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It used to be called "blossoming." It's what happens when an artist matures, outgrows his adolescent interests and lets talent and natural brilliance lead the way. It's when an artist gets serious, gets older.
Elvis Costello has blossomed. Once the enfant terrible and Puck's bad boy rolled into one in the English new wave scene, Costello, who took his pronomen shortly before his namesake's death and thereafter refused to change it, is reaffirming his position as the most important artist the new wave scene has produced on either side of the Atlantic. His "Clocking in Across America" tour, which he brought to the Greek Theater Friday night, is his best yet, a show brilliant in conception and execution and one of the major concert events of the year.
Compare this to previous efforts, say the Armed Forces Tour, which as its name implies displayed something of a blitzkrieg mentality. In the past, Costello has felt obligated to approach his audience — and, indeed, the U.S. — in rather the way Caesar regarded Gaul.
Notorious in the Bay Area anyway for an insulting 40-minute set at the Berkeley Community Theater in 1979, Costello accumulated more bad press in subsequent months. It all culminated in an unfortunate incident in which Costello found himself in a Midwestern bar with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett, quarrelling and eventually casting some racial slurs at some American artists, including Ray Charles.
The press, responding in kind, was quick to exploit the issue, and the incident stalled Costello's quickly rising star (though how fairly is up for debate: I should hate to envision myself in a Kansas bar with a couple of inebriated has-been artists who were probably very unsympathetic to my particular brand of rock 'n' roll).
But "Clocking In" has a jaunty tone to it, and before a packed house in Berkeley Friday night, Costello was enthusiastic, almost ebullient and, well, nice. He played for more than two hours, treating the crowd to more than 30 of his best songs, most of them with exciting new arrangements. The result was something of a "newly revised" version of his nine-album career.
The show was a spectacle. His three-piece back-up band, the Attractions, was supplemented by a four-man horn section and two backup singers in a 1930s Harlem getup. The show started with "Let Them All Talk," from the new album, Punch the Clock. Clearly, the brass section — two saxes, a trumpet and a trombone — were designed a la the Stax-Volt rhythm-and-blues shows of the early '60s. The show's garish lighting and costumery, however, lent a certain ghoulish aspect to the set-up. Macabre arms and limbs flailed everywhere and the bleating horns set the tone, resulting in the feel of, say, a dance band from hell or nightmarish TV-show themery as the band plowed through "Possession" and "Watching the Detectives."
Ironies abounded. Costello didn't play "Radio, Radio," his scathing assessment of commercial radio and one of his most compelling songs, but when his new single, "Everyday I Write the Book," came up, Costello cheerfully noted that it was "Number 44 on the Billboard charts." (Saturday, Costello went so far as to play DJ for a few hours on a commercial San Francisco radio station, and even dropped in for a while at UC-Berkeley's own KALX.)
While the songs from Punch the Clock were the chief draw for the show, it was interesting to see the premium placed on Get Happy!, a nearly forgotten LP from 1980. On it, Costello pulled off a songwriting tour de force, recording 20 extraordinary songs in a dense mix that, for the first few dozen listenings or so, remained extremely obscure — which was a bit off-putting for most record buyers.
The Get Happy! songs, however, were the highlights of the concert, all of them with slightly altered arrangements and all of them received ecstatically by the crowd. "King Horse," for example, came out with a roar — and with a "Backstabbers" intro. And "Clowntime is Over" closed the show turned into an anthem that revealed an Elvis Costello with a heart: "Who's making Lover's Lane safe again for lovers?" he wailed in a cathartic moment.
As time has gone on, Costello has subtly moved away from the devastating social commentary that marked his first few LPs. Fashion ("This Year's Girl"), love ("I said 'I'm so happy, I could die' / She said 'drop dead,' then left with another guy / That's what you get when you go chasing after vengeance") and sex ("Trying to discover my left foot from my right") have all felt the sting of his rapier-like tongue. Now, however, the dense, mile-a-minute wordplay is being replaced by straightforward love songs like "Everyday I Write the Book" and even — dare we say it — serious subjects.
Take "Shipbuilding," a landmark tune from Punch the Clock that deep in its sultry production displays a remarkably sophisticated commentary on the wartime chauvinism and economic benefits of the Falklands War — and this to a country whose press routinely ran headlines like "Up Yours, Argies!" He also found time in the exhausting show for a 90-second blitz of Madness's "Stand Down, Ronnie," and a new song, the somber, acoustic "Great Unknown."
The attentive fan must conclude that Elvis is on something of a roll. Elvis Costello happy? Stranger things have happened, so stay tuned.
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