One week at number on w/e 4th August 1984
Above and beyond all of that, though, it’s a genuine curiosity in songwriting terms. Over the years, Davis was strangely humble and unforthcoming about its roots and origins, referring to his childhood spent being friends with a “black boy” who lived in a rougher part of Chicago. “I couldn't figure out why they had to live where they lived, and we got to live where we lived,” Davis explained in the newspaper The Tennesean. “We didn't have a lot of money, but we didn't have broken bottles every six inches.”
It’s from this boyhood scenario that the story of “In The Ghetto” is supposed to stem, but it’s surprising that so little has been made – either by the press or the man himself – about Davis’ period spent working as a probation officer. “In The Ghetto” is sociological theory given an outlet in song-form, the cycle of urban misery described with every spin of the original record; let the needle hit the end, then lift it and return it to the run-in grooves, and you physically repeat the circle of neglect and life of crime every child in the same area goes through, and as the vinyl becomes worn and the music becomes distorted and uglier, so seeps through the steady decay. It’s a heavy load for a 1969 pop single to bear, but it manages.
Presley’s original recording is a strangely spacey and grand recording – widescreen and dramatic with its reverberating backing vocals, calmly plucked guitar lines and arrangements almost sounding as if they’re lifted from a Western soundtrack. “Paint Your Wagon” was a huge musical Western folly at this time, and there are echos of “Wanderin’ Star” about the gently shuffling wideness and melancholy of its sound. All of this is more likely to give the impression of a criminal cast out of society and forced to make his own way across a lonely prairie than it is the compressed and unforgiving environment of “the ghetto”. It’s a fine record, but it feels as if there could be other interpretations of it.
Enter Nick Cave. While Cave may currently have turned himself into the grandfather of modern alternative rock and a wise agony uncle for the broadsheet press, in 1984 he was an unpredictable ex-member of the manic and ramshackle Birthday Party, a fragile unit who sounded as if they might splinter to pieces before half their singles even finished. Neither that group nor Cave himself presented themselves as keen students of classic rock, instead coming across as nihilistic punks prone to screaming fits about all matters dark and gothic.
The fact that Cave chose a Presley cover to launch his solo career was therefore baffling at the time. A rock and roll revival was making itself felt through the psychobilly scene circa 1983/4, but “In The Ghetto” wasn’t the track to pick if you wanted to gain credibility from that crowd – it stems from the “establishment” era of Elvis, the point in his career where he was safely ensconced in his Graceland mansion and was no longer even a shadow of a rebel.
You can only conclude that Cave covered the song because he loved it, and instead of replicating it precisely or trying to scuzz it up, he instead boxes it into a minimal, slightly threatening space. At no point does it go wild, but the arrangement feels tighter, the slide guitar ominous, the drumming militaristic. Cave’s vocals, too, are not so relaxed, delivering the lines urgently, emphasising syllables unpredictably (you can hear this particularly in lines like “THEN one night in DES-peration, the young man BREAKS AWAY”). If Presley’s take on “In The Ghetto” is a cinematic sweep, Cave’s is a Play For Today version, alive and unflashy but still telling the same story. It swaps elegance for urgency.
It doesn’t usurp the original in terms of quality, but nor does it totally upend it. This isn’t Sid Vicious singing “My Way”, which I suspect some buyers and critics believed is how it would turn out – and it legitimised the song for a new generation. The tragedy is that “In The Ghetto” has never really aged, and a probation officer’s ideas about poverty, criminality and the cycle of deprivation and violence in 1969 was equally applicable in 1984 and indeed remains so today.
