Article about Elvis Costello, "Music & Costello"
Las Vegas Weekly, 2002-05-23
- Richard Abowitz
Music & Costello
That other Elvis perfects the art of survival
Richard Abowitz (abowitz@vegas.com)
"Every Elvis has his army appears in a handwritten scrawl
that closes out the liner notes to When I was Cruel, Elvis
Costellos first solo disc since 1996. It is actually something
my wife said to me, Costello says. I told her it sounded
like a line from a song. She told me I could use it. So I did.
Every Elvis has his army ended up as a line in Episode
of Blond, a song on the new disc that begins as a bitch slap to
the tabloid press and ends as an obscure sermon filled with images of
artistic bankruptcy. It is the perennial fork in the road. I think
every artist gets to one is Costellos take on the phrase.
So, has Englands Elvis ever been drafted away from the road he
was on into taking one less traveled? No, I havent yet.
Or my road just keeps winding into more bends. Can we leave this road
metaphor behind? Fair enough. Still, Costellos musical journey
the past few yearswhich, please imagine, was metaphorically undertaken
by ship, plane or any method that doesnt involve travel by roadhas
taken him to surprising places and to sounds far different than those
that he first became famous for 25 years ago.
WHEN HE WAS CRUEL
It was in the midst of Englands punk explosion in 1977 that 22-year-old
computer programmer Declan Patrick MacManus transformed into Elvis Costello:
a hyperactive, bitter nerd with buckling knees, Buddy Holly glasses,
low self-esteem and a real attitude about girls who say, No.
If Costello never actually made punk music, his image was in the spirit
of punk. Costello rejected the leather-panted clichés of 70s
rock gods like Robert Plant, as well as the portentous art rock of Pink
Floyds mannerist theater. Instead of being larger than life, Elvis
Costello reinvented the rock star as a geeks revenge fantasy.
Costellos songwriting was remarkable from the first: subtle,
melodic, complex and varied. Of the legendary British class of 77,
only the Clash had songs that could be considered equal to Costellos
early efforts. But the Clash, like most punk, rejected rocks past:
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Joe Strummer shouted
on The Clashs statement of purpose, 1977. But even
back then, Costello distinguished himself from his peers by his catholic
musical tastes. At a time when the Sex Pistols famously expelled a band
member just for admitting in an interview to liking the Beatles, Costello,
from a punk standpoint, was flaunting far more shameful influences.
In concerts from the period, Costello covered I Just Dont
Know What to Do With Myself by the very un-punk Burt Bacharach
and Hal Davis.
|
|
Elvis Costello and the Attractions, pictured in the late 70's |
|
|
Many fans and critics failed at first to grasp Costellos wide-ranging
musical tastes. Some probably still do, based on the general surprise
that greeted Painted from Memory, Costellos 1998 collaboration
with Bacharach. But Costello was never a snob in drawing musical boundaries,
even back when writing the songs on his debut, My Aim Is True,
released in 1977.
On a song like Watching the Detectives, I heard orchestras;
its just that all we had was a little electric keyboard,
he says. You do the best you can with the tools available to you
at the time.
But as good as the songwriting is on My Aim Is True, it
is Costellos voice that steals the show. Though blunt, stilted
and limited, Costellos singing still manages to convey to perfection
the rage and hurt of the boy who didnt get the girl. Pitched between
a denunciation and whine, in song after song, Costello, a scorned suitor
poisoned by bitterness, spits out each line with a focused rage that
always appears about to collapse into complete despair.
On Miracle Man: Why do you have to say that
there is always someone who can do it better than I can?
On No Dancing: Oh, I know that she has made
a fool of him. Like girls have done so many nights before, time and
time again.
On Alison: I dont know if youve
been loving somebody. I only know it isnt mine.
On (The Angels Want to Wear My) Red Shoes: Oh
I said, Im so happy I could die. She said, Drop
Dead and left with another guy.
On Im Not Angry: Youre upstairs
with the boyfriend while Im left here to listen. I hear you calling
his name, I hear the stutter of ignition. I could hear you whispering
as I crept by your door. So you found some other joker who could please
you more.
On Watching the Detectives: She looks so good
that he gets down and begs.
All that My Aim Is True lacked was a band worthy of Costello.
For the sessions, Costellos manager hired Clover, an American
band later to become famous backing Huey Lewis as the News. But before
recording My Aim Is True, Costello hired a backing band
whose playing was as intense, tight and furious as his own: the Attractions.
Over the next four years, while punk, then new wave came and went,
Elvis Costello and the Attractions released five more albums of intense,
brilliant and literate rock with enough leftover outtakes to fill a
couple more discs. There was constant touring and even a collection
of country covers. Costellos sales, though, remained modest. By
the early 80s, Costello needed to have some hits. It was time
for the angry young man to grow up.
I wanna bite the hand that feeds
me. I wanna bite that hand so badly. I want to make them wish theyd
never seen me.
from Radio, Radio
In 1977, Elvis Costello and the Attractions were a last-minute replacement
on Saturday Night Live for the Sex Pistols. But after starting
Less Than Zero off My Aim Is True as planned,
Costello brought the band to a dead stop on live television. I
am sorry, ladies and gentlemen. There is no reason to do this song here,
he said. Costello then launched into the then-unreleased Radio,
Radio.
