Except on that same re release,
Costello includes a new version of Deporte's Club, one of
the songs on the original album he hates so much
he gives it a new melody and plays it by himself.
(09:15):
An acoustic version shortens the title to DEPORTI fiddles with
some of the lyrics, and it never appears anywhere else,
just on this random re release by Raiko disc Records.
Whatever that is, and I would never have heard it
except that my friend Bruce ran across it and played
it for me. Bruce, by the way, was also in
(09:35):
the audience of that Elvis Casseillo TV show, grinning madly. Anyway,
Bruce and I used to make mixtapes for each other,
and he puts this new version Deportee on a mixtape
for my birthday, and I become obsessed with it. I'll
bet I sing parts of it to myself almost every day.
I don't really know why, but it might be one
of my favorite songs ever. There's a line in it
(09:58):
that jumps into my head whenever I'm sad. It's so perfect,
a little couplet about the dissolution of romantic love and
you don't know where to start or where to stop.
All this pillow talk is finely talk, king shop.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Can we play it?
Speaker 6 (10:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
I'm in the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of
the original awful version Deportees Club. Strangely, he'd never heard
the new, obscure and amazing version of the song he
produced so long ago.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
I want to hear his new version.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, So I found it on my iPhone and
Langer leaned his head over the table so that his
ear would be right next to the tiny phone speaker.
Is the one in the.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Air Children nine Club, bar Shend, Fine Classrooms, bunch of charms.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
Send.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
All Chrum that's doing the spent stems and part us.
(11:30):
There's a tad.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
You know, it.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Sounds like he's found the song, but he didn't know
at the time either that That's what I mean, That's
what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah, either review in the moment.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
No, Sometimes you know, if it's not sounding right, maybe
I don't know, maybe we were not focused enough. You know,
maybe we were making a record, but we were miles away.
Speaker 6 (11:55):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
In the end, they Alvis Costello and his producers all
thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't
understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a
bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.
And that's what I want to talk about, time and iteration.
(12:25):
What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge.
I know that this is just one three minute song.
Maybe you don't even like it, but every time I
hear it, I think the same thing, which is this
is something that gives a lot of people in the
world pleasure, including me, And it almost didn't happen. If
Elvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deportees Club turn
(12:48):
it into Deportee, we miss all that beauty, and the
thought of that breaks my heart. There's a theory about
creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an
economist named David Gailnsen came up with. Gailenson is an
art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art,
(13:10):
that there are two very different trajectories that great artists
seem to take. On the one hand, there are those
who do their best work very early in their life.
They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas
that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those
ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom.
(13:31):
Galensen calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example.
He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and
electrifies the art world at the turn of the last century.
I think that someone like Picasso is who we have
in mind when we think of that word genius. But
(13:52):
Galenson says, wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity.
He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who
never have a clear, easily articulated idea. They don't work
quickly when they start off. They don't really know where
they're going. By trial and error, they do endless drafts.
(14:12):
They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to
figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example. Seison,
every bit as famous and important a painter as Picasso,
may be the greatest of the Impressionists who reinvent modern
art in Paris in the late eighteen hundreds. With Seison's
genius and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different.
(14:36):
Why don't we start with your favorite?
Speaker 8 (14:38):
Do you have a favorite in this wild Maybe? My
favorite at the moment is that one the bay.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
I'm talking to a man named John Elderfield. He's a
Seeson expert, and he took me to that gallery at
the Metropolitan Museum in New York where they have all
of their seisons, easily a few billion dollars worth of
paintings in one room, and it took only about five minutes.
Wandering from picture to picture with Elderfield to see experimental
genius in action.
Speaker 8 (15:04):
So this is one of the many portraits of his
wife's that says On made, and it's one of four
pictures done in a short period of time when they
were living together in Paris.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
The season we're looking at is a picture of a
middle aged woman seated. Her head is tilted slightly to
the side. As with a lot of Saison's portraits, we
can see only one of her ears. He didn't like
doing the second year. She's sitting quietly, almost floating in
the chair.
Speaker 8 (15:34):
And I think it's arguably one of the greatest portraits
that he did.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
It's one of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield
says that the first two are a little smaller, looser,
maybe one trace from another, and then a third much
like the one we're looking at, but without any background
painted in just the figure. Is this very typical of
the way he worked? So he does essentially comes back
to her four times.
Speaker 8 (16:02):
Yeah, and then he.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Gets it right.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Notice my assumption here, because what I was thinking when
I said that bit about he gets it right the
fourth time was that if Saeson did four versions, he
must have been marching towards some kind of preordained conclusion.
He has an idea and he's perfecting it. But that's
not seyson Standard practice is you do a sketch, work
out the problems, do a finished version. Seyson kind of
(16:28):
starts in the middle. The fourth version of Sezon's portrait
of his wife, the one we're looking at, is less
finished than his second and third versions.
