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  Special thanks to my fishing buddy Eddie Gorodetsky for all the input and excellent source material, Sean Manning, Jackie Seow, Sal and Jeremy the Hot Rod Kings, all the crew at Dunkin’ Donuts, P.K. Ferguson (“no hard and fast rules here”), and Jonathan Karp for his unwavering enthusiasm, expert advice, and encouraging me to stick with this, who said all the right things at the right time when I needed to hear them.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DETROIT CITY

  PUMP IT UP

  WITHOUT A SONG

  TAKE ME FROM THIS GARDEN OF EVIL

  THERE STANDS THE GLASS

  WILLY THE WANDERING GYPSY AND ME

  TUTTI FRUTTI

  MONEY HONEY

  MY GENERATION

  JESSE JAMES

  POOR LITTLE FOOL

  PANCHO AND LEFTY

  THE PRETENDER

  MACK THE KNIFE

  WHIFFENPOOF SONG

  YOU DON’T KNOW ME

  BALL OF CONFUSION

  POISON LOVE

  BEYOND THE SEA

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW

  THE LITTLE WHITE CLOUD THAT CRIED

  EL PASO

  NELLY WAS A LADY

  CHEAPER TO KEEP HER

  I GOT A WOMAN

  CIA MAN

  ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

  TRUCKIN’

  RUBY, ARE YOU MAD?

  OLD VIOLIN

  VOLARE

  LONDON CALLING

  YOUR CHEATIN’ HEART

  BLUE BAYOU

  MIDNIGHT RIDER

  BLUE SUEDE SHOES

  MY PRAYER

  DIRTY LIFE AND TIMES

  DOESN’T HURT ANYMORE

  KEY TO THE HIGHWAY

  EVERYBODY CRYIN’ MERCY

  WAR

  BIG RIVER

  FEEL SO GOOD

  BLUE MOON

  GYPSIES, TRAMPS & THIEVES

  KEEP MY SKILLET GOOD AND GREASY

  IT’S ALL IN THE GAME

  A CERTAIN GIRL

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN CRAZY

  WITCHY WOMAN

  BIG BOSS MAN

  LONG TALL SALLY

  OLD AND ONLY IN THE WAY

  BLACK MAGIC WOMAN

  BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX

  COME ON-A MY HOUSE

  DON’T TAKE YOUR GUNS TO TOWN

  COME RAIN OR COME SHINE

  DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD

  STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

  VIVA LAS VEGAS

  SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES

  WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY

  WHERE OR WHEN

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG

  Your life is unraveling. You came to the big city, and you found out things about yourself you didn’t want to know, you’ve been on the dark side too long.

  CHAPTER 1 DETROIT CITY

  BOBBY BARE

  Originally released as a single

  (RCA Victor, 1963)

  Written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis

  IN THIS SONG YOU’RE THE PRODIGAL SON.

  You went to sleep last night in Detroit City. This morning you overslept, dreamt about white snow cotton fields, and had delusions about imaginary farmsteads. You’ve been speculating about your mother, having visions about your old pappy, making up stories about your brother, and idealizing your sister, and now you want to go home. Back to where things are more neighborly.

  From the postcards and junk mail that you dashed off, everybody assumes you’re a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they’re not, and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming. Your life is unraveling. You came to the big city, and you found out things about yourself you didn’t want to know, you’ve been on the dark side too long.

  By day you make the jeeps and limousines and the gas guzzlers, and by night you make the cocktail lounges. Everywhere you go people treat you like you are dead, everywhere you go you uncover more lies—if only they could read between the lines they could figure it out, it wouldn’t take much guess work.

  You rode a train full of merchandise northbound, and you ended up in Detroit City looking for a pot of gold, one fruitless search after another, each one taking an unexpected bad turn, and you’re exhausted—seems like you’ve been here your whole life, squandering opportunities, lost opportunities. Every day another daily dose of poison, what are you going to do?

  You’re going to take your foolish self-love and egotism and go back to what’s familiar, back to the ones that’ll stand by you, the ones that you left in the background. You want to go back home, you demand that of yourself. You’ve got a thirst and a hunger and a need, you got to get up and go, beat it, and push off. Time to say adios. You want to go home, where they’ll embrace you and take you in. Nobody will ask you for an explanation. No one’s going to pepper you with relentless questions. You’re going back to where you can clear your life up, going back to people of understanding. The people who know you best.

  * * *

  WHEN THIS SONG WAS WRITTEN, Detroit was a place to run to; new jobs, new hopes, new opportunities. Cars came off the assembly lines and straight into our hearts. Since then, like many American cities, it has ridden a roller coaster between affluence and decline. It has recently emerged from years of ruin, only to find itself tested again. But people from Detroit, the home of Motown and Fortune Records, birthplace of Hank Ballard, Mitch Ryder, Jackie Wilson, Jack White, Iggy Pop, and the MC5, can tell—any setback is only temporary, which is why dreams like Bobby Bare’s seem as real today as the day they were first sung. He’s able to manufacture a completely fictitious life just by penning some letters back home.