Reflecting on the incident in liner notes written last year, Costello
still seems surprised by the controversy that resulted: I believed
we were just acting in the spirit of the third word of the shows
title, but it was quickly apparent that the producer did not agree.
He stood behind the camera making obscene and threatening gestures in
my direction. When the number was over we were chased out of the building.
The SNL fiasco contributed to keeping Costello off American
television for years. On top of that, Radio, Radio also
trashed the primary medium for getting his music heard by the public.
Programmers were happy to ignore the singer after hearing him sneer,
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin to
anaesthetize the way that you feel.
But the most damaging event of all for Elvis Costello was a drunken
confrontation in March 1979 at a hotel in Ohio. Costello, on tour to
promote Armed Forces, his third U.S. release, found himself
in a Holiday Inn bar along with the old-guard entourage of Stephen Stills.
Still the angry punk, Costello decided to be obnoxious to the hippies.
But his desire to be as offensive as possible resulted in Costello using
a racial epithet to refer to Ray Charles. It worked. The comment was
offensive by any measure, and the argument turned physical. Though Costello
claimed five of Stills road crew had attacked him and dislocated
his shoulder, other reports say it was the result of just one punch
thrown by none other than singer Bonnie Bramlett.
Costello held a press conference to apologize and has demonstrated
repeatedly over the years that those comments were simply drunken palaver
and never reflected his actual views. Drunken talk isnt
meant to be printed in the paper, was Ray Charles forgiving
comment. Still, the incident was widely reported in the papers, and
Armed Forces, which had been Costellos first release
to enter the Billboard Top 10, fell off the charts. It would be two
years before Costello returned to America. E! Online recently included
the incident on its list of top-10 Music Meltdowns.
By the end of the 70s, Costello was also having something of
an identity crisis as a performer. Punk was dead and he wasnt.
Also, the pose of loser was wearing thin as Costello was clearly now
a rock star with all of the trappings. He was even keeping company with
the famed groupie Bebe Buell (mother of Liv Tyler and a former consort
of Todd Rundgren). It was at this point that Costello began to move
the emphasis away from the attitudes expressed in his songs and instead
released two discs that showed an increased interest in expanding his
musical palette. The first was Almost Blue, a collection
of country songs produced by Nashville legend Billy Sherrill. The other,
Imperial Bedroom, was an original song cycle of lush, complex
pop wedded to surreal lyrics, which remains among Costellos masterpieces.
Neither record sold and Costello seemed adrift as to what to do next.
The well-named Punch the Clock featured an uninspired Costello,
but did produce the hit Everyday I Write the Book. In 1984,
Costello appropriately rented a business office to write the songs for
the even more workmanlike Goodbye Cruel World. This album
produced the hit The Only Flame in Town, which sounds suspiciously
like a cynical attempt to rewrite Everyday I Write the Book.
Around this time, the once worshipful Rolling Stone magazine declared
in a review that Costello was halfway to hackdom.
Costello, of course, had artistic triumphs, too. The hard-rocking Blood
& Chocolate from 1986 reunited him with the Attractions and
proved equal to past efforts. The musically varied Spike
gave him the hit Veronica, which he co-authored with Paul
McCartney at the end of the decade. But the essential problem remained
that Costellos music was increasingly well-crafted and professional,
rather than inspired.
Im certain as a lost dog pondering
a sign post. I want to vanish. This is my last request. Ive given
you the awful truth, now give me my rest.
from I Want to Vanish
Sick of celebrity, bored of banged-out garage rock and disillusioned
with the music industry, Costello spent most of the 90s out of
the spotlight. But that doesnt mean he wasnt prolific or
that he wasnt producing outstanding music. Brutal Youth
in 1994 showed Costello could still make a great guitar album, and he
could do it without the Attractions. Increasingly, though, Costello
was looking elsewhere. He taught himself to read and write musical notation
in order to pen arrangements for a collaboration with a string quartet.
The result, The Juliet Letters, showed that Costello could
engage his omnivorous curiosity to work as a worthy substitute for his
flagging inspiration and lack of any particular musical direction.
Costello followed the album with Bacharach by doing For the Stars
with opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter. A list of just some of Costellos
other collaborators in the studio and onstage over the past decade is
jaw-dropping: Paul McCartney, Brain Eno, Bob Dylan, Bill Frisell, Tony
Bennett, Van Morrison and Lucinda Williams. If no longer a force in
music, Costello began to evolve into something of an icon. He appeared
in the Spice Girls movie and had a cameo performance with Burt Bacharach
in Austin PowersThe Spy Who Shagged Me. In 1998, Costello
won his first Grammy. In 1999, as if to underline his ascension from
angry young man to pillar of the establishment, Costello, backed by
the Beastie Boys, re-created his Radio, Radio debut for
Saturday Night Lives 25th anniversary show.
