Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint

"What happened to the Liberty Bell I heard so much about? Did it really ding-dong? It must have dinged wrong. It didn't ding long.—Allen Toussaint, from "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?"

Two men are caught in the spotlight, both middle-aged, both impeccably dressed. One is black, one white, each is wearing a dark suit, and, altogether inadvertently, both are wearing purple ties. It is a Monday night in February at Joe’s Pub, an intimate showcase club in New York City, and Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint are previewing their new album with a two-man performance for their record label and its foreign distributors. Elvis, the more rumpled one, rakish in a purple shirt and Stetson-styled dress-up hat, takes on his familiar frontman role—eloquent, witty and characteristically generous with praise for his 68-year-old musical partner, who sits erect and attentive at the piano, a small smile playing about his lips. Allen Toussaint, with a perfectly sculpted gray Afro and moustache, is a New Orleans legend. He has produced hits for such other New Orleans legends as Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey and The Neville Brothers, and has provided assistance to rock stars from Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Dr. John and The Band to—Elvis Costello. But he is—as he will be the first to tell you—a man who has always operated behind the scenes. “The proof of my labors still gets out there,” says Allen, “it’s just not brought out there by me.”

Elvis decided at their brief soundcheck/rehearsal this afternoon that he will play guitar on only one song, so he looks to Allen for his cue. From the first notes it’s clear he is as drawn in as anyone in the room by the spare and stately power of the music. They lead with one of their first collaborations, “The Sharpest Thorn,” guided by Allen’s elegant, almost classical accompaniment. They sing old songs and new songs alike, with Elvis almost invariably providing the lead vocal, and Allen—as on so many of his hit productions—providing the indispensable second voice. There are echoes of Allen’s mentor, New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair (“the Bach of rock,” as Allen dubbed him without a trace of irony), throughout the program, but only on Allen’s “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” (a song he wrote in 1970 that brilliantly delineates the 20th Century African-American urban experience without ever sacrificing its wryly idiomatic tone) does Allen take the lead. There are angry songs by Elvis that focus on the current political situation, there are tender love songs, there are songs that work as sheer entertainment, but the mood of the evening never falters, the sense that each and every person in the room, including the musicians, is lost in the music. By the very joyfulness of its expression this is, decidedly, music to make you smile.

"I think the marriage of [our styles] is very interesting inasmuch as how bold Elvis is, how attuned and aware of what's going on. He's not a coward, and that's good—for someone to have such a talent and be able to bring it forward. He says things that many people would like to but don't know how to say. Elvis has taken me by the hand and said, Let's take a trip."—Allen Toussaint

"Allen is a tempering influence on my tendency to really—I mean, if I'm let off the leash, I will go into it quite a bit, [but] you know, he will say just the right thing. It's not to say that either of us expresses our ideas better than the other, but he's got such an instinctive and natural ability to lend each of his talents in a different way and in different proportion—and, most important, [with] generosity."—Elvis Costello

It is the most improbable of collaborations. For the last 20 years at least, Elvis Costello—the former Declan McManus of London and Liverpool, at one time a certified pop star—has been a whirling dervish of creativity. In the last two years alone he has been working on an opera about Hans Christian Andersen for the Royal Danish Opera, put out a raw roots album (The Delivery Man) with his band, The Imposters, sung and recorded with a 52-piece Dutch jazz orchestra, Metropole Orkest, and showcased a 15-minute suite from the ballet he was commissioned to write for Italy’s Aterballetto dance company with symphony orchestras around the world. In the last few months he has performed at the Apollo, sung on a duets album with Tony Bennett, performed with Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch at the Grand Ole Opry, shot a VH1 tribute to his music with Billie Joe Armstrong, Death Cab For Cutie and Fiona Apple, and embarked on numerous other plans for a far-flung series of events in virtually every one of the seven lively arts. As Allen Toussaint says admiringly, “Elvis operates at one speed—top speed. If you wound him up any tighter, I think he’d explode!”

