DB's Song of the Day (day 90):"HEARTBREAK HOTEL" (1956) Elvis Presley

“And although it’s always crowded / You still can find some room / For broken-hearted lovers / To cry there in the gloom.”  Very appropriate, for today began very gloomy, gray and dull, then snow. Really. Maybe two inches or more before it ended.

Today’s song is the best Elvis Presley song. There was worry that the song was too “morbid” for a Top 40 hit, but a hit it was, in 1956. It left its mark on many who heard it then, people like Keith Richards and John Lennon, who would be major influences on their own generation. The song is stark and lean, sung with an amazing bravado that leaps out of the speakers and grabs you by whatever is grabbable: “Well, since my baby left me / I’ve found a new place to dwell.” We’re all ready to go along with him, to take a walk down lonely street.

The way Elvis slurs over the chorus “You make me so lonely, baby / Well, I’m so lonely / I’ll be so lonely I could die” is definitive. The cool mumble gets established right then, the elision of diction for the sake of effect. And I’ve always loved “The bellhop’s tears keep flowing / The desk clerk’s dressed in black”—it’s easy to imagine Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, maybe Peter Lorre, signing up for those roles. It’s not a funereal song but it definitely rocks with an eye on the end, we might say.

The song was memorably covered by John Cale on Slow Dazzle in 1975, with a vocal that reminds me of Karloff, and when Cale sings “we could die” he screams it as if he’s actually ready to. Elvis doesn’t go for such histrionics; he just rides that superb strum and lets the reverb do a lot of the work for him. The notion of a “heartbreak hotel” is quite an inspiration. There should be a place you can check into to wallow in your misery—“if your baby leaves you / And you need a new place to dwell.” And it’s like that, isn’t it? You check in and stay as long as you need to. Kind of like a soul asylum.

Today’s song is in honor of an “Elvis man” who departed this world way too soon—my brother-in-law, Leoance Simpson, who turned 8 the year this song came out, and died this month at age 65. He is deeply mourned and greatly missed.

So long, Leoance, it was good knowing you. Thanks for everything.

DB's Song of the Day (day 89):"BELL BOTTOM BLUES" (1970), Derek and the Dominoes

Today is the 69th birthday of Eric Clapton. I’ve never been much of a fan. Cream was OK but I never felt the need to have their albums, and the solo Clapton career was pretty much a bore. But I do have great respect for Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. This was Clapton at his hottest—the period 1970-71, when he played on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and with Delaney and Bonnie and friends, and even his song “After Midnight” was OK. I remember it on the Top 40 chart. But the album Layla, with Duane Allman on slide guitar, is one of the great guitar albums in rock history.

Today’s song is just Clapton though. Allman’s not on this one and that seems a good reason to feature it on Clapton’s special day. And because “Bell Bottom Blues,” and the title song “Layla,” were the songs that I got to know first and best from the album. “BBB” became one of those songs that set the tone for some of my early tape-making, which were all about creating classic rock playlists in an autobiographical vein. Now, “BBB,” at first, had nothing to do with me, personally. It’s a song about a lovesick guy who is trying to convince his ladylove that she means more to him than anything—his dignity (“Do you want to see my crawl across the floor to you / Do you want to hear me beg you to take me back / I’d gladly do it”), his life (“And if I could choose a place to die / It would be in your arms”). And he’s adamant that “it’s all wrong but it’s alright / The way that you treat me, baby”—which is a way of saying she can do whatever she likes with him. It’s a bit of the good ol’ masochistic blues, I suppose, though of course it may all be hyperbole.

What always sold this song to me is, first, the vocal. Clapton sings this one like he means it. Like he’s really suffering, and that the object of his desire is bound to turn down even something as naked and heartfelt as this musical plea. Then there’s lines like “You won’t find a better loser,” which has a knowing irony to it; and the great chorus of “I don’t want to fade away / Give me one more day please / I don’t want to fade away / In your heart I want to stay.” Now, the guy may be a loser and all that, but that idea of “fading away,” as I would subsequently learn, is the great fear when one feels a love affair waning. It’s like the person you once were—fully empowered and erotically plugged in—is ebbing, fading out, going, going, gone . . . .  And the thing that makes the blues so powerful is that the singer always associates all the best that he can be with the woman who’s dumping him. It’s like that particular self has no future without her, and that’s a hard lesson to learn.

When did you first learn that?  Everybody learns that shitty truth sometime, don’t they? Clapton, in this song, backs it up with more than just impassioned singing. He plays guitar that illustrates what is meant when people say guitars “chime” or “ring like a bell.” The guitar tone in this song is vibrant, alive, and sharp. And when he hits that solo around 2:33-2:43 he takes a cue from Robbie Robertson’s little stinging pickings at the strings. It kills me every time. Clapton has said that, with this album, he wanted to get away from acid rock’s three-day guitar solos and make a record more like The Band’s albums, by which he means no solos for solo’s sake but interplay. This album bristles with brilliant interplay. And most of the songs are pretty top notch too.

Like I said, the song at first was just a great song, but later it became a song I could identify with, as that sense of fading away and that sense of wanting one more day, or whatever it took to reverse the trend toward the end, was, for me, what made the experience of the song so palpable. Oh, and don’t forget that last verse, which changes the tone: “Bell bottom blues, don’t say goodbye / We’re surely going to meet again / And if we do, don’tcha be surprised / If you find me with another lover.” Yeah, cheap shot, like, why would she care? But then this isn’t said in order to hurt her but simply as the realization that all this passion being wasted on some chick who doesn’t care will certainly get the dude “another lover.”

