Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis

[MUSIC PLAYING] Pushkin. On August 4, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died. Then the rumors started, and she died again. And now, we're going to set the record straight and learn about the way Marilyn Monroe actually died, the third way. I'm Jake Brennan, and on my podcast, Hollywood Land, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Hollywood Land is part of the exactly right network. Listen to new episodes every Monday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is in a very formal European style building on a quiet side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Oak tables, high ceilings, in the library long ribbons of leather-bound volumes, and five different buss of Sigmund Freud all in a row. I went there to meet with the society's president, Michelle Press, a psychoanalyst herself, with that lovely quality of patience and openness the best therapists always have. I wanted to talk with her about a subject that I've always found deeply interesting, what Freud called "Parapraxis." But not just anyone's "Parapraxis," the King's "Parapraxis." [MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. After the first two episodes on memory earlier this season, I decided to do a third. It involves an Odyssey. This Odyssey took me from the pages of the handbook of psychobiography to a shrine in Tennessee, to the legendary battery studios in Times Square, and to the hushed offices of the New York Psychoan ytic Society, where I sat with Michelle Press in search of an answer to a simple question. What if a singer couldn't remember the words to a song? A song hit song a thousand times, particular parts of the song, the same part of the song over and over. What would that tell us about the singer? It was a term in German faulty acts or faulty functions. It would be slips of the tongue. It could be misreadings, mishearings, but it's Freud's invention. Michelle Press is talking about para-praxis. From the Greek, paramining abnormal beyond praxis meaning act, abnormal speech acts, or as they are more colloquially known, Freudian slips. Does Freud mean that there are no axial slips or that if you look at the range of axial slips, you can find meaning in some? So when you read him, he doesn't want to sound that kind of definitive. He'll say, yes, maybe one might prove that there are truly accidental or truly a result of fatigue or of maybe some medical illness. But he said, if you do the work, one will find the reasons for the slip that they're not accidental, that they have, he called it a sense. And that sense has to do with unconscious forces or unconscious ideas that are trying to find expression, but are because they're unacceptable, they emerge in these ways when one might be unguarded. Now is that concept of unacceptable central to the notion of para-praxis? Yes. When I was alive, that old shit was a part of the old, overhills and metals with strength. In 1956, early in his career, Elvis Presley recorded a song called Old Shep. It's a sentimental song about a boy in his dog, Shep, written in the 1930s by Red Foley. The dog gets old and sick. The vet says there's no hope. The boy aims his rifle at Shep to put him out of his misery, but he can't pull the trigger. He lies down next to Shep, cradle to him in his arms, as the dog dies in the song ends. Old Shep has gone where the good dog is gone, and no more with old shit. Well, I wrong. But if dogs have a heaven, that's one thing I know. Old Shep has a wonderful home. Old Shep is not one of Elvis's more famous songs, but in an essay published in 2005 on Elvis, the psychologist Alan Elms and Bruce Heller have an aside about a small but significant discrepancy between the original version of Old Shep and Elvis's cover. I'm going to come back to Heller and Elms in a while because they really do the most thorough analysis of Elvis's lyrical para-praxis. But let's start with Old Shep. Listen to Hank Snow performing the lyrics as they were originally written. The boy has just put away his gun, realizing he can't shoot Shep. So I threw down the little gun, ran right up to his side. He ladies faithful, old-headed, right online me, and friends. I stroked the best pal, but a man ever found. I even cried so I scarcely could see. Now listen to Elvis sing his version. I had struggled the best friend that a man ever had. I cried so I scarcely could see. Hank Snow sings, "I stroked the best pal a man ever found," meaning that the boy considers an act of violence against his best pal, then decides against it, and takes instead the path of nurture and sympathy. He recovers his humanity. But Elvis sings, "I had struck the best friend a man ever had, which turns the meaning of the song completely upside down." The boy does not recover his humanity. He now holds himself responsible for an act of violence against Shep, an act of violence that in fact he did not commit. Stroke becomes struck, and all of a sudden the song about moral redemption turns into a song about morbid remorse. Now I suppose