Allen, meanwhile, has led what can only be described as a quiet, somewhat reclusive life in New Orleans—if quiet reclusivity can be said to include a gold Rolls Royce and a Mercedes convertible, a home, production company and well-appointed recording studio, Sea-Saint, in the same comfortable Gentilly neighborhood, and a position of sufficient prominence in the world of music that for close to three decades everyone came to him. He saw no reason, and no likelihood, of ever leaving his hometown (“Everything that was dear to me was near to me”)—until Katrina. With Katrina he made the same preparations he always had: he boarded up his home and studio with the same numbered boards he had used before, and he prepared to wait out the storm at the Astor Crowne Plaza on Bourbon Street. When it became obvious Katrina wasn’t just another storm, he hired a school bus to take him to Baton Rouge, flew to New York, and there embarked upon a life he had never envisioned. With the help of his friend and business partner, Josh Feigenbaum, he found a comfortable midtown apartment, started playing a solo Sunday-brunch gig at Joe’s Pub (“This was something that was totally foreign to me”) and joined in the fundraising tributes sprouting up all over, but particularly in New York City.

That was how Allen came to know Elvis Costello. They had worked together previously when Elvis joined the legion of musical pilgrims coming to New Orleans for an infusion of elegant funk (it is Allen’s piano you hear on “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” from the 1989 album Spike). Elvis had begun singing Allen’s “Freedom for the Stallion” as a salute to New Orleans in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, and then he and Allen performed it together at Lincoln Center, reprising it the next day at Joe’s Pub. That, according to Elvis, was where the idea for the album was born. At first it was going to be a salute to Allen’s work in the form of an Allen Toussaint Songbook, but within days the concept expanded to include Elvis’ fiery new composition, “River in Reverse,” written the afternoon of the Parting the Waters benefit at Town Hall, and then very quickly—as Elvis continued to connect with Allen on an almost daily basis—it grew to incorporate a more ambitious collaboration. Allen had by now learned that his house and studio were lost. He and Elvis were backstage at Madison Square Garden’s From the Big Apple to the Big Easy benefit, and Elvis went up to him, “and I just said quietly, ‘So sorry to hear it,’ the way you would, and he just said, ‘The things I had served me well when I had them.’ Which I thought was a remarkable reaction. And then he said, ‘I’ll have to write some more.’”

“I loved New Orleans so much,” says Allen, “it took a lot for me to leave.” He still was not certain, even after coming to New York, that he was ready to step into the spotlight, but on the other hand there was no denying that the ground had shifted. In the last decade, the stars had stopped coming to New Orleans, and Allen, for his part, resolutely—some might say obstinately—refused to leave home for any of the opportunities the world might have to offer. Looking back on it, Allen says, “I was busy every day, I was making music and making tracks. I stayed with the music as if I was on a mission—but without a mission. Because I didn’t have something that I had to have ready the next day or the next week. When Katrina came, it’s almost as if Katrina said, ‘OK, you’ve been here doing this, let’s go put it to use.’”

"The music itself—not only the words—has a subtext. I don't that Allen's ever thought about it or analyzed it—I don't think that's in his nature. There are certain writers who are analytical, and there are others that just accept the thoughts that come to them. Whether they are about matters of the heart or matters of the world, they treat them equally. I might be opposite to him in that. You know, I consider everything that comes to me. But sometimes you can be in the middle of a song and recognize what it's actually saying, and that's the power of [the music]."—Elvis Costello

One of the things that drove the album from the start was the growing realization—not just on Elvis’ part but on Allen’s as well—of the richness, depth and complexity of Allen’s old songs. Elvis had known most of the compositions they were considering for the album for at least 20 years, but the full range of their social, political and emotional implications had never occurred to him, probably as much as anything because of the good-time New Orleans feel of their original presentation. Allen, too, was surprised by some of their nuances. He had never seen himself as political. He was not one to “shake a fist at the politician or the political scene—or beat someone over the head about something, even if it’s artistic. But Elvis found some of these songs of mine that were written 30 or 35 years ago totally applicable to the [current] situation, and when I hear them I see now that, yes, I guess that that was their destiny.”

Perhaps it was the fluidity of their composition that allowed them to find so unexpected a new life. Perhaps it was simply Allen’s evolution as a songwriter. He looks back on some of his classic early compositions as embodying the “soft-shoe approach—you know, light-hearted, debonair, not thick in any fashion. But then I guess I got to a point in my life where it became, ‘OK, I got this, but now it’s got to have and then some.’ Not to be different but because it deserved to go somewhere else. Because I found pleasure in that. Sometimes,” Allen says with a shrug, “my son says, ‘Daddy, why don’t you write like you used to, before you started wearing those suits and ties?’” He laughs, and his voice trails off. “I don’t know….”

