Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: The New York Psychoanalytics Society and Institute is in a very formal European style building on a quiet side street on the upper East side of Manhattan. Oak tables, high ceilings. In the library, long ribbons of leather bound volumes, and five different busts of Sigmund Freud, all in a row. I went there to meet with the Society's president, Michelle Press, a psychoanalyst herself with that lovely quality of patience and openness the best therapists always have. I wanted to talk with her about a subject that I've always found deeply interesting, what Freud called parapraxis, but not just anyone's parapraxis, the Kings parapraxis. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. After the first two episodes on Memory earlier this season, I decided to do a third. It involves an odyssey. This odyssey took me from the pages of the Handbook of Psychobiography to a shrine in Tennessee, to the legendary Battery Studios in Times Square, and to the hushed offices of the New York Psychoanalytics Society, where I sat with Michelle Press in search of an answer to a simple question. What if a singer couldn't remember the words to a song, a song had sung a thousand times, particular parts of the song, the same part of the song, over and over. What would that tell us about the singer?

00:02:12
Speaker 3: It was a term in German faulty acts or faulty functions. It would be slips of the tongue. It could be misreadings, mishearings, but it's Freud's invention.

00:02:24
Speaker 2: Michelle Press is talking about parapraxis, from the Greek para meaning abnormal, beyond praxis meaning act, abnormal speech acts, or as they are more colloquially known, Freudian slips. Does Freud mean that there are no accidental slips, or that if you look at the range of accidental slips you can find meaning in some.

00:02:48
Speaker 3: So when you read him, he doesn't want to sound that kind of definitive. He'll say, yes, maybe one might prove that there are some that are truly accidental, or truly a result of fatigue or of maybe some medical illness. But he said, if you do the work, one will find the reasons for this slip, that they're not accidental that they have. He called it a sense, and that that sense has to do with unconscious forces or unconscious ideas that are trying to find expression but are because they're unacceptable. They emerge in these ways when one might be unguarded.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: Now, is that concept of unacceptability central to the notion of parapraxis?

00:03:34
Speaker 3: Yes?

00:03:36
Speaker 4: What was a less over Here? Sun metal Stream?

00:03:55
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty six, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Shep. It's a sentimental song about a boy and his dog, Shep, written in the nineteen thirties by Red Foley. The dog gets old and sick. The vet says there's no hope. The boy aims his rifle at Shep to put him out of his misery, but he can't pull the trigger. He lies down next to Shep cradles him in his arms as the dog dies and the song ends.

00:04:26
Speaker 4: Old Shelby has gone weather, good dog, It's gold.

00:04:35
Speaker 5: And but if.

00:04:45
Speaker 4: Dolls have a heaven, that's one I know, Oh Shepherds.

00:04:57
Speaker 2: Wonderful who? Old Shep is not one of Elvis's more famous songs, but in an essay publish in two thousand and five. On Elvis, the psychologists Alan Elms and Bruce Heller have an aside about a small but significant discrepancy between the original version of Old Shep and Elvis's cover. I'm going to come back to Heller and Elms in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis's lyrical parapraxis. But let's start with Old Shep. Listen to Hank Snow performing the lyrics as they were originally written. The boy has just put away his gun, realizing he can't shoot Shep.

00:05:45
Speaker 6: So I threw down let a little gun and ran right up to his sign. Ladies, faithful, old head, right online, knee and friends. I stroked the best pound a little man ever found. I even cried, so I scared good.

00:06:10
Speaker 2: See Now listen to Elvis sing his.

00:06:16
Speaker 5: Version, I had strong, the best friend, not a man. I cry.

00:06:29
Speaker 4: Sauscurs good.

00:06:32
Speaker 2: See Hank Snow sings, I stroked the best pal a man ever found, meaning that the boy considers an act of violence against his best pal, then decides against it and takes instead the path of nurture and sympathy. He recovers his humanity, But Elvis sings, I had struck the best friend a man ever had, which turns the meaning of the song completely upside down. The boy does not recover his humanity. He now holds himself responsible for an act of violence against Shep, an act of violence that, in fact, he he did not commit. Stroke becomes struck, and all of a sudden, the song about moral redemption turns into a song about morbid remorse. Now, I suppose you can say stroke, struck whatever those two words sound the same. It's just a cover. But it's not just a cover. Elvis was obsessed with Old Shep. It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar. He played it incessantly as a child. At age ten, he played it at the Mississippi Alabama Fair, his first public performance. He played it at his high school talent show and won. He played it on dates with girls. He played it well into his career. And why does the song resonate so much with him? It's a song about love, betrayal, and loss, themes that are at the center of Elvis's life. He's a twinless twin, someone who's twin died in Utero and He's obsessed by that fact. He brings it up again and again. The loss of someone who should have been his closest friend, Alvis's mother, Gladys, is to say the least unusual. She's controlling, intense, he calls her baby. Gladys died when Alvis was just twenty three. When he first saw her casket, he threw himself on top of her body, then stepped back and talked about how beautiful she was. While pointing to her dead feet. He called them her little suities. He did this again and again. At the end of the funeral service, he lay on top of her casket, saying, I want to go with you. I don't want to stay here. I can't be without you. And we haven't even gotten to Priscilla, Alvis's wife. He spotted her when she was fourteen and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis.

