Encore: Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis

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Speaker 1 Pushkin

Speaker 31 To introduce this episode, I just want to relate how random my journey to it was.

Speaker 36 I was reading a book, I can't even remember what it was, and in a footnote, I always read the footnotes, the author said the psychologist whose work she was referring to had done a very strange paper once about Elvis.

Speaker 21 At which point I stopped reading the book and looked up the very strange paper about Elvis.

Speaker 11 It was by Alan Elms.

Speaker 39 It was amazing.

Speaker 21 So immediately I go to the next question.

Speaker 31 Was Alan Elms still alive?

Speaker 16 Yes, living in Davis, California.

Speaker 35 Next step, I got to go see him.

Speaker 18 So I immediately fly to San Francisco, rent a car.

Speaker 17 But the rental agency is out of all cars except for a bright canary yellow Chevy Corvette, which I take happily, but then halfway to Davis, driving at speeds that are very, very far from legal, I start thinking, what's this guy gonna think of me if I show up in a bright canary yellow Corvette?

Speaker 18 He's a brilliant psychologist.

Speaker 2 I don't want him prejudging me.

Speaker 46 So I park it around the corner, walk to his house, and spend a lovely afternoon with him.

Speaker 11 Sadly, he was feeling poorly at the time and didn't speak well enough for me to use a tape of his interview.

Speaker 48 But my spontaneous journey set the correct tone, I think, for this whole episode, which is that it was intended to be a caper, a grand caper, in which many crazy, unexpected things happen.

Speaker 12 And, as you will discover, so it was.

Speaker 21 By the way, the thing that Alan Elms and I talked the most about was not actually his Elvis paper.

Speaker 45 It was another even more ingenious thing he once wrote about the Wizard of Oz, which I promise you that I will get to one day here at Revisionist History.

Speaker 35 Join me for a walk down Revisionist History Memory Lane.

Speaker 52 The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is in a very formal European-style building on a quiet side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Speaker 48 Oak tables, high ceilings, in the library long ribbons of leather-bound volumes.

Speaker 52 and five different busts of Sigmund Freud all in a row.

Speaker 48 I went there to meet with the society's president, Michelle Press,

Speaker 46 a psychoanalyst herself, with that lovely quality of patience and openness the best therapists always have.

Speaker 56 I wanted to talk with her about a subject that I've always found deeply interesting, what Freud called parapraxis.

Speaker 56 But not just anyone's parapraxis.

Speaker 44 The king's parapraxis.

Speaker 58 My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 2 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 48 After the first two episodes on memory earlier this season, I decided to do a third.

Speaker 59 It involves an odyssey.

Speaker 48 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 Psychoanalytic Society, where I sat with Michelle Press in search of an answer to a simple question.

Speaker 63 What if a singer couldn't remember the words to a song, a song he'd sung a thousand times, particular parts of the song, the same part of the song over and over?

Speaker 53 What would that tell us about the singer?

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 17 Michel Press is talking about parapraxis.

Speaker 68 From the Greek, para meaning abnormal, beyond, praxis meaning act, abnormal speech acts, or as they are more colloquially known, Freudian slips.

Speaker 63 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?

Speaker 67 So when you read him, he doesn't want to sound that kind of definitive.

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 67 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,

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 43 Now, is that concept of unacceptability central to the notion of parapraxis?

Speaker 67 Yes.

Speaker 71 When I

Speaker 71 was a lamb,

Speaker 71 that old Shep was

Speaker 71 a pub

Speaker 72 Over hills

Speaker 72 and meadows with strain.

Speaker 48 In 1956, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Shep.

Speaker 48 It's a sentimental song about a boy and his dog, Shep, written in the 1930s by Red Foley.

Speaker 46 The dog gets old and sick.

Speaker 74 The vet says there's no hope.

Speaker 48 The boy aims his rifle at Shep to put him out of his misery, but he can't pull the trigger.

Speaker 56 He lies down next to Shep, cradles him in his arms, as the dog dies.

Speaker 65 And the song ends.

Speaker 72 Old Shelpy

Speaker 71 has gone,

Speaker 72 where the good dog is gone.

Speaker 72 And no more with old Shep

Speaker 72 will I roll.

Speaker 72 But if darks have a heaven brew, there's one thing

Speaker 72 I know.

Speaker 71 Old Shep has

Speaker 66 a wonderful

Speaker 66 home.

Speaker 56 Old Shep is not one of Elvis's more famous songs.

Speaker 48 But in an essay published in 2005 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' cover.

Speaker 48 I'm going to come back to Heller and Elms in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis' lyrical parapraxis. But let's start with Old Shep.

Speaker 68 Listen to Hank Snow performing the lyrics as they were originally written.

Speaker 46 The boy has just put away his gun, realizing he can't shoot Shep.

Speaker 76 So I threw down that old gun and ran right up to his side.

