Speaker 1: Pushkin. In nineteen eighty four, Alvis Costello released his ninth album,
Speaker 1: Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out,
Speaker 1: because I bought every Alvis Costello album back then the
Speaker 1: week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
Speaker 1: music you listen to at ages nineteen and twenty is
Speaker 1: the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness.
Speaker 1: If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll
Speaker 1: see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened
Speaker 1: to it right away. And this episode is about one
Speaker 1: song on that album. It's called The Deportees Club. I
Speaker 1: still have it on vinyl. It goes like this, Oh God,
Speaker 1: it's awful. My name is Malcolm Blackwell. Welcome to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things Forgotten are Misunderstood. This week, I
Speaker 1: want to go back to Elvis Costello in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: I should say you don't have to know anything about
Speaker 1: Elvis Costello or even like his music to be interested
Speaker 1: in this story. I'm not talking about Deportis Club as
Speaker 1: a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding
Speaker 1: how creativity works. And I've chosen Deportees Club as my
Speaker 1: case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed
Speaker 1: with it and maybe, hopefully you will be two once
Speaker 1: we're finished. Deportees Club is the second to last song
Speaker 1: on the B side of Goodbye to a World. The
Speaker 1: album cover is a picture of a little mountain top
Speaker 1: with two trees on it, with Costello and his band
Speaker 1: members in various strange poses. It's all very eighties. The
Speaker 1: record was produced by two legends of the British music
Speaker 1: scene at the time, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. You've
Speaker 1: probably heard some of their work dated records with Madness,
Speaker 1: Noyd Cole David Bowie virtually all of the great English
Speaker 1: new wave hit songs of the nineteen eighties and early
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley were the guys
Speaker 1: behind the curtain. I don't know if you've ever heard
Speaker 1: come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. Come On Eileen. Oh,
Speaker 1: I swear what he means at this moment you mean everything. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you could make that
Speaker 1: out that song. Langer and Winstanley Clive Langer knows Elvis Costello.
Speaker 1: Of course they would bump into each other in the
Speaker 1: way that people in a small always bump into each other,
Speaker 1: and New Way music in the nineteen eighties was a
Speaker 1: small world. At one point, Langer has his own band
Speaker 1: and he was doing a show in a riverboat in
Speaker 1: the river Mersey. Costello calls him up and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll come up and play a few songs before you
Speaker 1: go on. That's Langer. We met at a pub on
Speaker 1: Loreston Road in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery,
Speaker 1: with close cropped white hair and oversized glasses and the
Speaker 1: kind of graciousness that only the English seemed to possess.
Speaker 1: An absolutely delightful person. My father is English, an all older,
Speaker 1: charming englishman. Remind me of my father. We had some tea.
Speaker 1: It was all very civilized. Okay, back to Elvis Costello.
Speaker 1: He came up and played all his best songs, I
Speaker 1: mean his his you know, Allison and everything son. Alison's
Speaker 1: Costello's first big hit. Then I had to go on
Speaker 1: and do my first ever show with the same line up,
Speaker 1: and we weren't as good, you know, so I don't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't know quite how to take that. If you
Speaker 1: detect a little bit of friction in that, you're not wrong.
Speaker 1: Alvis Costello is a genius, and like a lot of geniuses,
Speaker 1: he has a really strong personality. A few years passed
Speaker 1: and Costello's record label decides they want to broaden his
Speaker 1: commercial appeal. He has a fanatical following among those who
Speaker 1: know New Way music, but the label wants a big
Speaker 1: commercial hit, so they turned to the hit makers Langer
Speaker 1: and Winstanley, and that two of them produce a record
Speaker 1: for Costello called Punch the Clock, which has a number
Speaker 1: of absolutely exquisite songs, including ship Building, which Lango co
Speaker 1: wrote with Elvis Costello, Birth the News, Coaching Shoes Far
Speaker 1: You collaborate on Punch the Clock. Yeah, and you like
Speaker 1: that album? Yes? He doesn't, and he doesn't know why
Speaker 1: is he unhappy with it? I think it was just
Speaker 1: too commercial for at that time, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: write something simpler, more live more. You know, he's more
Speaker 1: of a purist than I am, so I was brought
Speaker 1: up with psychedelic pop in the mid sixties, so I
Speaker 1: was kind of like, Oh, we can do this, we
Speaker 1: can do that. You know, and he's like, oh, I
Speaker 1: want it to sound real and black Bob Dylan or something,
Speaker 1: you know. But and when you get that right, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: I want to hear a little bit more about Punch
Speaker 1: the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an
Speaker 1: impact on the way the record turned out. Not so much.
