On May 4, 1979 Elvis Costello and the Attractions released "Accidents Will Happen" b/w "Talking in the Dark" and "Wednesday Week". After the infamous Holiday Inn incident, Costello couldn't buy a hit in the United States, but in the U.K. the catchy song, which Costello says is "about a straying lover struggling to tell the truth and face the consequences", reached #28.
The music video, by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, was one of the 35 videos selected for the Museum of Modern Art's "Golden Oldies of Music Video" exhibition in 2003.
On March 24, 1979 Elvis Costello opened his Rochester, NY concert with "I Stand Accused". By that time, news of his ugly encounter at a Holiday Inn bar with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett had spread like wildfire. In his book Complicated Shadows : The Life and Music of Elvis Costello author Graeme Thomson gets Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas to admit they started the altercation as the alcohol flowed.
“Stills said, “If you hate us so much, what are you doing in our country?”,’ recalls Thomas. ‘And Elvis said something like, “We’ve come to take your money and your women.” Then it just got worse. “What about our music?” “You haven’t got any good music.” “What about James Brown?” “James Brown?” Bang! That’s pretty much how that one started. It was just us being obnoxious bastards.’ In this instance, being obnoxious bastards culminated in Elvis describing James Brown as ‘a jive-ass nigger’ and Ray Charles as ‘nothing but a blind, ignorant nigger’.
The timing couldn't have been worse. The new album, Armed Forces, has just hit the Billboard Top 10 in America. On March 30, CBS Records called an emergency press conference to get Costello --now followed around by two armed policemen as bodyguards--to apologize and answer questions about whether he was a racist. Behind the scenes, record execs discussed dropping Costello from the label. They certainly stopped promoting the album. By the end of April, Armed Forces has dropped out of the Top 30 and the new single, "Accidents Will Happen", didn't even break into the Hot 100.
I’ll have to take the word of witnesses that I really used such despicable racial slurs in the same sentence as the names of two of the greatest musicians who ever lived, but whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out. It was an absurd overstatement of opposites, a contradiction in terms. Just as people say “bad” when they mean “good.” Surely this was all understood. Didn’t they know the love I had for James Brown and Ray Charles, whose recording of “The Danger Zone” I preferred to watching men walk on the moon? “My love for the world is, like, always.” How could you not know that? It seems that they did not. It took just five minutes to detach my tongue from my mind and my life from the rail it was on.
It's always interesting to see how people react to sudden fame, especially when they're expected to live up to some nasty misanthropic image. Costello may have deep regrets about the incident, but he also believes it might have saved his life. Like Dylan with his motorcycle accident, Costello would need to take a breather before he started trying to win back his fans.
On February 4, 1979 Elvis Costello's new single, "Oliver's Army" b/w "My Funny Valentine" entered the U.K. charts at #45. The Armed Forces track remains Costello's highest charting single, peaking for three weeks at UK#2 and selling nearly half a million copies.
The song is so catchy, its piano flourishes inspired by ABBA's "Dancing Queen", many people haven't bothered to figure out what the lyrics are about. Here, in a song he began writing on a flight back from Belfast, Costello is ranting against English imperialism, citing Oliver Cromwell's brutal occupation of Ireland in the 17th Century and name-dropping other past and potential targets: Hong Kong, Palestine, Johannesburg. The smartest, most acerbic lyrics to ever hit UK Top 10.
At the time, it seemed as if we were making an impossibly sophisticated leap from the sound of “This Year’s Model” but listening now there are very few production devices that sit between the listener and the songs. -Elvis Costello on Twitter
On January 5, 1979 Elvis Costello and the Attractions released Armed Forces, perhaps my favorite of all of Costello's records. Teaming up with Nick Lowe once again, the band had six weeks at London's Eden Studios to record. The whole thing is a marvel. My version was an American cassette with the Barney Bubbles paint splatter cover and "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace Love and Understanding", which had appeared in November of '78 as the B side of Nick Lowe's "American Squirm"single. It's interesting to read that some critics thought Costello was going soft. Essential!
Costello writes in Unfaithful Music + Disappearing Ink: Late at night after the sessions, I listened repeatedly to the newly released All Mod Cons by The Jam. What I felt about it was nothing like rivalry, more just admiration. Paul Weller and I were writing completely different songs, but The Jam’s record was such a big and different step up from their previous release that I was moved to put aside a good song like “Tiny Steps” simply because it owed too much to the music and lyrics of This Year’s Model.