Speaker 76 He laid his faithful old head right on my knee. And friends,

Speaker 76 I stroked the best pal

Speaker 76 that a man ever found.

Speaker 76 I even cried, so I scarcely could see.

Speaker 48 Now listen to Elvis sing his version.

Speaker 78 I had struck the best friend

Speaker 72 that a man ever

Speaker 72 had.

Speaker 72 I cried,

Speaker 72 so I scarcely could see.

Speaker 74 Hank Snow sings, I stroked the best pal a man ever found.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 54 He recovers his humanity.

Speaker 79 But Elvis sings, I had struck the best friend a man ever had, which turns the meaning of the song completely upside down.

Speaker 34 The boy does not recover his humanity.

Speaker 80 He now holds himself responsible for an act of violence against Shep, an act of violence that in fact he did not commit.

Speaker 34 Stroke becomes struck, and all of a sudden the song about moral redemption turns into a song about morbid remorse.

Speaker 48 Now, I suppose you can say stroke, struck, whatever. Those two words sound the same.

Speaker 46 It's just a cover.

Speaker 51 But it's not just a cover.

Speaker 48 Elvis was obsessed with old Shep.

Speaker 46 It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar.

Speaker 48 He played it incessantly as a child.

Speaker 68 At age 10, he played it at the Mississippi, Alabama Fair, his first public performance.

Speaker 48 He played it at his high school talent show and won. He played it on dates with girls.

Speaker 21 He played it well into his career.

Speaker 48 And why does the song resonate so much with him?

Speaker 52 It's a song about love, betrayal, and loss, themes that are at the center of Elvis' life.

Speaker 48 He's a twinless twin, someone whose twin died in utero, and he's obsessed by that fact.

Speaker 73 He brings it up again and again, the loss of of someone who should have been his closest friend.

Speaker 58 Elvis' mother, Gladys, is, to say the least, unusual.

Speaker 21 She's controlling, intense.

Speaker 70 He calls her baby.

Speaker 39 Gladys died when Elvis was just 23.

Speaker 47 When he first saw her casket, he threw himself on top of her body, then stepped back and talked about how beautiful she was.

Speaker 81 while pointing to her dead feet, he called them her little suities.

Speaker 41 He did this again and again.

Speaker 68 At the end of the funeral service, he lay on top of her casket, saying, I want to go with you.

Speaker 34 I don't want to stay here.

Speaker 44 I can't be without you.

Speaker 48 And we haven't even gotten to Priscilla, Elvis's wife.

Speaker 79 He spotted her when she was 14 and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis.

Speaker 82 Once, Elvis took you to a moor.

Speaker 82 Yes, he did.

Speaker 50 This is Priscilla being interviewed by Barbara Walters in 1985.

Speaker 82 Why? Why that fascination?

Speaker 82 I don't know what the fascination was. This is not the first time that he had done this.

Speaker 82 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. You wrote, there were times when you and Elvis spent days in the bedroom.

Speaker 82 Freezing bedroom. He liked it very cold.
The windows with blackout drapes, so no sunlight entered. Day after day.

Speaker 82 It went into weeks, I guess. We stayed like that.
We had our food delivered by the door.

Speaker 82 And

Speaker 82 it was cold. I mean, he did like it cold, and it was dark.

Speaker 82 And it could get real lonely.

Speaker 82 And that's how he

Speaker 82 liked it at times. Like a cocoon.

Speaker 82 Almost like a womb, I guess.

Speaker 42 You think?

Speaker 53 Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers.

Speaker 48 Priscilla is in a strapless sundress.

Speaker 51 She looks amazing.

Speaker 46 Barbara Walters turns to her and says, Alvis controlled your looks, your clothes, your hair, your makeup.

Speaker 81 He controlled you totally.

Speaker 50 Priscilla says, yes, he did.

Speaker 53 Then.

Speaker 82 Six years you lived there before he decided to marry you.

Speaker 82 In those six years of sleeping with him every night, he never had intercourse with you.

Speaker 82 You wrote in your book that there were times when you begged him.

Speaker 82 Six years of that?

Speaker 82 Priscilla, why?

Speaker 82 Well,

Speaker 82 again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was as what he wanted in a woman. And

Speaker 82 somewhere he,

Speaker 82 along

Speaker 82 in his past, he said that he wanted a virgin.

Speaker 73 Elvis is complicated.

Speaker 46 And what does Freud's theory of parapraxis say?

Speaker 41 That complicated feelings, inappropriate, maybe unacceptable feelings, are normally suppressed.

Speaker 46 But every now and again, some little bit of that buried emotion slips out.

Speaker 56 And if you're paying attention and listening closely, that little slip can tell you something.

Speaker 74 Struck for stroke.

Speaker 46 But old Shep is just the beginning.

Speaker 60 For Elvis, the real parapraxis occurs in Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Speaker 48 A song originally written in the 1920s and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the Army.

