Do You Remember? #3

Armed Forces came along at just the right time for me. I was a disillusioned high school senior ready to escape the hallowed halls of cliquedom, totally absorbed in myself and a paper I was writing for a Sociology class. Among the topics available I chose "Mercenaries" even though I was (and remain) a devout pacifist. Oh, the biting irony, I thought. A radical peacenik in enemy territory! It also helped that I'd recently discovered a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine in a used book store and was utterly fascinated with this brazen subculture: survivalists, wholesale ammo clearinghouse advertisements, camouflage clothing trends, missives from professional soldiers in exotic lands whose only allegiance was to legal tender, and hot girls in bikinis brandishing semi-automatic weapons.

‘Oliver's Army’ was perfectly in tune with the paper I was writing:

Hong Kong is up for grabs
London is full of Arabs
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by a Chinese line
With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne
But there's no danger
It's a professional career
Though it could be arranged
With just a word in Mr. Churchill's ear
If you're out of luck or out of work
We could send you to Johannesburg

I was aware of Elvis Costello, having seen his infamous 1977 performance on Saturday Night Live where he abruptly stopped playing ‘Less Than Zero’ (from his debut My Aim Is True) and apologized to the audience, saying "There's no reason for me to be doing this song." before launching into a sneering and self-absorbed (oh, how I could relate to that) ‘Radio Radio’ from This Year's Model. On the spot, Lorne Michaels banned him from SNL -- it was the stuff of legend. Still, I thought Costello was a bit of a joke, a strange New Wave punk in Buddy Holly glasses and pegged jeans with spasmodic pigeon-toed dance moves.

Months passed before I bought Armed Forces in, of all places, a Montgomery Ward department store. The album was like nothing I'd ever heard. At once modern and traditional, angry and pleading, intelligent and raucous, nerdy and heroic, the songs didn't so much speak to me as slap me around for waiting so long to buy the album.

Though not quite my favorite Elvis Costello album, it was the one that hooked me with its inventive sexual abstraction and words I'd never heard on a rock and roll album:

I was caught in the suction
By a face like a truncheon
I was down upon one knee
Stroking her vanity

I learned years later that, like much of Costello's work, this album went through dizzying changes. Originally titled Emotional Fascism, it opens with Accidents Will Happen’ which was the obvious choice, but not the first:

Oh I just don't know where to begin
Though he says he'll wait forever
It's now or never
But she keeps him hanging on
The silly champion
She says she can't go home
Without a chaperone . . .
Your mind is made up but your mouth is undone.

It was exactly those verbal moves in the last line that put me in a musical full-nelson and slammed me to the canvas. It was nerd-rock with guts and a clenched-jaw attitude. That and the in-your-face rhythm of Pete Thomas' drums, limber basslines of Bruce Thomas, Steve Nieve's theatrical piano and angular Moog pointillism, and Elvis' self-described hands of cement slashing at his Fender Jazzmaster. It was all so far removed from the Bob Seger, Chicago, Deep Purple, Molly Hatchet, Styx and Boston I'd been (willingly or not) subjected to. Also, I knew no one else in school who listened to Elvis Costello. I was an astonished and forlorn pioneer, baffled yet virtually heroic, listening to the likes of:

You'll be a joker all your life
A student at the comedy college

Sparks are flying from electrical pylons
Snakes and ladders running up and down her nylons
Ready to experiment, you're ready to be burned
If it wasn't for some accidents then some would never ever learn.

If that weren't enough, ‘Oliver’s Army’ and the cover of Nick Lowe's ‘(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?’ were the perfect partners to my little mercenary project, and in fact I listened to this album nonstop a dozen times while writing the paper. ‘Oliver's Army’ sounded equally brand-spanking new and cloyingly familiar, and it wasn't until later that I learned Steve Nieve's last-minute piano flourish owed no small debt to ABBA's ‘Dancing Queen’.

As fitting as this album was to teen angst about class and nationhood reduced to the scale of high school microcosm -- at that age, after all, personal problems seem global and sexual encounters can be covert and militaristic -- Armed Forces still holds up, highlighting Elvis' extensive musical, lyrical, and historical knowledge. ‘Accidents Will Happen’ was influenced equally by Burt Bacharach and Randy Newman, and the sonic wonders of Bowie's albums Station to Station and Heroes are evident on ‘Moods For Moderns’ and ‘Senior Service’. The Quisling Clinic mentioned in ‘Green Shirt’ was taken directly from a Wisconsin clinic of the same name, and Costello recognized the possibilities right away, as he wrote in the Rhino Records reissue liner notes:

"It was just up the road from our hotel. I didn't know much, but I knew a little history. 'Quisling' was the name of the Norwegian Fascist leader who betrayed his country in the Second World War. An entire Boys from Brazil-style fantasy could unravel from such a chance encounter."

Barney Bubbles' pop-art cover only served to accentuate the swirling emotional betrayals, chaos and lack of gravity in Costello's life on the road, as well as the increasing critical attention that was turning him into an "unpleasant character" in his own mind, distancing himself from his first wife. He eventually said about the recording sessions: "I was not quite 24 and thought I knew it all."

For all that Armed Forces is, it could have been even more. The songs that were edited out of the final mix – ‘Tiny Steps’, ‘Wednesday Week’, ‘Clean Money’ and ‘Talking In The Dark’ - all feature verbal gymnastic gems.

I wish I had your confidence
It's love and not coincidence
Do you say these words to everyone?
You're fantastic, you're terrific
Your excellence is almost scientific.
You took the words out of my mouth
You put the tongue into my cheek
But I'd better lose my memory by Wednesday Week.

These lyrics would probably have made my 18-year-old head explode.

As for the doomed Sociology paper, I recall getting a 'C' for lack of objectivity and for including too many Armed Forces references.