Elvis Costello Spikes Trump

In a Movie, Who Would Have Played "The Donald"? A 1989 Interview

The year 1989 did represent the end of a decade, especially in New York. The eighties were manic and tragic: the era of the movie Wall Street, and its "greed is good" ethos; and AIDS, which disproportionately killed gay people and hollowed out entire sections of the creative arts industry. Their offspring, and the coin of the realm, was the gossip column.

The entrance of Long Island Newsday's standalone city edition, New York Newsday, (1985-1995, may its memory be a blessing) created a three-way battle with the New York Post and the Daily News for the tabloid reader. And the weapons were gossip columns and columnists. Gossip writers at the three tabloids found the competition good for their paychecks, especially when New York Newsday poached Liz Smith from the Daily News for what was probably a successful Wall Street banker's annual bonus in salary.

There was one boldface couple you could not escape: Donald and Ivana Trump. Ms. Trump died at age 73 on July 14 in what is now being called an accident: blunt force body trauma resulting from a fall on the spiral staircase of her multilevel Manhattan home, a staircase that a reporter from the Post called "treacherous."

But in the 1980s, the Trumps were an object of fascination for tout le monde of New York nightlife, gaudy and shameless and by appearances, very wealthy. The Times today called Ivana and Donald "a quintessential 1980s power couple [that] reigned jointly over New York's tabloid culture." Today's newspaper also featured an obit for Mark Fleischman, "who presided over the raucous, drug-crazed denouement of the celebrity studded Manhattan disco Studio 54," in the early 1980s. Mr. Fleischman, 82, and long suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease, died in Switzerland where cause of death, assisted suicide, is legal. The Times of 2022 would have a fully staffed Studio 54 bureau, supplementing the Sunday Styles section.

What all of this represented caught the attention of frequent New York visitor Elvis Costello, who was fascinated by it. His 1989 album Spike, one of his wordy dozen best, was a tour de force of style mashups: the Dirty Dozen Brass Band from New Orleans, downtown New York players, some traditional Irish musicians from the Waterboys and the Chieftains, a pair of co-writes, including "Veronica," with Paul McCartney; and a song, "Baby Plays Around, written with his then-wife, Cait O'Riordan, who had been in the Pogues, that is as nakedly confessional as anything on Beyoncé's Lemonade. (But they weren’t boldface names, so New York gossip writers didn’t notice.) T Bone Burnett produced the album with Costello and Kevin Killen. Others with major roles included the guitar adventurer Marc Ribot, percussionist Micheal [sic] Blair who added the likes of glockenspiel to a surprising number of tracks, and the great jazz double-bassist Buell Niedlinger.

But it's the songs that make Costello albums stick, and this strong collection included "Deep, Dark Truthful Mirror"; "Tramp the Dirt Down," an Irish wake tune as a Bob Dylan genre exercise; and "God's Comic," as sardonic as Randy Newman, and it was hard to tell whether "comic" in the title was meant to be noun or verb. The opening song, "...This Town..." has a compelling chorus, as true today as it ever was: "You're nobody 'till everybody in this town/Knows you're poison."

I got together with Costello in early March 1989, for an interview at Manhattan's Regency Hotel, then known for a dining room where entertainment industry movers-and-shakers met for power breakfasts. We did not power breakfast. But we did talk about some of the power breakfast types that were referred to in the scene-setting opening song on Spike, "...This Town..." The interview has been edited for clarity and space.

The band on …This Town…included Roger McGuinn, Paul McCartney, Costello and O’Riordan, Jim Keltner and more

WR: I GUESS ONE PLACE TO START IS WITH 'THIS TOWN,' AND ITS DONALD TRUMP-STYLE CHARACTERS.

Elvis Costello: You noticed that, huh?

WR: I'M WONDERING IF THERE'S A DIFFERENCE ANYMORE BETWEEN THE ANGLO AND AMERICAN ACQUISITION OF WEALTH. THERE USED TO BE THIS CLICHÉ OF AN ENGLISHMAN MAKING A MILLION DOLLARS AND SITTING ON IT, WHILE THE AMERICAN GETS AGITATED WORRYING HOW TO MAKE THE NEXT TEN MILLION?

EC: I think that's probably universal now. Values are transmitted around the world because everybody's connected in the world of business, they're all in bed with each other. I don't see any distinction anymore. "This Town" could be written about Los Angeles or London or Sydney or Dublin. It's everywhere now, that attitude. The best we can do is make fun of it."