00:09:02
Speaker 7: Once Alvis took your tool move.

00:09:05
Speaker 8: Yes he did.

00:09:08
Speaker 2: This is Priscilla being interviewed by Barbara Walters in nineteen eighty five.

00:09:12
Speaker 7: Why why that fascination?

00:09:14
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the fascination was. This is not the first time that he had done this. I don't know if it was for the shock value, you know, to see how people would react, or just for his own thrill of it.

00:09:28
Speaker 7: You wrote there were times when you were Elvis spent days in the bedroom, freezing bedroom. He liked to be cold. The windows with blackout drapes or no sunlight ended day after day.

00:09:42
Speaker 8: It went into weeks. Yes, we stayed like that. We had our food delivered by the door, and it was cold. I mean, he did like a cold and it was dark, and it could get real lonely. And that's that's how he liked it at times, with a cocoon, almost like a womb.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: I guess you think. Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers. Priscilla is in a strapless sun dress. She looks amazing. Barbara Walters turns to her and says, Alvis controlled your looks, your clothes, your hair, your makeup. He controlled you totally. Priscilla says, yes, he did.

00:10:29
Speaker 7: Then six years you lived there before he decided to marry you. In those six years of sleeping with him every night, he never had intercourse with you. You wrote in your book that there were times when you begged him six years so why well again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was as what he wanted in a woman, and somewhere he along in his past he said that he wanted a.

00:11:05
Speaker 2: Virgin Alvis is complicated. And what does Freud's theory of parapraxis say that complicated feelings inappropriate, maybe unacceptable feelings are normally suppressed. But every now and again, some little bit of that buried emotion slips out, and if you're paying attention and listening closely, that little slip can tell you something struck for stroke. But old Shep is just the beginning for Elvis. The real parapraxis occurs in are You Lonesome Tonight? A song originally written in the nineteen twenties and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the Army.

00:11:59
Speaker 4: Are You Longsina.

00:12:04
Speaker 7: Who?

00:12:05
Speaker 9: As Day zero six, Take two.

00:12:18
Speaker 2: Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April fourth, nineteen sixty The recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive.

00:12:30
Speaker 10: Yeah this is there's numerous takes here, so they fall apart they make a mistake and what have you?

00:12:35
Speaker 2: John Jackson and Vic Nissini from Sony Me all listening together at the legendary Battery Studios in Manhattan where everyone from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen recorded Holy Ground. I started my quest at the very beginning.

00:12:54
Speaker 4: Is your hot till.

00:12:59
Speaker 3: Share?

00:12:59
Speaker 8: I harm?

00:13:04
Speaker 11: Tony d.

00:13:06
Speaker 8: Are you lonesome?

00:13:17
Speaker 4: Because he's so amadia is he? Uh? When he records that? Are the jordan Aires singing along with him?

00:13:24
Speaker 2: Or they're laying that tracked on C liveth Yeah.

00:13:29
Speaker 12: He always preferred to have everyone in one room and record live. Oh, even in one room, not in booths or no no, no, no no.

00:13:36
Speaker 4: He hated booths.

00:13:37
Speaker 2: Recording the song was not Elvis's idea. It was a favorite of the wife of his manager, Tom Parker. In the studio, Elvis asked the lights be turned off so the room was in darkness. He did five takes. He didn't like any of them.

00:13:53
Speaker 10: It was four in the morning when he recorded it, so he made everyone get out of the studio go away, and then he just you know, did it. And then they this is the second take, which they told him how the background singers, you know, pee popped because he said, just stop the tape, you know I'm on. They said, just do it once more because you know, we hit a peap pop on there. So the third take ends up being the master.

00:14:14
Speaker 4: Oh I see.

00:14:15
Speaker 10: Then he held the label held it back for seven eight months because.