Speaker 8 (16:36):
Well, for example, here you can see this unfinished parts
putatively unfinished parts, I mean like the area of the
dress there where there's like you can really see the
grounds of the canvas and all the way through the
lower part, and you can see who's been putting these
breast strikes down and not actually filling them all together.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Sezon didn't work according to some clear linear plan. He
basically just did versions over and again, iteration after iteration,
trying to stumble on something that seized his imagination. Many
of Saizan's paintings are unsigned because he doesn't want to
admit to himself that he's done. He does portraits of
his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and he makes him come
(17:18):
for a hundred sittings, one.
Speaker 8 (17:20):
Hundred, one hundred.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Normally they would be how many.
Speaker 8 (17:23):
And now I mean normally for portraits it would just
be a relatively short number, I mean five or something.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Why does he need a hundred exactly?
Speaker 8 (17:31):
I mean, what's in?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
What's she doing?
Speaker 8 (17:33):
All the time?
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Saisan was never finished. This is what David Gilinson means
by experimental genius, and Gillinsen points out that you can
see this creative type in virtually every field. Herman Melville
publishes Moby Dick when he's thirty two, writes it in
a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark Twain publishes Huck Finn when
(17:59):
he's in his late forties, and it takes him forever
because he ends up obsessively rewriting and rewriting the ending.
He says on who else does Citizen Kane? When he's
twenty four? Picasso. Alfred Hitchcock doesn't reach his prime until
his mid fifties, after he spent his entire career making
one thriller after another, playing with a genre over and
(18:21):
over again. Saison. But there's one field where I think
Galenson's theory plays out the most powerfully, and that's music.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minifold,
the major lift, the baffled game. Coboluia heluaallulua.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That's the song Hallelujah. It was composed by the Canadian
songwriter Leonard Cohen. But basically everybody is in a cover
of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright, You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovi,
John Kle, Bob Dylan, I could go on. It's featured
in countless TV and movie soundtracks. If you ride the
New York City Subway on a regular basis, you'll probably
(19:16):
hear a busker singing it virtually every day. Like a
good Canadian, I go to a Canada Day celebration every
year at Joe's pap in Manhattan, where local artists sing
cover versions of Canadian songs. Every year someone does a
version of Hallelujah. Every year. It brings down the house.
And here's what's interesting about that song.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It is so not Picasso. It is seison, textbook seison.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
A few years ago, the music writer Alan Light wrote
an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book on the song Hallelujah.
It's called The Holy or the Broken, and one of
the big themes is how peculiar Leonard Cohen is. He's
a poet, a tortured poet.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
He is a writer in that way that he labors
over what these lyrics are, line by line, word by word,
throws a lot away, spends a great deal of time.
And Hallelujah, famously, out of all of these, is probably
the song that he says bedeviled him the most.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
That's allan like. He came by my house one day
to talk about Hallelujah.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
sixty or seventy verses.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Which is for this song, which I mean, you've been
writing about music for many, many years. Have you ever
heard of a musician who wrote eighty different?
Speaker 7 (20:43):
I don't think so, I mean, and I don't know
what that. I don't know if that means variations on verses.
I don't know if that means entirely like how much
of this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter. It's a
whole other.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Level.
Speaker 7 (20:54):
Well, there's the famous story that you know, Leonard Cohen
and Bob Dylan have this kind of mutual admiration thing,
and apparently they met up in the eighties. At some
point they were both in Paris and they went to
meet at a cafe and Dylan said, oh, I like
that song Hallelujah, which is a fascinating piece of this
story that really the first person who paid attention to
(21:17):
Hallelujah as an important song was Bob Dylan. But he
said to Leonard, you know, I like that song. How
long did you work on that? And Leonard said, I
told him that I'd worked on it for two years.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Which was a lie. Cohen later confessed it took him
much longer. Then Cohen asks Dylan how long it took
him to write the song I and I.
Speaker 7 (21:35):
And Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Dylan is picasso with Leonard.
Speaker 7 (21:40):
It's not the first thought, best thought school at all,
and he talks about, you know, being in a hotel
room in his underwear banging his head on the floor
because he couldn't solve this song, Hallelujah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records
it in nineteen eighty four. It's for an album called
Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes
them to his record label, which is CBS. To the
head of CBS, who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikoff,
who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce
(22:14):
Springsteen's Born in USA? Not a dumb guy. Jetnikoff listens
to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not
releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being
released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes
a ripple. And if you go back and listen to
that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future
(22:35):
versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not
there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about
the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Cohen's original version
so hyper serious that it's almost satire. Ah No, kind
(23:02):
of turgid, isn't it. But Cohen's not done. He keeps
tinkering with it. He plays it in concerts, and he
slows it down. It becomes twice as long. He changes
the first three verses, leaving only the final verses the same.
The song becomes even darker this time around.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, I'll see your flag on the marvel large.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
But listen, love, love is not some kind of victory Marge, No.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
It's cold.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Maybe it's severa Brokale how Land, how Land.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
One night, Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon
Ballroom in New York, and the musician John Cale happens
to be in the audience. Cayl is a legend, used
to be in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure
in the rock and roll a vant garde. He hears
this song come out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away,
so he asked Cohen to send in the lyrics. He
(24:07):
wants to do a version of it, so Coen factes
him fifteen pages. Who knows what the lyrics actually are.
