Review of concert from 2004-03-03: LA, CA, Royce Hall - with Steve Nieve
- Chris Klimek

Portrait of the Artist, All Grown Up

Concert review: Elvis Costello with Steve Nieve
Royce Hall, UCLA
Wednesday, 3rd March 2004

by Chris Klimek

Elvis was irreducibly himself at UCLA’s Royce Hall Wednesday night, crooning his way through one of the most remarkable catalouges in pop: his own. Though his current tour is more-or-less a promotional outing for North, his collection of Only the Lonely-style downbeat ballads, he stayed true to his in-concert M.O., performing an expansive set that drew from nearly every chapter of his songbook without once succumbing to routine. Ironically, it was a boor’s demand for one of his seminal sorta-hits that conjured the “angry Elvis” persona he has spent the last 20 years of his quarter-century career trying to escape. The anonymous jerk bayed out the title “Radio Radio” as the final chords of “Fallen,” one of the delicate North cuts, were still echoing through the hall. “Amazing that we had to come all the way to Los Angeles to find an arsehole like you,” Elvis told the heckler. He quickly regained his composure, if not his calm, subjecting the man to several more barbs in the show’s second hour, all of them far wittier than the first.

Perhaps relishing the taste of confrontation, Elvis segued into a lengthy reading of God’s Comic that included venomous riffs on — in ascending order of aversion — Cher, modern country music, and Dick Cheney. (The veep was in the same hotel as Elvis on the last tour stop, in Florida.) “This song proposes a view of the afterlife that is not, strictly speaking, theologically correct,” he told us. “I checked with Mel Gibson.” It was a remarkable performance, proving yet again that Elvis does funny as well as he does bitter. Later, when introducing a solo ukulele (!) version of “The Scarlet Tide,” his Cold Mountain song that lost its Oscar last weekend to Annie Lennox’s Return of the King number, he scowled, “Fucking Hobbits.” After a moment’s pause, he reproached himself: “Now that’s no way to talk about Phil Collins.”

At the age of 50, Elvis is more compelling than ever as a live performer, but his powerful pipes and superb material are only part of the reason. More important than either of those is his willingness to take risks in front of an audience. He makes up a new set list every night. Any of the literally hundreds of songs he’s written may be heard, not to mention the two or three left-field cover versions he typically includes. (Encores for Wednesday night’s concert included “The Dark End of the Street” by Gram Parsons — a real country singer — and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Yes, the Rodgers and Hammerstein one.) He has so many songs in his head that he couldn’t possibly rehearse them all, which means that individual performances are not always perfect. This is a small price for an audience to pay to avoid the tedium of being able to guess what three-quarters of the set will be before the band has played at note. Rock and roll has never been and should never be about perfection. It isn’t synchronized swimming. It isn’t Miss Saigon. It’s about bringing genuine emotion to this performance, on this stage, for this audience, right now.

Of course, there are those — audience members and some artists, too — who believe that buying a concert ticket should simply be a more expensive corollary to putting a quarter in the jukebox. To which I reply that anyone who is only interested in hearing an artist’s played-to-death singles should stay home. CD players and iPods — not to mention Clear Channel FM playlists — give the listener absolute power to prevent accidental exposure to something new. The difference between watching an entertainer and watching an artist is that the artist will require you to surrender that comfort. Part of their art is choosing which songs they will play for you, and in what sequence. This is especially true of pop musicians like Costello, who have dared to evolve past the songs they wrote 25 or 30 years ago. There will always be singers who have no ambition beyond financing their alimony payments through helping after reheated helping of the same half-dozen or so hits they wrote in their twenties. And I like the Rolling Stones, for crying out loud.

It’s a two-way street: I’ve seen Elvis end shows after 90 minutes when the audience didn’t respond demonstrably to what he was doing. At Royce Hall last week, the enthusiastic crowd prompted him to stretch the show to two-and-a-quarter hours. I’ll bet that even the “Radio Radio” guy went home happy, if he had the balls to stick around. For his third encore set, Elvis traded in his acoustic for a Stratocaster. Despite a technical snafu that required a walk-on appearance from his guitar technician, he landed the one-two punch of “Pump It Up” and, yes, “Radio Radio” — a song that in 1978 prophesized the homogenization of the Clear Channel era with chilling accuracy. After that he bid us goodnight with a tender “Dark End of the Street,” coaxing the audience to sing the refrain along with him. When one loud-voiced guy near the front rows sang the opening line of “Alison” — not at all badly, it must be said — Elvis just waved him off.