Speaker 1: On Punch the Clock we didn't have tension. We had
Speaker 1: tension later, which I'll talk to you about what we
Speaker 1: did have. When we did the playback and Punched the Clock,
Speaker 1: we got quite drunk and played it back really loud,
Speaker 1: of course they did, and how much would you kill
Speaker 1: to have been in the room with them? And he
Speaker 1: kind of freaked out, So it's all rubbish. It's terrible.
Speaker 1: It's terrible. And I was to, you know, calm him
Speaker 1: down a bit and we all carry it on. When
Speaker 1: the time comes to make the next album, Costello turns
Speaker 1: to Langer and win Stanley again, only this time the
Speaker 1: first thing he said is that I want to call
Speaker 1: it good Bye Cool World. I think it's going to
Speaker 1: be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band,
Speaker 1: so he was confiding in me. They do a first
Speaker 1: run through recording all the songs, live. Langer is the producer,
Speaker 1: the one who's supposed to be running the show, but
Speaker 1: immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically takes over because he's
Speaker 1: quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and you know, lovely,
Speaker 1: but he could sort of barge in and start changing things.
Speaker 1: But you know, so, I remember saying to him, thanks
Speaker 1: for letting me be here to listen to remote your record,
Speaker 1: you know, but I don't think it should go like that.
Speaker 1: Shouldn't be like this, you know. So it was a bit.
Speaker 1: We're a bit of a standoff. I think he went
Speaker 1: out and bought a half bottler gin and I asked
Speaker 1: Langer and why Costello said this was going to be
Speaker 1: his last album. It's not like he was an old
Speaker 1: man ready to retire. He wasn't even thirsty. It was
Speaker 1: just that he'd had a lot on his back, you know,
Speaker 1: he'd been to a lot. I don't know if he
Speaker 1: wanted to carry on playing the game at that point.
Speaker 1: The result is disastrous. I hated Good By Cruel World
Speaker 1: when I first heard it, and remember I'm a massive
Speaker 1: Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did
Speaker 1: a television variety show called spectacle. Lad he's a gentleman.
Speaker 1: Will you please welcome to the stage. I wants the
Speaker 1: nickolo And in the episode where he interviews Nick Low
Speaker 1: and Richard Thompson, the camera pans the audience and twice
Speaker 1: you see me grinning madly as I said. I'm a
Speaker 1: massive Elvis Costello fan, and believe me when I say goodbye.
Speaker 1: Cruel World was unlistenable, especially Deportise Club. It was angry
Speaker 1: and loud and upsetting. And I'm not the only one
Speaker 1: who feels that way. In nineteen ninety five, the album
Speaker 1: is rereleased by Ricodisc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in
Speaker 1: the liner notes, congratulations, you've just purchased our worst album.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of admire as honesty. Except on
Speaker 1: that same re release, Costello includes a new version of
Speaker 1: Deportis Club, one of the songs on the original album
Speaker 1: he hates so much he gives it a new melody
Speaker 1: and plays it by himself. An acoustic version, shortens the
Speaker 1: title to deeport fiddles with some of the lyrics, and
Speaker 1: it never appears anywhere else, just on this random rerelease
Speaker 1: by Raycodisc Records, whatever that is, and I would never
Speaker 1: have heard it except that my friend Bruce ran across
Speaker 1: it and played it for me. Bruce, by the way,
Speaker 1: was also in the audience of that Elvis Casillo TV show,
Speaker 1: grinning madly. Anyway, Bruce and I used to make mixtapes
Speaker 1: for each other, and he puts this new version Deeporte
Speaker 1: on a mixtape for my birthday, and I become obsessed
Speaker 1: with it. I'll bet I sing parts of it to
Speaker 1: myself almost every day. I don't really know why, but
Speaker 1: it might be one of my favorite songs ever. There's
Speaker 1: a line in it that jumps into my head whenever
Speaker 1: I'm sad. It's so perfect, a little couplet about the
Speaker 1: dissolution of romantic love and you don't know where to
Speaker 1: start or where to stop. All this pillow talk is
Speaker 1: finely talking shop. Can we play it? Yeah? I'm in
Speaker 1: the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of the original
Speaker 1: awful version Deportise Club. Strangely, he'd never heard the new,
Speaker 1: obscure and amazing version of the song he produced so
Speaker 1: long ago. I want to hear his new version. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I found it on my iPhone and Langer leaned
Speaker 1: his head over the table so that his ear would
Speaker 1: be right next to the tiny phone speaker. This one
Speaker 1: nine shady five blastom bunch trump that distress Sire's dad.