From Janet Maslin writing for Rolling Stone :
Consider "Oliver's Army," the piéce de résistance on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, an album that's killer in several senses of the word. The tune sounds bright and bouncy, with a jangly keyboard riff along the lines of "Here Comes Santa Claus," and it's enough to make you want to rock around the room. But sit down, Fred, and get a load of the lyrics you're dancing to: There was a Checkpoint Charlie He didn't crack a smile But it's no laughing party When you've been on the murder mile Only takes one itchy trigger One more widow, one less white nigger Oliver's Army is here to stay Oliver's Army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else than here today. In fact, this is an angry song about imperialism and the military, reportedly written just after Costello visited Northern Ireland. In spirit and on its very congenial surface, "Oliver's Army" is a hit single. You can hear it one way, or the other way, or both. Elvis Costello doesn't seem to give a damn what you do, and that's no small part of his charm.
Costello writes songs that are elusive at times, bursting with bright phrases you can't always catch. (As someone who still thinks the Rolling Stones are singing "Heartbreaker... with your bowling ball," I'm all in favor of half-audible lyrics that encourage a valuable do-it-yourselfism in the listener.) He sings about violence with a vibrant romanticism, and about love with murder in his heart. He writes short, blunt compositions that don't pretend to be artful, though they are, and don't demand to be taken seriously, even though they're more stunning and substantial than anything rock has produced in a good long while. He doubles back on himself at every turn, and you're forced to take it or leave it.
There's only one way to listen to Elvis Costello's music: his way. The songs are so brief they barrel right by, leaving an impression of jubilant and spiteful energies at war with each other. Every now and then, words like "quisling" or "concertina" leap out of nowhere and add to the confusion. Images are etched hard and fast, then replaced by new ones even stronger. There's an overload of cleverness on the LP -- more smartly turned phrases than twelve songs ordinarily could bear. But the rapid pacing alleviates any hint of self-congratulation.
Costello's songs are dense the way Bob Dylan's used to be, driven by the singer's faith that if this line doesn't get you, the next one will, and compressed so tightly that they lend themselves to endless rediscovery. He has something like the younger Dylan's rashness, too, being hotheaded enough to oversimplify anything for the sake of a good line, and being a good enough writer to get away with it. His puns are so outrageous they're irresistible. In "Senior Service" (the name of an English cigarette): "It's the breath you took too late/It's the death that's worse than fate." In "Oliver's Army": "Have you got yourself an Occupation?" In "Chemistry Class": "Are you ready for the final solution?" The first line on the record, "Oh, I just don't know where to begin." Beneath all this gamesmanship lurks something like a grand passion, however unexpected it may be from a fellow who favors photographs that make him look like a praying mantis. The EP that accompanies some copies of Armed Forces (Columbia wants you to buy the album in a hurry, so they'll stop including Live at Hollywood High after the first several hundred thousand records) contains a live version of "Alison" that's so steeped in tortured love it makes the concert audience squeal. And the LP's final cut, "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," is delivered with a sincerity bordering on desperation. The wise guy who can work Hitler into a song about competitive friendship ("Two little Hitlers will fight it out until/One little Hitler does the other one's will") is also prey to authentic romantic agonies so exquisitely maddening they go hand in hand with danger.
Listen to "Watching the Detectives," rerecorded in an almost playful version on the EP, with these show-stopping lines: "Nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/It only took my little fingers to blow you away." Or "Party Girl" (as in "You'll never be the guilty party, girl"), with its alternating waves of passionate declaration and angry denial. No Elvis Costello love song is without its ax to grind or its hatchet to bury, but at least the emotion, however strangled, comes through. Costello never sounds exactly willing to give himself over to sentiment, yet he works hard to make himself more than marginally accessible: a gangster with heart. Without that bit of humanizing, he'd be a specialty item. With it, he can be a star.
It hardly hurts that Costello's songs are never less than snappy, even when their drum parts are reminiscent of machine guns, or that Nick Lowe had produced him this time with a large and general audience in mind. Notwithstanding his Buddy Holly glasses and his Buddy Holly white socks, Elvis Costello refers most readily to the Sixties. And Lowe makes the most of this, filling Armed Forces with recycled lounge music ("Moods for Moderns"), Beatles-like codas and the trashiest organ lines this side of "96 Tears." Like the lyrics, these echoes run together in a quick, exciting jumble, so dense that the end of one number, "Busy Bodies," can mix the phrasing of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Nowhere Man" with the guitar lines of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" and the whoo-oos of the Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl." Costello draws so heavily on the recent rock past that his reliance upon it amounts to a kind of cheapening, a repudiation. But that's only one more in a long line of quicksilver contradictions.