Speaker 71 Are you lonesome

Speaker 71 tonight?

Speaker 71 Do you miss

Speaker 82 LWB0106 take two.

Speaker 48 Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April 4th, 1960. The recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive.

Speaker 76 Yeah, this is, there's numerous takes here, so they fall apart, they make a mistake, and what have you.

Speaker 41 John Jackson and Vic Anacini from Sony, me,

Speaker 48 all listening listening together at the legendary Battery Studios in Manhattan, where everyone from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen recorded.

Speaker 44 Holy Ground.

Speaker 74 I started my quest at the very beginning.

Speaker 74 His voice is so amazing.

Speaker 79 Is he, when he records that, are the Jordanaiers singing along with him or are they laying that track down separately?

Speaker 58 No, live. It's all live.

Speaker 66 Everything's all live.

Speaker 79 He always preferred to have everyone in one room and record live.

Speaker 76 Oh, even in one room, not in booths.

Speaker 58 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 66 He hated booths.

Speaker 46 Recording the song was not Elvis' idea.

Speaker 32 It was a favorite of the wife of his manager, Tom Parker. In the studio, Elvis asked that the lights be turned off, so the room was in darkness.

Speaker 48 He did five takes.

Speaker 56 He didn't like any of them.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 76 And then they, this is the second take, which they told him of the background singers, you know, P-popped.

Speaker 76 Because he said, just stop the tape. You know, I'm done.
They said, just do do it once more, because we hit a p-pop on there. So the third tape ends up being the master.

Speaker 63 Oh, I see.

Speaker 76 And the label held it back for seven, eight months.

Speaker 58 Oh, they didn't realize what they had on their hands.

Speaker 76 Yeah. It was

Speaker 76 seven months, I think, after he got recreated. They finally released it as a single.

Speaker 58 And it didn't go out on.

Speaker 76 He had done eight songs for Elvis's back.

Speaker 76 And this was just like, yeah, just try this one.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 73 It's almost like the song had a curse on it right from the beginning.

Speaker 34 And from then on, Elvis could never quite get it right.

Speaker 54 I talked about this with Michelle Prest at the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

Speaker 70 Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs he sang.

Speaker 34 There's all these examples out of his life of him being able to recite, to sing from memory, massive amounts of stuff.

Speaker 52 I'm interested about that.

Speaker 63 There's a little slip.

Speaker 53 I'm worried about that.

Speaker 21 I said, I'm worried about that.

Speaker 53 I'm interested in that.

Speaker 21 And I'm wondering

Speaker 29 what would you make of that as a psychoanalyst?

Speaker 35 I try to go on.

Speaker 47 But of course, I'm talking to a hardcore Freudian.

Speaker 46 I meant to say I was interested.

Speaker 53 But what came out was worried.

Speaker 67 I mean, I'm still caught on your slip, obviously, thinking.

Speaker 23 What do you make of it?

Speaker 67 So one thought was whether the slip might be a key to something that you're figuring out and puzzling with

Speaker 47 him.

Speaker 23 Because

Speaker 67 right now you're immersed in him.

Speaker 58 Oh, I am.

Speaker 80 I've been singing this song under my breath for months.

Speaker 79 I can't understand why.

Speaker 84 I've never been a Nelvis fan.

Speaker 80 I don't own a single song of his.

Speaker 23 Or

Speaker 69 am I drawn to this story because isn't this story that I'm talking to you

Speaker 54 the great anxiety of anyone in a creative field?

Speaker 69 That moment when you lose control, right?

Speaker 66 Where the

Speaker 48 presentation to the audience is

Speaker 37 unmasked.

Speaker 21 I want to show you.

Speaker 84 I take out my laptop, pull up YouTube.

Speaker 34 There's a mountain of Elvis on YouTube.

Speaker 70 One of the last performances of his life, it's bananas.

Speaker 44 I mean, he just, it's.

Speaker 65 He's singing a song he sings thousands of times, and he just

Speaker 55 completely loses control of it.

Speaker 51 Now I can skip it.

Speaker 47 Okay, now here comes

Speaker 47 a banana.

Speaker 47 I wonder if

Speaker 47 you lost in the night.

Speaker 85 You know, someone said

Speaker 85 the world's a stage, and each of us play a part.

Speaker 86 Play head me here and play again,

Speaker 86 the end

Speaker 83 with a plus tags.

Speaker 66 You read your lines

Speaker 66 cleverly.

Speaker 10 You never missed a cue.

Speaker 82 Then he came back, too.

Speaker 85 You forgot the words.

Speaker 5 You seemed to change, you fool.

Speaker 27 When I first saw it, it, as someone in a...

Speaker 47 I mean, I'm not Elvis, but I'm someone in a creative field.

Speaker 23 It terrified me.

Speaker 41 It's like up on stage doing what he's paid to do, and he just.

Speaker 43 every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge.

Speaker 21 He can't do it right.

