Caught In a Trap: on Elvis’s and Fine Young Cannibals’ “Suspicious Minds” by j. w. bonner
“Where history leaves gaps, the imagination fills in.”
—Sarah Messer, The Red House
The Temptations charted #1 at the end of October 1969 with “I Can’t Get Next To You.” That Norman Whitfield produced hit took a turn as the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s election grew closer—
Not that I can’t get next to you—don’t wanna. Can’t trust you, man.
“Suspicious Minds” served up as the last of Presley’s #1 hits—seventeenth in all and first since 1962, when John F. Kennedy, who had beaten Nixon for the White House, was still President. When Pressley charted, Nixon was suffering from his own political paranoias while a country grew increasingly suspicious of the man holding the highest office in the land. Mistrust polluted encounters, became viral, grew epidemic. Presley had yet to offer his services to the Nixon White House to eradicate drugs, a meeting that would take place the following winter.
The recording of this song followed Presley’s triumphant December ’68 televised special, and the recording sessions took Elvis back to Memphis, to the same recording studio, American Recording Studio, where, according to Fred Bronson, in his The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, the Box Tops had recorded their lovely 1967 #1 hit “The Letter” and Dusty Springfield recorded her classic “Son of a Preacher Man,” using the Memphis Cats as her rhythm section, the same group that had garnered acclaim for its work with, among others, Elvis.
Elvis comes into his own again in “Suspicious Minds.” The music is soulful and his vocal flair is compressed into this tale of doubt and feared betrayal, another song of love potentially lost. Maybe autobiography is at play, adding an element of conviction to Elvis’s voice. There was the dream of Love, but this dream is falling apart in the wake of suspicions, this man out late and no explanations she can believe. The angelic backing vocalists singing behind Elvis, helping plead his cause in a swell of gospel divinity, seem likely to melt her resistance if she’ll only listen.
Opening with a tangled and catchy bit of guitar and percussion, good news from the get go, the lyrics begin in medias res. Elvis proclaims in his dusky, powerful, soulful voice, “We’re caught in a trap.” This song is the flip side of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the first number one single of ’69. Marvin Gaye has caught his woman; she’s smelling of it. He’s heard the gossip and now sniffs her—proof positive. And she’s not denying, worried about what else might go down in this kitchen, the late 20th century domestic version of all those early century blues songs of jealousy or pregnancy killings by the river. (Even Neil Young had released his version of this blues trope, “Down by the River,” in 1969, a classic Young song with its urgent electric guitar—and a solo that extends the three minute radio single to over nine minutes on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.)
Elvis, on the other hand, has a woman who has already said everything to him. He’s pleading his case, to the only jury that matters: his woman, Priscilla, who’s heard the news too often for her dignity. (It’s hard not to think of biography or to think that these are accusations Elvis has had to allay or, in guilt, affirm over the years. When Keith Richards writes in his autobiography, Life, about the screaming girls at the Stones concerts or the groupies and willing girls available before and after shows, let’s remember the seismic parental worries about Elvis a decade earlier.)
The trap they’re in: her fear of betrayal and his unwillingness to leave her. And the song’s listener is trapped, too, trying to make sense of this story, not having heard her side, and attempting to shake off—in a losing effort if the song as a whole, rather than a focus on the mere words themselves, is taken in as an experience—the compelling power of this voice. Elvis tells her, in the next two lines after the statement of the dilemma, “I can’t walk out”; then, his voice actually quivering, a bit of a waver in these next words, words and emotion to make a pretty hard-hearted woman take pause, “Because I love you too much, baby.” He warns her of what she’s doing to him, implying that she’s pushing him away, forcing him toward a leaving, “When you don’t believe a word I say.” He tells her truth: “We can’t go on together / With suspicious minds.” Strings are swelling, hearts coming into tune or getting ready to burst. A gospel sounding backing chorus emphasizes “suspicious minds” behind Elvis’s lead, wagging a collective finger at the accuser or serving as the general gossip of choral voices that she’s hearing in her head, all those voices that have led her to talk to him in this accusatory way, while the Elvis character pleads his case. He’s telling her that his love should carry the day, and if his love can’t, then this voice most surely will. Doesn’t matter what she’s heard or what she believes to be true: please listen to him, hear his love for her.
It’s a domestic scene that’s been played out since time immemorial: wandering man, wronged woman. But this man isn’t apologizing; he’s telling her she’s got it wrong. And the listener is placed in the position of the suspicious interlocutor, trying to decide whether to believe him.