Speaker 1: You know, it sounds like he's found the song, but
Speaker 1: he didn't know at the time either that that's what
Speaker 1: I thought. I mean, that's what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: either of you in the moment. No, Sometimes you know,
Speaker 1: if it's not sounding right, maybe I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: we were not focused enough. You know, maybe we were
Speaker 1: making a record, but we were miles away. You know.
Speaker 1: In the end, they Elvis Costello and his producers all
Speaker 1: thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't
Speaker 1: understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a
Speaker 1: bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to talk about, time and iteration.
Speaker 1: What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge.
Speaker 1: I know that this is just one three minute song.
Speaker 1: Maybe you don't even like it, but every time I
Speaker 1: hear it, I think the same thing, which is, this
Speaker 1: is something that gives a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: world pleasure, including me, And it almost didn't happen. If
Speaker 1: Alvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deeportise Club, turn
Speaker 1: it into Deeporte. We miss all that beauty, and the
Speaker 1: thought of that breaks my heart. There's a theory about
Speaker 1: creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an
Speaker 1: economist named David Gallinson came up with. Gallinson is an
Speaker 1: art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art,
Speaker 1: that there are two very different trajectories that great artists
Speaker 1: seem to take. On the one hand, there are those
Speaker 1: who do their best work very early in their life.
Speaker 1: They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas
Speaker 1: that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those
Speaker 1: ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom.
Speaker 1: Gallenson calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example.
Speaker 1: He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and
Speaker 1: electrifies the art world the turn of the last century.
Speaker 1: I think that someone like Picasso is who we have
Speaker 1: in mind when we think of that word genius. But
Speaker 1: Gallenson says, wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity.
Speaker 1: He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who
Speaker 1: never have a clear easily articulated idea. They don't work
Speaker 1: quickly when they start off, they don't really know where
Speaker 1: they're going. Work by trial and error. They do endless drafts.
Speaker 1: They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to
Speaker 1: figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example? Sayson?
Speaker 1: Every bit as famous and important a painter's. Picasso may
Speaker 1: be the greatest of the Impressionists who reinvent modern art
Speaker 1: in Paris in the late eighteen hundreds. With Seson's genius
Speaker 1: and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different. Why
Speaker 1: don't we start with your favorite? If you have a
Speaker 1: favorite in the world, maybe my favorite at the moment
Speaker 1: is that one good Bye. Talking to a man named
Speaker 1: John Elderfield. He's a Seson expert, and he took me
Speaker 1: to that gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
Speaker 1: where they have all of their Seeson's, easily a few
Speaker 1: billion dollars worth the paintings in one room. And it
Speaker 1: took only about five minutes wandering from picture to picture
Speaker 1: with Elderfield to see experimental genius in action. So this
Speaker 1: is one of the many portraits of his wife's says,
Speaker 1: I'm made, and it's one of four pictures done in
Speaker 1: a short period of time when they were living together
Speaker 1: in Paris. The seeson we're looking at is a picture
Speaker 1: of a middle aged woman seated. Her head is tilted
Speaker 1: slightly to the side. As with a lot of Sazon's portraits,
Speaker 1: we can see only one of her ears he didn't
Speaker 1: like doing the second year. She's sitting quietly, almost floating
Speaker 1: in the chair. And I think it's arguably, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the greatest portraits that he did. It's one
Speaker 1: of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield says that
Speaker 1: the first two are a little smaller, looser, maybe one
Speaker 1: trace from another, and then a third much like the
Speaker 1: one we're looking at, but without any background painted in
Speaker 1: just the figure. Is this very typical of the way
Speaker 1: he worked, So he essentially comes back to her four times,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and then he right. Notice my assumption here,
Speaker 1: because what I was thinking when I said that bit
Speaker 1: about he gets it right the fourth time was that
Speaker 1: if Sazon did four versions, he must have been marching
Speaker 1: towards some kind of preordained conclusion. He has an idea
Speaker 1: and he's perfecting it. But that's not says on standard
Speaker 1: practice is you do a sketch, work out the problems.