you can say, "Stroke, struck, whatever." Those two words sound the same. It's just a cover, but it's not just a cover. Elvis was obsessed with old Shep. It's the first song he ever learned on the guitar. He played it incessantly as a child. At age 10, he played it at the Mississippi Alabama Fair. At his first public performance, he played it at his high school talent show, and won. He played it on dates with girls. He played it well into his career. And why does the song resonate so much with him? It's a song about love, betrayal, and loss. Themes that are at the center of Elvis's life. He's a twinless twin. Someone whose twin died in utero, and he's obsessed by that fact. He brings it up again and again, the loss of someone who should have been his closest friend. Elvis's mother, Gladys, is to say the least unusual. She's controlling, intense. He calls her baby. Gladys died when Elvis was just 23. When he first saw her casket, he threw himself on top of her body. Then stepped back and talked about how beautiful she was, while pointing to her dead feet. He called them her little "soudies." He did this again and again. At the end of the funeral service, he lay on top of her casket, saying, "I want to go with you. I don't want to stay here. I can't be without you." We haven't even gotten to Priscilla, Elvis's wife. He spotted her when she was 14, and eventually convinced her to move in with him in Memphis. Once, Elvis took you to a move. This is Priscilla, being interviewed by Barbara Walters in 1985. Why? Why that fascination? I don't know. I don't know what the fascination is. This is not the first time that he had done this. I don't know if it was for the shock value, you know, to see how people would react, or just for his own thrill of it. You wrote, "There were times when you and Elvis spent days in the bedroom, freezing bedroom he liked to play cold. The windows with blackout drapes, so no sunlight ended. Day after day. It went into weeks. Yes, we stayed like that. We had our food delivered by the door. It was cold. I mean, he did like a cold and it was dark and I could get real only. And that's how he liked it at times. Like a cocoon. Almost like a wool, I guess. You think? Priscilla and Barbara Walters are on a white couch surrounded by pink flowers. Priscilla is in a strapless sundress. She looks amazing. Barbara Walters turns to her and says, "Alvis, control your looks, your clothes, your hair, your makeup. He controlled you totally." Priscilla says, "Yes, he did. Then." Six years you lived there before he decided to marry you. In those six years of sleeping with him every night, he never had intercourse with you. You wrote in your book that there were times when you begged him six years of that. So why? Well, again, you know, I can only go back to what his concept was. What he wanted and a woman. And somewhere he, along in his past, he said that he wanted a virgin. Elvis is complicated. And what does Freud's theory of para-praxis say that complicated feelings, inappropriate, maybe unacceptable feelings, are normally suppressed. But every now and again, some little bit of that buried emotion slips out. And if you're paying attention and listening closely, that little slip can tell you something. Struck, broostroke. But old chap is just the beginning. For Elvis, the real para-praxis occurs in "Are You Lonesome Tonight." A song originally written in the 1920s, and which Elvis took to the top of the charts just after he came out of the army. L10K 0L6 take 2. Elvis at the RCA Studios on Music Row in Nashville, April 4th, 1960. The recordings from the original session now held in the Sony Music Archive. John Jackson and Vic Anacini from Sony, me, all listening together at the legendary battery studios in Manhattan, where everyone from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen recorded, "Holy Ground." I started my quest at the very beginning. "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Boy, this is so amazing. Yeah. Is he, when he records that, are the Jordanaires singing along with him or they're laying that track down separate? No, live. It's all live. Everything's all on here. Yeah. He always preferred to have everyone in one room and record live. Or even in one room not in booths or, you know, no, no, you hated booths. Recording the song was not Elvis's idea. It was a favorite of the wife of his manager, Tom Parker. In the studio, Elvis asked the lights be turned off, so the room was in darkness. He did five takes. He didn't like any of them. It was four in the morning when he recorded it. So he made everyone get out of the studio, go away, and then he just, you know, did it. Yeah. And then they, this was the second take, which they told them of the background singers, you know, Peepop, 'cause he said, "Just stop the tape. You know, I'm done." They said, "Just do it once more because we'll get a Peepop on there." So the third take ends up being the master. Oh, I see. And they held the label held it back for seven, eight months. Well, they didn't realize what they had on their