  What is it about lapsing into narration in a song that makes you think the singer is suddenly revealing the truth?

  Bobby Bare first tried his hand at becoming a recording artist back in the 1950s, eventually signing with Capitol Records and releasing a couple of singles that went nowhere. Trying his luck as a songwriter, he wrote “The All American Boy” and did a demo for his friend Bill Parsons. Bill recorded a version, but the record company, Fraternity Records, decided to release the demo that Bare had recorded. A clerical error left Bill Parsons’s name on the label, so Bobby Bare’s first chart hit was under the name Bill Parsons. This was probably the first incident of identity theft in America.

  This is not so much the song of a dreamer, but the song of someone who is caught up in a fantasy of the way things used to be. But the listener knows that it just doesn’t exist. There is no mother, no dear old papa, sister, or brother. They are all either dead or gone. The girl that he’s dreaming about long ago got married to a divorce attorney and she has three kids. Like thousands of others he left the farm, came to the big city to get ahead, and got lost. That’s why this song works.

  CHAPTER 2 PUMP IT UP

  ELVIS COSTELLO

  Originally released on the album This Year’s Model

  (Radar, 1978)

  Written by Elvis Costello

  THIS SONG SPEAKS NEW SPEAK. It’s the song you sing when you’ve reached the boiling point. Tense and uneasy, comes with a discount—with a lot of give-a-way stuff. And you’re going to extend that stuff till it ruptures and splits into a million pieces. You never look back you look forward, you’ve had a classical education, and some on the job training. You’ve learned to look into every loathsome nauseating face and expect nothing.

  You live in a world of romance and rubble, and you roam the streets at all hours of the night. You’ve acquired things and brought people the goods.

  It’s not like you have a promising future. You’re the alienated hero who’s been taken for a ride by a quick-witted little hellcat, the hot-blooded sex starved wench that you depended on so much, who failed you. You thought she was heaven and life everlasting, but she was just strong willed and determined—turned you into a synthetic and unscrupulous person. Now you’ve come to the place where you’re going to blow things up, puncture it, shoot it down.

  This song is in full swing. The one-two punch, the uppercut, and the wallop, then get out quick and make tracks. You broke the commandments and cheated. Now you’ll have to back down, capitulate and turn in your resignation.

  What is it about you anyway? You want to boost everything up, exaggerate it, until you can grip it and fondle it.

  Why does it all seem so crooked and hush hush?

  Why all the trivial talk and yakety yak?

  Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head?

  And what about that little she goat that won’t go away? You want to maim and mangle her. You want to see her in agony, and you want to blow this whole thing up until it’s swollen, where you’ll run your hands all over and squeeze it till it collapses.

  This song is brainwashed, and comes to you with a lowdown dirty look, exaggerates and amplifies itself until you can flesh it out, and it suits your mood. This song has a lot of defects, but it knows how to conceal them all.

  * * *

  ELVIS IS ONE OF THOSE GUYS W
HOSE FANS fall somewhere between the two poles of passion and precision. There are people who tick off the boxes of his life with the same obsession of someone completing a train schedule while others don’t know anything beyond the fact that he sings a song that accompanied a particularly devastating breakup. Very seldom a cheery wedding song but plenty of breakup songs.

  Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song. Frank Sinatra’s feelings over Ava Gardner allegedly inform “I’m a Fool to Want You,” but that’s just trivia. It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.

  Elvis Costello and the Attractions were a better band than any of their contemporaries. Light years better. Elvis himself was a unique figure. Horn-rimmed glasses, quirky, pigeon-toed and intense. The only singer-guitarist in the band. You couldn’t say that he didn’t remind you of Buddy Holly. The Buddy stereotype. At least on the surface. Elvis had Harold Lloyd in his DNA as well. At the point of “Pump It Up,” he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much. But he also had a heavy dose of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Pump It Up” is a quasi-stop-time tune with powerful rhetoric, and with all this, Elvis exuded nothing but high-level belligerence. He was belligerent in every way. Even down to the look of his eyes. A typical Englishman or Irishman, didn’t matter how much squalor he was living in, always appeared in a suit and a tie.

  Back then English people appeared in suits and ties no matter how poor they were. With this manner of dress every Englishman was equal. Unlike in the States, where people wore blue jeans and work boots and any type of attire, projecting conspicuous inequality. The Brits, if nothing else, had dignity and pride and they didn’t dress like bums. Money or no money. The dress code equalized one and all in old Britain.

  “Pump It Up” is intense and as well-groomed as can be. With tender hooks and dirty looks, heaven-sent propaganda and slander that you wouldn’t understand. Torture her and talk to her, bought for her, temperature, was a rhyming scheme long before Biggie Smalls or Jay Z. Submission and transmission, pressure pin and other sin, just rattled through this song. It’s relentless, as all of his songs from this period are. Trouble is, he exhausted people. Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves. Here, however, it’s all compacted into one long song. Elvis is hard edged with that belligerence that somehow he is able to streamline into his work. The songs are at top speed and this is among his very best. In time Elvis would prove he had a gigantic musical soul. Too big for this type of aggressive music to contain. He went all over the place and it was hard for an audience to get a fix on him.