There was never any question about what Allen was going to do with his life. He knew, he says, from the time he was six-and-a-half years old, and his parents simply accepted it because they had no choice. At 13 he started his own group, The Flamingos, with blind R&B singer/guitarist Snooks Eaglin. He made sure Snooks got all the words right, and he painstakingly wrote out note-for-note arrangements for the band for the same reason Elvis would learn to read and write music in his 40s—to be able to present the music properly, even if it was, in Allen’s case, just the jukebox hits of the day. Once he entered the recording end of the business in the late ’50s, he began writing songs himself for the most natural reason: The recording artists needed songs. “They need a song? Of course, write a song. Sometimes at a recording session they would need another, so we’d go on break, and I’d write another right then and there. Ever so humble, I must say, but song it was.”

He rehearsed the singers at home. “Guys and girls [Irma Thomas, Art and Aaron Neville, Betty Harris and Benny Spellman, among others] would get together in the front room of my parents’ house, and we would have a jam session all day long.” Allen would work out background vocals for each song, with every singer not featured on that particular number making up the chorus. He passed out the arrangements in the studio, and they would do four songs in three hours. They were, he says, simple songs and fun times, when the world seemed like a kinder place. On his own, Allen listened to everything: gospel and hillbilly, the Metropolitan Opera and Professor Longhair, Grieg and Chopin. The first classical piece he learned was Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor; he taught it to himself from a record when he was barely in his teens, “and the piano I was playing it on was flat, so for two years I was playing it in the wrong key!”

With the same mix of determination, originality and self-invention, he sought his true voice. In Lee Dorsey—an auto repair man, or body-and-fender artiste as Allen dubbed him—he found it: an instrument as curiously original and idiosyncratic as his own. “I can always see Lee moving through the world,” he told New Orleans music historian Jeff Hannusch, “and me back there watching and writing about it.” For Dorsey he wrote and produced “Ride Your Pony,” “Working in the Coal Mine” and “Holy Cow,” all pop and R&B hits in the mid ’60s, writing and arranging the sessions with Lee’s voice in his head, creating “pockets” for the singer to fit right into. With Dorsey’s 1970 album, Yes We Can, and singles sessions from the same period, for the first time Allen found a way to explore some of the more ambitious concepts that he had unconsciously been yearning to express. “Those songs,” he told Hannusch, “would probably never have been written if it hadn’t have been for the kind of guy that Lee [was].” “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?,” “On Your Way Down,” “Tears, Tears, and More Tears” and “Freedom for the Stallion”—which provide much of the template for the new album with Costello—all stem from those Dorsey sessions, while The Pointer Sisters’ version of “Yes We Can,” a big pop hit in 1973, was one of the first productions out of Allen’s new studio, Sea-Saint. From this point on, Allen’s horizons just kept on expanding, both as producer (he was responsible for LaBelle’s 1975 #1 pop hit, “Lady Marmalade”), songwriter (Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights,” a simultaneous #1 hit on the pop, country and adult-contemporary charts in 1977) and artist, a career on which he embarked with some ambivalence in the immediate aftermath of Lee Dorsey’s Yes We Can. From Allen’s point of view it was almost as if he had been pushed into it. He still saw himself as “the one who made a demo for someone with the zeal for being front-stage center. My life [had always] been, OK, here comes John—I’m ready for John. Here comes Sally—I’m ready for Sally. Then here comes me… No, I’m the one waiting for John and Sally.”