00:14:18
Speaker 2: They didn't realize what they hed on their hands.

00:14:19
Speaker 10: Yeah, it was seven months. I think after he recreated they finally released it as a single and didn't go out that he had done eight songs for Elvis's back and this was just like, yeah, just try this.

00:14:33
Speaker 2: One, recorded in the wee hours of the morning in darkness as a favor to someone else, a song neither Elvis nor his label particularly liked. It's almost like the song had a curse on it right from the beginning, and from then on Elvis could never quite get it right. I talked about this with Michelle Press at the New York Psychoanalytics Society. Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs he sang. There's all these examples out of his life of him being able to recite, to sing from memory, massive amounts of stuff. I'm worried about, I'm interested about that. There's a little slip I'm worried about, I said, I'm worried about that. I'm interested in that, and I'm wondering what the what would you make of that? As a psychoanalyst. I try to go on, but of course I'm talking to a hardcore Freudian. I meant to say I was interested, but what came out was worried.

00:15:37
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm still caught on your slip, obviously thinking what.

00:15:41
Speaker 4: Do you what do you make of it?

00:15:43
Speaker 3: So one thought was whether the slip might be a key to something that you're figuring out and puzzling with him, because you're right now, you're immersed in him.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: Oh I am. I've been singing this song under my breath for months. I can't understand why I've never been an Elvis fan. I don't own a single song of his.

00:16:06
Speaker 4: Or am I am?

00:16:07
Speaker 2: I drawn to this story because isn't this story that I'm talking to you the great anxiety of anyone in a creative field, that moment when you lose control, right or the the presentation to the audience is unmasked. I want to I want to show you. I take out my laptop, pull up YouTube. There's a mountain of Elvis on YouTube, one of the last performances of his life. It's bananas. I mean, he just it's he's singing a song he's singing thousands of times.

00:16:43
Speaker 11: And he just.

00:16:45
Speaker 4: Completely loses control of it.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: I can skip it coming.

00:16:58
Speaker 13: I wonder if.

00:17:00
Speaker 12: Two lungs of a night, you know, if someone said the worlds of stays in each play apart.

00:17:09
Speaker 4: Playing in.

00:17:12
Speaker 5: A plus tags Irigel select cleverly.

00:17:17
Speaker 10: I never missed you.

00:17:19
Speaker 8: And it came back to it.

00:17:20
Speaker 14: Forgot the word seem to change.

00:17:25
Speaker 2: When I first saw it it as someone in a I mean, I'm not Elvis, but I'm someone in a creative field. It terrified me. It's like up on stage doing what he's paid to do, and.

00:17:38
Speaker 15: He he just I'm like, well, really, won't during your life.

00:17:45
Speaker 4: Go on living without you?

00:17:48
Speaker 8: Now?

00:17:48
Speaker 6: The stage is bare and I'm sitting there without a new hair.

00:17:53
Speaker 8: I don't know.

00:17:57
Speaker 12: If you'll come back to me.

00:18:02
Speaker 2: Every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge, can't do it right. It's he's returning to the song again and again and again and again and again and doing the same kind in this particular always a bridge so singing party over.

00:18:20
Speaker 3: How many years did this go on?

00:18:22
Speaker 4: Yours?

00:18:25
Speaker 11: Okay?

00:18:26
Speaker 14: In nineteen eighty two, this life and.

00:18:28
Speaker 10: Version was rare in the UK and each number twenty five and the British Singles.

00:18:31
Speaker 2: Chart at Battery Studios. I made the Sony guys play every version they had. They even have names, Laughing Elvis, Crazy Elvis, each one stranger than the one before.

00:18:46
Speaker 4: The World's a Stadius and East must play a part.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: There's sweat and tears streaming down his face.

00:19:15
Speaker 12: And I had no calls to do.

00:19:22
Speaker 2: It goes on like this, on and on a baby.

00:19:30
Speaker 4: Show. Come again.

00:19:34
Speaker 8: Tell me, dear h, that's it man?

00:19:50
Speaker 7: What'll do?

00:19:50
Speaker 4: You don't not a jury? And what I'll do?

00:19:52
Speaker 8: You o? S?

00:20:01
Speaker 2: Have you ever played the song before?

00:20:02
Speaker 11: No?

00:20:03
Speaker 4: I never played it before.

00:20:03
Speaker 8: I didn't.

00:20:04
Speaker 4: It's funny. I played a bunch of chick I played a bunch of his stuff. Do you want to flip in a standby switch?