Speaker 1: Do a finished version, says on kind of starts in
Speaker 1: the middle. The fourth version of Sazon's portrait of his wife,
Speaker 1: the one we're looking at, is less finished than his
Speaker 1: second and third versions. Well, for example, here you can
Speaker 1: see this unfinished parts. So how putatively unfinished parts. We
Speaker 1: light the area of the dress. There where it's light,
Speaker 1: you can really see the grounds of the canvass, and
Speaker 1: all the way through the lower part. Then you can
Speaker 1: see who's been putting these breast strikes down and not
Speaker 1: actually filling them all together. Sayson didn't work according to
Speaker 1: some clear linear plan. He basically just did versions over
Speaker 1: and again, iteration after iteration, trying to stumble on something
Speaker 1: that sees his imagination. Many of Sann's paintings are unsigned
Speaker 1: because he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's done.
Speaker 1: He does portraits of his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and
Speaker 1: he makes him come for a hundred sittings, a hundred
Speaker 1: a hundred. Normally they would be how many and now
Speaker 1: I mean normally for portress it would just be a
Speaker 1: relatively shown number, I mean five or something. Why does
Speaker 1: he need a hundred exactly. I mean, what's so, what's
Speaker 1: he doing all the time? Sesan was never finished? This
Speaker 1: is what David Gillinson means by experimental genius, and Gillinson
Speaker 1: points out that you can see this creative type in
Speaker 1: virtually every field. Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick when he's
Speaker 1: thirty two, writes it in a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark
Speaker 1: Twain publishes Huck Finn when he's in his late forties,
Speaker 1: and it takes him forever because he ends up obsessively
Speaker 1: rewriting and rewriting the ending. He says on Orson Welles
Speaker 1: does Citizen Kane when he's twenty four. Picasso Alfred Hitchcock
Speaker 1: doesn't reach his prime until his mid fifties, after he
Speaker 1: spent his entire career making one thriller after another, playing
Speaker 1: with a genre over and over again. It's his own.
Speaker 1: But there's one field where I think Gallenson's theory plays
Speaker 1: out the most powerfully, and that's music. It goes like this,
Speaker 1: the fourth, the fifth, the minor five, the major lift,
Speaker 1: the baffled game. Compola, Lleluiah, halleluiah, halleluialleluia. That's the song Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: It was composed by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen. But
Speaker 1: basically everybody is in a cover of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright,
Speaker 1: You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovi, John Cale, Bob Dylan,
Speaker 1: I could go on. It's featured in countless TV and
Speaker 1: movie soundtracks. If you ride the New York City subway
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, you'll probably hear a busker singing
Speaker 1: it virtually every day. Like a good Canadian, I go
Speaker 1: to a Canada Day celebration every year at Joe's Pub
Speaker 1: in Manhattan, where local artists sing cover versions of Canadian songs.
Speaker 1: Every year someone does a version of Hallelujah. Every year.
Speaker 1: It brings down the house. And here's what's interesting about
Speaker 1: that song. It is so not Picasso, it is, says On.
