Close Up: Deep Dark Truthful Mirror

Paul B · Post by **Paul B** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 10:54 am

Hi All,

Deeply, darkly and truthfully, a few thoughts and EC quotes on this song. Do make it a conversation: post your own or tell us what you think. Thanks.

Another song featuring the demon drink (lot of them about, trust no one’s said to him: ‘I love your songs, especially the early booze ones.’)

Anyway, there’s this guy, right, had a few too many - again -and he’s trying to find his way home (unwise in his condition) except he doesn’t really want to go home ‘cos he’s sure there’s some old good time he can re-find, so he canes it completely with the booze, hauling himself to the next bar and the next bar, becoming incoherent (I mean he’s dribbling and his face is looking like one big purple punch mark by now). Finally, every watering hole has closed and he ends up crashed out somewhere on the way home, helpless as a baby, which is when he starts seeing those visions…remember: you’ll never been alone in the bone orchards, ‘cos this battle with the bottle there’s nothing so novel…

Like You Tripped at Every Step, it’s very tender, at the start at least: ‘And it’s going to tell you things that I still love you too much to say’ – for how much longer though, one day you’re going to have to face yourself.

Roustabouts - slang for dock workers, in port towns such as Elvis’s own Liverpool. Sounds like you can get some nasty cuts off this fibre glass tumbleweed, and he’s certainly tumbling from bar to bar like one tonight. The next lines:

He falls down, he falls down like a drunk
And you drink ‘til you drool
But it’s his story you’ll flatter
You’ll stretch him out like a saint
But the canvas that he splattered
Will be the picture that you never paint

bring up for me the idea of an ageing artist canonised as a "saint", when all he can do now is splash paint about in a drunken stupor, which is a tragedy (reminds me of Francis Bacon or Jackson Pollock). An ironic tragedy though, as even then the paintings are truly great, their visceral talent meaning they can get out what we’ve all got in us but aren’t able to express. The ‘human condition’ I think they call it…

A butterfly feeds on dead monkey’s hand - EC: "This is a real image from a nature film I saw once on TV. I wanted to get across here that the character’s hallucinating." This was a mid 80’s BBC wildlife doc Flight of the Condor, about the Andean mountains in Chile, with images of butterflies drinking turtle tears and feeding off the hand of a monkey’s corpse.

Jesus wept, he felt abandoned – no idea, but it’s bleak, Catholic and this guy’s obviously crucifying himself on a bottle. The song has slowed down now, just single piano chords, the words are electrifying when Elvis sings them and, er, it rhymes with the previous line too.

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror must be among Elvis’s favourites, often featured live. The solo performances on the Spike tour and at Meltdown were breathtaking - the last verse literally grabbing hold of your throat. It also featured with the Rude 5 and was amongst the only Spike / Mighty Like a Rose songs the Attractions played in the 90’s. It invariably comes up early in the set, after a couple of potboilers (not unlike its placing on Spike), deepening the tone as Elvis’s sparsely accompanied voice echoes round the hall.

The New Orleans accompaniment on the recording – including the warm barrelhouse piano of Allen Toussaint and marching style of The Dirty Dozen- show what was in Elvis’s musical in-tray at the time. He abandoned his original idea of a full soul band treatment and the song sounds fragile and suspended. I went to see Toussaint a couple of year’s later – double bill with the masterful Dr John – but his show had more schmaltz than majesty, so Elvis obviously got something magic out of him.

The excellent Bright Blue Times page has some interesting quotes from Elvis about this song:

"I showed everybody the lyrics and I explained it in simple terms, so there was absolutely no ambiguity in the meaning of it. I said ‘Here's a drunk guy, he's on his way home, he won't go home, he's chasing something that isn't there. He won't admit his problem and he starts to hallucinate.’ It's a simple thing.

"Now, if I wrote that on the sleeve it would take away some of the mystery, and stop people from going, "Well what the hell does it mean, 'butterfly drinks a turtle's tears'?" You know, "Jesus wept, he felt abandoned." You have to leave space in the room for people's imagination to run around in. I make no apology for using those images, 'cause they're very striking. I mean, what am I supposed to have? A voice that goes [whispering with hands cupped round his mouth], "And then he started to hallucinate." Wouldn't that spoil it? Isn't that kind of treating people like children?

"But sometimes when you've got the musicians who are concentrating on the musical interpretation of it, you have to explain it in the most simplistic terms so it's not hidden to anybody. You have to be slightly disparaging about your own lyric so the music can really do its job. Say with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, they don't enter until the first chorus. The guy is marching down and down this chord sequence; it's quite literal. And just at the point where he's at the most down point in each verse they enter like somebody picking him up again off the floor. They have the effect to my ears of sounding like they're picking this guy up, but only to look at his own reflection. And then in the last verse, where the hallucinations begin, they start to wind through the chords and do all these slurs: they slide between the chords. That's using the music in a visual way. I do see these things when we're arranging stuff. They've got such a -- rich isn't the right word -- such a grainy sound that it makes it not easy to understand, but easy to feel, what's happening. Which is probably better than understanding it completely literally, be-cause it isn't literal. It's hallucination."