00:20:13
Speaker 2: I'm with Jack White at his studio in Nashville Third Man Records. Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, one of the great rock and rollers of his generation and a huge Elvis fan. He's a shrine to Elvis in his hallway. Actual shrine. All that's missing is flowers. We met in his private office, lots of black and yellow and leather and taxidermy. He sat on the couch with a guitar. Do you play Do you play Elvis songs a concert?

00:20:43
Speaker 4: Sometimes? I do, like a.

00:20:49
Speaker 16: What's that?

00:20:58
Speaker 4: I want you to love me?

00:21:01
Speaker 7: Love me?

00:21:01
Speaker 4: And just dream and just say.

00:21:11
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, don't stop, I'm enjoying it. Anything any other ones you do?

00:21:19
Speaker 4: Wait?

00:21:19
Speaker 2: But anyway, why do you why that one? What's it about that song?

00:21:23
Speaker 12: I had heard that early from a band called the Flat Duo Jets that I really liked, and I didn't know it was Elvis. And then when i'd heard the Elvis version, I had connected the two, like, oh no, really, and I started doing it when.

00:21:33
Speaker 4: I put in coffee houses.

00:21:34
Speaker 12: I started playing that when I was like sixteen, Yeah, I goes back.

00:21:39
Speaker 4: Which is funny.

00:21:40
Speaker 12: I eventually heard a story of Robert Plant telling Elvis he loved that song when led Zepp and met Elvis, and then when they walked out out of the hallway that Elvis poked his head out in the hallway and sang that song to Robert Plan. They sang it back to each other, and you were crying and must have been an amazing moment.

00:22:02
Speaker 2: Jack White owns the original acetate pressing of Elvis's first recording from nineteen fifty three, My Happiness. After we talked, White took me into his vault to show it to me. It's priceless. He asked me if I weren't to hold it. I was too terrified to say yes. Jack White seemed like the right person to see to try and understand Elvis's problem. And are you lonesome tonight?

00:22:25
Speaker 4: All right, let me see.

00:22:26
Speaker 9: We're gonna take a crack.

00:22:26
Speaker 4: It might we might have to give a couple whorls. What are you a lone song tonight? Do you miss me tonight?

00:22:50
Speaker 9: Are you sorry? We drifted a paw? Does your memoir strain through a bride song?

00:23:06
Speaker 4: Day? We're not stew and call you sweet hot?

00:23:17
Speaker 12: Do the chair in your partner seamany?

00:23:24
Speaker 4: And bear? Do you geeze? That's a door? Stell and pitcher me? Then? Is your heart filled with pain? Shall I come back again? Till the deed are your own?

00:23:47
Speaker 9: Song?

00:23:49
Speaker 11: To night?

00:23:53
Speaker 2: That's the first half of the song. The song version all questions. A man is wondering whether his lover misses him. Then comes the spoken bridge, in which the emotional tables are turned and the man leaves himself bare. Are you Lonesome Tonight? Has been recorded countless times over the years. A lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny and way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in, so does Jack White.

00:24:23
Speaker 4: I wonder if you're a lonesome tonight.

00:24:28
Speaker 13: You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part.

00:24:33
Speaker 4: Fate had me playing in love with you as my sweetom. That one was where we at. I loved you at first glance.

00:24:42
Speaker 13: You read your line so cleverly.

00:24:44
Speaker 12: And never missed a cue. The thing came back too.

00:24:48
Speaker 4: You seem to change.

00:24:49
Speaker 12: You acted strange, and why I've never known, Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you.

00:25:05
Speaker 13: But I'd rather go on hearing your lies and to go on living without. Now the stage is bare and I was standing there with emptiness all around. If you won't come.

00:25:22
Speaker 5: Back to me.

00:25:25
Speaker 12: And maybe bring the crook back, is your heart fill Lewis play.

00:25:35
Speaker 4: Shall not come back again?

00:25:39
Speaker 9: To medd Loan song to night?

00:25:48
Speaker 2: Whoa wait You you you enjoyed that.

00:25:55
Speaker 12: I did it gets it gets uh, there's some nice parts where it gets the.

00:26:00
Speaker 4: You can see uh playing that live now, I just did that, like well, we just did that.

00:26:06
Speaker 12: I played it once yesterday reading this, but now playing like that, I.

00:26:11
Speaker 4: Could see, wow, live you could really that really could be to be.

00:26:14
Speaker 12: A really emotional song. So I didn't really think about it until just then.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: What led you to think that just now?