At this point, Cale says that for his version he
took the cheeky parts. He ends up using the first
two verses of the original combined with three verses from
the live performance, and Cale changes some words. Most importantly,
(24:29):
he changes the theme and brings back the biblical references
that Cohen had in the album version.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
Maybe there's a God about all I ever love?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
From love?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
How does shoot at someone?
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Who?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Are you?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
You?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
And it's not a cry you can hear at night.
It's not somebody you've seen the line.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
It's a call and answer for Alganillluia.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Hell Cale is really the one who cracks the code
of Hallelujah. According to Alan Knight, this cover version appears
on a Leonard Cohen tribute album put together by a
French music magazine. It was called I'm Your Fan. Came
out in nineteen ninety one. Almost nobody bought I'm Your Fan,
except weirdly me. I think I found it in a
(25:24):
remainder bin in a little record store on Columbia Road
in Washington, d C. Another person who bought I'm Your
Fan was a woman named Janine who lived in Park
Slope in Brooklyn. She was good friends with a young
aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He used to house sit
at her apartment, and one time, when Buckley's there, he
happens to see the CD of I'm Your Fan. He
(25:46):
plays it. He hears John Cale's version of Hollelujah and
decides to do his own version of that version. He
performs it at a tiny little bar in the east
village called Cheney, where he happens to be heard by
an executive from Columbia Records. So Columbia Records ends up
signing Buckley and he records his version of Hollelujah for
(26:06):
the album Grace, which ends up being Buckley's first and
only studio album. It came out in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 9 (26:15):
Remember moved in you and the Holy Dove was moving too,
And every breathed Withdrew was Hallanluia.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're
most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one.
It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's
a cover of John Cayle's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
only with Cale's piano swapped out for a guitar, and
of course Buckley swaps out Cale's voice for his own
(26:58):
extraordinary voice Hallelujah. All every subsequent cover, and there have
(27:24):
been hundreds, are really covers a Buckley covering Kale covering Cohen.
So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.
Speaker 7 (27:34):
Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
and this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay, but nobody
bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
(27:55):
the hype around him, so that didn't make it a hit.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal like Jesus,
with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough
until nineteen ninety seven, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in
Memphis and he goes swimming in one of the channels
of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing
and singing the chorus of a Whole Lot of Love
(28:19):
by led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again. And
that tragedy suddenly propels his work and Hallelujah into the spotlight.
Speaker 7 (28:29):
And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
fifteen years since Leonard recorded.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
This song, fifteen years and think about how many incredible
twists and turns that song takes before it gets recognized
as a work of genius. It just happens that the
(29:05):
independent label Passport Records releases the first version. The album
it's on is rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen
doesn't give up, keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah.
John Cale, one of the most influential musicians of his era,
happens to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song
some more. Cale's version goes out on the obscure French
(29:28):
CD I'm a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living
room in Park Slope, and Janine happens to have a
house sitter who happens to play it, happens to like it,
and happens to have an ethereal amazing voice. Buckley's version
goes nowhere until he happens to die under the most
dramatic and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then finally we recognize
(29:51):
the genius of this song. But think about how fragile
and elusive that bit of genius is. If any of
those incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never
have heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy chain of
(30:13):
happenstance matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon One says,
A Bridge over Troubled Water one of the most beautiful
pop songs ever written. It came so fast, and when
it was done, I said, where did that come from?
It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly.
You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require fifteen
(30:35):
years worth of twists and turns and random events. The
world is really good at capturing conceptual creations, or at
least we don't miss as many conceptual works because they
don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But if
you're Seyson and the first version you produce is just
a starting point and you never know exactly what you're
(30:57):
doing or why, or whether your work is finished or not,
the stars really do have to be aligned. Seyson was
his own worst enemy in a way. He threw up
barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us when he
painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point. The
art of the experimental innovator is elusive.
Speaker 8 (31:19):
There are some of them which now are in museums
which we know he had tried to destroy. I mean,
and you can see in some of them the cases
of where he slashed the canvases.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Why would he destroy his own canvases?
Speaker 8 (31:33):
You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted
to do and felt he actually never was actually getting
to that point. There are other paintings done much later
where he simply abandons them. And Picassa said that, you
know what actually engages us is Saisan's doubt, his uncertainty.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
He's obsessive, you know, he's.
Speaker 8 (31:56):
Absolutely just totally obsessive.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Elvis Costello Deportee in its original, flawed form. It comes
out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the way,
that Hallelujah first came out, and I'm not sure that's
a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a very particular
moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year
was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's
(32:31):
not a single stray note or emotion on that record.
It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along
comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the
midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in
glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up, he's having financial difficulties.
(32:51):
He says later that Langer and Winstanley were ill equipped
for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time.
