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“The Baked Potato? What’s that?” I ask the young woman at the Elvis Costello concession table. She’s sporting a black T-shirt bearing that message, along with the crude outline of a spud and the words “Est. 1970.”
She doesn’t know, she says, but Pete the drummer gave them out to everyone in the crew earlier. “It’s his birthday,” she adds.
It’s not the only Baked Potato T-shirt we’ll see Tuesday evening at Artpark in Lewiston. The sound guy at stage left, he’s got one. So does the opening act, singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins, when she comes out to harmonize four songs with Costello in the middle of his 100-minute set. And, of course, there’s the one adorning Pete Thomas, back there at his drum kit.
Thomas is one of the two members of Costello’s original band, the Attractions, who are present in his current group, the Imposters. The other is the man all in red at the keyboards – Steve Nieve.
I spend the whole show wishing I could hear Nieve better. Even when the sound improves after the opening “Accidents Will Happen,” he’s still buried beneath the blare and blaze of the guitars.
But what guitars they are! We think of Costello as a brilliant songwriter and a quirky vocalist (he even sings into a white bullhorn in “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”), but tonight he’s shining as an instrumentalist too. Perhaps the presence on stage of that other guy in sunglasses has inspired him to step up his game.
That’s none other than Charlie Sexton, the Texas guitar whiz we so admired when he was touring with Bob Dylan. In a lineup that’s powerful to begin with, he supercharges it.
I’m ready for a set that sprinkles selections from Costello’s latest album, “The Boy Named If,” between slices of his considerable catalog of old favorites, but there’s no “Farewell OK” or “Paint the Red Rose Blue.”
Instead, he does a loose harmony with Atkins on the cheating song, “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” (“I wrote this song about a guy who’s ascended and fallen,” he says). Even though I binge-listened to the album over the weekend, I’m at a loss to pick out others, although now that I glance over the back cover of the CD, I spot a couple more.
Otherwise, there’s a generous helping of hits – surprise selections like “Green Shirt” from the “Armed Forced” album back in 1979 and righteous reworkings of familiar favorites, the most spectacular being an extended guitar-laden version of “Watching the Detectives.”
The cloud-covered sky is dark when Costello introduces the band late in the show and leads the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to Pete. (He’s 68, a mere 16 days older than Costello.)
From there, it’s not far to the greatest Elvis Costello song that Costello didn’t write – “What’s So Funny (‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding)” – a signal that the show is over.
But not quite. Everybody takes their places again for “Alison,” with Costello explaining how they didn’t want to play this breakthrough hit ballad when they first visited Buffalo many years ago because it would make everybody think they were nice guys and because “I didn’t have enough fingers to play the introduction.”
This time, thanks to Charlie Sexton, he does. It’s “Alison” plus. Tucked into the middle are strains of the Motown hit “This Old Heart of Mine.” In a night full of delights, it’s the cherry on top.
When it’s over, I go to my phone and, amid a long list of recipes, there’s the answer to my original question about The Baked Potato. It’s in Los Angeles, where Pete Thomas lives these days. Studio City, to be exact. It’s a famous jazz club on Cahuenga Boulevard, right off the Hollywood Freeway.
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