00:26:21
Speaker 12: Because it feels like, well, it's in a mine, it's a lot of minor chords, so that that that's already gets you in that melancholy vibe, but it has it has that. What just occurred to me now is he doesn't he doesn't. He doesn't really care that if she's lonesome, he's lonesome, that the singer is lonesome. And it's a it's a mcguffin to pretend like I'm worried about you?

00:26:45
Speaker 4: Are you lonesome tonight?

00:26:47
Speaker 11: You know?

00:26:48
Speaker 12: But it's really he's the singer is worried about himself. So that could be. You know, you take that kind of emotional song and you put years and years on stage, and then you put drugs in the mix, and then in your own state of mind at the time. It could be a really you could be onto something there. It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful to sing.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: What's fascinating is the some parts the singer is in control and he's worried about her right the spoken parts, the singer is vulnerable and he's confessing his own and it's so screwed up. It's like, I know you lied to me, and I wish you hadn't right. I whish I didn't know that you lied to me because I'd rather be in the state of being deceived than know the truth, which is like seventeen convolutions of neuroticism.

00:27:40
Speaker 12: He's still blaming her most of the lines, still pointing the finger.

00:27:45
Speaker 2: White says, you can't run from that kind of emotion, not if you're singing the song properly. And so when he writes songs, he tries to establish some distance between himself and the feelings he's singing about.

00:27:58
Speaker 1: I try to push it into a character's standpoint rather than it being a self confession. It confessional for me because I think that would be really hard to consistently keep living that moment over and over and over again. I've definitely seen older artists ignoring certain parts of their certain songs in their career because it's probably too close to home about something or other.

00:28:22
Speaker 2: But you can't avoid a song's emotional effects all the time, and especially not when you have to read a soliloquy in the middle of it, which is what the are you lonesome? Bridge? Is a speech parachuted into the heart of the song.

00:28:36
Speaker 12: I had a little flubb moment at one point trying to figure out, well, wait a minute.

00:28:41
Speaker 4: It's a waltz.

00:28:43
Speaker 12: You know you have that.

00:28:45
Speaker 4: So if I'm like, I wonder if.

00:28:52
Speaker 12: Two three so one two three one two three, so your brain kind of wants to go, I wonder if you're lonesome tonight? That's what your brain wants to do. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and.

00:29:11
Speaker 4: We must each play a part.

00:29:12
Speaker 2: Then it starts to get it breaks down.

00:29:15
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean it would, I mean I would. I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier if someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite.

00:29:24
Speaker 2: That part, which should I recite while you played a guitar?

00:29:27
Speaker 4: Yeah, do that.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: I'm not going to torture you with my rendition of the spoken bridge. Well maybe later. I'm just saying until I die, I can say I played with Jack White and then, because how many opportunities am I going to get like this? I asked Jack White to help me edit the soliloquy. If one were to rewrite it, I'm thinking you that you uh, you lose the first three lines fate had me playing in love you as my sweetheart? Or even Act one was when we met? Why don't why don't they just start with act one?

00:30:05
Speaker 8: Did that?

00:30:09
Speaker 12: Act one was where I met I loved you at the first class? He read your lines so carefully, never.

00:30:18
Speaker 4: Missed a que.

00:30:21
Speaker 13: What did I do there?

00:30:21
Speaker 2: You say carefully cleverly, which is clever, beautiful?

00:30:26
Speaker 4: And then came back too. You seem to change, you acted strange.

00:30:31
Speaker 2: What did Jack White do there? The actual lyric is you read your lines so cleverly? He said, you read your line so carefully, carefully for cleverly. A man singing one of the songs of his musical idol comes to the emotionally complex center and what do we hear? A moment of vulnerability? Can he be as clever as Elvis? He's not sure. He must be careful parapraxis.

00:31:04
Speaker 17: Sometimes you know I love I love him so much, and that you know, I'm afraid to learn more about certain things, like you know, you're so close to it, and you've experienced certain things about you know nothing in comparison to what he went through, but you're in the same where we do the same kind of thing. We perform, and we go on stages, and we make records and all this stuff from a different time.

00:31:27
Speaker 12: Period, but you notice these tiny little moments that are when you see certain you're like, oh, I know exactly what that's about. I know exactly what that feels like.