There’s a bridge halfway through the single, where the music’s tempo slows, and Elvis gives a soulful, spoken plea to his woman. His voice is heavenly. Just as Elvis stole black r&b to popularize rock & roll, here he is saying to every soul crooner of this year or any year: can’t beat this. And he’s right. It’s a voice that has the listener yearning, shivering, expectant. He’s hitting the high notes and then the voice is low—floor-hugging, groveling bass low. He’s almost hoarse, his voice given to the emotions he’s feeling in response to her lack of faith. And then he releases the moment, back into the pop soul of the song’s beat, begging her, trying to get her to side with him against whatever demons lurk in her heart and suspicious mind. She needs to trust him and not worry about where he’s been at night. He ends the song, “don’t you know,” telling her that he loves her.
As a listener, you want to believe. How can anyone disbelieve that voice when Elvis has it working in such fine form? It’s a powerful instrument. As Dave Marsh writes in The Heart of Rock & Soul, “here’s the final piece of evidence that what happened at Sun [Studio] was no fluke.” But there are the facts of the road and of recording and of being Elvis. Maybe Elvis wants to believe what he’s singing, wiping away the past and looking for a fresh beginning, reinventing himself as he is since the ’68 televised special. Whether she believed or not, the public did, taking “Suspicious Minds” all the way to #1 in November, the year after Nixon’s election.
It's easy, too, to take the song’s resonance from the personal to the political realm. Generational mistrust was the trope of multiple articles in the mainstream press. The press itself kept a skeptical eye on Nixon and Agnew’s political and personal activities. And Nixon’s White House operatives were famously mistrustful of the press.
Minds were getting suspicious, and the political song was as old as the one Elvis sang. In September 1952, a Vice Presidential nominee appeared on radio and the more recent medium of television to confront the suspicious minds of a nation. Reports of an $18,000 slush fund for Nixon’s “‘financial comfort,’” as reported by the New York Post (see Eric F. Goldman’s The Crucial Decade—And After), forced Nixon to go public to defend himself from these allegations. In his thirty minute address, Nixon narrated his background and disclosed his finances, and Nixon said that he would retain one gift for his two girls, a “little cocker spaniel dog….black and white, spotted,” named, by one daughter, Checkers (qtd. in Goldman). From Checkers to CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President) was only twenty years. In two decades, Nixon had finally committed a felony, as President, that would not wash under a televised address about his wife’s “‘respectable Republican cloth coat’” (the alliteration and assonance in this phrasing are marvelous, as is the contrast of the multisyllabic opening rhyming phrase leading to the plain monosyllabic cloth then coat) or a dog for his children. Playing the emotional chords of a man whose wife did not possess a “‘mink coat…[but] would look good in anything’” (qtd. in Goldman), a phrase that lacked the wit of Marilyn Monroe’s better quip (“I did not have nothing on; I had the radio on.”)—and Pat Nixon wasn’t Joltin’ Joe’s Marilyn Monroe, so who knows if Pat Nixon naked would lead to a more negative assessment by the then California Senator—gave Nixon a second chance in the 1950s, but Watergate and the subsequent coverup authorized by Nixon led to Nixon’s reluctant resignation from the White House, a resignation from the national ticket that was two decades coming. The man who had campaigned in 1968 to bring together the country, who campaigned with a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, had developed a campaign strategy and policy of obfuscation around negativism and cynicism by the end of the 1960s and into the early years of the 1970s. This trope is repeated by the most recent Republican President, as Trump campaigned on making America great again while belittling every ideal sacred to the country’s history. (Or perhaps, Trump played the narrow playbook of those ministers and explorers in the 1600s who practiced genocide in the holy name of God.)
In 1958, fewer than a quarter of Americans distrusted their government. By late 1973, more than half of Americans voiced their distrust in government. Nixon had begged, on November 3, 1969, while Elvis’s hit was riding at the top of the charts, in a televised speech about prolonging the Vietnam War, for the support “of the great silent majority of my fellow Americans.” In 1952, following his Checkers speech, public support in favor of Nixon had been overwhelming. By the 1970s, the count was against Nixon. And Nixon dragged public faith in government down with him—his ultimate legacy, fulfillment of the Republican grail: to undermine Big Government’s New Deal. That legacy has only been compounded by the latest corrupt Republican figure, Donald Trump, whose influence has led to political pandering, even in the wake of his election defeat, that would have made people gasp in disbelief and disgust, even Republicans of the day, in the Seventies during the Watergate hearings.
No other pop cultural figure proved more closely identified with Nixon than Elvis. Named an honorary narcotics agent by Nixon, Elvis continued until the end with his own prescription addiction. Maybe, along with the Manson murders and Altamont, the end of the Sixties found its most dramatic moment with Elvis in the Nixon White House, selling his services to a felon.