hands. Yeah. It was seven months, I think, after he recorded it, they finally released it as a single. And didn't go out. He had done eight songs for Elvis's back. And this was just like, yeah, just try this one. Recorded in the wee hours of the morning in darkness as a favor to someone else, a song neither Elvis nor his label particularly liked. It's almost like the song had a curse on it right from the beginning. And from then on, Elvis could never quite get it right. I talked about this with Michelle Prest at the New York Psycho and Lidic Society. Elvis wasn't typically someone who forgot the words to the songs he sang. This is all his examples of his life of him being able to recite, to sing from memory, massive amounts of stuff. I'm worried about that. There's a little slip. I'm worried about it. I said, "I'm worried about that." I'm interested in that. And I'm wondering what the, what would you make of that? As a psychoanalyst, I try to go on. But of course, I'm talking to a hardcore Freudian. I meant to say I was interested, but what came out was worried. I mean, I'm still caught on your slip, obviously, thinking, "What do you, what do you make of it?" So one thought was whether the slip might be a key to something that you're figuring out and puzzling with, with him. Because right now you're immersed in him. Oh, I am. I've been singing this song under my breath for months. I can't understand why. I've never been an Elvis fan. I don't own a single song of his. Or am I, am I drawn to this story because isn't this story that I'm talking to you, the great anxiety of anyone in a creative field, that moment when you lose control, right? Where the presentation to the audience is unmasked. I want to show you, I take up my laptop, pull up YouTube. There's a mountain of Elvis on YouTube. One of the last performances of his life, it's bananas. I mean, he's singing a song, he's singing thousands of times and he just completely loses control of it. I can skip it. Here comes the hand. I wonder if you lost a bit of light. You know someone said the world's a state, it's an issue. It's a place where you can see the world. It's a place where you can see the world's a state. When I first saw it as someone in a, I mean, I'm not Elvis, but I'm someone in a creative field. It terrified me. It's like up on stage doing what he's paid to do and he just. Every live performance he's ever given of this that we have on tape, he mangles the bridge. He can't do it right. He's returning to the song again and again and again and again and doing the same kind of. In this particular. It's always a bridge. So the singing part. He's almost over how many years did this go on? Years. Okay, in 1980 to this left version was where you went to the UK and reached on the 25th of the British singles chart. At battery studios I made the Sony guys play every version they had. They even have names, laughing Elvis, crazy Elvis. Each one stranger than the one before. The worlds are stale, you need to be supposed to lay apart. Oh God! Oh, God! There's sweat and tears streaming down his face. It goes on like this. On and on. Shall I come again? Tell me, dude, how you doing? [LAUGHS] That's it, man. 14 years, I'm having a great time. Well, I'll do you. I'm Jake Brennan, and I'm my podcast, Hollywood Land. I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Like how the story of Marilyn Monroe isn't just the story of a Hollywood icon. Marilyn Monroe has become so iconic that her death can only be explained through conspiracy theories. And for some fans who can't let go, these stories have metastasized from conjecture to accepted fact. So on August 4th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died. And now, we're going to set the record straight, and learn about the way Marilyn Monroe actually died. The third way. Learn more about what happens when fame, media obsession, and conspiracy collide. Listen to Hollywood Land on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever played this song before? No, I've never played it before. It's funny, I've played a bunch of, um, check, I've played a bunch of his stuff. You might have flipped in the stand by, switched on the back. I'm with Jack White at his studio in Nashville, third-man records. Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, one of the great rock and rollers of his generation, and a huge Elvis fan. He's a shrine to Elvis in his hallway. Actual shrine. All that's missing is flowers. We met in his private office. Lots of black and yellow and leather and taxidermy. He sat on the couch with a guitar. Do you play, um, chip? Do you play Elvis songs in concert? Sometimes I do a low-temper go. [Music] I was gonna say, "Don't stop! I've been joining it!" Anything else you do? Wait, wait, why do you, why that one? What's the about that song? I heard that early from a band called The Flat Dude with Jets that I really liked. I didn't know it was Elvis. Then when I heard the Elvis version, I connected the two. Oh, now I'm ready to do it. I started doing it when I played in coffee houses. I started