00:31:41
Speaker 2: There are ten known live recordings of Elvis performing Are You Lonesome Tonight, starting in nineteen sixty one in a concert at Block Arena in Honolulu, up to the end of Elvis's life in nineteen seventy seven. Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyze them all in their essay Twelve Ways to Say Lonesome? Assessing error and control in the music of Elvis Presley, Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the sung portion of Are You Lonesome Tonight more or less flawlessly because the song portion is the part of the song where the singer is in control, but in the Spoken Bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected, and that's the part Elvis can't get right. Elms and Heller count a total of one hundred and nine errors in those ten live performances of the Spoken Bridge, twenty nine of which involved just four lines. I loved you at first glance, where he confesses the depths of his feelings. You seem to change, You acted strange, where he testifies to his betrayal and rejection, and why I've never known, where he expresses his feelings of anger and victimization, and with emptiness all around, where he admits to his loneliness. The most problematic conditions of the Bridge are the later ones, which come after the summer of nineteen seventy two. What happens in the summer of nineteen seventy.

00:33:18
Speaker 7: Two, And one day you went in and said I'm leaving. There was another man in your life. He was your karate teacher, right, Mike Stone. And you went off then.

00:33:30
Speaker 8: And lived with him.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: Priscilla Presley back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's Prime Time Freudian.

00:33:38
Speaker 7: It was said that Elvis tried to kill him. I wanted him killed, right? Do you believe that?

00:33:43
Speaker 8: I think at that time yes, he did. He wanted that to happen.

00:33:50
Speaker 4: Do the cheers in your father?

00:33:54
Speaker 14: Seeing empty?

00:33:56
Speaker 4: And do you gain? Is that your ball head? And wish you had hair filled with pain? Shall I come back?

00:34:15
Speaker 11: Tell me?

00:34:17
Speaker 4: Are you lost? Lord?

00:34:21
Speaker 7: Lord?

00:34:25
Speaker 8: I want.

00:34:28
Speaker 2: A man who fears betrayed an abandonment, is portrayed and abandoned.

00:34:37
Speaker 4: And I had no cause to doctor.

00:34:45
Speaker 2: It's too much. He's a wreck baby?

00:34:52
Speaker 11: Shall I come?

00:34:54
Speaker 4: Okay?

00:34:56
Speaker 9: Tell me, dear?

00:34:58
Speaker 4: Why are you loss?

00:35:08
Speaker 2: After I left Jack, I went to see Bobby Braddock just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row. This you may remember Bobby Braddock from season two of Revisionist History. He's the legendary songwriter I called the King of Tears. Braddock wanted to introduce me to a good friend of his, a singer songwriter named Casey Bowles.

00:35:34
Speaker 16: That's the church across alto.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: Thirty something, long red hair, the kind of person who if you touch you expect a little jolt of static.

00:35:44
Speaker 4: Didn't work?

00:35:45
Speaker 14: Oh you won't sing that song.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: That we were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios on the main floor in a corner where the piano was Casey sang are you Lonesome Tonight? With Bobby on the piano, do.

00:36:07
Speaker 11: You miss me?

00:36:12
Speaker 4: Are you Sobby?

00:36:14
Speaker 2: We drifted, Then we sat and they talked about Nashville. They talked about how they both grew up in the Church of Christ, the most strict of Southern fundamentalist denominations, and they talked about Elvis.

00:36:30
Speaker 16: My dad thought he was Elvis. I think, yeah, he really.

00:36:34
Speaker 11: He was a Church of Christ song leader and really wanted to be a Jordanaire badly, and so Ray Walker was one of the Jordanaires, and he tried to emulate him by way of dress and hairstyle. And so I grew up either hearing him say hello, Darlan, nice to see you, or doing this sort of you know, is it vaudeville style or just just sort of a over the top modeling style.

00:37:01
Speaker 16: I guess is modeling the way you'd say it modeling.

00:37:03
Speaker 2: Then Bobby Braddock started talking about recitations, the spoken part in many older country songs, and he made the same point that Jack White did that they're much easier if they're set to music, if you could just as easily sing them, like on one of Braddock's most famous songs, he Stopped Loving Her Today.

00:37:22
Speaker 14: Recite like.

00:37:27
Speaker 4: She came to see him one waste.

00:37:33
Speaker 5: Ah, we all wonder, Yeah, and you could sing that she came to see him one last time.

00:37:41
Speaker 4: Oh, we all wonder if she would.

00:37:45
Speaker 5: And that works either way. But this is just like, uh, we got this song, let's get a recitation, throw it in there and and they Elvis made it work. And I'm thinking, just instinctively, just because he was, Uh, he was just so good.

00:38:00
Speaker 2: Recitations are unusual these days. Braddock hasn't written one since something he did for Toby Keith in the nineteen nineties.

00:38:07
Speaker 5: Last successful recite song I had was actually it was well, actually it was it was. It was a hip hop thing I want to talk about me, But that was talking talking.

