|
PHILADELPHIA — "I want to give you an example of uncomplicated behavior," Elvis Costello said on the second day of a recent three-night stand at the Tower Theater in suburban Philadelphia. With that, he bent over his electric guitar and slashed his fingers across the strings a few times, raising an awful racket.
The audience cheered and laughed, in on the joke: Costello was preparing to play a song called "Uncomplicated." But as we all knew, an even richer joke was the unstated one: British songwriter and singer Elvis Costello never does anything uncomplicated.
A full decade into his recording career and appearing in America for the first time in two years, Costello makes the only Carolinas appearance of his current tour at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University in Durham.
Everything, from the way Costello organizes a concert tour to the knotty, profuse lyrics he stuffs into his songs, is rife with complication.
He's playing solo this time out, performing mostly at colleges with opening act Nick Lowe. Promoters say the show will feature Costello's "Spectacular Spinning Songbook": a carnival wheel at least 12 feet tall labeled with the names of close to 50 songs. Volunteers from the audience will be asked to give the wheel a spin to choose songs.
It's no wonder Costello isn't in the Top 10 or filling a big arena. The intensity of his performances, particularly on the first and last nights in Philadelphia, was both exhilarating and chilling; professional showmanship was forever being undercut by the detailed confidences being offered in the songs.
By any measure, Costello is one of the most unlikely people to have become a major songwriter and pop star. He looks like a puffy version of the young Wally Cox. Mr. Peepers crossed with Mr. Potato Head — and whenever he's on stage, his face is coated with a glaze of perspiration, the inevitable result of both his passionate singing and the black suit with shirt buttoned tight against his throat that is his standard stage costume.
But if Costello began his career in 1976 as a horn-rimmed rocker, the most articulate punk to come out of England, the Avenging Nerd, he has spent the Intervening decade deepening his public persona in a way no other rock performer has ever accomplished. His closest parallel is Bob Dylan, to whom Costello owes the artistic freedom to stuff more words into a rock song than its melody will hold.
Costello, who has released 12 albums in the last 10 years, has moved steadily through punk, rock, country, folk and pop with the implacable rapaciousness of a tapeworm. But he's also changed his relationship to his audience in a way Dylan never did.
Alternately hostile, confiding, sarcastic, resentful and avuncular, Costello keeps his fans on their toes and tries their patience. Certainly, many people will remember the clays in the late '70s when it was not uncommon for Costello to tell the audience to shut up, or for him to stomp off the stage after a half-hour, steaming over some slight that no one could fathom.
During recent interviews, Costello has ascribed some of his behavior to the impetuosity of youth. After all he was only 21, poor — and furious about it — when he first came to prominence. That was the source of his initial appeal. In the late 170s, Costello hated the big business that rock music had become as much as many of us did. He was, more than anything else, a fan, or rather an idealized one, capable of stating his case with far more skill and precision than most fans can muster.
That's the big difference between Costello then and now: After years of resisting it, he has finally accepted the fact that he is more of a professional entertainer than a fan — he's crossed the line. And while he's still fond of indulging his fannishness (this is an obvious reason for the Spectacular Spinning Songbook a way to make renewed contact with his followers, to feel their enthusiasm on stage with him), his professionalism has freed him to create his most ambitious work.
| 