Right now, Elvis Costello serves as a feisty and furiously talented middleman, halfway between rock's smoothest sellouts and the angriest fringes of its New Wave. He wants to be daring, but he also wants to dance. He'd like to seethe and sell records at the same time. He's mindful of -- indeed, insistent upon -- the form and its limitations: it's only rock + roll, after all. But he takes it to the limit just the same.
Bebe Buell was seeing Costello in this time period. In Please Kill Me-- the Uncensored Oral History of Punk she tells the story of meeting Costello at The Whiskey.
I turned and immediately knocked his glasses off by mistake. I apologized. He had a great sense of humor about it, he told me he didn't need his face anyway-and we were sweating and shaking and totally scared to death of each other.
It was so cute-you don't feel that kind of purity too often in your life. I mean, we were in love. It was just, forget it, that was that.
We went to see somebody record and Elvis didn't like them, so we crawled out of the recording session on our hands and knees and we ran right into the president of Columbia, which was Elvis's label at the time. I'm sure they thought I was a horrible influence on him, because at that point there was only one person badder than me and that was Anita Pallenberg.
I think they really saw trouble when they saw Elvis and me together. They thought, Oh god, how are we gonna explain this one? Immediately it was sort of like the Punk and the Model-Beauty and the Beast. And the press pulverized us.
Was she the inspiration for "Party Girl"? Bebe responded to my question on twitter: Bebe NO- I didn't even know him yet when he wrote it. I met EC June 1978~he was creating + then making "Armed Forces" when I was first living w/ him in the Fall of 1978 in London.Think he just had a very active imagination which is great when you're a songwriter!x Of course- there are so many rumors out there- including some started by EC himself. I NEVER thought or claimed that any of the songs on This Year's Model or Armed Forces held me as the subject. Anything after that? All bets are off! EC is famous for denying! 40 Year Itch:
Oh! I’m going to listen to Get Happy right now!!! BeBe
Now you're on the right path!
Tom Moon called Armed Forces one of the 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, writing:
Armed Forces was written when Costello was twenty-four, after he and the Attractions had finished a long tour of the U.S. by van. It is the bridge between Costello the "punk singer-songwriter" and Costello the unabashed romantic of rock's New Wave. In the liner notes of the expanded edition, Costello recalls that while on the road, the band listened to cassettes of Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, Cheap Trick and ABBA. And it's possible to hear the influence of those polished productions in Armed Forces's specific details (the whomping piano-studded refrain of "Accidents Will Happen" and the nattily harmonized "Moods for Moderns"). This is the record where Costello realizes that the doors are wide open, and he can make any kind of snarly (or idealistic) noise he wants. So he makes all kinds of noise -- songs that thrum with Springsteen-like idealism ("Peace, Love and Understanding") or express disdain ("Goon Squad") or go to great lengths to draw parallels between cultural and personal upheavals ("Two Little Hitlers"), an idea underscored by Costello's original working title for the album, Emotional Facism.
From Robert Christgau who gave the album an A- grade:
Like his predecessor, Bob Dylan, this ambitious tunesmith offers more as a phrasemaker than as an analyst or a poet, more as a public image than as a thinking, feeling person. He needs words because they add color and detail to his music. I like the more explicitly sociopolitical tenor here. But I don't find as many memorable bits of language as I did on This Year's Model. And though I approve of the more intricate pop constructions of the music, I found TYM's relentless nastiness of instrumental and (especially) vocal attack more compelling. A good record, to be sure, but not a great one.
On December 18, 1978 Elvis Costello and the Attractions released the non-album single "Talking in the Dark" b/w"Wednesday Week". Both songs are inventive tunes of lost love that hover around the two minute mark and both were produced by Nick Lowe at Eden Studios in London. Costello would later say "Talking in the Dark" was his favorite song from the Armed Forces sessions.
Elvis Costello's favorite albums from 1978
Chet Baker Broken Wing
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 (pianist, conductor: Krystian Zimerman) FUNKADELIC: One Nation Under a Groove
THE HOLLIES: The Best of the Hollies “Look Through Any Window.”
THE JAM: All Mod Cons
NICK LOWE: Jesus of Cool, “36 Inches High”
WILLIE NELSON: Stardust , “Moonlight in Vermont.”
CHARLIE PARKER: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions, “Ko-Ko.”
THE ROLLING STONES: Some Girls, “Shattered.”
THE SPINNERS: The Best of the Spinners, “Rubberband Man.”
HANK WILLIAMS: 40 Greatest Hits, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “I’ll Never Get out of This World Alive.”
Torn Curtain (Bernard Herrmann)
