Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (2015) by Elvis Costello

Author:Elvis Costello [Costello, Elvis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir, Musicians
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-23T12:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

What Do I Have to Do to Make You Love Me?

We were in a Holiday Inn bar in Columbus, Ohio, home of my favorite author and cartoonist, James Thurber.

One of his best illustrations shows a man and a woman walking along as a lightning bolt with a human face and outstretched arms is about to strike them from behind.

The man is saying to the woman, “You and your premonitions.”

You could say I had it coming.

There was some beauty to the fact that it took a woman to knock me down.

It had been a cartoonish struggle at best, everyone collapsing into a heap of flailing limbs that only ended when the barman came around the counter with a raised baseball bat and we were all obliged to bow to its superior authority.

I went up to my room and got myself a better weapon but, mercifully, the meekest fellow on my road crew stood fast and would not let me go back downstairs to start the ruckus up again.

Then I went to sleep it off.

It took just a few late-night phone calls for the story to hit the headlines.

It was absurd that I should have ended up in a slanging match with the Stephen Stills tour party, as at seventeen, I had nothing but admiration for the man.

My guess is that I had developed the rather juvenile view that the previous musical generation had squandered their inheritance and I started to believe we had been sent to sweep it all away.

Whatever the larger argument, the petty sniping over a few cocktails soon escalated from snide remarks to unspeakable slanders.

I’ll have to take the word of witnesses that I really used such despicable racial slurs in the same sentence as the names of two of the greatest musicians who ever lived, but whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.

It was an absurd overstatement of opposites, a contradiction in terms.

Just as people say “bad” when they mean “good.”

Surely this was all understood. Didn’t they know the love I had for James Brown and Ray Charles, whose recording of “The Danger Zone” I preferred to watching men walk on the moon?

“My love for the world is, like, always.”

How could you not know that?

It seems that they did not. It took just five minutes to detach my tongue from my mind and my life from the rail it was on.

Does anything else that I’ve done in the other 59 years and 525,550 minutes suggest that I harbor suppressed racist beliefs?

You tell me.

My family knows.

My friends know.

My children will all know it, in time.

I see someone coming and wonder, Do they know this, too? Maybe they’ve read this about me. It’s the kind of stain that lasts forever in a tangle of unqualified facts upon which you may now so easily stumble.

I could tell you that this was the result of too much time talking chemically altered nonsense and laughing at my own jokes.

I could tell you

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.