"This collaboration with Elvis is a luxury. I had already thought in my mind that he would be the general because, after all, he invited me in. But when we did start, we were [both] very reluctant about the take-charge. Which was odd."—Allen Toussaint

The problem was, simply, finding an approach that worked. This wasn’t a question of Elvis fitting himself into someone else’s established style, as he did with Burt Bacharach, nor was it a matter of submitting finished songs for Allen to arrange. The intent was a true creative partnership, but at first, Elvis says, there was just too much politeness. In the end it was Allen’s piano playing that furnished the inspiration. He had recorded “Tipitina and Me”—an elegiac, minor-key variation of Professor Longhair’s exuberant signature piece—for Our New Orleans 2005, one of the first of the tribute albums. Now, as Allen fooled around with the figure at the end of a somewhat dispiriting first day, Elvis asked if it would be alright to write some lyrics to it. He came back the next morning with “Ascension Day,” a moody gospel piece for voice and piano (“Not a soul was stirring / Not a bird was singing, at least not within my hearing”). The music, Elvis says, “had opened up a series of images. When I heard that piece for the first time, I felt like a curtain came back, and I was looking into a world—not of people standing around with stained T-shirts and no shoes, trying to drag their few possessions out of the way of a body of water, but more of a roomful of people of great nobility and gentility. There’s no irony, there’s no self-regard; I’m sure Allen’s doing it just because he loves the way it sounds and feels.”

From that point they were on their way. The first collaboration after “Ascension Day,” was on a song idea of Costello’s, “The Sharpest Thorn.” It was, Elvis says, about “somebody who goes out full of pride to a celebration, a parade, and comes home at the end of the day with confetti in his hair, his pockets picked, a little poorer, a little wiser. It wasn’t a serious song [at the start], but it was lifted up by these images that Allen suggested almost out of thin air. He just suddenly said to me, ‘Could it be about good and evil?’ And I said, yes, it could absolutely be about a moral dilemma. Then at another point he said, ‘Is there any place for the Archangel Gabriel in this song?’ It was the most extraordinary thing. Allen literally put us in a reverie with those few remarks and his response to the music, the way he asked questions about certain cadences and articulated the changes [with] a gospel accompaniment.”

Oh no, Allen demurs in a separate conversation, “Elvis already had the plot going.” And as far as the music was concerned, he simply felt “very reverent about it. When I first heard it going in a certain direction, I thought—I actually wrote down in my notes—I will funkify this. I will make it funky. But I noticed when I was playing it, I didn’t dare touch it. It felt like it would have been sacrilegious to do anything but the purest form of what it was.”

Along with writing and song selection, they quickly settled on a recording format. They would, if at all possible, work in New Orleans, and they would employ both Allen’s customary four-man horn section and guitarist along with Elvis’ band, The Imposters, to achieve the abrasive edge Elvis felt the album needed. Had they simply worked with New Orleans musicians, Elvis says, it would have been like remaking the old records, only with a new vocalist. This way you get “to play with your own interpretation, but when it comes to the articulations that lie above the beat, it wouldn’t have been the same if we’d got a New York horn section.” The idea was to create an authentic original voice.

Within a month they were in the studio. They started in Hollywood, because New Orleans was still closed down, and they got the first three songs in 25 minutes, before the horns arrived. “I thought, Wow, we’re not even going to get to New Orleans,” says Elvis. “We’re going to finish this record in three days!” “We were really spoiled,” Allen agrees. When the horns finally got there on the second day, things slowed down considerably because Elvis was committed to the idea of cutting everything live. It was definitely harder, says Allen, who had been cutting separate tracks for convenience’s sake for over 30 years, but it was a revitalizing experience. “The horns were playing the song, they were not just playing parts,” says Allen, “They were hearing the song coming at them, [just like] Elvis was hearing the horns coming right back at him. I must say, it was wonderful to see that happen. I don’t recall fixing anything.”

Everyone left for New Orleans the first week of December, as soon as New Orleans began to reopen and they were able to get into a hotel and recording studio. For Allen there was nowhere else on earth to be, and for Elvis the same allure that had originally drawn him to the city’s music remained, in a heartbreakingly different way, as he drove through desolate, deserted streets seeking out a vanished world. New Orleans was where they recorded Elvis’ angry “River in Reverse,” the song with which the idea for the album began, but it was also where Elvis was determined to get Allen to step out front-and-center on his own wide-ranging portrait of a world, “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” “I was tricked into singing it,” Allen says, laughing as he recalls the way Elvis had him teach everyone the precise syntax of the chorus (“Pray tell what’s gonna happen to brother / Who’s gonna help him get further? / One another. / ‘Is that the truth?’ / ‘Yeah, you’re right’”) and then demo the song with the band.