"I suppose the oddest part of the recording was in New Orleans, because we had The Dirty Dozen Brass Band playing these parts with just drum patterns and maybe an acoustic guitar marking out the changes and Allen Toussaint playing piano. Very bare arrangements. But when we took them to L.A. we found we didn't really want to put much more on those tracks. On 'Deep Dark Truthful Mirror', we certainly intended to have a more conventional soul-band sound--but it didn't seem right. Once Toussaint's piano part was on, he's got such tremendous personality, what was the point? No bass could compliment that. So the process of doing the record backwards uncomplicated it for me. It made it easier to hear the song."

That’s definitely enough, suffice to say I love DDTM. When Elvis played it solo at the first gig of his I went to - that was it, I was hooked. And I wasn’t drunk at the time. Honestly.

Post by **BlueChair** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 5:27 pm

"Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" will always have a soft spot for me, as it was one of the first Elvis songs I was familiar with.

I think it is often overlooked because it is on Spike, an album which a lot of Elvis hardcore fans are kind of iffy about.

Thanks for those insights, Paul!

Watching_Detectives · Post by **Watching_Detectives** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 6:01 pm

Wow.

I too love this song. One of my favorites.

Thanks much for the incredible insight you give!

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 7:01 pm

Though it gets off to a slighty shaky start by EC standards ("This Town" is fun, but I've never heard anyone argue it's top quality Costello), "Spike" also contains many of EC's very finest moments and some of my personal all time favorites, and "Deep Dark" is way, way up there.

Great piano, great horns; striking, heartbreaking, vivid lyrics that really tell a story that, for all the surreal imagery, is striking clear and free from EC's tendency to obfuscate. A real highpoint and a song that really should stand the test of time. Maybe someone will eventually have a hit with it....

cbartal · Post by **cbartal** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 8:34 pm

And let's not forget his recent pairing of the song live with "You've Really Got a Hold on Me".

Is this guy the Einstein of pop music, or what?

so lacklustre · Post by **so lacklustre** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 5:34 am

I love the 'unplugged' version on the MLAR bonus disc.

lapinsjolis · Post by **lapinsjolis** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 3:53 am

Don't you think Elvis is being deliberately simplistic in the explanation? Maybe we all pin our own meaning on songs and art in general. I thought of it as St. Paul says 'through a glass darkly' only mixing the eternal with the temporal. Thus the surreal imagery that we can see but only understand in part.

It's the lack of the ability to see oneself as we really are with vices and flaws. Also the reluctance for others to be honest of what they see of us. The lack of self knowledge is damning in the spiritual sense but it's also in the visceral sense. How someone can't see themselves no matter how destructive to self and others they become.

The addiction suggested in the song is a dramatic example but I always thought it was to make a much subtler point.

Paul B · Post by **Paul B** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 5:14 am

Good point, eloquently made. I was trying to unpick some of Elvis's intentions, devices, themes etc, but I suppose that can actually be quite limiting. It goes much broader, the surface story in the song is both a structure to hang it on and an example that might lead to the wider ideas. It's not like we neccesarily learn from our mistakes, or stop repeating them, but at least after something like this song we might know ourselves a little better.

'London's Brilliant Parade' became a very personal song for me, it was only when he talked about it a a gig that I discovered it was very personal for him too.

I've never seen him pair 'Mirror' with 'You've Really Got a Hold on Me', must be great. I do savour the way he does that - like the highly charged Alsion medley of a few years ago or weaving 'God's Comic' and 'I'm a Believer' with the glorious jump cut from 'Well I saw her face, now I'm a believer' to 'Now I'm dead...'!

I think Spike's a fine record, although it does lose it slightly somewhere on the second side (as we used to say in vinyl days). For many it was the begining of Elvis getting bored with himself and trying too many styles. MLAR coming straight afterwards tested the patience of a lot of old fans to destruction I remember.

verbal gymnastics · Post by **verbal gymnastics** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 7:08 am

Paul B wrote:I've never seen him pair 'Mirror' with 'You've Really Got a Hold on Me', must be great. I do savour the way he does that - like the highly charged Alsion medley of a few years ago or weaving 'God's Comic' and 'I'm a Believer' with the glorious jump cut from 'Well I saw her face, now I'm a believer' to 'Now I'm dead...'!

Hmm - there's an idea for a thread - why don't we do Elvis segues?

Paul B · Post by **Paul B** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 9:00 am

Excellent idea verbals. But we'll need one of those real get a life hardcore fans who compile totally unfathomable tour set list song frquency charts, like the Beyond Belief fanzine. Or maybe some of us just have a few nice memories. I can't recall any quite as choice as that God's Comic one (he did used to use other Monkee's songs sometimes, though never to quite the same effect).