Speaker 51 He's returning to the song again and again and again and again and again and doing the same kind of thing in this particular speaking note.

Speaker 38 It's always a bridge.

Speaker 58 So it's kind of like a singing part.

Speaker 67 He's almost over how many years did this go on?

Speaker 12 Years.

Speaker 76 Okay, in 1982, this Life Inversion was a radio hit in the UK and reached number 25 on the British Singles chart.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 58 The world's a stage, and each must play a part.

Speaker 54 There's sweat and tears streaming down his face.

Speaker 72 And I had no cause to doubt you.

Speaker 83 It goes on like this: on and on.

Speaker 66 Shall I come back

Speaker 77 again?

Speaker 66 Tell me, dear,

Speaker 51 are you gonna lose something

Speaker 51 to me?

Speaker 66 That's it, man.

Speaker 86 14 years right now,

Speaker 86 I'll tell you.

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Speaker 21 Have you ever played this song before?

Speaker 83 No, I never played it before. And it's funny, I played a bunch of

Speaker 83 check, I played a bunch of his stuff. Would you mind flipping

Speaker 23 standby switch on the back?

Speaker 48 I'm with Jack White at his studio in Nashville.

Speaker 46 Third Man Records.

Speaker 32 Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, one of the great rock and rollers of his generation, and a huge Elvis fan.

Speaker 48 He has a shrine to Elvis in his hallway.

Speaker 53 Actual shrine.

Speaker 24 All that's missing is flowers.

Speaker 48 We met in his private office.

Speaker 73 Lots of black and yellow and leather and taxidermy.

Speaker 50 He sat on the couch with a guitar.

Speaker 59 Do you play Elvis songs in concert?

Speaker 83 Sometimes I do

Speaker 77 like a.

Speaker 72 What's happening?

Speaker 78 Treat me like a.

Speaker 78 cool

Speaker 66 treatment melan.

Speaker 66 I want you to love me,

Speaker 66 love me just the same.

Speaker 89 Treat me just the same.

Speaker 89 Oh, love me.

Speaker 63 Sometimes I'll do that one. I was going to say, don't stop.

Speaker 66 I'm enjoying it.

Speaker 63 Anything, any other ones you do?

Speaker 58 Wait, by the way, why do you...

Speaker 66 Why that one?

Speaker 38 What's it about that song?

Speaker 83 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 heard the Elvis version I had connected the two like oh now I'm gonna do it and I started doing it when I put in coffee houses I started playing that

Speaker 83 I was like 16 yeah so

Speaker 83 kind of goes back which is funny I'd eventually heard a story of Robert Plant

Speaker 83 telling Elvis he loved that song when Led Zeppelin met Elvis and then when they walked out

Speaker 83 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

Speaker 83 were crying and must have been an amazing moment.

Speaker 48 Jack White owns the original acetate pressing of Elvis' first recording from 1953, My Happiness.

Speaker 55 After we talked, White took me into his vault to show it to me.

Speaker 74 It's priceless.

Speaker 35 He asked me if I wanted to hold it.

Speaker 74 I was too terrified to say yes.

Speaker 34 Jack White seemed like the right person to to see to try and understand Elvis's problem in Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Speaker 17 Are you lonesome

Speaker 90 tonight?

Speaker 23 Do you miss me

Speaker 66 tonight?

Speaker 78 Are you sorry

Speaker 89 when we drifted

Speaker 72 apart?

Speaker 78 Does your memory stray

Speaker 78 to a bright summer day

Speaker 83 when I kissed you

Speaker 91 and called you sweetheart?

Speaker 89 Do the chairs in your parlour seem empty

Speaker 40 and bare?

Speaker 89 Do you gaze at your doorstep

Speaker 71 and picture me

Speaker 45 there?

Speaker 89 Is your heart filled with pain?

Speaker 75 Shall I come back

Speaker 75 again?

Speaker 23 Tell me, dear,

Speaker 23 are you lonesome

Speaker 23 tonight?

Speaker 39 That's the first half of the song.

Speaker 53 The sung version, all questions.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 54 Are You Lonesome Tonight has been recorded countless times over the years.

Speaker 48 A lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny and way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in.

Speaker 48 So does Jack White.

Speaker 83 I loved you at first glance. You read your lines so cleverly and never missed a cue.

Speaker 5 Then came that too.

Speaker 83 You seemed to change, you acted strange, and why I've never known.

Speaker 83 Honey, you lied when you said you loved me,

Speaker 83 and I had no cause to doubt you.

Speaker 83 But I'd rather go on hearing your lies

Speaker 83 than to go on living without you.

Speaker 83 Now the stage is bare

Speaker 83 and I'm standing there with emptiness all around.

Speaker 83 And if you won't come back to me,

Speaker 83 then you bring the curtain down.

Speaker 90 Is your heart filled with pain?

Speaker 89 Shall I come back

Speaker 89 again?