A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been
more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs,
gritty and spare, to match his moods. Something not nineteen
eighty four. Meanwhile, Langer and Winstanley had been brought on
(33:14):
board to produce Hits, polished exquisite.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Every little bit was pondered over and you know, thought
about and put together very carefully. I mean, you had
bands like Scrittly Polity at that time, you know, spending
nine months on a song, and Trevor Horn spending four
weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band
called Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and they spent a month
just getting a particular drum sound.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Right, So we weren't that pendictte but we were dealing
with a world that was, you know, perfection. It was
we were trying to make pop perfection.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
You can imagine what happened when that world collides with
Elvis Costello, and some of it.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Just sounded like I mean, even the band were kind
of not very excited by some of the material. So
it wasn't a great experience. But we did it very quickly,
but just quickly. Mean in the time it took Trevor
On to get a Slayer down to two tribes, so
it's about three or four weeks.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, the whole album, it was a mess perfectionism in
a hurry. That's how you get to the bitter words. Congratulations,
you've just bought my worst album. Goodbye Cruel World is
not good. It's unlistenable, But it's what happens next that matters.
You Know how people always say, put your failures behind you,
(34:37):
get on with your life, never look back. Alvis Costello
does none of those things, because he says on he's
not Picasso. He carries around a little black book where
he writes draft after draft after draft of the songs
he's thinking about. He changes lines in the middle of
songs he's already recorded. He re arranges songs at different
tempos or in different time signatures. He cannibalizes his own work,
(35:00):
creating new songs out of old songs. And I don't
know where to start or where to stop. He doesn't
want to. S sign is named to the painting. And
thank god there are people like him and Saizon in
this world, because without the obsessives and the perpetually dissatisfied,
and the artists who go back over and over again
(35:21):
repainting what others see as finished, we would never have
seen the beauty of deportee.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
And you don't know weirdest stopped, all wed stop, All
this pillow talk is nothing.
Speaker 6 (35:39):
Marve then.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Fine talk.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
In shop down when ack.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
You can get more information about this and other episodes
at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Our show is produced by mea LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and
Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed
(36:13):
by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flaonon Williams is our
engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Siraka. The Panoply
management team is Laura Mayor, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weissberg.
I'm Malcolm Glad Party, Party,
Pushkin. In nineteen eighty four, Elvis Costello released his ninth album,
Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out,
because I bought every Elvis Costello album back then the
week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
music you listen to at ages nineteen and twenty is
the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness.
(00:38):
If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll
see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in nineteen
eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened
to it right away. And this episode is about one
song on that album. It's called the Deportees Club. I
still have it on vinyl. It goes like this, Oh God,
(01:10):
it's awful. My name is Malcolm Blavo. Welcome to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood. This week, I
(01:30):
want to go back to Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty four.
I should say you don't have to know anything about
Elvis Costello or even like his music to be interested
in this story. I'm not talking about Deportees Club as
a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding
how creativity works, and I've chosen Depotees Club as my
(01:53):
case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed
with it and maybe, hopefully you will be two once
you're finished. Depote's Club is the second to last song
on the B side of Goodbye World. The album cover
is a picture of a little mountaintop with two trees
(02:13):
on it, with Costello and his band members in various
strange poses. It's all very eighties. The record was produced
by two legends of the British music scene at the time,
Clive Langer and Alan win Stanley. You've probably heard some
of their work. They did records with Madness, Lloyd Cole,
David Bowie, virtually all of the great English new wave
(02:33):
hit songs of the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties.
Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley were the guys behind the curtain.
I don't know if you've ever heard come On Eileen
by Dexy's Midnight Runners. Come On Eileen. Oh, I swear
what he means at this moment you mean everything.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you could make that
out that song. Langer and win Stanley Clive Langer knows
Elvis Costello. Of course they would bump into each other
in the way that people in a small world always
bump into each other, and new wave music in the
nineteen eighties was a small world. At one point, Langer
(03:15):
has his own band and he was doing a show
in a riverboat on the river Mersey. Costello calls him
up and.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
He said, oh, I'll come up and play a few
songs before you go on.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That's Langer. We met at a pub on Lawston Road
in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery, with close
cropped white hair and oversized glasses and the kind of
graciousness that only the English seemed to possess. An absolutely
delightful person. My father is English and all older, charming
Englishman remind me of my father.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
We had some tea. It was all very civilized. Okay,
back to Elvis Costello. He came up and played all
his best songs. I mean it's his you know Alison
and Everything.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Song, Allison Costello's first big hit.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Oh then I had to go on and do my
first ever show with the same lineup, and we weren't
as good, you know, so I don't know. I didn't
know quite how to take that.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
If you detect a little bit of friction in that,
you're not wrong. Alvis Costello is a genius, and like
a lot of geniuses, he has a really strong personality.
A few years pass and Costello's record label decides they
want to broaden his commercial appeal. He has a fanatical
following among those who know New Way music, but the
(04:41):
label wants a big commercial hit, so they turned to
the hit makers Langer and win Stanley, and the two
of them produce a record for Costello called Punch the Clock,
which has a number of absolutely exquisite songs, including Shipbuilding,
which Langer co wrote with Elvis Costello.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Isis worth the news culture shoes? Fine?
