Speaker 1: Pushkin years ago, and this is going to date me.
Speaker 1: My best friend Bruce and I used to make mixtapes
Speaker 1: for each other, actually mixed CDs. We used to spend
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of time picking the songs and then an
Speaker 1: even more enormous amount of time on the art for
Speaker 1: the CD box. My mixes were always named after Pope's
Speaker 1: for reasons I cannot remember, like Pope Pious to twelfth
Speaker 1: with a big photocopied picture of him in some ermine robe. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the point of the mixes, and I think this is
Speaker 1: true of everyone who grew up in the mix era,
Speaker 1: was to find songs that you knew about and liked,
Speaker 1: and that you believed that your best friend didn't know
Speaker 1: about and would like, which, if you're talking about someone
Speaker 1: with whom you've been sharing music, your whole life is
Speaker 1: a pretty narrow window. Anyway. Bruce put the acoustic re
Speaker 1: release of Elvis Costello's Deeptie on a special mix. I
Speaker 1: think it was for one of my birthdays in my
Speaker 1: roaring twenties. I just remember thinking two things as I
Speaker 1: listened to that song over and over again. First, I
Speaker 1: knew the first version and hated it. And This was
Speaker 1: the same song sung by the same artist, and now
Speaker 1: in this form it was magical. How did that work?
Speaker 1: The second thing I remember thinking is this is why
Speaker 1: God invented best friends. I still think that. By the way,
Speaker 1: here we go the first in our musical encore, Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: 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 Elvis Costello album back then the
Speaker 1: week it came out. There's a theory in psychology the
Speaker 1: music you listened 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 favor it songs,
Speaker 1: you'll see what I mean. Anyway, I was twenty in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I
Speaker 1: listened to it right away. And this episode is about
Speaker 1: one song on that album. It's called The Deportees Club.
Speaker 1: I still have it on vinyl. It goes like this,
Speaker 1: Oh God, it's awful. My name is Malcolm Bladmo. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This week I want to go back to Elvis Costello
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. I should say you don't have
Speaker 1: to know anything about Elvis Costello or even like his
Speaker 1: music to be interested in this story. I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about Deportees Club as a song, but as a symbol.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in understanding how creativity works, and I've chosen
Speaker 1: Depotees Club as my case study for the purely arbitrary
Speaker 1: reason that I'm obsessed with it, and maybe hopefully you
Speaker 1: will be two once you're finished. Depotees Club is the
Speaker 1: second to last song on the B side of Goodbye
Speaker 1: Cruel World. The album cover is a picture of a
Speaker 1: little mountaintop with two trees on it, with Costello and
Speaker 1: his band members in various strange poses. It's all very eighties.
Speaker 1: The record was produced by two legends of the British
Speaker 1: music scene at the time, Clive Langer and Alan win Stanley.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard some of their work. They did records
Speaker 1: with Madness, Lloyd Cole, David Bowie, virtually all of the
Speaker 1: great English new wave hit songs of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: He's In early nineteen nineties, Clive Langer and Allan Winstanley
Speaker 1: were the guys behind the curtain. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've ever heard Come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners,
Speaker 1: Come On Eileen. Oh, I swear what he means at
Speaker 1: 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 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 world always bump into
Speaker 1: each other, and new wave music in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: was a small world. At one point, Langer has his
Speaker 1: own band and he was doing a show in a
Speaker 1: riverboat in the river Mersey. Costello calls him up and
Speaker 1: he said, oh.
Speaker 3: I'll come up and play a few songs before you
Speaker 3: go on.
Speaker 1: That's Langer. We met at a pub on Lowiston 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: englishmen remind me of my father. We had some tea.
Speaker 1: It was all very civilized, Okay, back to Alvis Costello.
Speaker 3: He came up and played all his best songs, I
Speaker 3: mean his hits, you know, Alison and everything.
Speaker 1: So Alison Costello's first big hit.
Speaker 3: And 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 passed 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 4: Is birth.
Speaker 1: New sculting Shoes Fun. 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 for 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, yeah,
Speaker 3: we can do this, we can do that, you know,
Speaker 3: and he's like, oh, I want it to sound real
Speaker 3: and black pop dinner or something.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: But 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.
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 Punched
Speaker 3: the Clock, we got quite drunk and played it back
Speaker 3: really loud, of.
Speaker 1: Course they did, and how much would you kill to
Speaker 1: a bit in the room with.