00:38:17
Speaker 16: That's what I'm thinking about.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: But you know, it's can you can you can you pay a little slice of that?

00:38:22
Speaker 8: You remember I.

00:38:26
Speaker 11: Never did that?

00:38:27
Speaker 5: Why do that? Always? I always do it with with with a karaoke thing where I get up there and play the thing.

00:38:35
Speaker 15: I want to talk about me. We wean't talk about. I want to talk about number one. You talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk, you talk about your church in your head, when you talk about the trouble you've been having with your mother and your daddy, with your brother and your daddy and your mother and your crazy ex lover, you know. And then and then the minstrel minstrel period of line, which everybody said, you can't put that in a song. Nobody will ever cut it, you know. And it was one of the biggest songs ever.

00:39:03
Speaker 14: Had about your medical charts. And when you start take that out, nobody were recording. Toby Keith did. Here's probably the only one who would have though.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: Then I showed them the prize. I brought it my bag, my copy of the Handbook of Psycho Biography containing the Heller and Elms essay.

00:39:27
Speaker 4: Hold on, I have my book here.

00:39:29
Speaker 5: I tell you that's fashioning.

00:39:33
Speaker 2: To a pair of Elvis fanatics, it was like I'd unearthed the Dead Sea scrolls.

00:39:38
Speaker 5: What's the book.

00:39:39
Speaker 2: It's a book called Handbook of Psycho Biography, and it has an essay on this.

00:39:44
Speaker 5: Song Wow phycle biography and.

00:39:46
Speaker 2: So yeah, so here's so this guy has gone through. I made a chart all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made in every known live recording. Of these were two songwriters, and I felt they immediately saw themselves in that chart. Do you find yourself making the kind of error sometimes even subtle ones, that you know you've been talking about?

00:40:11
Speaker 16: That's so interesting.

00:40:12
Speaker 11: I wrote a song about my mother, called Somebody Something, and my mother is adorable, and whenever you heard about things going wrong or like some tumultu a story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what, want't we the only person in the family that there's nothing I have it written about.

00:40:28
Speaker 16: So it's trying to dig dirt on her and there was nothing.

00:40:31
Speaker 11: And so I ended up writing this song about her, called Somebody Something, and I cry every time I do it. And there is a line that says, you know, she's always been somebody something. She's lived every life but her own, and it's gone. I can't remember it right now.

00:40:49
Speaker 5: I don't know that feeling.

00:40:50
Speaker 16: I can't remember it. She's always been somebody something.

00:40:54
Speaker 11: It's been everything but alone, A daughter, a mother, a lot, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's lived every life but her own. Yeah, she's always been somebody's something. And there's a line that says, you know, she she wonders what it might be like to be somebody else, and she wonders what it feels like to be free. But she's always imagined being nobody's nothing, and that's something.

00:41:23
Speaker 16: She never want to be.

00:41:24
Speaker 11: But that line usually is just gone. And a lot of times I'll go hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly.

00:41:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, wait, what's the specific line that's gone? Is which one?

00:41:40
Speaker 7: Uh?

00:41:40
Speaker 4: What's gone? Again?

00:41:42
Speaker 16: She's always been somebody's synth. That's been everything but alone.

00:41:45
Speaker 11: Daughter, a lover, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's been everything.

00:41:52
Speaker 9: But alone.

00:41:52
Speaker 16: Yeah, yeah, why is it that lone?

00:41:56
Speaker 11: I don't know. I think that.

00:42:02
Speaker 16: I don't know.

00:42:03
Speaker 11: I think when you she's so when you see somebody give so much of themselves, and that's truly the only thing that she will never experience.

00:42:11
Speaker 16: And I think it's what I've experienced the most of.

00:42:15
Speaker 2: A minute before we were joking about Toby Keith. Now, Casey is pensive as she compares her mother's life to her own.

00:42:25
Speaker 11: Not being able to make a relationship work the first eighteen thousand times out of the gate, or you know, officially the first two and not being a mother and she real close. Yeah, I love her.

00:42:38
Speaker 14: Go to church where they're right?

00:42:39
Speaker 16: Do I sit still? Because she makes me and I stay awake.

00:42:43
Speaker 4: It's good.

00:42:45
Speaker 5: When I was a kid, if I'd get bored in church and my mother and reaching them and pinch me.

00:42:50
Speaker 2: Oh, I got smacked, Casey, can you play that song for us? Is it going to be two?

00:42:56
Speaker 16: Let's see? Okay, okay, well we'll see if this happens. She grew up playing cowgirl in a railroad town.

