It was a dark and stormy night in April 1936. The city of Tupelo, Mississippi was ravaged by a tornado that killed more than 230 people. It is ranked as the fourth deadliest tornado in U.S. history.
Tupelo is also the birthplace of Elvis Presley. But the real reason we’re here is because “Tupelo” is one of the defining songs of The Bad Seeds….a song that tends to make it frequently into their live sets.
My fellow Bad Seeders, here is the original video from 1985:
“Tupelo” is the first track off “The Firstborn Is Dead.” On the B-side of the single version is a brilliant re-do of “The Six Strings That Drew Blood” originally released by The Birthday Party.
The Bad Seeds on the record are Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey.
I love the the “Looka, looka yonder” line in the song. A reference to Leadbelly’s song “Black Betty” which Nick Cave has also covered.
Of course, leave it to Nick to make a storm and the birth of Elvis Presley sound apocalyptic.
From the song:
“Well Saturday gives what Sunday steals,
And a child is born on his brother’s heals,
Come Sunday morn the first-born’s dead,
In a shoe-box tied with a ribbon of red.”
The firstborn who’s dead is Jesse Garon Presley, Elvis Presley’s twin brother. Jesse was stillborn and Elvis was delivered 35 minutes later.
It’s currently in their live set as they tour the world. Since Barry Adamson is back with The Bad Seeds, it’s really cool to have him perform songs he worked on years ago with the band.
Here’s a great live version from 1992:
It’s a good thing Gladys rocked baby Elvis to sleep and kept him safe from the brutal pounding of nature on their “clapboard shack with a roof of tin,” or we wouldn’t have “The King.”
Here’s a photo of the house Elvis was born in and what Nick was referencing.
Here are The Bad Seeds performing the song for the BBC in 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd5bqHtaehY
“The Firstborn is Dead” has been referred to as the blues record. The Bad Seeds have a habit of trying to keep things fresh and not delivering what’s expected. I love their anti-formula of sorts.
“The public gets what they deserve, not what they demand, unless we all decide to be a business, not a band.” (“Breakdown” by Agent Orange.)
This wasn’t the first time a song was written about the tornado of Tupelo, John Lee Hooker recorded his own version. In the video below the title says it’s about the 1927 flood of Tupelo, but that has to be a mistake since the major one happened in 1936.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77pmWCpMNkI
Here are The Bad Seeds performing the song in 2009:
Some have pointed out the line in the song, “Water water everywhere” is a reference to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The video below is from their show in Mexico last month. The video isn’t too sharp, but the audio is decent.
In other news, The Bad Seeds are on world tour and as they perform I’ll try to keep up with video gems from recent shows.
Here they are in Brisbane on March 8th doing a killer version of “Stagger Lee”:
“O God help Tupelo, O God help Tupelo!”
Thanks for reading and come back next week for another edition of Nick Cave Monday.
6 responses
My goodness, we just saw The Bad Seed’s show at the Ryman Auditorium (a.k.a. The Grand Old Opry)in Nashville on Saturday and it was amazing! Having seen them on the postponed ‘Nocturama’ U.S. tour back in ’02, with a pretty impressive incarnation of the band at the time (back when Warren was a relatively “new” addition and both Blixa & Mick were still members), and even more recently on the ‘Grinderman 2’ tour, we knew we were in for a real treat. The show began with three tracks from the new album, then straight into the back catalog of classics -leading in with Nick telling us “about a girl.” “Stranger Than Kindness,” “Your Funeral, My Trial,” and “Deanna” were wonderful to hear. Not only was Barry Adamson with them but Conway Savage was there too. Shilpa Ray, the accordion player who was the supporting act during the Grinderman 2 tour was present as well, sans accordion, and incorporated into a back-up singer spot. Excellent show! Great set list…
Love this series. And finally, my favorite Nick Cave song ever. I used to play the hell out of it on KTRU in my college radio days in the 80s. And I did again after Katrina (along with Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927”). And I did again sitting in evacuation traffic in Mississippi during Gustav.
I’m stuck in a work meeting or I’d be blasting all these versions, thanks for tracking them down.
One thing: 1927 was THE flood, the one that permanently changed the lower Mississippi Valley, that tilted state vs. federal power struggles more toward Federal, and influenced presidential elections for several cycles. Even after Katrina it is probably one of the defining natural disasters in US history. 1936 is more Tupelo-specific because of the tornado outbreak that happened there. Which one John Lee Hooker is referencing, I don’t know.
Thank you Ray. Glad to finally get to your favorite song. I always go nuts when he performs it live.
And thanks for the clarification on the 1927 flood. Now I lean to thinking that John Lee Hooker’s version points more to the 1927 flood as the video says.
I wonder if Nick had both the 1927 flood and the 1936 tornado in mind since early in the song he sings: ‘Ya can say these streets are rivers, ya can call these rivers streets.’
Yeah, I was cranking ‘Tupelo’ all weekend, my neighbors probably think I’m obsessed. (Know I’m obsessed is more like it.)
Despair and horror drip from this song, for me, way more than any of the murder ballads.
“Ya can say these streets are rivers, ya can call these rivers streets” and the one “water water everywhere, no bird can fly no fish can swim”, after Katrina, when even after the flood went down there were no animals, no squirrels, no birds for months. It was eerie.
Gustav hit a year after I bought a house in post-K New Orleans and a few weeks after my marriage imploded, and my soon-to-be-ex evacuated my kids to Texas and I went east. I remember squatting in the sand in Pensacola watching the ocean and sky turn black, with “The Beast it cometh, cometh down, the Beast it cometh, cometh down” going around and around in my head. Like it was this great leap of faith to move back to New Orleans after Katrina, and it turns out God does not care, and watch what the Devil is going to do to your puny faith…
At the Philly show several weeks ago, Nick held my hand during Tupelo and it was a literal Sublime experience.
Victoria, a true Bad Seeder.
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