Speaker 23 Tell me, dear,

Speaker 92 are the lonesome

Speaker 92 tonight?

Speaker 66 Wait,

Speaker 58 you enjoyed that.

Speaker 40 I did.

Speaker 83 There's some nice parts where it gets the

Speaker 83 you can see

Speaker 83 playing that live.

Speaker 83 Now that I just did that, like, well, we just did that. I played it once yesterday, like, reading this.

Speaker 83 But now playing it like that, I could see, wow, live, you could really, that really could get to be a really emotional song.

Speaker 83 So I didn't really think about it until just then.

Speaker 55 What led you to think that just now?

Speaker 83 Because it feels like, well, it's in a minor, it's got a lot of minor chords, so that already gets you in that melancholy vibe, but it has that.

Speaker 83 What just occurred to me now is

Speaker 83 he doesn't really care that if she's lonesome, if he's lonesome.

Speaker 83 The singer is lonesome. And it's a MacGuffin to pretend like, I'm worried about you.

Speaker 83 Are you lonesome tonight?

Speaker 83 But it's really the singer is worried about himself.

Speaker 83 So that could be,

Speaker 83 you take that kind of emotional song and you put

Speaker 83 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 re,

Speaker 83 you could be onto something there. It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful to sing.

Speaker 69 What's fascinating is the

Speaker 48 sung parts, the singer is in control and he's worried about her.

Speaker 58 Right.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 66 Right.

Speaker 63 I wish 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 17 convolutions of

Speaker 58 neuroticism.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 83 Because he's still blaming her most of the lines,

Speaker 23 still pointing the finger.

Speaker 79 White says, you can't run from that kind of emotion, not if you're singing the song properly.

Speaker 48 And so when he writes songs, he tries to establish some distance between himself and the feelings he's singing about.

Speaker 83 I try to push it into a character's standpoint rather than it being a self

Speaker 83 confessional for me, because I think that would be really hard to consistently keep living that moment over and over and over again.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 60 But you can't avoid a song's emotional effects all the time.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 83 I had a little flub moment at one point trying to figure out: well, wait a minute, it's a waltz. You know, you have that.

Speaker 83 So if I'm like,

Speaker 83 I wonder if

Speaker 83 two, three, so one, two, three, one, two, three,

Speaker 83 three. So your brain kind of wants to go, I wonder if you're lonesome tonight.

Speaker 50 That's what your brain wants to do.

Speaker 83 And you know someone said that the world's a stage and we must each play a part. Then it starts to get, that's a good thing.
Oh,

Speaker 35 it breaks down.

Speaker 83 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 83 I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier if someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite

Speaker 70 that part. Wait, should I recite it while you play the guitar?

Speaker 58 Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 66 So we can do that.

Speaker 48 I'm not going to torture you with my rendition of The Spoken Bridge.

Speaker 58 Well, maybe later.

Speaker 50 I'm just saying, until I die, I can say I play with Jack White.

Speaker 34 And then, because how many opportunities am I going to get like this?

Speaker 60 I asked Jack White to help me edit the soliloquy.

Speaker 55 If one were to rewrite it, I'm thinking you that

Speaker 55 you lose the first three lines.

Speaker 35 Fate had me playing in love, you as my sweetheart.

Speaker 48 Or even Act One was when we met.

Speaker 52 Why don't they just start with Act 1?

Speaker 73 Do that.

Speaker 35 Act 1 was where we met.

Speaker 83 I loved you at first glance.

Speaker 83 You read your lines so carefully. Never missed a cue.

Speaker 4 What did I do there? You said carefully instead of cleverly, which said cleverly.

Speaker 23 Beautiful friends.

Speaker 61 Then came act two.

Speaker 83 You seemed to change. You acted strange.

Speaker 42 What did Jack White do there?

Speaker 21 The actual lyric is, you read your lines so cleverly.

Speaker 48 He said, you read your lines so carefully.

Speaker 58 Carefully, for cleverly.

Speaker 46 A man singing one of the songs of his musical idol comes to the emotionally complex center.

Speaker 47 And what do we hear?

Speaker 34 A moment of vulnerability.

Speaker 48 Can he be as clever as Elvis?

Speaker 39 He's not sure.

Speaker 68 He must be careful.

Speaker 60 Parapraxis.

Speaker 83 Sometimes, you know, I love him so much that, you know, I'm afraid to learn more about certain things. Like, you know,

Speaker 83 you're so close to it and you've experienced certain things about,

Speaker 83 you know, nothing in comparison to what he went through, but

Speaker 83 we do the same kind of thing. We perform and we go on stages and we make records and all this stuff.
I'm from a different time period, but you notice these tiny little moments that are,

Speaker 83 when you see certain, you're like, oh, I know exactly what that's about. I know exactly what that feels like.