playing that. I was like 16, yeah. Which is funny. I'd eventually heard a story of Robert Plant telling Elvis he loved that song. He let's up and met Ellis and then when they walked out of the hallway that Elvis poked his head out and the hallway and sang that song to Robert Plant. They sang it back to each other and you're crying. Must have been an amazing moment. Jack White owns the original acetate pressing of Elvis's first recording from 1953. My happiness. After we talked, White took me into his vault to show it to me. It's priceless. He asked me if I weren't to hold it. I was too terrified to say yes. Jack White seemed like the right person to see to try and understand Elvis's problem. In our U-Loansom tonight. Alright, let me see if we can take a crack. We might have to give her a couple of worlds. [Music] Are you lonely, son? Tonight. Do you miss me tonight? Are you sorry? We drifted apart. Does your memory strain to a bright summer day? When I kissed you and called you sweetheart? Do the chairs in your parlour seem empty and bare? Do you gaze at some doorstep and picture me then? Is your heart filled with pain? Shall I come back again till the deep onion won't soak tonight? That's the first half of the song. The song version, all questions. A man is wondering whether his lover misses him. Then comes the spoken bridge, in which the emotional tables are turned and a man leaves himself bare. Are you lonely tonight has been recorded countless times over the years. A lot of performers leave out the bridge because it's corny and way too long and hard. Elvis kept it in, so does Jack White. I wonder if you're lonely tonight. You know someone said that the worlds of stage in each must play a part. Fate had me playing in love with you as my sweetheart. Back one was where we met. I loved you at first glance. You read your mind so cleverly, never missed a cue. Then came back to you. You seemed to change your acting strange and why I've never known. Honey, you lied when you said you loved me and I had no calls to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lies and to go on living without you. Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. If you won't come back to me, then they can bring the curtain down. Shall I come back again? Tell me dear, I'll give you a whole song tonight. Whoa! You enjoyed that. I did. There's some nice parts where you can see playing that live. Now I just did that. I played it one session today, reading this. But now playing like that, I could see why alive you could really, that really could be a emotional song. So I didn't really think about it till just then. What led you to think that just now? Because it feels like, well, it's in a minor chord. I'm not sure if it's a minor chord, but it's a minor chord. You take that kind of emotional song and you put years and years on stage, and then you put drugs in the mix, and then your own state of mind at the time. You could be on to something there. It could be a real diversion that it's too powerful to sing. What's fascinating is that the song parts the singer is in control, and he's worried about her. The folk and parts the singer is vulnerable, is confessing his own, and it's so screwed up. It's like, I know you lied to me and I wish you hadn't, I wish I didn't know that you lied to me, because that'd rather be in the state of being deceived than know the truth, which is like 17 convolutions of neuroticism. He's still blaming her most of the lines, still pointing the finger. White says, "You can't run from that kind of emotion, not if you're singing the song properly." And so when he writes songs, he tries to establish some distance between himself and the feelings he's singing about. I tried to push it into a character's standpoint, rather than it being a self confession over me, because I think that would be really hard to consistently keep living that moment over and over and over again. I've definitely seen older artists ignoring certain parts of their certain songs in their career, because it's probably too close to home about something or other. But you can't avoid a song's emotional effects all the time, and especially not when you have to read a soliloquy in the middle of it, which is what the Arulon Simbridge is. A speech passed. I have a little flub moment at one point trying to figure out wait a minute. It's awaltz. You have that, so if I'm like, I wonder if two, three, so one, two, three, one, two, three, so your brain kind of wants to go. I wonder if you're Lonesome tonight. That's what your brain wants to do. You know someone said that the world's a stage and when my stage plays a part, then it starts to get, oh, see it breaks down. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I would, I can definitely say that this would be a lot easier if someone else was playing guitar and I could just recite that part. Which I recite it while you play the guitar. