Close Up on Beyond Belief

[Paul B]

Morning all. Having had some great discussions about individual songs (lyrics, structure, meaning, jokes and so on) on the old official EC site board, thought it a good idea to do same here.

Anyroad, my starter for 10 is Beyond Belief. Apologies if the following is slightly long, but if you know the song well and have your own feelings about it, I hope it'll make for a stimulating read.

A kaleidoscopic and magical piece, Beyond Belief starts raggedly on the count in. Both nonchalant and aggressive, it builds to a taught, wound up atmosphere that never achieves release. The song propels relentlessly forward, yet feels like it could collapse at any moment. Loud, live or on headphones, it's giddy making - like being in a runaway car and wanting to scream ‘We’re going to fast, I don’t like this!’

Each line is a new entry point into the song. The vocal takes on the twirling spiral structure of the music, unravelling an uncaring world (‘crocodile tears’), conceited and defeated. The narrator identifies himself as one of the bits of debris, about as welcome as an oil slick. The association of ‘wind up world’ and ‘nervous tick’ is just one of myriad juxtapositions the lyric throws off as the song spins wildly on it's axis, like a mad world.

Beyond Belief is a highly worked track. On the latest reissue notes EC writes how he spent 3 weeks in the studio after the band had gone, changing and perfecting a lot of Imperial Bedroom’s vocals. The developments he made to Beyond Belief (we get to hear one stage of these in the bonus track The Land of Give and Take) included rewriting much the lyric, taking his delivery down an octave and recording some of the lines individually, allowing him to hold the end note of one line over the beginning of the next - all adding to the woozy kaleidoscopic effect.

‘You hang around, dying to be tortured’ - Asking for it, basically. And remember elsewhere he’s stood to be insulted and paid for the privilege.

‘You’ll never be alone in the bone orchard’ – not alone because you have all the other sun scorched human remains to keep you company; you’re going that way too, bone dry in the sun. Look, shall we just say the lyric starts off how it means to go on: depressingly.

‘This battle with the bottle’ – a line that does exactly what it says on the tin. Elvis says in the liner notes that he needed some ‘sober reflection’, on the strength of this song nothing but a prolonged period of abstinence will do. From other comments he’s made it’s evident that much powder snorting was going on at this time too.

‘There’s nothing so novel’ – like, y’know, ‘Not!’ A prime example of Elvis’s gloriously throwaway sarcasm.

Gin Palace is old slang for a pub by the way.

Pete’s drumming drives Beyond Belief forward. He’s often told the story of his single take ‘morning after the all night before’ drum track. Coming to the studio straight from an all night party, he pleaded with Elvis to let him off work for the day so he could get home to bed. What we get is the guide track Elvis insisted Pete lay down before he was allowed to pull a sickie, so work in the studio could continue. It just so happens that in that moment Pete gave Elvis the key to the song and provided probably the most archetypal Attractions performance ever recorded.

Pete wasn’t just drumming blind drunk, but blind also in the sense that little else of the song was in place, thus his rhythm doesn’t follow any verse/chorus structure, there not being one yet. Things like his drum rolls (except for the later overdubbed deep Kettle drum effect ones) and changes to using the cymbals instead of the hi-hat (which he’d usually do to mark the chorus) are arbitrary and out of sync with the final song. Noticeably, after the line ‘you see your Alice’, the drums lose the rhythm completely, except for the pounding kick. It’s to Elvis’s credit that he never got Pete to rerecord his contribution after he’d recovered: ‘The strength of Pete’s performance meant that I was able to consider a more ambitious…approach.’

It all makes one almost regret that Pete went on to give up drinking - but, hey, you can’t be 23 forever. Using Elvis’s phrase about the Attractions, Pete’s contribution makes the music ‘wound up and offhand all at the same time.’ In one radio interview I heard Pete say he’s received much praise for the song from people who’ve no idea the circumstances it was created in. He was especially proud that Britt Ekland (of all people) came up to him and said ‘Oh my God, you’re the drummer on Beyond Belief!'

‘Through a two way looking glass…’ - Enter the love interest with an Alice Through the Looking Glass reference, passing through the mirror into a reversed and twisted world.

In a sense - Triple exposure in one line: In a sense / innocence / inner sense. Clever bugger that Elvis bloke.

The criminal charge of Assault and Battery is twisted around to become the contrary ‘insults and flattery’. Lovely way to describe some tawdry chat up where the guy harbours feelings both nice and nasty towards the girl.

Steve's faintly fairground sounding organ comes in around here and spins the roundabout some more.

Putting a sinister and absurd twist on another well-known phrase, as Elvis was want to do around this time, you have to be cruel to be callous, not to be kind. All sounds a bit nasty to me.

‘Then you find you fit...’ - The identikit’s pieced together, you’re what she’s looking for, or you’ve just pretended to be anyway. Warning: Alcohol can get in the way of possible relationships. However, there’s a quick discreet exit, ‘cos actually you were lying when you said that bit about having no secrets. That, having made your escape, you’re already on the way to the bone orchard to drink yourself insensitive is probably one of them.

The song spins and rolls even faster on the chorus, fired by Steve’s curt and manic piano trills. The chorus lyrics, which list unbelievable wonders, jarringly culminate with the character’s unlovely state.

‘My hands are clammy and cunning, she’s been suitably stunning’ - The promise of casual sex that’s too easy and guilt ridden, or perhaps just a masturbation fantasy. Moving swiftly on, Hades was the King of the Underworld wasn’t he?