Speaker 1: Textbook says On. A few years ago, the music writer
Speaker 1: Alan Light wrote an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book
Speaker 1: on the song Hallelujah. It's called the Holy or the Broken,
Speaker 1: And one of the big themes is how peculiar Leonard
Speaker 1: Cohen is. He's a poet, a tortured poet. He is
Speaker 1: a writer in that way that he labors over what
Speaker 1: these lyrics are line by line, word by word, throws
Speaker 1: a lot away, spends a great deal of time, and Hallelujah, famously,
Speaker 1: out of all of these, is probably the song that
Speaker 1: he says bedeviled him the most. That's alan like, he
Speaker 1: came by my house one day to talk about Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
Speaker 1: and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
Speaker 1: and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty or seventy verses, which is for this song, which
Speaker 1: I mean, you've been writing about music for many, many years.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of a musician who wrote eighty different?
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think so. I mean then I
Speaker 1: don't know what that. I don't know if that means
Speaker 1: variations on verses. I don't know if that means entirely
Speaker 1: like how much of this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: It's a whole other, whole other level. Well, there's the
Speaker 1: famous story that you know, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: have this kind of mutual admiration thing, and apparently they
Speaker 1: met up in the eighties at some point they were
Speaker 1: both in Paris, and they went to meet at a
Speaker 1: cafe and Dylan said, oh, I like that that song Hallelujah,
Speaker 1: which is a fascinating piece of this story. That really
Speaker 1: the first person who paid attention to Hallelujah as an
Speaker 1: important song was Bob Dylan. But he said to Leonard,
Speaker 1: you know I liked that song. How long did you
Speaker 1: work on that? And Leonard said, I told him that
Speaker 1: I'd worked on it for two years, which was a lie.
Speaker 1: Cohen later confessed it took him much longer. Then Cohen
Speaker 1: asks Dylan how long it took him to write the
Speaker 1: song I and I and Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: Dylan is picasso with Leonard. It's not the first thought,
Speaker 1: best thought school at all. And he talks about, you know,
Speaker 1: being in a hotel room in his underwear banging his
Speaker 1: head on the floor because he couldn't solve this song, Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records
Speaker 1: it in nineteen eighty four. It's for an album called
Speaker 1: Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes
Speaker 1: them to his record label, which is CBS to the
Speaker 1: Head of CBS. Who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikov,
Speaker 1: who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce
Speaker 1: Springsteen's Born in USA? Not a dumb guy. Yetnikov listens
Speaker 1: to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not
Speaker 1: releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being
Speaker 1: released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes
Speaker 1: a ripple. And if you go back and listen to
Speaker 1: that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future
Speaker 1: versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not
Speaker 1: there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about
Speaker 1: the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Kohen's original version
Speaker 1: so hyper serious that it's almost satire. Kind of turgid,
Speaker 1: isn't it. But Cohen's not done. He keeps tinkering with it.
Speaker 1: He plays it in concerts, and he slows it down.
Speaker 1: It becomes twice as long. He changes the first three verses,
Speaker 1: leaving only the final verses the same. The song becomes
Speaker 1: even darker this time around. Yeah, your flag on the
Speaker 1: marble large, But listen, love, Love is not some kind
Speaker 1: of victormage. No, it's cool, it's every broken hole. One night,
Speaker 1: Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon Ballroom in
Speaker 1: New York, and the musician John Klee happens to be
Speaker 1: in the audience. Kale is a legend, used to be
Speaker 1: in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure in the
Speaker 1: rock and roll avant garde. He hears this song come
Speaker 1: out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away, so he
Speaker 1: asked Cohen to send him the lyrics. He wants to
Speaker 1: do a version of it, so Cohen factses him fifteen pages.
Speaker 1: Who knows what the lyrics actually are. At this point,
Speaker 1: Kle says that for his version, he took the cheeky parts.
Speaker 1: He ends up using the first two verses of the
Speaker 1: original combined with three verses from the live performance, and
Speaker 1: Kle changes some words. Most importantly, he changes the theme
Speaker 1: and brings back the biblical references that Cohen had in
Speaker 1: the album version. Baby There's a God above all. I
Speaker 1: have a love from loves? How to shoot at someone?
Speaker 1: Who are you? And it's not a cryken hear at mine?
