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Elvis Costello, an English rock 'n' roller, stood at the front of the stage at The Orpheum last night and took a moment mid-set to address an adoring crowd. "You might've heard this one on the radio in Boston..." he said and paused dramatically, "and it's called, appropriately enough, 'Accidents Will Happen.'" The crowd roared its recognition of the tune and appreciation of the jibe and the band plunged onward to victory and three encores.
In fact, the band's self-congratulatory image of itself to the contrary, there's almost nothing about the music of Elvis Costello and the Attractions that's the least bit challenging.
Hailed for the past couple of years by pundits as one of the most hopeful things to happen in rock in the 70s — a musician for our time as important and exciting as the original Elvis was to his — Costello seems about as much a threat as were Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
He looks like a bookish nurd, sings like a peevish Paul Anka, runs a band that thinks The Ventures were bad as switchblades, writes songs called "Goon Squad" and "Two Little Hitlers," shakes his fist and demands that you take him seriously as a rock rebel. It'd be strictly for laughs except that, waddaya know, somebody out there's buying his records. Armed Forces, his current album, is #11 on the Billboard sales charts this week.
Costello almost entitled the record Emotional Fascism and that tells you a lot about the man's power and appeal. His face red and fist clenched, his eyes bugged out behind his glasses, Costello bullied the crowd onto its feet at the end of the show. It was quite a demonstration, but didn't have much to do with music.
Which, finally, isn't to say that The Attractions aren't a very tight, tough, loud pop-rock band (when they aren't playing reggae), blessed with a brutally graceful drummer. It's just that the sight and sound of the humorless goofball they've got up front tends to undermine their good work.
A group called The Rubinoos from Berkeley, California opened the show. They're a lot smarter than they are exciting (deep as they are into the bubblegum-rock of Tommy James and the Shondells), and they noted, as they concluded a stone-faced parody of heavy-metal rock, that "It's not what you play, it's what you look like when you play it." Nobody knows this better than Elvis Costello, the weasel that roared.
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