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Elvis Costello — just mention the name and music writers knock over chairs to get to their word processors. And no wonder: He's got everything we pant to write about: lyrics you need a Cliff's Notes to translate; a personality nobody can predict; a certain danger.
He's small, with a Napoleonic bad attitude to match. And he's been practicing — Costello has been seriously honked off in public for 13 years now.
And hey, is this guy versatile or what? Just slap your eyes on Elvis' new look. Is it Deadhead Elvis? Or Elvis Gibbons, ready to get down and boogie ZZ Top style?
Whatever, it's a 180-degree turn from the literate king of the British punks, the wired-up, short-cropped, knock-kneed guy on the cover of his explosive 1977 debut My Aim Is True.
From the beginning, Costello seemed destined to outlive punk. His impact upon pop culture is likened to another literate wise guy, Bob Dylan, as both have had an influence on music and society out of all proportion to their sales figures.
On the heels of his new Mighty Like a Rose disc, his 13th recording in as many years, Costello is on the road.
Back in his punk years Costello had a burning secret. He was a closet Deadhead.
According to his own account, his musician father used to bring home records, and once toted home a slew of San Francisco psychedelia. Costello listened to it all, and nursed a then-unfashionable yen (it was, after all, Britain) for the Dead.
As Costello told a British writer earlier this year: "(The Grateful Dead) always gave me a good feeling. In the early '70s I'd listen to their records and it was like getting secret messages from the other side of the world... you're cheating yourself if you can't get past the image of the Deadheads."
But even during his prince of punks days, Costello always had a refreshing antipathy toward whatever was expected, politically correct, or, trendy.
How else to explain his late '80s collaboration with Paul McCartney? The first album a 9-year-old Costello (then Declan MacManus) ever bought was a Beatles record, but by the late '80s there was nobody less hip than McCartney. Not only was he musically prolific, but he was widely and erroneously believed to be a mush merchant who, in the Beatles, was only partially kept in line by John Lennon.
Thus when Costello and McCartney started writing songs together, the conventional wisdom was that the acerbic Costello was filling in for McCartney's dead and equally acerbic songwriting partner.
Costello blasted that analysis. Although many Lennon-McCartney songs were collaborations, just as many were written entirely by one or the other. (Their song publishing pact dictated that all of their songs were credited Lennon-McCartney).
It's interesting that on the song "The Other Side of Summer" on Costello's new album, he sings "Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions?'"
Was Costello defending Paul?
"John Lennon wrote some wonderful songs," Costello told The New York Times, "but 'Imagine,' which has been so sanctified, was one of his worst. He didn't think it all the way through."
The Costello-McCartney sessions did yield a critically praised album for McCartney. More surprisingly, it served Costello well, too, giving him his first Top 20 song in years, "Veronica," from 1989's Spike album.
The new Mighty Like a Rose album contains two songs co-written with McCartney: "So Like Candy" and the "running around with your pants off" raver, "Playboy to a Man."
The new album has drawn a few nasty reviews. For someone who always was the critics' darling (partly because, a cynic once noted, he looked like most rock critics), this was something new.
The music business, Costello snapped to Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, "is ugly, crass and demeaning."
"Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm doing this for," Costello said. "But I know there are people out there who really take things I sing to heart.... When it gets down to just the record and the headphones, just you and the listener, that can't be quantified."
On his current tour, it's anybody's guess what he'll play on a given night. His record company doesn't presume to know.
"I think he's mixing it up," said his Warner Bros. publicist, Karen Moss, with a laugh.
In San Francisco recently, Costello concentrated on newer material, performing half the songs from Mighty Like a Rose, including "How to Be Dumb," "Everybody's Crying Mercy" (And They Don't Know the Meaning of the Word), and "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)." Older songs included "Veronica" from 1989's Spike and the wonderful, lilting "Temptation" from 1980's Get Happy! album.
As usual, no matter what is on the musical menu, longtime fans
know they're in for an interesting if bumpy ride — although Costello is strangely modest about his skills as a musician.
Apart from his live shows, fans can look foward to an upcoming segment of MTV Unplugged, airing on July 10 and 14.
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