We may seem happy
Like everything’s alright
From the outside looking in
Everything’s uptight
But deep down inside we’re covering up the pain
It’s an old thing
It’s a soul thing
But it’s a real thing...

There’s old dude standing on the corner
Waiting for a fox to pass
The only thing he’s got to go by
Is this is where he saw her last
And there’s old John, two dollars in his pocket
Talking loud and thinks he’s rich
And look for little fool, too cool to go to school
Get a job, in two days he quits

I’ll tend to heat up quickly,” says Elvis on The Charlie Rose Show, “[whereas] with Allen you’ll be laughing at the wit of the line before you’ve realized the seriousness of what he said.” What gives Allen’s songs their sense of mystery and power, he says, what permits them to open up—much like Sam Cooke’s songs—from their commonplace expressions and everyday settings, are the layers of nuance and suggestion that lie just beneath the surface. On the other hand, “John actually has a face,” Allen says with some amusement, referring to the character in his song. “He used to wear grey pants and a red shirt.” In response to my assumption that Allen was the one who came up with the idea for the angry—or maybe it’s just humorously indignant—trombone solo by Big Sam Williams in the middle of the song, “No way,” says Allen. “No way—and let me say it again. It was the expertise and awareness of Elvis that caused that to happen. Someone told Elvis, ‘You know, that trombone player can really play, and he came over and said, ‘Why don’t we consider having a trombone solo?’ Now when was the last time you heard a trombone solo on a record? I would have missed that. But Elvis don’t miss. He sees the moment.” Allen pauses. “I think that’s why his life must be joyful to him.”

The recording of the album, Elvis says, was in fact “the most joyful experience I’ve ever had in the studio. You go in a room, you do it right, and then it’s done.” Because it was conceived as a three-act “entertainment,” in the end, beautiful versions of Allen’s “What Do You Want the Girl to Do?” and “The Greatest Love”—both of which are highlights of the live show—were left off the final mix, because, Elvis felt, they would have thrown off the balance of the overall presentation. The album, as it is now constituted, begins with three of Allen’s most accessible songs, each transformed by Elvis’ passionate performance, followed by “The Sharpest Thorn,” before embarking on the album’s second—and more overtly political—movement, introduced by “Brother.” The last act kicks in with “International Echo,” with words by Elvis and music by Allen, once again in an unmistakable Professor Longhair vein. Speaking of joyfulness, this is surely as rollicking a number as Elvis has ever written, a tribute not just to the impact of music in general but to the impact of Allen’s music on Elvis, and Elvis’ perhaps on you and me. It’s about how music can work on the imagination, how it “comes from one city, travels around the world and then rebounds back,” Elvis says. It’s a song about how Elvis first heard Allen’s music covered by English beat groups, how he heard “Wonder Woman”—one of River In Reverse’s most obscure numbers—in a wonderfully unselfconscious version by his friend (and longtime collaborator) Nick Lowe’s pub-rock band, Brinsley Schwarz, in the early ’70s, “and then I sought out the Lee Dorsey version and found they’d copied it note for note!”

Send out a message and it’s sure to rebound
What’s that I hear?
What is that sound? Seems to be coming from
under the ground
international echo

For Elvis there is no greater expression of truth than art. Not politics, not posterity (“I have no concern for posterity,” he has said. “I believe when you’re gone, you’re gone”), just a dedication to process and aspiration. He loves “the way painters used to paint the roofs of churches [as if there were] always a world beyond.” That had to do with belief, of course, but it is all to do with conveying a vision that has its own imperative, Elvis has come to feel, it’s all about communicating something that demands expression.