Speaker 3: Them, and he kind of freaked out, said it's all rubbish,
Speaker 3: you know, it's terrible, it's terrible, and I was like
Speaker 3: I had to, you know, calm him down a bit,
Speaker 3: and we all carry it on.
Speaker 1: When the time comes to make the next album. Costello
Speaker 1: turns to Langer and Winstanley again, only this time.
Speaker 3: The first thing he said is that I want to
Speaker 3: call it Goodbye World. I think it's going to be
Speaker 3: 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. Alvis 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 things, you know. So I remember saying
Speaker 3: to it, thanks for letting me be here to listen
Speaker 3: to you and make your record, you know. But I
Speaker 3: don't think it should go like that. Shouldn't be like this,
Speaker 3: you know. So it was a bit. We're a bit
Speaker 3: of a standoff. I think he went out and bought
Speaker 3: a half bottler gin and.
Speaker 1: I asked Langer and why Costello said this was going
Speaker 1: to be his last album. It's not like he was
Speaker 1: an old man ready to retire.
Speaker 3: He wasn't even thirty. It's just he'd had a lot
Speaker 3: on his back you know he'd been through a lot.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he wanted to carry on playing
Speaker 3: the game at that point.
Speaker 1: The result is disastrous. I hated Goodbye Cruel World when
Speaker 1: I first heard it, and remember, I'm a massive Elvis
Speaker 1: Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did a
Speaker 1: television variety show called Spectacle Ladies.
Speaker 5: And gentleman, will you please welcome to the stage.
Speaker 3: I want to list to Nick Lo.
Speaker 1: And in the episode where he interviews Nick Low and
Speaker 1: Richard Thompson, the camera pans the audience and twice you
Speaker 1: see me grinning madly as I said. I'm a massive
Speaker 1: Elvis Costello fan, and believe me when I say Goodbye
Speaker 1: Cruel World was unlistenable, especially Deportie's Club. He was angry
Speaker 1: and loud and upsetting. And I'm not the only one
Speaker 1: who feels that. In nineteen ninety five, the album is
Speaker 1: re released by Raycho Disc Records, and Elvis Costello writes
Speaker 1: in the liner notes, congratulations, you've just purchased our worst album.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of admire his honesty. Except on
Speaker 1: that same re release, Costello includes a new version of
Speaker 1: Deporte's 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 Deportee, fiddles with some of the lyrics, and
Speaker 1: it never appears anywhere else, just on this random re
Speaker 1: release by Rico disc Records, whatever that is. And I
Speaker 1: would never have heard it except that my friend Bruce
Speaker 1: ran across it and played it for me. Bruce, by
Speaker 1: the way, was also in the audience of that Elvis
Speaker 1: Casseillo TV show, grinning madly. Anyway, Bruce and I used
Speaker 1: to make mixtapes for each other, and he puts this
Speaker 1: new version Deportee on a mixtape for my birthday, and
Speaker 1: I become obsessed with it. I'll bet I sing parts
Speaker 1: of it to myself almost every day. I don't really
Speaker 1: know why, but it might be one of my favorite
Speaker 1: songs ever. There's a line in it that jumps into
Speaker 1: my head whenever I'm sad. It's so perfect, a little
Speaker 1: couplet about the dissolution of romantic love and you don't
Speaker 1: know where to start or where to stop. All this
Speaker 1: pillow talk is finely tall ging shop.
Speaker 3: Can we play it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I'm in the pub with Clive Langer, the producer
Speaker 1: of the original awful version Deportees Club. Strangely, he'd never
Speaker 1: heard the new, obscure and amazing version of the song
Speaker 1: he produced so long ago.
Speaker 3: Want to hear his new version? 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. MS is
Speaker 1: the one in the air, dir.
Speaker 5: Children Nightclub, bar stand in five Classrooms, Its bunch and
Speaker 5: Chip stands.
Speaker 3: On your charms.
Speaker 5: Best doing the bass batles stress stabski and bart booze
Speaker 5: and burn bugs buk deep Barty. There's a tads.
Speaker 1: It sounds like he's on the song, but he didn't
Speaker 1: know at the time either that that's what saw. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what's sort of fascinating that. Yeah, neither of you
Speaker 1: in the moments.
Speaker 3: No was sometimes you know, if it's not sounding right,
Speaker 3: maybe I don't know, maybe we were not focused enough,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe we were making a record, but we
Speaker 3: were miles away.