00:43:23
Speaker 11: Dream, and she'd see, oh, shoot, hold on, there's a lit line, but Elvis in this that's just random. Hold on dream and see shee Holly, but I'm gonna do again? What did I just say? Sorry, I'm thinking about my mom. She grew up playing cowgirl.

00:43:50
Speaker 4: She grew up playing cowgirl in a railroad.

00:43:56
Speaker 11: Town dream, and she'd see Hollywood someday.

00:44:03
Speaker 4: She knew, some distant Friday night, we're.

00:44:08
Speaker 16: The citar Oh just right, Fate would come.

00:44:13
Speaker 4: In and carry you away.

00:44:19
Speaker 16: As far sheha could say from there. Those were just facts, that's all right.

00:44:28
Speaker 2: Hold one second, My first reaction to Casey's failure of memory was to be embarrassed for her, worried that she had lost control. That's the way we're trained to think. Just listen to the words I've just used, failure, embarrassed, worried in one way or another. That's what this season of Revisionist History has been about, about the ways we judge each other for our mistakes and choices. The easiest thing in the world is to look at those mistakes and condemn. The much harder thing is to look at those mistakes and understand.

00:45:09
Speaker 16: She married in December anywhere you can address her, Mama maid. She looked dark, grown up, standing.

00:45:19
Speaker 11: There like that, had a honeymoon in Memphis Town.

00:45:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, she'll look for an overs all around.

00:45:31
Speaker 16: May love in the Grayhound, coming back as far as she could see from there. Those were just the facts.

00:45:41
Speaker 4: Lie.

00:45:43
Speaker 11: You went from somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, Jesus.

00:45:52
Speaker 2: Parapraxis is not failure. When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated. It's the opposite. Parapraxis is a gift. I presented myself as interested in this story, but now you know that this subject doesn't just interest me it worries me. Losing control is my great anxiety. When Jack White said carefully instead of cleverly, it was a hint that playing Elvis wasn't a trivial matter for him. It was a sacred act. Carefully full of care, and Elvis, after the loss of Priscilla, sang a song hit song a thousand times only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pane. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real. So Bobby Braddick and I sat there listening to Casey singh tears in her eyes, fumbling to remember the lyrics of a song about her mother. Fumbling not because your mother didn't matter to her, but because she did.

00:47:16
Speaker 11: She's always there, somebody something.

00:47:23
Speaker 18: Then everything, daughter, Wow, daughter lover who a fan?

00:47:38
Speaker 7: Mother?

00:47:39
Speaker 16: She's live every life.

00:47:41
Speaker 4: But she'd say, that's just call Alma.

00:47:51
Speaker 16: She's always there. Somebody's so.

00:48:01
Speaker 4: God, it's beautiful.

00:48:04
Speaker 2: Why are you covering your mouth.

00:48:05
Speaker 16: I'm just it's just weird.

00:48:09
Speaker 11: Because I've never It's just weird when you're thinking about what it is like.

00:48:13
Speaker 16: I just thought, oh bad.

00:48:14
Speaker 11: Memory, too many songs old, too many songs in there. But at any point in time, I could pull out a rap from new edition from nineteen eighty two, like why is that in there? And something that you wrote is not in there? That is so weird?

00:48:32
Speaker 2: It's not weird. A lesser person would have sung it perfectly. Thank you for listening to Season three of Revisionist History, And if you like this episode, you'll enjoy my new series launching later this year. It's called Broken Record, and you can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts. Revision's History is a pan up production. The senior producer is Mia LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gira. Special thanks to Kim Green and Hal Humphries of Storyboard e MP in Nashville and here in New York. Thanks to Jason Gambrell, Evan Viola, Rachel Strom, Nicole Bunsis, Kate Mescal, Kristen Meinzer Carle Migliore, Andy Bauers, and of course El Hefe Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm glamo.

00:50:05
Speaker 4: Okay, so it will be.

00:50:12
Speaker 2: I wonder if you're lonesome tonight. You know, someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part. Fate had me playing in love you as my sweetheart. Act one was when we met. I loved you at first glance. You read your lines so cleverly and never missed a que. Then came act too. You seem to change, and you acted strange, and why I'll never know, Honey. You lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lies than go on living without you. Now the stage is bare, and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. And if you won't come back to me, then make them bring the curtain down.

00:51:21
Speaker 4: How about doing nice very good?

00:51:23
Speaker 2: I mustn't.

00:51:24
Speaker 4: I'm not very musical.

00:51:25
Speaker 5: No, it's very good.

00:51:26
Speaker 4: That's good. Yeah,