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NEW BRUNSWICK — Elvis Costello confuses me. When I was in high school, there were two kinds of guys: nerds and hoods. Nerds wore glasses, baggy pants and ties and were thought of as brains even if they had failed kindergarten. Hoods wore leather, swore more than they had to and acted tough even when they were scared stiff. The two seldom hung around together.
Which is why Costello is a mystery. He dresses like a nerd and sings like a hood.
You wouldn't think a guy who looks like Woody Allen and wears a sharkskin suit could stir up much of a storm behind a guitar. Yet Costello performs with an exuberance that puts him in the front rank of rock singers. His appearance last night at the Ledge was a rousing and intermittently moving experience. More than once his delivery reminded me of Springsteen at his caustic best. More than once there was a glimpse of the old Dylan — the Dylan of pegged pants and newly discovered electricity — within his studied, stork-like motions. The music is tough, biting rock which grabs you as much by the insistence of its beat as by the earnest, if sometimes garbled, lyrics of the singer.
That, of course, is what early rock was all about: It played with your guts, not your mind. No glitter, no fancy lights, just good, hard music. This new Elvis, no less than the original, does such material well. There were a few moments last night when I was lifted 20 years back and saw the face of a Jersey punk doing the slop in the East Franklin firehouse. Not a mean achievement for somebody in a sharkskin suit.
But the "raw energy" of early rock is not enough to explain a figure like Costello. This is not, after all, 1958, and he is no 14-year-old. Wearing a suit in 1958 may have passed for eccentricity; today it can only seem calculated. But for what effect?
When Costello hushes his band, glares at the audience, points fingers and snarls, "I'm not angry," you know damn well he is, and it touches something deep in you, something beyond the power of the Muzaking of our culture ever fully to submerge. The ghost of Buddy Holly, maybe, or the first signs of a new savage indignation that might, like the music of the first Elvis, lay open some wounds and dab some healthful vinegar into the price of our success.
But then you see the suit and the glasses and you know they're not accidental, and you have to ask yourself whether this gangly eccentric too is some promo wizard's dream. Costello sang the title cut from his Columbia album My Aim Is True with a mournful fervor that was all the more moving because he prefaced the song with the announcement that he would never again sing it in public. Why did he say that? Was it a tease, a lurid secret shared? I felt honored and cheated at once. The man retains such an air of enigma it's hard to tell the carrot from the stick.
Willy Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, the Boston group who started the show, are easier to figure. Willy cavorts with just the adolescent snottiness you expect from punk rock. The band is very good. At their best they evoke the early Stones, and manage to do what I assume all such groups want to do: release the ragged invincibility of rock, and so give the audience a look at its own dirty laundry.
Costello is more subtle, indeed nearly opaque. His style of punk seems about the freshest, least calculated music I've heard in a long time. But whether it's from the guts or the ad room, I don't know. It got us on our feet, but so far the dance remains a mystery.
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