Speaker 1 (05:12):
You collaborate on Punch the Clock?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:16):
And you like that album?
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Yes? He doesn't, and he doesn't know.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Why is he unhappy with it?
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think it was just too commercial at that time,
and he wanted to write something simpler, more live more.
You know, he's more of a purist than I am.
So I was brought up with psychedelic pop in the
mid sixties, so I was kind of like, Oh, we
can do this, we can do that you know, and
he's like, oh, I want it to sound real and
(05:46):
black pop dinner or something, you know. But and when
you get that right, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I want to hear a little bit more about Punch
the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an
impact on the way the record turned out.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Not so much. On Punch the Clock we didn't have tension.
We had tension later, which I'll talk to you about
what we did have. When we did the playback of
Punch the Clock, he got quite drunk and played it
back really loud.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Of course they did, and how much would you kill
to a bit in the room with.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Him, and he kind of freaked out, said it's all rubbish,
it's terrible, it's terrible, and I was like, I had to,
you know, calm him down a bit and we all
carry it on.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
When the time comes to make the next album, Castello
turns to Langer and win Stanley again, only this time.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
The first thing he said is that I want to
call it Goodbye Corl World. I think it's going to
be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band,
so he was confiding in me.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
They do a first run through recording all the songs live.
Langer is the producer, the one who's supposed to be
running the show, but immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically
takes over.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Because he's quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and
you know, lovely, but you can sort of barge in
and start changing th hims, you know. So I remember saying,
thanks for letting me be here to listen to you
and make your record, you know, but I don't think
it should go like that. Shouldn't be like this, you know.
(07:20):
So it was a bit a bit of a standoff.
I think he went out and bought a half bottler.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
June and I asked Langer and why Costello said this
was going to be his last album. It's not like
he was an old man ready to retire.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
He wasn't even thirty. It was just that he'd had
a lot on his back, you know, he'd been through
a lot. I don't know if he wanted to carry
on playing the game at that point.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
The result is disastrous. I hate it. Goodbye cruel World.
When I first heard it, and remember I'm a massive
Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did
a television variety show called Spectacle.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
Ladies, and gentleman, will you please wag him to the stage.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I want to live to Nick Lo, And in the
episode where he interviews Nick Low and Richard Thompson, the
camera pans the audience and twice you see me grinning
madly as I said. I'm a massive Elvis Costello fan,
and believe me when I say goodbye. Cruel world was unlistenable,
especially Deporte's Club. It was angry and loud and upsetting.
(08:33):
And I'm not the only one who feels that way.
In nineteen ninety five, the album is re released by
Raiko Disc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in the liner notes, congratulations,
you've just purchased our worst album. You have to kind
(08:53):
of admire as honesty. Except on that same re release,
Costello includes a new version of Deporte's Club, one of
the songs on the original album he hates so much
he gives it a new melody and plays it by himself.
(09:15):
An acoustic version shortens the title to DEPORTI fiddles with
some of the lyrics, and it never appears anywhere else,
just on this random re release by Raiko disc Records.
Whatever that is, and I would never have heard it
except that my friend Bruce ran across it and played
it for me. Bruce, by the way, was also in
(09:35):
the audience of that Elvis Casseillo TV show, grinning madly. Anyway,
Bruce and I used to make mixtapes for each other,
and he puts this new version Deportee on a mixtape
for my birthday, and I become obsessed with it. I'll
bet I sing parts of it to myself almost every day.
I don't really know why, but it might be one
of my favorite songs ever. There's a line in it
(09:58):
that jumps into my head whenever I'm sad. It's so perfect,
a little couplet about the dissolution of romantic love and
you don't know where to start or where to stop.
All this pillow talk is finely talk, king shop.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Can we play it?
Speaker 6 (10:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
I'm in the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of
the original awful version Deportees Club. Strangely, he'd never heard
the new, obscure and amazing version of the song he
produced so long ago.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
I want to hear his new version.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, So I found it on my iPhone and
Langer leaned his head over the table so that his
ear would be right next to the tiny phone speaker.
Is the one in the.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Air Children nine Club, bar Shend, Fine Classrooms, bunch of charms.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
Send.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
All Chrum that's doing the spent stems and part us.
(11:30):
There's a tad.
Speaker 7 (11:32):
You know, it.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Sounds like he's found the song, but he didn't know
at the time either that That's what I mean, That's
what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah, either review in the moment.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
No, Sometimes you know, if it's not sounding right, maybe
I don't know, maybe we were not focused enough. You know,
maybe we were making a record, but we were miles away.
Speaker 6 (11:55):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
In the end, they Alvis Costello and his producers all
thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't
understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a
bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.
And that's what I want to talk about, time and iteration.
(12:25):
What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge.
I know that this is just one three minute song.