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. You do that? I'm not going to torture you with my rendition of the spoken bridge. Well, maybe later. I'm just saying until I die, I can say I play with Jack White. And then because how many opportunities am I going to get like this? I ask Jack White to help me edit this a little bit. If one would have re-write it, I'm thinking you, that you, uh, you lose the first three lines. Kate had me playing in love, you as my sweetheart, or even act one was when we met. Why don't they just start with act one? Did that. Act one was where we met. I loved you at first class. You read your lines so carefully. Never Mr. Cue. What I do there. You say carefully instead of, carefully, which is it, cleverly. Beautiful friends. Mr. Cue. Then came act two. You seem to change your acting strange. What did Jack White do there? The actual lyric is, "You read your lines so cleverly." He said, "You read your lines so carefully." Carefully, for cleverly. A man singing one of the songs of his musical idol comes to the emotionally complex center. And what do we hear? A moment of vulnerability. Can he be as clever as Elvis? He's not sure. He must be careful. Parapraxis. Sometimes, you know, I love him so much and that, you know, I'm afraid to learn more about certain things. Like, you know, when you, you, you, you, so close to it and you've experienced certain things about, you know, nothing in comparison to what he went through, but you, you, you're in the same, we're, we do the same kind of thing. We perform and we go on stages and we make records and all this stuff. Not from a different time period, but you notice these tiny little moments that are when you, when you see certain things, you're like, "Oh, I know exactly what that's about. I know exactly what that feels like." There are ten known live recordings of Elvis performing, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Starting in 1961, in a concert at Block Arena in Honolulu, up to the end of Elvis's life in 1977. Alan Elms and Bruce Heller analyzed them all in their essay, "Twelve Ways to Say Lonesome," assessing error and control in the music of Elvis Presley. Elms and Heller find that Elvis performs the sung portion of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" more or less flawlessly, because the sung portion is the part of the song where the singer is in control. But in the spoken bridge, the narrator is suddenly the one who's been deceived and rejected, and that's the part Elvis can't get right. Elms and Heller count a total of 109 errors in those ten live performances of the spoken bridge, 29 of which involve just four lines. I loved you at first glance, where he confesses the depths of his feelings. You seem to change, you acted strange, where he testifies to his portrayal and rejection. And why I've never known where he expresses his feelings of anger and victimization, and with emptiness all around, where he admits to his loneliness. The most problematic renditions of the bridge are the later ones, which come after the summer of 1972. And one day you went in and said, "I'm leaving." There was another man in your life. He was your karate teacher, Mike Stein. And you went off then and lived with him. Priscilla Pressley, back on the couch with Barbara Walters, America's prime time Frodean. It was said that Elvis tried to kill him or wanted him killed. Do you believe that? I think at that time, yes, he did mean one of that to happen. Tell me, dear, are you lost? Oh, Lord, Lord. I wonder how. A man who fears portrayal and abandonment is betrayed and abandoned. And I had no calls to die, sure. It's too much. He's a wreck. I'm Jake Brennan. Now my podcast, Hollywood Land, I revisit some of the biggest stories from Hollywood history, separating the myths people want to believe from the reality underneath them. Then, the rumors started and she died again. And now, we're going to set the record straight and learn about the way Marilyn Monroe actually died in the third way. Learn more about what happens when fame, media obsession and conspiracy collide. Listen to Hollywood Land on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. After I left Jack White, I went to see Bobby Braddock, just down the street at the Sony Studios on Nashville's Music Row. This was just good. You may remember Bobby Braddock from season two of revisionist history. He's the legendary songwriter I called the King of Tears. Braddock wanted to introduce me to a good friend of his, a singer and songwriter named Casey Bowles. Come on. That's the church across the alto. 30-something, long-red hair, the kind of person who if you touch, you expect a little jolt of static. You want to work? Oh, you want to sing that song? You want me to sing that song? We were in the biggest of the Sony recording studios on the main floor in a corner where the piano was. Casey sang, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" with Bobby on the piano. "Do you miss me tonight?" "Are you sorry we drifted above?" Then we sat and they talked about Nashville. They talked about how they both grew up in the Church of Christ, the most strict of Southern fundamentalist denominations. And they talked about Elvis. My dad