When Fine Young Cannibals effectively cannibalize the Elvis tune in the mid 80s, what sustenance are they bringing? Some might argue they are the George Romero zombies from the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, hungry for the life they would find in the body of this Elvis hit. FYC had, in fact, emerged from the body parts of the English Beat’s breakup in the early 1980s: guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steele. The English Beat had been known to appropriate a good song as a cover; their version of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” was a marvel, reconfigured as an immediate ska classic, played with verve, and their version took me back to my love of so many great Sixties pop songs. (And to the classic ska bands emerging on absorbing compilations, More Intensified on Island Records, with classics from 1963-67 by the Skatalites, the Ethiopians, Desmond Dekker and the Four Aces, so that I was left “sadder than sad,” as the lyrics of “Tears” tell us, that I had come to these versions more than a decade after their release.) When English Beat played Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom on a tour with the Pretenders in the summer of 1981, the band brought energy to each syllable and note. Every cover, from “Tears” to the Andy Williams classic “Can’t Get Used To Losing You,” adhered to Ezra Pound’s dictum and was made new. (And may I say how much I loved Chrissie Hynde in those days—who am I kidding: still do—and the Pretenders rocked that night and I was only yards from the stage, closer than first down distance in football, and “Stop Your Sobbing” was part of the evening’s set—yes, still love that cover and still love the band and, yes, again, still love her.)
When FYC was formed, several years after I almost wore out the grooves of English Beat’s debut, I was curious to hear where Cox and Steele were headed. Their recruited singer, Roland Gift, provided a soulful voice. And their self-titled debut album release took “Suspicious Minds” into its fold. (Thatcher still governed England, pals with the latest Republican President, Ronald Reagan, whose own second term political coverup, the Iran-Contra affair, would fall short of Nixon’s Watergate trauma. Prescient song selection?) I wondered what alchemy the band might make of the last #1 hit Elvis charted. What did this resplendent remnant of 1969 offer this British band in the mid 1980s?-- the same year, 1985, that brought forth magnificent work by the Pogues (whose cover versions on Rum Sodomy and the Lash get the blood roiling), the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, UB40 (with a marvelously reinvented version of a Sixties Sonny and Cher classic, “I Got You Babe”). Music was happening all around FYC, songs new and songs reimagined into even more interesting versions of themselves, like Joyce making Ulysses from the Odyssey. (But in three or four minute versions rather than epics.)
So, when FYC performs its soul take on Elvis, it’s a bit astonishing that the song hews closely to the original. It’s all homage, with a sly Vegas wink. What seems autobiographical or deeply confessional in the Elvis version seems glossed by FYC, a Cliffs Notes study of recrimination and loss. It’s as if Gift and the boys are serving up a performative first reading, all fine and note appropriate, rather than an earned Stanislavsky approach. Gift’s voice verges on autotune correctness, alto sax to Presley’s rougher baritone grit, a synthetic meat rather than grass-fed—or as if we’ve drifted into Huxley’s Brave New World’s feelies. Strings and horns quiver and wail for the appropriate measures. Background quiver?—check. On the video of the song, the initial black and white, respectful tribute to Elvis’s ’68 Comeback special or to his tectonic appearances on Ed Sullivan, transitions to Vegas glitter outfits, a cheeky nod to the white whale Elvis would become. Maybe the knowledge of his fate creates too much suspicion to do more than perform the song as a straight homage or a campy throwaway. FYC and the listener know what befalls and befouls him. That knowledge finds itself enacted in FYC’s version. They’re caught in a trap.
What FYC has, that the ’69 Elvis lacks, is the full arc of an American tragedy, Presley’s rise from Mississippi farmland to Graceland, all that talent resurrected for an encore as the Sixties came to their end, and then the detritus of that decade swept Elvis, along with music and politics, into an early Seventies wasteland. Only as the drugs do their final work on that once gorgeous body and still-exquisite voice, do new musical shoots start to emerge, whose full punk flowering coincides (ironically? appropriately?) with Elvis’s death.
And the political fallout seems to be stuck in a single’s groove: Trump’s nefarious calls to state attorney generals to find him the votes to overturn the results of the states’ voters, his absurd statements that Pence could stop the democratic process from ensuring its stable transfer of power, his calls to protest the official count of electoral votes so that the subsequent encouraged hordes stormed the Capitol—these are the residual fumes of Nixon’s time in office that Trump and his political operatives have inhaled. This song’s lyrics have never been more politically timely: we’re caught in a trap in which no one can believe a word anyone says.
J. W. Bonner writes frequently for various publications, including Asheville Poetry Review and ARGO: A Hellenic Review. His fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, Tyuonyi, and The Greensboro Review.