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