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It was musical chairs on the concert scene Wednesday night. The Elvis Costello/Nick Lowe concert was moved from Navy Island in St. Paul to the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis. The King Sunny Ade/Black Uhuru show set for the Orpheum was transferred to First Avenue. And Afrika Bambaataa, scheduled at First Avenue, was canceled. If interested parties hadn't read a paper on Wednesday or listened to the right radio stations, they might have been thoroughly confused and disappointed.
Costello ticket holders were befuddled when they showed up at the Orpheum expecting a general-admission concert, and they were handed reserved-seat stubs. What happened to the seat you were going to save for a friend who was coming late? Sorry, you get your assigned seat when you walk in the door in exchange for your general admission ticket to Navy Island.
Costello and Lowe made the best of a bad situation. After Lowe's fun exploration of pop-meets-rockabilly, Costello gave a thrilling, albeit uneven, performance that showed his various personae.
When he first surfaced in England in 1977, Costello was the angry, young new-wave rocker. He has mellowed over the years, sampling Motown-influenced soul, country music and, in the '80s, Cole Porter-styled pop. His retrospective approach Wednesday made a strong argument that Costello is popular music's preeminent wordsmith.
In fact, the three encore selections he offered without his band made fans jealous of those who had seen his brief solo tour earlier this year. To be able to dwell on his tongue-twisting, often brilliant lyrics doubles the appreciation of his art.
With his raw voice and thick British accent, it's often difficult to decipher his words when he's accompanied by his band, but the crowd seemed to know all the words from the records anyway.
Costello used hand gestures to try to bring life to a few offerings from his new album, Goodbye Cruel World, but the material just didn't measure up to his best stuff and served only to slow down what had started as a spectacular show.
He began with old favorites including "Watch Your Step," "Mystery Dance" and "Shabby Doll." But he has reinvented these songs musically, allowing Steve Nieve's keyboards to add new shades and colors to the canvas. Costello's band, the Attractions, picked up the tempo on "Watching the Detectives" and Nieve created a spacier feeling than on the recorded version while Costello's voice played off the band with all the sophistication of a jazz crooner instead of the rock screamer who originally recorded the song seven years ago.
The man's musical instincts are amazing, his growth stunning. He can move from an acerbic jab at star-making in the ballad, "Worthless Thing," to a metallic treatment of the Byrds' teen dream classic, "So You Want To Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," with both the musical and lyrical transitions making complete sense.
Sometimes, though, he suffered from his own ambition. For instance, the arrangement on "Clubland" backfired in its busyness, and a country blues tune didn't connect with the rock-oriented crowd even though it may have been Costello's most penetrating and controlled vocal of the night. This 29-year-old former computer programmer has mastered the right heartache of a country singer. That effort and the jazzy sophistication on other selections begin to suggest that the quality of Costello's singing — always expressive but invariably coarse in the past — is making progress toward catching up to the quality of his songwriting.
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