thought he was Elvis, I think. Yeah. He was the church of Christ, long-leader and really wanted to be a Jordanair badly. So Ray Walker was one of the Jordanaires and he tried to emulate him by a way of dress and hair style. So I grew up either hearing him say, "Hello, darling. Nice to see you." Or doing this sort of, you know, is it Vodville style or just sort of a, over-the-top modeling style, I guess, is modeling the way you'd say it. Then Bobby Braddock started talking about recitations, the spoken part in many older country songs. And he made the same point that Jack White did, that they're much easier if they're set to music, if you could just as easily sing them. Like I'm one of Braddock's most famous songs, he stopped loving her today. The wrist change, like. She came to see him when we were still here. We all wonder. Yeah, you could sing that. She came to see him one last time. Oh, we all wonder if she would. And that works either way. But this is just like we got this song. Let's get a recitation, throw it in there. And they obviously made it work. And I'm thinking just instinctively, just because he was just so good. And it's our unusual these days. Bratik hasn't written one since something he did for Toby Keith in the 1990s. Last successful recitation song I heard was actually. It was actually. It was a hip-hop thing. I want to talk about me. But that was talking, talking, talking. Toby Keith, that's what I'm thinking about. Yeah. But it was. You know what I'm talking about. Can you pay a little slice of that, do you remember? I can pretend I can tell me Keith. I never do that. Why do that always do it with the karaoke thing? Where I get up there and play the thing. I want to talk about I. I want to talk about number one. Now, you talk about your work, how your boss is a jerk. You talk about your church and your head. You talk about the trouble you've been having with your mother and your daddy. With your brother and your daddy and your mother and your crazy ex lover. And then the menstrual period line, which everybody said, you can't put that in a song. Nobody will ever cut it. You know, and it was one of the biggest songs I ever had. About your medical starts and when you start. Yeah. Take that out. Toby Keith did. He's probably the only one who would have those. Then I showed them the prize. I brought it my bag. My copy of the handbook of psychobiography containing the Heller and Elm's essay. Hold on. I have my book here. I'll tell you. Yeah, that is fascinating. To a pair of Elvis fanatics, it was like I'd unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls. What's the book? Simple called Handbook of Psychobiography. And it has an essay on this song. Wow. Psychobiography. And so, yeah. So, here's, so this guy has gone through, he made a chart of all of the, all of the lyrical mistakes that Elvis made in every known live recording of. Oh my gosh. Yeah. These were two songwriters and I felt they immediately saw themselves in that chart. Do you find yourself making the kind of errors sometimes even subtle ones that we've been talking about? That's so interesting. I wrote a song about my mother called Somebody Something and my mother is adorable and whenever you heard about things going wrong or like some multiple story, it was my dad. And so, I finally was like, you know what? Why are we the only person in the family that there's nothing I've written about? So I was trying to dig dirt on her and there was nothing. And so, I ended up writing this song about her called Somebody Something and I cry every time I do it. And there is a line that says, you know, she's always been somebody something, she's lived every life but her own. And it's gone. I can't remember it right now. I don't know that feeling. I can't remember it. Yeah. She's always been somebody something. It's been everything but alone. A daughter, a mother, a daughter, a lover, a wife and a mother. She's lived every life but her own. Yes, she's always been somebody something. And there's a line that says, you know, she wonders what it might be like to be somebody else and she wonders what it feels like to be free. But she's always imagined being nobody's nothing and that's something she never want to be. But that line usually is just gone. And a lot of times I'll go, hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly. Yeah. We what's the specific line that's gone is which one? What's gone again? She's been everything but alone. A daughter, a lover, a wife and a mother. Yeah. Why is it that line? I don't know. I think that um, I don't know. I think when you've, you wouldn't, she's so, when you see somebody give so much of themselves and that's truly the only thing that she will never experience. And I think it's what I've experienced the most of. A minute before we were joking about Toby Keith, now Casey is pensive as she compares her mother's life to her own. Not being able to make a relationship work the first 18,000 times out of the gate or you know officially the first two and um, not being a mother and you know. But she's real close