Speaker 68 There are 10 known live recordings of Elvis performing Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Speaker 34 Starting in 1961 in a concert at Block Arena in Honolulu, up to to the end of Elvis' life in 1977, Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyze them all in their essay, 12 Ways to Say Lonesome, Assessing Error and Control in the Music of Elvis Presley.

Speaker 59 Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the sung portion of Are You Lonesome Tonight more or less flawlessly, because the sung portion is the part of the song where the singer is in control.

Speaker 48 But in the spoken bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected.

Speaker 84 And that's the part Elvis can't get right.

Speaker 68 Elms and Heller count a total of 109 errors in those 10 live performances of the Spoken Bridge, 29 of which involve just four lines.

Speaker 48 I loved you at first glance, where he confesses the depths of his feelings.

Speaker 69 You seemed to change, you acted strange,

Speaker 48 where he testifies to his betrayal and rejection.

Speaker 46 And why I've never known, where he expresses his feelings of anger and victimization.

Speaker 48 And

Speaker 22 with emptiness all around,

Speaker 56 where he admits to his loneliness.

Speaker 32 The most problematic renditions of the bridge are the later ones, which come after the summer of 1972.

Speaker 39 What happens in the summer of 1972?

Speaker 82 And one day you went in and said, I'm leaving.

Speaker 82 There was another man in your life then.

Speaker 82 He was your karate teacher. Right.
Mike Stone.

Speaker 82 And you went off then and lived with him.

Speaker 74 Priscilla Presley, back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's primetime Freudian.

Speaker 82 It was said that Elvis tried to kill him or wanted him killed. Right.
Do you believe that? I think at that time, yes, he did. He wanted that to happen.

Speaker 75 I do the chairs in your parlor

Speaker 75 seem empty and bare.

Speaker 75 Do you gaze at your bald head

Speaker 75 and wish you had hair?

Speaker 75 Is your heart

Speaker 75 filled with pain?

Speaker 75 Shall I come back?

Speaker 75 Tell me, dear,

Speaker 75 are you lonesome?

Speaker 75 Oh, Lord, Lord,

Speaker 75 I wonder how

Speaker 49 a man who fears betrayal and abandonment is betrayed and abandoned.

Speaker 75 And I had no cause to doubt you.

Speaker 9 It's too much.

Speaker 59 He's a wreck.

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Speaker 39 After I left Jack White, I went to see Bobby Braddock just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row.

Speaker 92 This was just two. Good.

Speaker 32 You may remember Bobby Braddock from season two of Revisionist History.

Speaker 48 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 named Casey Bowles.

Speaker 91 That's the church across the alto.

Speaker 37 30-something, long red hair.

Speaker 74 The kind of person who, if you touch, you expect a little jolt of static.

Speaker 84 It'll work.

Speaker 92 Oh, you're gonna sing that song. Oh, that's you want me to sing that song?

Speaker 48 We were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios on the main floor, in a corner where the piano was.

Speaker 48 Casey sang, Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Speaker 49 with Bobby on the piano.

Speaker 49 Are you lonesome

Speaker 49 tonight?

Speaker 49 Do you miss me

Speaker 49 tonight?

Speaker 77 Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Speaker 48 Then we sat and they talked about Nashville.

Speaker 55 They talked about how they both grew up in the Church of Christ, the most strict of southern fundamentalist denominations.

Speaker 46 And they talked about Elvis.

Speaker 30 My dad thought he was Elvis, I think.

Speaker 30 Yeah, he really, he was a Church of Christ song leader and really wanted to be a Jordanair badly. And

Speaker 30 so Ray Walker was one of the Jordanaiers, and he tried to emulate him by way of dress and hairstyle.

Speaker 30 And so I grew up either hearing him say, hello, darling, nice to see you, or doing this sort of, you know,

Speaker 30 is it vaudeville style or just sort of an

Speaker 30 over-the-top modeling style, I guess, is modeling the the way you'd say it?

Speaker 91 Modeling?

Speaker 34 Then Bobby Braddock started talking about recitations, the spoken part in many older country songs.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 50 Like on one of Braddock's most famous songs, He Stopped Loving Her Today.

Speaker 92 The recitation, like

Speaker 92 she came to see him one last time.

Speaker 92 Oh, we all wondered if she would. Yeah, you could sing that.
She came to see him one last time.

Speaker 71 Oh, we all wondered if she would.

Speaker 92 And that works either way. But this is just like,

Speaker 92 we got this song, let's get a recitation and throw it in there.

Speaker 92 And Elvis made it work.

Speaker 92 And I'm thinking just instinctively, just because

Speaker 92 he was just so good.

Speaker 46 Recitations are unusual these days.

Speaker 56 Braddock hasn't written one since something he did for Toby Keith in the 1990s.

Speaker 92 Last successful recitation song I had was actually

Speaker 92 a hip-hop thing. I want to talk about meat.

Speaker 92 But that was talking, talking, talking.

Speaker 30 Toby Keith, that's what I'm thinking about.