Speaker 6: 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 I think the same thing, which is this is
Speaker 1: something that gives a lot of people in the world pleasure,
Speaker 1: including me. And it almost didn't happen. If Elvis Costello
Speaker 1: doesn't go back and revisit Deportees Club turn it into Deportees,
Speaker 1: we miss all that beauty, and the thought of that
Speaker 1: breaks my heart. There's a theory about creativity that I've
Speaker 1: always loved. It's an idea that an economist named David
Speaker 1: Gailnsen came up with. Gailenson is an art lover, and
Speaker 1: it strikes him when looking at modern art, that there
Speaker 1: are two very different trajectories that great artists seem to take.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, there are those who do their
Speaker 1: best work very early in their life. They tend to
Speaker 1: work quickly. They have very specific ideas that they want
Speaker 1: to communicate, and they can articulate those ideas clearly. They
Speaker 1: plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute boom. Gailensen calls
Speaker 1: them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example. He bursts
Speaker 1: on the scene in his early twenties and electrifies the
Speaker 1: art world at the turn of the last century. I
Speaker 1: think that someone like Picasso is who we have in
Speaker 1: mind when we think of that word genius. But Galenson says,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, there's another kind of creativity. He calls
Speaker 1: it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who never have
Speaker 1: a clear, easily articulated idea. They don't work quickly when
Speaker 1: they start off. They don't really know where they're going.
Speaker 1: They 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. Seisson,
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 3: Why don't we start with your favorite?
Speaker 5: Do you have a favorite in this field.
Speaker 7: Maybe my favorite at the moment is that one the big.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to a man named John Elderfield. He's a
Speaker 1: season 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
Speaker 1: minutes wandering from picture to picture with Elderfield to see
Speaker 1: experimental genius in action.
Speaker 7: So this is one of the many portraits of his
Speaker 7: wife's that Saysan made, and it's one of four pictures
Speaker 7: done in a short period of time when they were
Speaker 7: living together in Paris.
Speaker 1: The seison 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 Seison'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 and kids.
Speaker 7: Arguably, you know, one of the greatest portraits 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 traced 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 7: Yeah, and then he 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 Seeson'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 7: Well, for example, here you can see this unfinished parts
Speaker 7: are putatively unfinished parts. I mean like the area of
Speaker 7: the dress there where there's like you can really see
Speaker 7: the grounds of the canvas, and all the way through
Speaker 7: the lower part. You know, you can see who's been
Speaker 7: putting these breast strikes down and not actually filling them
Speaker 7: all together.
Speaker 1: Seizan 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 Viallard, and he makes him come
Speaker 1: for a hundred sittings.
Speaker 7: One hundred, one hundred.
Speaker 1: Normally they would be how many now, I.
Speaker 7: Mean normally for portraits it would just be a relatively
Speaker 7: short number, I mean five or something.
Speaker 1: Why does he need one hundred exactly?
Speaker 7: I mean, what's what's he doing? All the time?
Speaker 1: Z was never finished? This is what David Gillinson means
Speaker 1: by experimental genius, and Galenson 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.
Speaker 3: He's Picasso.
Speaker 1: Mark 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 Wells
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, says On. But
Speaker 1: there's one field where I think Galenson's theory plays out
Speaker 1: the most powerfully, and that's music.
Speaker 6: It goes like this, the fourth fifth, the monifold, major lift,
Speaker 6: the baffled kiing loompos Helua Hellelua, hallelu.
Speaker 4: Helua.
Speaker 1: That's the song Hallelujah. It was composed by the Canadian
Speaker 1: songwriter Leonard Cohen. But basically everybody has done a cover
Speaker 1: of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright, You Two, Jeff Buckley, bon Jovie,
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 Pub 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 in thinking about that song. It is
Speaker 1: so not Picasso, it is Seyson textbook seison. A few
Speaker 1: years ago, the music writer Alan Light wrote an absolutely
Speaker 1: wonderful book, an entire book on the song Hallelujah. It's
Speaker 1: called The Holy of the Broken. And one of the
Speaker 1: big themes is how peculiar Leonard Cohen is. He's a poet,
Speaker 1: a tortured poet.
Speaker 8: He is a writer in that way that he labors
Speaker 8: over what these lyrics are, line by line, word by word,
Speaker 8: throws a lot away, spends a great deal of time,
Speaker 8: and Hallelujah, famously, out of all of these, is probably
Speaker 8: the song that he says bedeviled him the most.
Speaker 1: That's Alan like, he came by my house one day
Speaker 1: to talk about Hallelujah.
Speaker 8: He sort of was chasing some idea with this song
Speaker 8: and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing
Speaker 8: and depending when he tells the story, wrote fifty or
Speaker 8: sixty or seventy verses, which just 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
Speaker 1: different I.