This has been a hard-won realization for a man who was originally perceived as a post-punk sensibility whose only lyrical reference points were “guilt and revenge.” He did much, he now recognizes, to play up that image, and he didn’t really question the confinement it imposed upon him (“There was always the unwillingness to be vulnerable”) until he began working on 1986’s King of America with producer T-Bone Burnett. That was when he re-learned the lesson he had taken from all the records that had inspired him since he was a kid, from Mingus to Hank Williams: that it should not be about keeping the meaning secret but about being “generous with what you’ve got,” as he described it to music writer Bill Flanagan, “giving the song enough space to be what you actually intended instead of trying to turn it into something else.” Since then the expression of his ideas has come in many different forms. 2003’s North, for example, is a nakedly unadorned confession—“there’s no flashy language to speak of, it’s not dressed in any poetic clothes or conceits or any of the devices that I’ve employed that [can] develop like barnacles, you know, on a ship.” Some of the other projects have been more rococo, striking different audiences in different ways, but they have all been an attempt to emphasize what Elvis calls “creativity, not positivity or negativity,” to access one form or another of direct emotional communication. He is not so quick to judge others by their image nowadays, particularly young singers looking to make their marks. Image is one thing, music another. From Elvis’ point of view, he made a lot of wrong choices starting out, he did a lot of things he is not particularly proud of—but he always cared about the music, “I always took it seriously.”

Asked what kind of song he would create for Elvis if he were writing for him today as he once wrote for Lee Dorsey, Allen says, “I would probably write a very, very simple song—one that is easy to be hummed. With a comical chorus, whether it had lyrics or not. Elvis is very bold in his speech, and he admits himself that many times he writes to the dark side. I would find no validity in going in the direction [in which] he goes so strongly and drives his own bus. So I would take all of that power of a giant and submit it as tenderly as a lamb. The way he delivered his spirit of it would make it as emotional, or as spiritual, as it needed to be.”

And if he were to write and produce for himself, if he were given the impossible assignment of trying to spotlight the real Allen Toussaint in the same way he has shone the light on so many others? Here the answer is not so easy. He might, he says in May just before the start of the River In Reverse tour, bring Allen Toussaint more to the forefront now, “just because of the endorsement of other folk.” But left to his own devices, he suspects he would probably still do much the same thing he has done in the past: surround himself with as many beautiful, ambient sounds as he found pleasing, put in the trees and the wind, write bass lines and counter lines—“and, to me, any of those things is just as important, and most of them are more important, than me. When I am recording other artists, I don’t feel that way. I feel that they are most important. With me [it’s] everything else.”

But maybe this is changing. After showcasing the album with Elvis in England, Europe and Japan, after playing San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and a host of other cities this summer on a full-scale band tour, it seems as if Allen—almost against his will—is coming closer to center stage. The show is accompanied by all the accoutrements and triumphalism of a standard rock presentation, but at its heart are those same moments of private reverie, shared by artist and audience alike, that made the Joe’s Pub appearance in February so remarkable. Elvis performs many of his most familiar songs (though, he is quick to point out to the audience, with new arrangements by Allen), the wit and patter are all Elvis’, and Allen for the most part remains a bemused, if dignified, spectator, his quizzically raised eyebrows his most explicit commentary on the proceedings. But over the course of the tour he has begun to do more and more vocals, always with Elvis’ enthusiastic public endorsement (“I get the best seat in the house,” he frequently says as he stands onstage for Allen’s beautifully realized tribute to Professor Longhair), and if Elvis’ “Poisoned Rose” is invariably one of the soulful highlights of a soulful evening, so too is “Who’s Gonna Help Brother,” no less than Allen’s recent addition of Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” There is something for everyone here, brought to you unquestionably by way of Elvis’ extraordinary graciousness, energy and generosity of spirit, but Allen Toussaint simply playing the piano conveys no less extraordinary a presence. “Toussaint for President!” someone calls out one night, and Elvis, who has just introduced the show’s single stage prop, a tiny action figure of President Bush, can only assent with the broadest of grins.

For Allen, there would have been little point in making a sad, doleful album: The significance of the music, the significance of music in general, is simply too great. “This is not a sympathy record,” he has said. “The songs here can live in war and peace, anytime, anywhere.” He and Elvis, he hastens to point out, did not set out to make speeches. “We were making the music we love.” The view is little different, even from Elvis’ more political perspective. When all is said and done, it is the music that will survive. “God gave me something to hold onto,” Allen says, “so that the things that happen around me are only as dramatic as I perceive them.” He is meditating on matters of race, on the divided world he was born into, on the way that things have and have not changed, but he could just as easily be speaking of Katrina. “Everything costs something,” he says gravely. “The world is better now… It’s better.”