Speaker 92 But it was, you know, it's all in the middle.

Speaker 58 Wait,

Speaker 63 can you play a little slice of that? Do you remember?

Speaker 72 I could pretend I'm Toby Keith. I never did that.

Speaker 92 I never did that. When I do that,

Speaker 92 I always do it with a karaoke thing where I get up there and play the thing.

Speaker 92 I want to talk about me. We want to talk about I.
We want to talk about number one.

Speaker 92 You talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk, you talk about your church and your head when it hurts.

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 38 And it fits that.

Speaker 92 And then the minstrel period 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 they ever had

Speaker 92 about your medical charts and when you start yeah

Speaker 92 take that out nobody will record it Toby Keith did

Speaker 66 he's probably the only one who would have though

Speaker 58 then I showed them the prize I brought it my bag my copy of the handbook of psychobiography containing the Heller and Elms essay hold on I have my book here I'll tell you that's fascinating yeah that is fascinating.

Speaker 50 To a pair of Elvis fanatics, it was like I'd unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Speaker 92 What's the book?

Speaker 50 It's a book called Handbook of Psychobiography, and it has an essay on this song.

Speaker 92 Wow, psychobiography.

Speaker 63 And so, yeah, so here's, so this guy has gone through, he made a chart

Speaker 49 of all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made in every known live recording of.

Speaker 66 Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Speaker 50 These were two songwriters, and I I felt they immediately saw themselves in that chart.

Speaker 80 Do you find yourself making the kind of errors, sometimes even subtle ones, that

Speaker 30 we've been talking about? That's so interesting. I wrote a song about my mother called Somebody Something, and my mother is adorable.

Speaker 91 And

Speaker 30 whenever you heard about things going wrong or like some tumultuous story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what?

Speaker 30 My only person in the family that there's nothing I haven't written about. So I was trying to dig dirt on her, and there was nothing.

Speaker 30 And so I ended up writing this song about her called Somebody Something, and I cry every time I do it. And

Speaker 30 there is a line that says, you know, she's always been somebody something. She's lived every life but her own.

Speaker 30 And it's gone. I can't remember it right now.

Speaker 92 I don't know that feeling.

Speaker 66 I can't remember it.

Speaker 78 She's always been somebody something.

Speaker 66 She's been everything but a love.

Speaker 30 A daughter, a mother, a lot, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's lived every life but her own.
Yes, she's always been somebody's something.

Speaker 30 And there's a line that says, you know, she wonders what it might be like to be somebody else.

Speaker 1 And she wonders

Speaker 30 what it feels like to be free.

Speaker 30 But she's always imagined being nobody's nothing. And that's something she never wants to be.
But that line usually is just gone.

Speaker 30 And a lot of times I'll go, hold on, and divert and tell a funny story really quickly

Speaker 73 yeah wait what's the specific line that's gone is which one

Speaker 63 well it's gone again

Speaker 91 she's always been somebody something she's been everything but alone daughter a lover a daughter a lover a wife and a mother she's been everything

Speaker 66 but alone yeah

Speaker 66 yeah

Speaker 30 why is it that line I don't know I think that um

Speaker 30 I don't know. I think when you see

Speaker 30 when you see somebody give so much of themselves, and that's truly the only thing that she will never experience, and I think it's what I've experienced the most of.

Speaker 34 A minute before, we were joking about Toby Keith.

Speaker 48 Now Casey is pensive as she compares her mother's life to her own.

Speaker 30 Not being able to make a relationship work the first 18,000 times out of the gate, or, you know, officially the first two, and

Speaker 30 not being a mother.

Speaker 92 But still, real close to her, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love her. She's a good child.

Speaker 92 Go to church with her, right?

Speaker 23 I do. I sit still because she makes me, you know, I stay awake.

Speaker 93 It's good.

Speaker 92 When I was a kid,

Speaker 92 I'd get bored in church, and my mother would reach down and pinch me.

Speaker 23 Oh, I got smacked.

Speaker 34 Wait, Casey, can you play that song for us?

Speaker 81 Is it going to be two?

Speaker 23 Let's see.

Speaker 23 Okay.

Speaker 30 Okay, well, we'll see if happens.

Speaker 71 She grew up playing cowgirl

Speaker 71 in a railroad town.

Speaker 93 Dreaming she'd see.

Speaker 91 Oh, shoot. Hold on.

Speaker 30 There's a line but Elvis in this. That's just random.

Speaker 66 Hold on.

Speaker 30 Dreaming C, Holly, but I'm going to do it again.

Speaker 1 What did I just say?

Speaker 91 Sorry, I'm thinking about mom.

Speaker 30 She grew up playing cowgirl.

Speaker 93 She grew up playing cowgirl

Speaker 23 in a railroad town.

Speaker 93 Dreaming she'd see Hollywood someday.

Speaker 93 She knew some distant Friday night,

Speaker 78 with a cigarette to hold just right.