Maybe you don't even like it, but every time I
hear it, I think the same thing, which is this
is something that gives a lot of people in the
world pleasure, including me, And it almost didn't happen. If
Elvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deportees Club turn
(12:48):
it into Deportee, we miss all that beauty, and the
thought of that breaks my heart. There's a theory about
creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an
economist named David Gailnsen came up with. Gailenson is an
art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art,
(13:10):
that there are two very different trajectories that great artists
seem to take. On the one hand, there are those
who do their best work very early in their life.
They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas
that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those
ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom.
(13:31):
Galensen calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example.
He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and
electrifies the art world at the turn of the last century.
I think that someone like Picasso is who we have
in mind when we think of that word genius. But
(13:52):
Galenson says, wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity.
He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who
never have a clear, easily articulated idea. They don't work
quickly when they start off. They don't really know where
they're going. By trial and error, they do endless drafts.
(14:12):
They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to
figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example. Seison,
every bit as famous and important a painter as Picasso,
may be the greatest of the Impressionists who reinvent modern
art in Paris in the late eighteen hundreds. With Seison's
genius and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different.
(14:36):
Why don't we start with your favorite?
Speaker 8 (14:38):
Do you have a favorite in this wild Maybe? My
favorite at the moment is that one the bay.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
I'm talking to a man named John Elderfield. He's a
Seeson expert, and he took me to that gallery at
the Metropolitan Museum in New York where they have all
of their seisons, easily a few billion dollars worth of
paintings in one room, and it took only about five minutes.
Wandering from picture to picture with Elderfield to see experimental
genius in action.
Speaker 8 (15:04):
So this is one of the many portraits of his
wife's that says On made, and it's one of four
pictures done in a short period of time when they
were living together in Paris.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
The season we're looking at is a picture of a
middle aged woman seated. Her head is tilted slightly to
the side. As with a lot of Saison's portraits, we
can see only one of her ears. He didn't like
doing the second year. She's sitting quietly, almost floating in
the chair.
Speaker 8 (15:34):
And I think it's arguably one of the greatest portraits
that he did.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
It's one of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield
says that the first two are a little smaller, looser,
maybe one trace from another, and then a third much
like the one we're looking at, but without any background
painted in just the figure. Is this very typical of
the way he worked? So he does essentially comes back
to her four times.
Speaker 8 (16:02):
Yeah, and then he.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Gets it right.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Notice my assumption here, because what I was thinking when
I said that bit about he gets it right the
fourth time was that if Saeson did four versions, he
must have been marching towards some kind of preordained conclusion.
He has an idea and he's perfecting it. But that's
not seyson Standard practice is you do a sketch, work
out the problems, do a finished version. Seyson kind of
(16:28):
starts in the middle. The fourth version of Sezon's portrait
of his wife, the one we're looking at, is less
finished than his second and third versions.
Speaker 8 (16:36):
Well, for example, here you can see this unfinished parts
putatively unfinished parts, I mean like the area of the
dress there where there's like you can really see the
grounds of the canvas and all the way through the
lower part, and you can see who's been putting these
breast strikes down and not actually filling them all together.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Sezon didn't work according to some clear linear plan. He
basically just did versions over and again, iteration after iteration,
trying to stumble on something that seized his imagination. Many
of Saizan's paintings are unsigned because he doesn't want to
admit to himself that he's done. He does portraits of
his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and he makes him come
(17:18):
for a hundred sittings, one.
Speaker 8 (17:20):
Hundred, one hundred.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Normally they would be how many.
Speaker 8 (17:23):
And now I mean normally for portraits it would just
be a relatively short number, I mean five or something.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Why does he need a hundred exactly?
Speaker 8 (17:31):
I mean, what's in?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
What's she doing?
Speaker 8 (17:33):
All the time?
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Saisan was never finished. This is what David Gilinson means
by experimental genius, and Gillinsen points out that you can
see this creative type in virtually every field. Herman Melville
publishes Moby Dick when he's thirty two, writes it in
a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark Twain publishes Huck Finn when
(17:59):
he's in his late forties, and it takes him forever
because he ends up obsessively rewriting and rewriting the ending.
He says on who else does Citizen Kane? When he's
twenty four? Picasso. Alfred Hitchcock doesn't reach his prime until
his mid fifties, after he spent his entire career making
one thriller after another, playing with a genre over and
(18:21):
over again. Saison. But there's one field where I think
Galenson's theory plays out the most powerfully, and that's music.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minifold,
the major lift, the baffled game. Coboluia heluaallulua.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That's the song Hallelujah. It was composed by the Canadian
songwriter Leonard Cohen. But basically everybody is in a cover
of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright, You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovi,
John Kle, Bob Dylan, I could go on. It's featured
in countless TV and movie soundtracks. If you ride the
New York City Subway on a regular basis, you'll probably
(19:16):
hear a busker singing it virtually every day. Like a
good Canadian, I go to a Canada Day celebration every
year at Joe's pap in Manhattan, where local artists sing
cover versions of Canadian songs. Every year someone does a
version of Hallelujah. Every year. It brings down the house.
