Tomorrow Ain’t Never Gonna Come

I go through phases with my Elvis listening. There are certain favorites I come back to again and again. I can’t imagine I’ll ever get sick of “My Baby Left Me”, for example. There are others. And “Tomorrow Never Comes” is the current reigning favorite.

I do not agree with John Lennon that Elvis died when he went into the Army. If that were true, then his gospel stuff wouldn’t have happened. And his re-trenchment into country music in the 70s. I am currently reading Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, a fascinating look at all of the innovative folks who were making music in the mid-20th century, some real famous (like Elvis), and some famous only locally – some with one or two radio hits, but the career itself was a long long one. Portraits of Ernest Tubb and Howlin’ Wolf and Cowboy Jack Clement and Sleepy LaBeef (I am basically in love with Sleepy and I don’t care who knows). Lester Bangs, in his notes for a review of this book, went off the deep end because he couldn’t get past Elvis. It’s like writing a book about all of the playwrights working and writing during Shakespeare’s time. Where Shakespeare is just one of many. Like: okay, clearly there were a lot of guys writing plays … but Shakespeare sucks up all the oxygen, sunlight, and space. You have to get him out of the way, forcibly, in order to see what else was going on.

In Lost Highway, Jack Clement, in his interview with Guralnick, said that Elvis (who is a common theme, mentioned by every participant in the book) “vaporized” country music in the 50s. It took country a good 20 years to deal with the impact and find its way again. This is a comment that comes up again and again. Another musician said that with the advent of Elvis “the bottom dropped out of country music”. That became clear to me in my research on the Louisiana Hayride. Elvis loved country music. Loved it. But what he was doing was not country (or – it was, but it wasn’t – it was country, with an r&b beat, and gospel-inspired vocals, all coming through the filter of a young raunchy active sex drive) and strict country-and-western stars found themselves totally pushed to the side in the giant wake of the Elvis tsunami.

For the first couple of years of Elvis’ career, his songs dominated not only the pop charts, but also the country and r&b charts. That soon changed. His songs started disappearing from the country charts. I am not enough of a music historian to understand why that happened, although I would imagine that resentment had something to do with it. “Eff you, you have VAPORIZED us, and so we no longer want you hanging out on our charts.” There may be some subtlety I am missing, so feel free to give me some perspective if that is the case.

But Elvis never stopped listening to country (well, he listened to everything), and in 1970, he went to Nashville and cut a country album.

There are some incredible vocal performances from Elvis on this album, and the diversity of songs is really something. The arrangements are all superb, and some of them actually sound like old hillbilly songs, with jamming banjos and such. It’s just more evidence that Elvis, in his massive talent, fit in anywhere. He could have done a Gershwin album and fit in with that. First of all, there’s the voice. It could do anything. He’s very near to operatic in “Now or Never” and “Surrender” (one of his best vocal performances), and then you hear him sing “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, and it’s all nasty honky-tonk blues, with Elvis making grunting sex noises during the bridge. He was so versatile that it still boggles the mind and in a way I’m with Lester Bangs, who wrote: “The only credible explanation is that Elvis was from another planet.”

Dean Martin loved cowboy songs, and also cut a bunch of country and western tunes. He’s another one whose talent could have been so narrow, so specific, that he could have only been allowed to do one kind of thing. But that voice. That voice could go anywhere. However, there is the little matter of authenticity, which is such an important part of country-and-western music (it’s similar to rap in that way). Pretenders are found out real quick (although that’s probably not as true nowadays, when country stars are slick millionaires, many of whom have never driven a pickup truck in their lives). Elvis, born in a shack to sharecropping parents, really was country, despite his adolescence in an urban area. A millionaire many times over by 1970, he still lived in Memphis on a giant farm, with horses and tractors. He didn’t move to Nashville. He didn’t move to California or New York. He stayed put.

And an interesting thing started happening in the 70s, in the last 7 years of his life. He started making appearances on the country charts again. Country had regained its footing after the appearance of Elvis, and knew what it was again, and could afford to … let Elvis hang out on their charts. He no longer would blot out the sun of the other recording artists. He could share space with others.

And, of course, Elvis is now in the Country Music Hall of Fame. His country stuff is the real deal, but with his own personal stamp on it.

Earnestness was not one of Elvis’ defining characteristics as a performer, although it does come up from time to time, especially in the early stuff. The ballads of the 70s, so scorned by rock-and-roll purists, are not earnest. They are howls of pain from a man who just doesn’t feel like rocking anymore. His marriage ended. That killed him. He missed his daughter. His court of sycophants was fracturing. He struggled with his weight. He was approaching middle age, trying to come to terms with it. He was lonely lonely lonely, and surrounded by people at all times. But more than the psychological aspect: his voice was so extraordinary, three octaves of it, that he wanted to show it off. The ballads let him do that. I love the ballads. Sure, there are some stinkers (I never need to hear “Mama Liked the Roses” again: that’s an earnest song: and like I said, Elvis is not at his best when he goes all earnest. He’s best when there is pain, urgency, heat: he’s best when things get intense.)

And things are very very intense in my current favorite Elvis song (sound clip above), “Tomorrow Never Comes”, including on his 1970 country album. (It’s written by Ernest Tubb, speaking of which …)

You can hear, again, the gospel influence, especially in the build and when he goes high (“Tomorrow … ain’t NEV-er gonna come …”). It’s not strict pure country, it’s not pop either.

It’s Elvis.

In terms of his magnificent voice, it’s this time in his life (late 60s, early 70s) that Elvis’ voice really comes into its own (although he really did emerge in full bloom). But in 1970, Elvis was 35 years old. He knows exactly what he is doing, at every moment in the song. He has thought it through, he has contemplated the song’s possibilities, its build, he doesn’t give too much away at first. It starts slow, with an insistent almost military drum-beat underneath, a clue of where we are going to go. The song is relentless, in a way.

I haven’t even mentioned his gift with lyrics. Gordon Stoker, of the Jordanaires, has said that one of Elvis’ greatest gifts as a performer was that he always meant every single word he said in every single song. (That, by the way, is why the movies are interesting and why they shouldn’t be dismissed. Despite Elvis’ existential depression at the terrible songs he was forced to sing, he still means it when he sings them. The fortitude that that took, not to mention the rock-solid professionalism, is now, in some circles, seen as a cop-out. It is not a cop-out. It is admirable, it is heroic. It’s vaudeville, it’s burlesque: You do the job, get paid, go home. This used to be seen as a performer’s finest quality in simpler times. Elvis was a superstar, and yet he behaved like a good obedient employee. This also trapped him, but it should not be dismissed as a bad quality out of hand. This is why Elvis was Elvis.)

And Elvis means every single word here.

It’s almost blinding, when he finally gets to the climax of the song. Because he means it. Tomorrow ain’t never gonna come. He sings that phrase countless times in the song, and each time it has a reverb for him. Each one is different, each one digs deeper into the dirt. You can hear it in his voice. And the last note, which is there as a possibility from the first note, is thrilling.

If you want to have a lasting career, not just in music but in anything, you have to be the kind of person who is unable, on a cellular level, to phone anything in.

In Tomorrow Never Comes, a majestic and emotional ballad, you can hear the continuum with the jiggling boy who wailed in agony in “My Baby Left Me”:

Now I stand at my window,
wring my hands and cry.
I hate to lose that woman,
hate to say goodbye.
You know she left me,
yes, she left me.
My baby even left me,
never said a word….

Same guy. Same commitment. Same intuition. Same ability to tap into a loneliness so intense that it’s almost panicked.

But the voice. That voice has gone to another level. Just listen to him.