Speaker 8: Don't think so. I mean, and I don't know what that.
Speaker 8: I don't know if that means variations on verses, I
Speaker 8: don't know if that means entirely like how much of
Speaker 8: this is exaggeration, But it doesn't matter. It's a whole
Speaker 8: other level. Well, there's the famous story that you know,
Speaker 8: Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have this kind of mutual
Speaker 8: admiration thing, and apparently they met up in the eighties
Speaker 8: at some point they were both in Paris, and they
Speaker 8: went to meet at a cafe and Dylan said, oh,
Speaker 8: I like that that song Hallelujah, which is a fascinating
Speaker 8: piece of this story that really the first person who
Speaker 8: paid attention to Hallelujah as an important song was Bob Dylan.
Speaker 8: But he said to Leonard, you know, I like that song.
Speaker 8: How long do you work on that? And Leonard said,
Speaker 8: I 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 8: And Bob said, yeah, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: Dylan is picasso with Leonard.
Speaker 8: It's not the first thought best thought school at all,
Speaker 8: and he talks about, you know, being in a hotel
Speaker 8: room in his underwear, banging his head on the floor
Speaker 8: 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. Yetnikoff 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 rip. 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. 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.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll see your flag on the marble of the lodge.
Speaker 3: But listen, love, Love is not some kind of pigtorim much.
Speaker 5: No, it's cool.
Speaker 7: It's severa brocale.
Speaker 3: How landed you?
Speaker 4: How?
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. Kyle is a legend, used
Speaker 1: to be in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure
Speaker 1: in the rock and roll of vant garde. He hears
Speaker 1: this song come out of Cohen's mouth and he's blown away,
Speaker 1: so he asks Cohen to send in the lyrics. He
Speaker 1: wants to do a version of it, so Cohen faxes
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 4: Maybe there's a God about all?
Speaker 5: I ever love?
Speaker 8: From love?
Speaker 2: How does shoot at someone who are to you? It's
Speaker 2: not a cry you can hear at night. It's not
Speaker 2: somebody you've seen the line. It's a corner ansomer, Olganilluiall.
Speaker 1: Cale is really the one who cracks the code of Hallelujah.
Speaker 1: According to Alan Knight, this cover version appears on a
Speaker 1: Leonard Cohen tribute album put together by a French music magazine.
Speaker 1: It was called I'm Your Fan. Came out in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. Almost nobody bought I'm Your Fan, except weirdly me.
Speaker 1: I think I found it in a remainder bin in
Speaker 1: a little record store on Columbia Road in Washington.
Speaker 4: D C.
Speaker 1: Another person who bought I'm Your Fan was a woman
Speaker 1: named Jeanine who lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn. She
Speaker 1: was good friends with a young aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley.
Speaker 1: He used to house sit at her apartment, and one
Speaker 1: time when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD
Speaker 1: of I'm Your Fan. He plays it. He hears John
Speaker 1: Cale's version of Hollelujah and decides to do his own
Speaker 1: version of that version. He performs it at a tiny
Speaker 1: little bar in the East village called Cheney, where he
Speaker 1: happens to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records.
Speaker 1: So Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records
Speaker 1: his version of Hollelujah for the album Grace, which ends
Speaker 1: up being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 4: Remembering La moved in You and the Holy Dove was
Speaker 4: moving too, and every regret Withdrew is hamon Luya.
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.
Speaker 3: Alleluia.
Speaker 1: Every subsequent cover, and there have been hundreds, are really
Speaker 1: covers of Buckley covering Kal covering Cohen. So the evolution
Speaker 1: finally stops. But wait, not really.
Speaker 8: Buckley records a song in nineteen ninety four, still nobody
Speaker 8: particularly pays attention to it. I mean again, in retrospect,
Speaker 8: we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure
Speaker 8: in this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay. But nobody
Speaker 8: bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record. When it came out,
Speaker 8: it peaked at number one hundred and sixty on the
Speaker 8: charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all
Speaker 8: 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 Hollelujah into the spotlight.
Speaker 8: And it's really kind of you know, as you hit
Speaker 8: the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts.
Speaker 8: The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's
Speaker 8: fifteen years since Leonard recorded this song.
Speaker 1: Fifteen years and think about how many incredible twists and
Speaker 1: turns that song takes before it gets recognized as a
Speaker 1: work of genius. It just happens that the independent label
Speaker 1: Passport Records releases the first version after the album It's
Speaker 1: on is rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen doesn't
Speaker 1: 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 now nowhere except Janine's
Speaker 1: living room in Park Slope, and Janine happens to have
Speaker 1: a house sitter who happens to play it happens to
Speaker 1: like it and happens to have an ethereal amazing voice.