'Wolf whistles...' - It seems the traditional mating calls of building site laddies to passing women are no worse than thesupposedly more civilised clashes (dogfights even) of beauties and beasts, roses and thistles.

Of the final ‘I’ve got a feeling…’ refrain, the lyric sheet it says not ‘grief’ but ‘gried’ (which ain’t in my dictionary).

‘Once it seemed so appealing’ – so it was a fine idea at the time then...

Elvis said that when the Attractions fired up behind him it was like being strapped on front of an express train and everything in this song has been on free run, all senses jammed on open. It sounds like it shouldn’t hold together but it never topples and unravels, Elvis’s voice just echoes down in the mix and the music follows, unresolved. So then, no relief in Beyond Belief.

[cbartal]

Yeah, I think it's pretty good too.

[sulkygirl]

Believe it or not, I actually created an art piece entitled "Beyond Belief". Of course, the idiot locals at the county fair entered in "Craft" (next to the Teddy Bears & Homemade Quilts) instead of "Modern Art". Got a 3rd (only slightly better than "Honorable Mention").

It's ugly, but cool. Will try to get a photo posted.

[Mr. Average]

I love the details of the dissection and the graphical evisceration of the song.
Only problem is this: I am still not too sure what the song is really about.
Can it be synopsized as a forelorn love song?...a self deprecating confession?...an admission of guilt that has damaged his quality of life?...a celebration of stumbling about trying to find lifes meaning? In its simplest, least common denominator description, what is it saying to us, and what do you think was the stimulus that caused it to flow from the pen of the writer?

"I might make it California's fault, be locked in Geneva's deepest vaults, just like the canals of Mars and the Great Barrier Reef, I come to you beyond belief.."...what the hell is that saying to me, or about him, or about the ever-elusive subject of this, my favorite EC song, in spite of the fact that I admit to not understand it's meaning.

Frankly, its live performance creates just too much energy in my psychokinetic energy axis (the Russians have photographed these energy fields with Kerlian photography...years ago) that, when it is played live as it was last year at the UCLA 'dance show' venue, my arms and legs fell off and I think that the three people standing immediately in front and on either side of me died from the injuries that I induced during this song. so caveat emptor in Hollywood on February 04 at the House of Blues.

Caveat Emptor. I cannot be held accountable for something that I cannot control.

[Paul B]

Thanks for your short and sweet reply cbartal.

Sulky I'm sorry to hear about the fate of your artwork - what was it like?

Mr Av, probably too much indulgence, affairs and the usual trappings of fame caused it to flow from his pen. I'd feel it more a self hatred than a love song.

A vague stab at how I see the chorus: California's fault being a double meaning about tectonic plates and the somewhat empty ideal of fame and wealth that parts of that state seem to hold, whlie there's real unimaginable monetary riches in Geneva's vaults. This juxtaposed with the real wonders of the universe: the Great Barrier Reef or the Canals of Mars. Then back the overindulged and sorry for himself narrator, beyond belief. Once he found it so appealing (the binges, sex, fame and adulation), now it's beyond a joke (the same things have worn him down and messed with his mind - hey, fame won't make you happy, y'know).

Sorry to hear about apalling injuries sustained during concert going. Trust they grew back.

[Paul B]

BTW if anyone else would like to start off another close up on a favourite song, that'd be lovely. Night all.

[cbartal]

Sorry Paul if I came off a little cutesy. I agree with your assessment wholeheartedly.

If I could ever come close to approaching your critical analysis I'd offer my perspective on another EC song.

I have to tend to my current task at hand, however, that of killing friends and making braincells... er, that's right, I think, whatever.

[Paul B]

Cute's good! I've got to get back to my tasks in hand as well...

[ice nine]

What was THAT!!!!

[verbal gymnastics]

Cute's good! I've got to get back to my tasks in hand as well...

Ahem - I think you need to rephrase that!

Welcome by the way Paul but we'll have none of this smutty innuendo on here! Not until you've reached 20 posts anyway

[laughingcrow]

Welcome Paul...

Beyond Belief seems to me to be about a guy who goes around nightclubs looking for a girl, and then he eventually find one, at which point the song describes all the really vain superficial things about their 'relationship'...

Gin palace...obviously a bar as you point out

Battle with the bottle is nothing so novel...means to me that him being there drinking (probably a lot) is purely incidental, he's doing it as a means to an end, not because he needs to.

I always took 'two way looking glass' as seeing the girl through both sides of a pint glass..

But you know there's not a hope in Hades....of what? sex? I think it means no hope of a relationship beyond anything physical.

Beyond belief itself to me, means the state of bemusement/contemptment he finds himself in with regards to the 'nightclub scene'.

[Paul B]

Hey I didn't start this task in hand business! I was only echoing sulky's phrase, but I suppose a Freudian slip is a Freudian slip (although Freud did say 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...')

Hi Crow, I agree, the nightclub relationship sounds accurate. BB to meseems to be the pinnacle of a lot of songs around related themes up to then, though I'd especially cite work like Watch Your Step and Temptation. I do think the 'battle with the bottle' is a serious line though - it's a common phrase (and for once one that he doesn't twist around) for acoholic tendencies. Elvis had had those at times, by his own admission, culminating in giving up drinking comletely.

[SoulForHire]

Bump (due to recent related thread)

[A rope leash]

I think it's about being famous and relating to ordinary people, or even trying to come off as being ordinary after acheiving fame.

If Elvis kncocked on your front door, wouldn't that be beyond belief?