Speaker 1: It's not somebody you see the line, It's a con
Speaker 1: and it's a wrong Hello, Kale is really the one
Speaker 1: who cracks the code of Hallelujah. According to Alan Light,
Speaker 1: this cover version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album
Speaker 1: put together by a French music magazine. It was called
Speaker 1: I'm Your Fan. Came out of nineteen ninety one. Almost
Speaker 1: nobody bought I'm Your Fan, except weirdly me. I think
Speaker 1: I found it in a remainder bin in a little
Speaker 1: record store on Columbia Road in Washington, d C. Another
Speaker 1: person who bought I'm Your Fan was a woman named
Speaker 1: Jeanine who lived in Parkslope in Brooklyn. She was good
Speaker 1: friends with a young aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He
Speaker 1: used to house sit at her apartment, and one time,
Speaker 1: when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD of
Speaker 1: I'm Your Fan. He plays it. He hears John Cale's
Speaker 1: version of Hallelujah and decides to do his own version
Speaker 1: of that version. He performs it at a tiny little
Speaker 1: bar in the east village called Chennai, where he happens
Speaker 1: to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records. So
Speaker 1: Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records his
Speaker 1: version of Hallelujah for the album Grace, which ends up
Speaker 1: being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came out
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four. I remembering moved in you and
Speaker 1: the Holy Dove was moving to and every breath Withdrewsllujah.
Speaker 1: Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're
Speaker 1: most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one.
Speaker 1: It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's
Speaker 1: a cover of John Kle's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
Speaker 1: only with Kle's piano swapped out for a guitar, and
Speaker 1: of course Buckley swaps out Kle's voice for his own
Speaker 1: extraordinary voice Hallelujah Allah. All every subsequent cover, and there
Speaker 1: have been hundreds, are really covers a Buckley covering Koe
Speaker 1: covering Cohen. So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.
Speaker 1: Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
Speaker 1: particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
Speaker 1: we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
Speaker 1: in this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay, but nobody
Speaker 1: bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
Speaker 1: it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
Speaker 1: charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
Speaker 1: the hype around him, so that didn't make it a hit.
Speaker 1: Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal like Jesus,
Speaker 1: with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough
Speaker 1: until nineteen ninety seven, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in
Speaker 1: Memphis and he goes swimming in one of the channels
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing
Speaker 1: and singing the chorus of a Whole Lot of Love
Speaker 1: by led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again. And
Speaker 1: that tragedy suddenly propels his work and Hallelujah into the spotlight.
Speaker 1: And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
Speaker 1: the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
Speaker 1: The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
Speaker 1: fifteen years since Leonard recorded this song. Fifteen years, and
Speaker 1: think about how many incredible twists and turns that song
Speaker 1: takes before it gets recognized as a work of genius.
Speaker 1: It just happens that the independent label Passport Records, who
Speaker 1: leases the first version for the album It's on, is
Speaker 1: rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen doesn't give up,
Speaker 1: keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah. John Cale,
Speaker 1: one of the most influential musicians of his era, happens
Speaker 1: to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song some more.
Speaker 1: Cale's version goes out on the obscure French CD I'm
Speaker 1: a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living room in
Speaker 1: Park Slope, and Janine happens to have a house sitter
Speaker 1: who happens to play it, happens to like it, and
Speaker 1: happens to have an ethereal amazing voice. Buckley's version goes
Speaker 1: nowhere until he happens to die under the most dramatic
Speaker 1: and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then finally we recognize the
Speaker 1: genius of this song. But think about how fragile and
Speaker 1: elusive that bit of genius is. If any of those
Speaker 1: incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never have
Speaker 1: heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy chain of happenstance
Speaker 1: matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon once says
Speaker 1: of Bridge over Troubled Water, one of the most beautiful
Speaker 1: pop songs ever written. It came so fast, and when
Speaker 1: it was done, I said, where did that come from?
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly.
Speaker 1: You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require a
Speaker 1: fifteen years worth of twists and turns and random events.
Speaker 1: The world is really good at capturing conceptual creations, or
Speaker 1: at least we don't miss as many conceptual works because
Speaker 1: they don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But
Speaker 1: if you're Sayson and the first version you produce is
Speaker 1: just a starting point, and you never know exactly what
Speaker 1: you're doing or why, or whether your work is finished
Speaker 1: or not, the stars really do have to be aligned.
Speaker 1: Sayson was his own worst enemy in a way. He
Speaker 1: threw up barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us
Speaker 1: when he painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point.