Speaker 1: Buckley's version goes nowhere until he happens to die under
Speaker 1: the most dramatic and heartbreaking of circumstances, and then finally
Speaker 1: we recognize the genius of this song. But think about
Speaker 1: how fragile and elusive that bit of genius is. If
Speaker 1: any of those incredibly random things don't happen, you probably
Speaker 1: would never have heard Hallelujah. I don't think this crazy
Speaker 1: chain of happenstance matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul
Speaker 1: Simon one says, A Bridge over Troubled Water one of
Speaker 1: the most beautiful pop songs ever written. It came so fast,
Speaker 1: and when it was done, I said, where did that
Speaker 1: come from? It doesn't seem like me. The song came
Speaker 1: out perfectly. You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't
Speaker 1: require 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 Seyson 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: Sezon 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.
Speaker 7: There are some of them which now are in museums,
Speaker 7: which we know he had tried to destroy. I mean,
Speaker 7: and you can see in some of them the cases
Speaker 7: of where he slashed their canvas.
Speaker 1: Says, why would he destroy his own canvases?
Speaker 5: You know, he.
Speaker 7: Had certain ideas about what he wanted to do and
Speaker 7: felt he actually never was actually getting to that point.
Speaker 7: There are other paintings done much later where he simply
Speaker 7: abandons them. And Picassa said that you know what actually
Speaker 7: engages is says An's dart, his uncertainty. He's obsessive, you know,
Speaker 7: he's absolutely just totally obsessive.
Speaker 1: Alvis Costello Deputy in its original flawed form, it comes
Speaker 1: out in nineteen eighty four, the same year, by the
Speaker 1: way that halle Lujah first came out and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that's a coincidence, because nineteen eighty four is a
Speaker 1: very particular moment in pop music. The biggest album of
Speaker 1: that year was Michael Jackson's thriller Pop Music, Glass to Perfection.
Speaker 1: There's 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 Langler 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 have been brought on
Speaker 1: board to produce Hits, Polished Exquisite.
Speaker 3: Every little bit was pondered over and thought about and
Speaker 3: put together very carefully. I mean, you had bands like
Speaker 3: Scritty Polity at that time. You know, spending nine months
Speaker 3: on a song and Trevor Hall and spending four weeks
Speaker 3: 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 Pendickette, but we were dealing
Speaker 3: with a world that was, you know, perfection. It was
Speaker 3: we were trying to make perfection.
Speaker 1: You can imagine what happened when that world collides with
Speaker 1: Alvis Costello.
Speaker 3: And some of it just sounded like I mean, even
Speaker 3: the band were kind of not very excited by some
Speaker 3: of the material. So it wasn't a great experience. But
Speaker 3: we did it very quickly. But does quickly mean in
Speaker 3: the time it took Trevor on to get a snare
Speaker 3: sound for Two Tribes, so it's about three or four weeks. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the whole album.
Speaker 1: It was a mess perfectionism in a hurry. That's how
Speaker 1: you get to the bitter words. Congratulations, you've just bought
Speaker 1: my worst album. Goodbye Cruel World is not good. It's unlistenable,
Speaker 1: but it's what happens next that matters. You know, how
Speaker 1: people always say, put your failures behind you, get on
Speaker 1: with your life, never look back. Alvis Costello does none
Speaker 1: of those things, because he's says on, He's not Picasso.
Speaker 1: He carries around a little black book where he writes
Speaker 1: draft 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 re arranges songs at different tempos or in different
Speaker 1: time signatures. He cannibalizes his own work, creating new songs
Speaker 1: out of old songs. And I don't know where to
Speaker 1: start or where to stop. He doesn't want to sign
Speaker 1: his name to the painting. And thank god there are
Speaker 1: people like him and seys on in this world, because
Speaker 1: without the obsessives and the perpetually dissatisfied, and the artists
Speaker 1: who go back over and over again repainting what others
Speaker 1: see has finished, we would never have seen the beauty
Speaker 1: of deportee.
Speaker 6: And you don't know where stop with?
Speaker 5: Stop All this pillow talk is nothing, Ma, then fine
Speaker 5: talking 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 and
Speaker 1: other episodes at revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia Label, Roxanne Scott,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flon Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Soraka. The
Speaker 1: Panoply management team is Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glad.
Speaker 5: Party, Party,