Meanwhile, though he was so prolificone weekend, on a whim, he
co-authored 10 songs for singer Wendy Jamesit was hard to notice
that Costellos solo albums were becoming increasingly rare. His
last, All This Useless Beauty, recorded in 1996 with the
Attractions, was primarily a collection of older songs written for other
artists. Its final track, I Want To Vanish, seemed horribly
autobiographical. Costello concedes this in the liner notes for a re-issue
of All This Useless Beauty, released earlier this year:
I didnt want to pretend I was still 22. These words had
a different point of view than those Id written in the 70s.
These songs were about betraying your principles, letting yourself down
and being diminished. None of these lyrics contained any anger toward
the characters, only disappointment that they had settled for so little.
I could just as easily have been talking to myself.
Costellos lyrics werent the only thing that had changed
since the 70s. His singing, too, had changed, becoming deeper,
richer and more subtle. Elvis Costello was now, ahem, a baritone. His
songwriting had also become increasingly sophisticated and varied. Critic
David Wild recently commented to USA Today that Costello is not
so much setting up a standard for singer-songwritersBob Dylan
did thatbut rather living up to that standard when painfully few
even come close.
But despite the quality and range of his output during the years spent
in collaborations, until When I Was Cruel, Costello seemed
to have lost for good his great strength: a commanding musical identity.
Rather than blending influences into his songs as he had in the past,
he was instead customizing Elvis Costello music to fit into the traditions
of different genres.
When I Was Cruel is my
first record for seven years. Ive been singing so many ballads
with other people recently that I was in the mood again for some rowdy
rhythm.
Elvis Costellos introductory
notes to When I Was Cruel.
When I Was Cruel has been credited as a return to form
for Costello, but that misses the point. Despite the guitar buzz, the
disc sounds nothing like Costellos past efforts. It is instead
Costello once again sounding inspired and bringing to bear an arsenal
of new tricks: from dance samples to a newly evolved falsetto.
Costello, a stickler for definitions, even resists the word rock:
Beat music is what I call it. The production team I assembled
to help me with this was young guys who didnt have any preconceived
notion of how I should sound. People say the early albums were loud,
but I never heard that. When I Was Cruel to me is a lot
more raucous, though controlled, and for a purpose. I didnt want
this to be a garage-rock album. At the same time, I wanted that certain
energy. Im happy with the sound we got.
To play with him, Costello formed a band that included Attractions
Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve, along with new bass player Dave Faragher.
Because it wasnt the Attractions, Costello, with a wink, named
the group the Imposters, after one of his old songs. But the main attraction
on When I Was Cruel is a reinvigorated Costello. His singing
goes from a whisper to a scream, while his guitar is all tremolo and
sting. The lyrics are once again a dense forest of puns, but with a
far stronger sense of narrative than on his early music.
Costello has frequently spoken of his admiration for Dylans Love
and Theft. Like that album, Cruel shows a middle-age
artist demanding attention from a public that long ago forgot about
him. It is still too early to tell if the world will acknowledge that
Costello is back and better than ever. But this time out, Costello is
doing his best to bring the music to the people. Once contentious and
hostile with the press, Costello has mellowed. Talking to him now, though
its clear he still doesnt enjoy interviews, he is always
polite. He knows he has a monster album and he clearly wants to keep
the focus on it. Asked about his old discs, he responds tartly, I
dont listen to my old records, ever, unless I need to in order
to show someone a part.
However, he admits he did go back and listen to them recently in order
to write liner notes for the re-issues. It was an odd experience for
Costello:
I couldnt try to write the notes from the heart that wrote
the songs. That was too long ago. But I also think I have a different
perspective now, which is useful to bring to those discs. Rhino was
nice enough to give an extra discs worth of space with each release,
and it allowed us to assemble a sort of behind-the-scenes look with
things that didnt make the album. I wouldnt say going back
and listening to it changed or influenced anything about how I write
and work now.
Back to the now!
Also, Costello is once again doing the promotional rounds for When
I Was Cruel and back on the roadnot a metaphor this time,
but actual roadsplaying a string of concerts, including Vegas.
It is his first tour with a rock band in a while and the set list so
far has reflected it.
When we started rehearsing, we were doing early songs and some
things from Imperial Bedroom and Blood & Chocolate,
but then there was this gap. Weve begun putting some things in
to rectify that. We may be working on something from the record with
Burt. But it will sound very different. I mean, I am not going to do
it as a beat record. It is just inevitable with the band. Anyway, it
isnt close to ready yet, but maybe well have it worked out
by the time we get to your neck of the woods.
Costellos May 24 appearance at the Hard Rock, by the way, will
be his third trip to Vegas.
I was there the first time, before you really got started. But
when I came back on the tour in 1999 I did with Steve Nieve, it was
all built up. I love the fact that in these huge casinos you can walk
for miles without ever going outside. Quite amazing, really, isnt
it?
A quarter-century on, the 47-year-old Costello is no longer the angry
punk who was Waiting for the End of the World. Instead,
Costello has triumphed by showing the greater art is to be found in
surviving. Still cynical about life, Costello once again has found faith
in his music and that, for now, seems to be enough for him. As Costello
sings on his new single 45, an autobiographical song written
on his birthday: Bass and treble heal every hurt.
All contents © 1998 - 2002 Radiant City Publications, LLC