to her right? Yeah, lover. She's wonderful. Go to church with her right? I do. I sit still because she makes me, you know, I stay away. It's good. Yeah. When I was a kid, if I'd get bored in church and my mother'd reach down and pinch me, you know. Right. Wait, Casey, can you play that song for us? Is it going to be too? Let's see. Oh, okay. Okay, well, we'll see if this happens. Oh, shoot. Hold on. There's a little line of Elvis in this. That's just random. Hold on. Dream and see she, Hollywood. I'm going to do it again. What did I just say? Sorry, I'm thinking about Mom. She grew up playing Calgirl. In a railroad town, Dream and see she'd see Hollywood someday. She knew some distant Friday night, With a cigarette, oh, just right. Fate would come and carry her away. As far as she could see from the air, Those were just the facts. That's all right. Hold on a second. My first reaction to Casey's failure of memory was to be embarrassed for her. Worried that she had lost control. That's the way we're trained to think. Just listen to the words I've just used. Failure. Embarrassed. Worried. In one way or another, that's what this season of revisionist history has been about. About the ways we judge each other for our mistakes and choices. The easiest thing in the world is to look at those mistakes and condemn. The much harder thing is to look at those mistakes and understand. She married in December, May work, and address her mama made. She looked all grown up standing there like that. Had a honeymoon in Memphis town. Yeah, she looked for it all, we saw her around. Made love in the greyhound coming back. The one who was far as she could see from there. Those were just the facts alive. You went from somebody's daughter to somebody's wife. She's always there. Parapraxis is not failure. When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated. It's the opposite. Parapraxis is a gift. I presented myself as interested in this story. But now you know that this subject doesn't just interest me, it worries me. Losing control is my great anxiety. When Jack White said carefully instead of cleverly, it was a hint that playing Elvis wasn't a trivial matter for him. It was a sacred act, carefully full of care. And Elvis, after the loss of Priscilla sang a song, hit song a thousand times, only now in a way that gave the audience a window on his pain. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real. So Bobby Brattick and I sat there, listening to Casey's sing. Tears in her eyes, fumbling to remember the lyrics of a song about her mother. Fumbling, not because her mother didn't matter to her, but because she did. She's always there, somebody's something. ♪ Got her lover ♪ ♪ The wife and the mother ♪ ♪ She's lived every life but her own ♪ ♪ She'd say that's just called the end of all my ♪ ♪ She's always there ♪ ♪ Somebody something ♪ - That's beautiful. Why are you covering your mouth? - I'm just, that's just weird. (guitar music) Because I've never, that's just weird when you're thinking about what it is. Like I just thought, oh, bad memory, too many songs, old, too many songs in there. But at any point in time, I could pull out a rap from new edition from 1982. Like why is that in there? And something that you wrote is not in there. That is so weird. It's not weird. A lesser person would have sung it perfectly. (guitar music) Thank you for listening to season three of "Revisionist History." And if you liked this episode, you'll enjoy my new series launching later this year. It's called "Broken Record." And you can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts. "Revisionist History" is a panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Label with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. "Flaw and Williams" is our engineer, fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Ciera. Special thanks to Kim Green and Hal Humphries of Storyboard EMP in Nashville. And here in New York, thanks to Jason Gambrow, heaven Viola, Rachel Strom, Nicole Bumsis, Kate Muscow, Kristen Meinser, Carly Mighliori, Andy Bowers, and of course, L. Hefe, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. (soft music) (soft music) Okay. (soft music) So it will be a wonder if you're loansome tonight. You know, someone said that the world's a stage, and each must play a part. Fate had me playing in love. You as my sweetheart. Act one was when we met. You read your line so cleverly, never missed a cue. Then came act two. You seem to change, and you acted strange. And why, I'll never know. Honey, you lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you. But I'd rather go on hearing your lies than go on living without you. Now the stage is fair, and I'm standing there with emptiness all around. And if you won't come back to me, then make them bring the curtain down. How about you? Nice. Very good. I'm not very musical. No, that's very good. That's good. On August 4th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died. Listen to new episodes every Monday on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.