Speaker 90 Fate would come and carry her away

Speaker 93 as far as she could see from there. Those were just the

Speaker 91 facts.

Speaker 91 That's not right.

Speaker 91 Hold one second.

Speaker 48 My first reaction to Casey's failure of memory was to be embarrassed for her, worried that she had lost control.

Speaker 46 That's the way we're trained to think.

Speaker 27 Just listen to the words I've just used.

Speaker 38 Failure.

Speaker 60 Embarrassed.

Speaker 58 Worried.

Speaker 48 In one way or another, that's what this season of revisionist history has been about.

Speaker 46 About the ways we judge each other for our mistakes and choices.

Speaker 48 The easiest thing in the world is to look at those mistakes and condemn.

Speaker 48 The much harder thing is to look at those mistakes and understand.

Speaker 83 Yeah, she looked forever.

Speaker 72 Made love in the greyhound coming back.

Speaker 93 As far as she could see from there, those were just the facts of life.

Speaker 93 You went from somebody's daughter

Speaker 71 to somebody's wife.

Speaker 71 She's always there.

Speaker 58 Parapraxis is not failure.

Speaker 69 When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated.

Speaker 48 It's the opposite.

Speaker 55 Parapraxis is a gift.

Speaker 46 I presented myself as interested in this story.

Speaker 41 But now you know that this subject doesn't just interest me.

Speaker 54 It worries me.

Speaker 44 Losing control is my great anxiety.

Speaker 42 When Jack White said carefully instead of cleverly, it was a hint that playing Elvis wasn't a trivial matter for him.

Speaker 48 It was a sacred act.

Speaker 58 Carefully, full of care.

Speaker 46 And Elvis, after the loss of Priscilla, sang a song he'd sung a thousand times, only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pain.

Speaker 32 Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities.

Speaker 68 They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real.

Speaker 56 So Bobby Braddock and I sat there listening to Casey sing.

Speaker 34 Tears in her eyes, fumbling to remember the lyrics of a song about her mother.

Speaker 47 Fumbling not because her mother didn't matter to her, but because she did.

Speaker 47 She's been everything

Speaker 47 but long

Speaker 47 daughter.

Speaker 47 daughter, lover,

Speaker 47 a YF and a mother.

Speaker 47 She's lived every life but her own.

Speaker 47 She'd say that's just called

Speaker 47 being a woman.

Speaker 47 She's always been

Speaker 47 somebody, something

Speaker 4 God, it's beautiful.

Speaker 80 Why are you covering your mouth?

Speaker 30 I'm just, it's just weird.

Speaker 30 Because I've never, it's just weird when you're thinking about what it is. Like, I just thought, oh, bad memory, too many songs, old, too many songs in there.

Speaker 30 But at any point in time, I could pull out

Speaker 30 a rap from New Edition from 1982. Like, why is that in there?

Speaker 30 And something that you wrote is not in there. That is so weird.

Speaker 53 It's not weird.

Speaker 74 A lesser person would have sung it perfectly.

Speaker 62 Thank you for listening to season three of Revisionist History.

Speaker 46 And if you liked this episode, you'll enjoy my new series launching later this year.

Speaker 32 It's called Broken Record.

Speaker 34 And you can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 48 Revisionist History is a Panoply production.

Speaker 54 The senior producer is Mia LaBelle with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista.

Speaker 48 Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer, Fact-Checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 47 Special thanks to Kim Green and Hal Humphreys of Storyboard EMP in Nashville.

Speaker 49 And here in New York, thanks to Jason Gambrell, Evan Viola, Rachel Strom, Nicole Bunces, Kate Mescal, Kristen Meinzer, Carly Migliore, Andy Bowers, and of course, El Hefe, Jacob Weisberg.

Speaker 58 I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 42 So it'll be a wonder if you're lonesome tonight.

Speaker 92 You know,

Speaker 70 someone said that the world's a stage and each must play a part.

Speaker 84 Fate had me playing in love.

Speaker 7 You as my sweetheart.

Speaker 48 Act one was when we met.

Speaker 52 I loved you at first glance.

Speaker 48 You read your lines so cleverly and never missed a cue.

Speaker 55 Then came Act two.

Speaker 61 You seemed to change and you acted strange

Speaker 84 and why I'll never know.

Speaker 46 Honey, you lied when you said you loved me.

Speaker 48 And I had no cause to doubt you.

Speaker 52 But I'd rather go on hearing your lies

Speaker 84 than go on living without you.

Speaker 48 Now the stage is bare

Speaker 48 and I'm standing there

Speaker 35 with emptiness all around.

Speaker 68 And if you won't come back to me,

Speaker 72 then make them bring the curtain down.

Speaker 72 How about doing? Nice.

Speaker 66 Very good.

Speaker 58 I'm not very musical.

Speaker 66 No, it's very good. It's good.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

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