  From here he went on to play chamber music, write songs with Burt Bacharach, do country records, cover records, soul records, ballet and orchestral music. When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach, you obviously don’t give a fuck what people think. Elvis blows through all kinds of genres like they are not even there. “Pump It Up” is what gives him a license to do all these things.

  CHAPTER 3 WITHOUT A SONG

  PERRY COMO

  Originally released as a single

  (RCA Victor, 1951)

  Music by Vincent Youmans

  Lyrics by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu

  THIS SONG DOESN’T REALLY NAME the song that the world would be worse off if it never heard. It’s a mystery. Elvis Presley quotes the first verse of this song as being representative of everything he believes. Most people first heard this song sung by Perry Como.

  Perry Como was the anti–Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn’t be caught dead with a drink in his hand, and could out-sing anybody. His performance is just downright incredible. There is nothing small you can say about it. The orchestration alone can knock you off your feet.

  Perry is also the anti–American Idol. He is anti–flavor of the week, anti–hot list and anti-bling. He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine. Perry Como stands and delivers. No artifice, no forcing one syllable to spread itself thin across many notes.

  He can afford to be unassuming because he has what it takes. A man with lightning in his pocket doesn’t ever brag. He walks out onstage, cocks his head to better hear the band, stands in front of the audience and sings… and the people in front of him are transformed. Not by the clothes on his back or the drink in his glass, not by the last starlet he kissed or the car that he drives. But by the song that he sings. And without this song he has nothing, and this is the song he sings.

  Perry Como lived in every moment of every song he sang. He didn’t have to write the song to do it. He may have believed the songs more than some of the people that wrote them. When he stood and sang, he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word. What more could you want from an artist?

  Without a song. Few songs become popular but the ones that do we can’t seem to do without.

  Get you away from the gangsters and psychopaths, this menagerie of wimps and yellow-bellies. You want to be emancipated from all the hokum.

  CHAPTER 4 TAKE ME FROM THIS GARDEN OF EVIL

  JIMMY WAGES

  Recorded by Sun Records, 1956—unreleased

  Written by Jimmy Wages

  WHAT YOU’D LIKE TO SEE IS A NEIGHBORLY face, a lovely charming face. Someone on the up and up, a straight shooter, ethical and fit. Someone in an attractive place, hospitable, a hole in the wall, a honky-tonk with home cooking. Nobody needs to be in a quick rush, no emphasis on speediness, everybody’s going to measure their steps. Your little girl will support you; she waits on you hand and foot, and she sides with you at all times.

  But you’re in limbo, and you’re shouting at anyone who’ll listen, to take you out of this garden of evil. Get you away from the gangsters and psychopaths, this menagerie of wimps and yellow-bellies. You want to be emancipated from all the hokum. You don’t want to daydream your life away, you want to get beyond the borderlands and you’ve been ruminating too long.

  You’ve been suspended in midair, but now the stage is set, and you’re going to go in any direction available, and get away from this hot house that has gone to the dogs. The one that represses you, you want to get away from this corrupt neck of the woods, as far away as possible from this debauchery. You want to ride on a chariot through the pillars of light, you got faith, you’re fearless and undaunted, you’re hanging tough and sick of being hog tied and being held back. You want to be flung into a distant realm where you’ll be redeemed, and you’ll go with anyone who’ll escort you out of this jungle of baloney and everything fishy. Even if you have to dog paddle your way across the seven seas, you’ll do it, and you can bet on that, put money on it. You overpower your fears and wipe them out, anything to get out of this garden of evil. This landscape of hatred and horror, this murky haze that fills you with disgust.

  You want to be piggy backed into another dimension where your body and mind can be restored. If you stay here your dignity is at risk, you’re one step away from becoming a spiritual monster, and that’s a no-no.

  You’re appealing to someone, imploring someone to get you out of here. You’re talking to yourself, hoping you don’t go mad.

  You’ve got to move across the threshold but be careful. You might have to put up a fight, and you don’t want to get into it already defeated.

  * * *

  NOTHING ARTIFICIAL ABOUT THIS SONG, nothing manufactured or contrived about it. Nothing cosmetic or plastic here. This is the real deal and it’s off the map. No racial bloodlines here. This song is no joke.

  The guitar player sounds like Luther Perkins playing a Gibson Les Paul, instead of his usual Fender. In fact, it sounds exactly like the part Luther would play, so it could be him. This is a Sam Phillips record. Raw and fearless as anything Sam ever recorded.

  The singer Jimmy Wages grew up with Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi, lived on the same block, until Elvis moved away to Memphis when he was eight years old. You have to wonder, what if Elvis had stayed in Tupelo, and Jimmy Wages had moved away? Also, you have to wonder, what if Sam had sent Elvis over to Luther’s house instead of to Scotty Moore’s? Scotty and Bill would then have been backing up Johnny Cash, and Luther and Marshall Grant would have been playing with Elvis.