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In the past year, three new faces have appeared that are challenging the established legion of musicians and comedians.
Elvis Costello, Steve Martin and Warren Zevon all share a common element: they have taken by surprise an entertainment industry, loaded with "celebrities" who are content to dance at Studio 54 and provide fodder for gossip columnists, rather than to play for the people who made them well-known in the first place.
Elvis Costello has emerged from the anonymity of his former computer programming job to record his two critically acclaimed albums, My Aim is True and This Year's Model, in just a year's time.
With his horn-rimmed glasses, wiry hair, and ice cold stare, he give the appearance of a physics professor with designs on your little sister.
Costello's music is by no means complex: his roots are in the Mid-Sixties English music scene with an added "roller skating arena" organ that makes his songs so readily identifiable. What makes him far more interesting than his country's rock and roll plutocrats (the Stones, Rod Stewart, Elton John) is his willingness to admit frustration and hatred without sales in mind.
Steve Martin came along when politics can no longer carry the bulk of a comedian's routine. His specialty is creating a character who makes an idiot of himself without seeming to. He is also an accomplished juggler, magician, banjo player and uses a wide variety of props on stage including bunny ears, an arrow through his head, and balloon animals.
Martin will tell jokes that other comedians won't touch because they are too obvious or just plain silly, yet he pulls them off with great adroitness. Performing at the Hartford Jai Alai Fronton, he told the audience that his girlfriend has "the nicest pussy." Then he went into a rage and condemned the audience for associating everything he said with sex. He concluded by saying. "by the way, that cat was the best #ck# I ever had."
Warren Zevon has come into his own after having "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me" and a few of his other songs recorded by Linda Ronstadt. Unfortunately, he has already been given a distorted image by A.M. disc jockeys who play "Werewolves of London" incessantly.
Zevon comes from a group of Southern California musicians that includes the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Karla Bonoff and others. His songs are full of bizarre, violent characters like "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," a Norwegian mercenary in the Congo war, and love stories that never end quite right as in "Accidentally Like A Martyr." What he lacks in his husky voice, he compensates with an urgent combination of electric guitar and his choppy piano playing style.
His band, called "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" plays nothing but the essential in concert, as if their next meal depends on that night's show. The saxophone and female chorus that make the lyrics to "Excitable Boy" seem to deceptively benign are gone production finesse replaced with muscle that reveals the kid's true brutal tendencies.
Zevon has a stage manner that reveals the existence of his song's characters in himself. He finds his glass Stolichnaya vodka empty between numbers and signals a roadie who walks past Zevon's piano, refilling the glass without breaking stride. This brings a chuckle and applause from his audience and he replies, "I never get applause for drinking around the house." Now that Costello, Martin and Zevon's time has arrived, it does look bad for some of the old guard that no longer record or tour with regularity.
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