And here's what's interesting about that song.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It is so not Picasso. It is seison, textbook seison.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
A few years ago, the music writer Alan Light wrote
an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book on the song Hallelujah.
It's called The Holy or the Broken, and one of
the big themes is how peculiar Leonard Cohen is. He's
a poet, a tortured poet.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
He is a writer in that way that he labors
over what these lyrics are, line by line, word by word,
throws a lot away, spends a great deal of time.
And Hallelujah, famously, out of all of these, is probably
the song that he says bedeviled him the most.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
That's allan like. He came by my house one day
to talk about Hallelujah.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
sixty or seventy verses.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Which is for this song, which I mean, you've been
writing about music for many, many years. Have you ever
heard of a musician who wrote eighty different?
Speaker 7 (20:43):
I don't think so, I mean, and I don't know
what that. I don't know if that means variations on verses.
I don't know if that means entirely like how much
of this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter. It's a
whole other.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Level.
Speaker 7 (20:54):
Well, there's the famous story that you know, Leonard Cohen
and Bob Dylan have this kind of mutual admiration thing,
and apparently they met up in the eighties. At some
point they were both in Paris and they went to
meet at a cafe and Dylan said, oh, I like
that song Hallelujah, which is a fascinating piece of this
story that really the first person who paid attention to
(21:17):
Hallelujah as an important song was Bob Dylan. But he
said to Leonard, you know, I like that song. How
long did you work on that? And Leonard said, I
told him that I'd worked on it for two years.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Which was a lie. Cohen later confessed it took him
much longer. Then Cohen asks Dylan how long it took
him to write the song I and I.
Speaker 7 (21:35):
And Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Dylan is picasso with Leonard.
Speaker 7 (21:40):
It's not the first thought, best thought school at all,
and he talks about, you know, being in a hotel
room in his underwear banging his head on the floor
because he couldn't solve this song, Hallelujah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records
it in nineteen eighty four. It's for an album called
Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes
them to his record label, which is CBS. To the
head of CBS, who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikoff,
who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce
(22:14):
Springsteen's Born in USA? Not a dumb guy. Jetnikoff listens
to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not
releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being
released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes
a ripple. And if you go back and listen to
that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future
(22:35):
versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not
there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about
the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Cohen's original version
so hyper serious that it's almost satire. Ah No, kind
(23:02):
of turgid, isn't it. But Cohen's not done. He keeps
tinkering with it. He plays it in concerts, and he
slows it down. It becomes twice as long. He changes
the first three verses, leaving only the final verses the same.
The song becomes even darker this time around.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, I'll see your flag on the marvel large.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
But listen, love, love is not some kind of victory Marge, No.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
It's cold.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Maybe it's severa Brokale how Land, how Land.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
One night, Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon
Ballroom in New York, and the musician John Cale happens
to be in the audience. Cayl is a legend, used
to be in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure
in the rock and roll a vant garde. He hears
this song come out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away,
so he asked Cohen to send in the lyrics. He
(24:07):
wants to do a version of it, so Coen factes
him fifteen pages. Who knows what the lyrics actually are.
At this point, Cale says that for his version he
took the cheeky parts. He ends up using the first
two verses of the original combined with three verses from
the live performance, and Cale changes some words. Most importantly,
(24:29):
he changes the theme and brings back the biblical references
that Cohen had in the album version.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
Maybe there's a God about all I ever love?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
From love?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
How does shoot at someone?
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Who?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Are you?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
You?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
And it's not a cry you can hear at night.
It's not somebody you've seen the line.
Speaker 5 (24:55):
It's a call and answer for Alganillluia.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Hell Cale is really the one who cracks the code
of Hallelujah. According to Alan Knight, this cover version appears
on a Leonard Cohen tribute album put together by a
French music magazine. It was called I'm Your Fan. Came
out in nineteen ninety one. Almost nobody bought I'm Your Fan,
except weirdly me. I think I found it in a
(25:24):
remainder bin in a little record store on Columbia Road
in Washington, d C. Another person who bought I'm Your
Fan was a woman named Janine who lived in Park
Slope in Brooklyn. She was good friends with a young
aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He used to house sit
at her apartment, and one time, when Buckley's there, he
happens to see the CD of I'm Your Fan. He
(25:46):
plays it. He hears John Cale's version of Hollelujah and
decides to do his own version of that version. He
performs it at a tiny little bar in the east
village called Cheney, where he happens to be heard by
an executive from Columbia Records. So Columbia Records ends up
signing Buckley and he records his version of Hollelujah for
(26:06):
the album Grace, which ends up being Buckley's first and
only studio album. It came out in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 9 (26:15):
Remember moved in you and the Holy Dove was moving too,
And every breathed Withdrew was Hallanluia.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're
most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one.
It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's
a cover of John Cayle's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
only with Cale's piano swapped out for a guitar, and
of course Buckley swaps out Cale's voice for his own
(26:58):
extraordinary voice Hallelujah. All every subsequent cover, and there have
(27:24):
been hundreds, are really covers a Buckley covering Kale covering Cohen.
So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.