Speaker 1: The art of the experimental innovator is elusive. There are
Speaker 1: some of them which now are in museums, which we
Speaker 1: know he had tried to destroy. I mean, and you
Speaker 1: can see in some of them, the cases of where
Speaker 1: he slashed their canvases. Why would he destroy his own canvases?
Speaker 1: You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted
Speaker 1: to do and felt that he actually never was actually
Speaker 1: getting to that point. There are other paintings done much
Speaker 1: later where he simply abandons them. And Picassa said that,
Speaker 1: you know what actually engages as is says Zune's doubt,
Speaker 1: his uncertainty. He's obsessive, you know, he's absolutely just totally obsessive.
Speaker 1: Albus Costello Deportee in its original flawed form. It comes
Speaker 1: out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the way,
Speaker 1: that Hallelujah first came out, and I'm not sure that's
Speaker 1: a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a very particular
Speaker 1: moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year
Speaker 1: was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's
Speaker 1: not a single stray note or emotion on that record.
Speaker 1: It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along
Speaker 1: comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the
Speaker 1: midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in
Speaker 1: glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up, he's having financial difficulties.
Speaker 1: He says later that Languor and Winstanley were ill equipped
Speaker 1: for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time.
Speaker 1: A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been
Speaker 1: more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs,
Speaker 1: gritty and spare, to match his mood. Something not nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four. Meanwhile, Langer and win Stanley had been brought
Speaker 1: on board to produce Hits, polished exquisite. Every little bit
Speaker 1: was pondered over and thought about and put together very carefully.
Speaker 1: I mean, you had bands like Scritty Polity at that time,
Speaker 1: you know, spending nine months on a song, and Trevor
Speaker 1: Horne spending four weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.
Speaker 1: Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band
Speaker 1: called Frankie Ghost to Hollywood, and they spend a month
Speaker 1: just getting a particular drum sound, right. So we weren't
Speaker 1: about pendicaty, but we were dealing with the world that was,
Speaker 1: you know, perfection. It was we were trying to make perfection.
Speaker 1: You can imagine what happened when that World collides with
Speaker 1: Albus Costello, and some of it just sounded like I mean,
Speaker 1: even the band were kind of not very excited by
Speaker 1: some of the material, so it wasn't a great experience.
Speaker 1: But we did it very quickly, but just quickly, I
Speaker 1: mean in the time it to travel on to get
Speaker 1: a snare, so down to two tribes, so it's about
Speaker 1: three or four weeks. Yeah, the whole album, it was
Speaker 1: a mess, perfectionism in a hurry. That's how you get
Speaker 1: to the bitter words. Congratulations, you've just bought my worst album.
Speaker 1: Good Bye Cruel World is not good, it's unlistenable, But
Speaker 1: it's what happens next that matters. You Know how people
Speaker 1: always say, put your failures behind you, get on with
Speaker 1: your life, never look back. Alvis Costello does none of
Speaker 1: those things, because he says on he's not Picasso. He
Speaker 1: carries around a little black book where he writes draft
Speaker 1: after draft after draft of the songs he's thinking about.
Speaker 1: He changes lines in the middle of songs he's already recorded.
Speaker 1: He rearranges songs at different tempos or in different time signatures.
Speaker 1: He cannibalizes his own work, creating new songs out of
Speaker 1: old songs. And I don't know where to start or
Speaker 1: where to stop. He doesn't want to sign his name
Speaker 1: to the painting. And thank god there are people like him,
Speaker 1: and says on in this world, because without the obsessives
Speaker 1: and the perpetually dissatisfied, and the artists who go back
Speaker 1: over and over again repainting what others see as finished,
Speaker 1: we would never have seen the beauty of deportee. And
Speaker 1: you don't know where to start off to stop. All
Speaker 1: this pillow talk is not in Marvin Finlet talking the shop.
Speaker 1: When you've been listening to Revisionist History, if you like
Speaker 1: what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us
Speaker 1: on iTunes. You can get more information about this in
Speaker 1: other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your
Speaker 1: favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle,
Speaker 1: Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Siroca.
Speaker 1: Panomply management team is Laura Mayor, Andy Bowers and Jacob Weissberg.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glauder. PARTI PATI