A word about that title: “Bell Bottom Blues.”  Now, bell bottoms were the preferred jeans of the Seventies. They went with the whole druggie lifestyle somehow. I’m not sure why. It’s been said that Clapton’s title came from the fact that Pattie Boyd—George Harrison’s wife with whom Clapton was passionately infatuated—had asked him to buy her some bell bottoms. Sure, whatever. I’m figuring that seeing her in those bell bottoms lit a fire in Eric. But that’s gossip, y’know. What I do know is that, to me, the act of walking in rain in bell bottoms (they tended to drag a bit) usually meant that water would seep up to about shin level. “Bell Bottom Blues,” as a phrase, always brought that to my mind, that sense of walking around in the rain, bluesing, in dragging, frayed bell bottoms.  

DB's Song of the Day (day 88):"BRILLIANT DISGUISE" (1987) Bruce Springsteen

It was only a matter of time before this guy showed up. The album of his that got through to me earliest was Born to Run (1975) which I heard maybe a year after it came out (not counting the radio airplay on Philly stations down there in DE), but I don’t feel like talking about anything from that, yet, ditto Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), which is the one I got when it came out and saw the tour, in Philly of course. Springsteen had the air of local boy makes good, in those days. But I’ll save that one for another day.

Maybe yesterday’s choice of a late Eighties R.E.M. track set up this track from the same year. The album, Tunnel of Love, came after Bruce had shown what he could do with the full-on double album epic, The River (1980), crammed with everything on his palette, and after he’d done the quiet, glum, stripped-down soul-search—kinda looking for the heart of America—Nebraska (1982), and after the “look at me girls, I’m a sex symbol, working-class rocker” bit with Born in the U.S.A. (1984). What to do next? This album is very uneven, showing some doubts about how to answer that question and even the good songs, like this one, suffer from the malaise known as the Eighties (what a wimpy drumtrack and those synths—he should’ve left them behind with “Dancing in the Dark”!).  Still, “Brilliant Disguise” is about as good a song as the Brucer ever wrote.

It’s also got a good, live singing video, directed by none less than Marty Scorsese. Bruce was trying to get back to grit, I guess. Singing to himself late night in the kitchen, we imagine. It works.

The song is a great brood piece on what kind of love the guy is stuck with. First of all, it’s a recognition that, while the romantics among us hope or expect love to remake us, giving us a new lease on life, we’re still stuck with ourselves as part of the equation. “I tried so hard, baby, but I still can’t see / What a woman like you is doin’ with me.” But it’s also a song that registers jealousy, suspicion, and the kind of doubts that make a “sure thing” so unsure. “I wanna read your mind / To know just what I've got in this new thing I've found.”

The idea of the “brilliant disguise” is, well, brilliant. It’s a nod to the fact that, when we want to impress people and make them fall in love with us, we tend to show them only what we want them to see, our best behavior, our wonderful sensitivity, our golden sense of humor, and so on. It’s a disguise of all the things we don’t want to let on about ourselves—that we’re boring, irritable, selfish, and not necessarily eager for eros. Or, at least, the erotic appetites of others can be downright inconvenient at times. And it’s that non-parity, the song suggests, that causes both partners to look for something else, maybe in hopes of finding what they never had, maybe in hopes of turning into someone new.

“I’m just a lonely pilgrim / I walk this world in wealth / I want to know if it’s you I don’t trust / Because I damn sure don’t trust myself.”  It doesn’t get spelled out better than that often. All that notion that we have to trust our lover sorta goes up in smoke if we’re not to be trusted, doesn’t it?

And then check out that final verse, which really gave me chills upon the first ten or twenty times I heard it:

Now you play the loving woman / And I play the faithful man / But just don’t look too close / Into the palm of my hand / We stood at the altar / The gypsy swore our future was right / But come the wee wee hours / Maybe, baby, the gypsy lied / So when you look at me / You better look hard and look twice / Is that me, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?

Up till this point the “brilliant disguise” had been hers, now it may be his too. Disguising, possibly, his unfaithfulness, and certainly his doubts about that gypsy’s fortune-telling. And Springsteen, who by this point had become a very sensitive vocalist, able to exploit that deep earnestness we all know and love, really lets us feel the “bottom just fell out of everything” notion that “maybe, baby, the gypsy lied”—and the gypsy ain’t the only one.

So, then, while we’re still reeling with the fact that the singer, in all his hurt and suspicion and longing and doubt, is also, possibly, in disguise, he gives us the real kicker:

Tonight our bed is cold
I’m lost in the darkness of our love
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of.

And then we see that all the doubt about her really amounts to nothing, though he may have already ruined it through suspicion, but, more to the point, he can’t free himself of doubting what he knows to be true. It’s a life of paradox, of the certainty that what you love is not to be trusted because you can’t trust your own heart. If the bottom already fell out of everything, here it becomes the canker that gnaws endlessly at the heart of it all. What if I’m wrong to love what I love? What if I’m a fool? What if I’m in disguise from myself?

It’s a great lyric and it’s delivered with a slightly slurred, hurried vocal that registers that sense of singing to oneself that Dylan does so well, and, like some of Bob's best songs on the mind-fuck of intimate relations, this one is for the books.