Speaker 7 (27:34):
Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
and this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay, but nobody
bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
(27:55):
the hype around him, so that didn't make it a hit.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal like Jesus,
with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough
until nineteen ninety seven, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in
Memphis and he goes swimming in one of the channels
of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing
and singing the chorus of a Whole Lot of Love
(28:19):
by led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again. And
that tragedy suddenly propels his work and Hallelujah into the spotlight.
Speaker 7 (28:29):
And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
fifteen years since Leonard recorded.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
This song, fifteen years and think about how many incredible
twists and turns that song takes before it gets recognized
as a work of genius. It just happens that the
(29:05):
independent label Passport Records releases the first version. The album
it's on is rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen
doesn't give up, keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah.
John Cale, one of the most influential musicians of his era,
happens to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song
some more. Cale's version goes out on the obscure French
(29:28):
CD I'm a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living
room in Park Slope, and Janine happens to have a
house sitter who happens to play it, happens to like it,
and happens to have an ethereal amazing voice. Buckley's version
goes nowhere until he happens to die under the most
dramatic and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then finally we recognize
(29:51):
the genius of this song. But think about how fragile
and elusive that bit of genius is. If any of
those incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never
have heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy chain of
(30:13):
happenstance matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon One says,
A Bridge over Troubled Water one of the most beautiful
pop songs ever written. It came so fast, and when
it was done, I said, where did that come from?
It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly.
You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require fifteen
(30:35):
years worth of twists and turns and random events. The
world is really good at capturing conceptual creations, or at
least we don't miss as many conceptual works because they
don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But if
you're Seyson and the first version you produce is just
a starting point and you never know exactly what you're
(30:57):
doing or why, or whether your work is finished or not,
the stars really do have to be aligned. Seyson was
his own worst enemy in a way. He threw up
barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us when he
painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point. The
art of the experimental innovator is elusive.
Speaker 8 (31:19):
There are some of them which now are in museums
which we know he had tried to destroy. I mean,
and you can see in some of them the cases
of where he slashed the canvases.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Why would he destroy his own canvases?
Speaker 8 (31:33):
You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted
to do and felt he actually never was actually getting
to that point. There are other paintings done much later
where he simply abandons them. And Picassa said that, you
know what actually engages us is Saisan's doubt, his uncertainty.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
He's obsessive, you know, he's.
Speaker 8 (31:56):
Absolutely just totally obsessive.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Elvis Costello Deportee in its original, flawed form. It comes
out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the way,
that Hallelujah first came out, and I'm not sure that's
a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a very particular
moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year
was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's
(32:31):
not a single stray note or emotion on that record.
It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along
comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the
midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in
glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up, he's having financial difficulties.
(32:51):
He says later that Langer and Winstanley were ill equipped
for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time.
A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been
more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs,
gritty and spare, to match his moods. Something not nineteen
eighty four. Meanwhile, Langer and Winstanley had been brought on
(33:14):
board to produce Hits, polished exquisite.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Every little bit was pondered over and you know, thought
about and put together very carefully. I mean, you had
bands like Scrittly Polity at that time, you know, spending
nine months on a song, and Trevor Horn spending four
weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band
called Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and they spent a month
just getting a particular drum sound.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Right, So we weren't that pendictte but we were dealing
with a world that was, you know, perfection. It was
we were trying to make pop perfection.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
You can imagine what happened when that world collides with
Elvis Costello, and some of it.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Just sounded like I mean, even the band were kind
of not very excited by some of the material. So
it wasn't a great experience. But we did it very quickly,
but just quickly. Mean in the time it took Trevor
On to get a Slayer down to two tribes, so
it's about three or four weeks.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, the whole album, it was a mess perfectionism in
a hurry. That's how you get to the bitter words. Congratulations,
you've just bought my worst album. Goodbye Cruel World is
not good. It's unlistenable, But it's what happens next that matters.
You Know how people always say, put your failures behind you,
(34:37):
get on with your life, never look back. Alvis Costello
does none of those things, because he says on he's
not Picasso. He carries around a little black book where
he writes draft after draft after draft of the songs
he's thinking about. He changes lines in the middle of
songs he's already recorded. He re arranges songs at different
tempos or in different time signatures. He cannibalizes his own work,
(35:00):
creating new songs out of old songs. And I don't
know where to start or where to stop. He doesn't
want to. S sign is named to the painting. And
thank god there are people like him and Saizon in
this world, because without the obsessives and the perpetually dissatisfied,
and the artists who go back over and over again
(35:21):
repainting what others see as finished, we would never have
seen the beauty of deportee.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
And you don't know weirdest stopped, all wed stop, All
this pillow talk is nothing.
Speaker 6 (35:39):
Marve then.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Fine talk.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
In shop down when ack.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
You can get more information about this and other episodes
at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Our show is produced by mea LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and
Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed
(36:13):
by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flaonon Williams is our
engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Siraka. The Panoply
management team is Laura Mayor, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weissberg.
I'm Malcolm Glad Party, Party,
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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