[Costello continues, on a roll]

"Do you know what my ambition is, my latest ambition? Since I've been here, I've seen Trump on TV a few times, just to reinforce the type of character he portrays, whether or not he's nice in his private life, he's probably pretty obnoxious. It struck me the other day, I'd really like to do the soundtrack of his life story. I think they should get Dennis Hopper to play him. Don't you think Dennis Hopper looks a little bit like Donald Trump?"

WR: DENNIS HOPPER MUST BE ABOUT 15 YEARS OLDER THAN TRUMP. (ed. note: Hopper, born in 1936, was 10 years older at the time ).

EC: Yeah, but he could play him really well. If it was done out of Hollywood, maybe they'd have Meryl Streep play Ivana. Or Kim Basinger, or something."

[With neither of us able to visualize the Donald Trump story beyond that of a New York huckster of a certain era, we need to come back from this fanciful notion to talk about the rest of the album.]

WR: THE BLEND OF MUSICIANS, FROM IRISH TRADITIONALISTS TO NEW ORLEANS ROOTS, THE WHOLE RANGE, WAS THERE AN OVERRIDING CONCEPT BEFORE YOU STARTED WITH SPIKE?

EC: They were the best people to play the music. I looked at every element of each song, and there were quite some intricate structures. It's not complicated music, but there was a lot of care in deciding the balance of musicians. A couple of people, like Derek Bell of the Chieftains, had never played with Steve Wickham of the Waterboys. who'd never played with Frankie Gavin of De Danaan [as they do on "Every King's Shilling"]. So just in the [Irish] local sense it was quite a hybrid, and that was the best way I thought of achieving an original effect, an original twist on using those [traditional Irish] instruments, rather than just borrowing the authenticity of folk music. The same when we went down to New Orleans, I was aware that 'Deep Dark Truthful Mirror' is not that far removed from what the Dirty Dozen Brass Band did.

"Also, if you have this idea of certain instruments playing commentary to the songs, it's probably essential that you have somebody play the simple structure of the song. It may not grab the headlines that Benmont Tench [keyboards for Tom Petty's Heartbreakers], or Jerry Scheff [frequent bass player for rock's original famous Elvis], do a vital, essential, and unselfish job in playng the structural part of the song, so you can allow a player like Marc Ribot or Mitchell Froom to put some wild kind of commentary on the song. Without that strong foundation, it wouldn't add up to anything, it would just be a lot of noises."

WR: ROCK AND ROLL IS NOT THE MUSIC OF FIVE SOLOISTS.

EC: [was miffed about a Village Voice review for misunderstanding the roles of various star players, hearing Spike as an all-star competition]. "Some people you just can't explain music to, because they don't understand anything about it. Curiously enough, some of them actually write about music for a living."

WR: YOU'VE BEEN DESCRIBED AS HAVING AN ANALYTICAL, ROCK CRITIC-ISH SORT OF MIND.

EC: I think that stems simply from the fact that I know a lot of music, because I've been listening to music longer than most people my age. [E.C., then 34, was born in 1954]. My parents were both involved in music in different ways, it was always around me, so I've memorized a lot of records, I have a memory for tunes and recordings, not ones I necessarily love, but I can be talking about music and pull out an example that will really surprise someone I know, because it's not something they thought I appreciated. Or it's something so obscure and probably best forgotten they're kind of amazed I remember it. It makes me seem kind of bookish to them, but it's not really that, it's just a kind of mental tic. . . I can synthesize a lot of music in my head from lots of influences without the influences being very obvious. Which is not the case with most people, the influences are all too transparent in most pop music. That gives me the impression about being rather studious about pop music, when it's just like a little trick that happens to work out. It makes certain critics who are a little uncertain about their own abilities resent me slightly, because it would appear that I could do their job, but they can't possibly do mine."

WR: WOULD YOU WANT TO?

EC: I think the old cliché of the cynical critic being a frustrated musician is completely wrong. I think most of them are frustrated human beings that have such mean-spirited cynical attitudes towards music. And also, overexposure to very much cynically motivated pop music brings about a dull, desensitized view of almost everything. I wouldn't be in the rock critic business for more than five minutes--I'd throw the radio or television out the window after about a half hour."

WR: LAST NIGHT MADONNA'S NEW SINGLE DEBUTED AS A PEPSI COMMERCIAL.

EC: Yeah, well I mean...

WR: GOING BACK, EVERY REVIEW OF EVERY ALBUM YOU MADE SAYS, 'THIS IS ELVIS' BREAKTHROUGH, HIS MOST ACCESSIBLE. IF THAT WERE TRUE...

EC: I'd be Donald Trump right now. It would be the Costello Tower.

Elvis Costello is on tour this summer. For a deep dive into random, individual songs in the Costello repertory, I recommend the Substack "That Fatal Mailing List" by the astute Matt Springer.