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You are what you remember, whatever salient moments have accrued. Whole years might be discounted, while a few incidents — colored and bent through the prism of your mind — stab through like the light of long-dead stars. Dante was 9 years old when he caught a glimpse of his Beatrice; old man Kane died whispering the name of his boyhood sled. Whatever the atomic clocks say, all seconds are not created equal.
I don't remember the year I saw Elvis Costello and the Attractions at the Kingfish in Baton Rouge but surmise it must have been 1980 because a reliable friend says he saw them at the Warehouse in New Orleans that year. It wasn't the first rock show I ever attended, but it might have been the best, or at least the most influential, concert I ever saw, heard and felt in my chest.
By the time of that show, Costello's debut album My Aim is True was already 2½ years old. Costello had released two albums with the Attractions since that first record, This Year's Model and Armed Forces. I can't remember whether I bought the first or second album first, but by the time the third was released I was a major fan, actively trying to write songs after Costello with the same kind of pub-punk strained through an autodidact's paperback library feel, if you get what I mean: More Formica than leather, something like a leaner Dylan meets Ray Davies, snarly as William Zanzinger's tongue, but in brisk, poppy four-four time.
It was with the devotion of a forger that I studied those three albums and quickly understood that Costello's musicality was beyond me. His key and chord changes fit my ear but not my fingers; beneath the rattling surface there seemed to be a deep, silent structure, the sense of aptness that attends genuine art. (As with the Beatles, Costello's songs sound simpler than they are.) You could simulate a Costello song, you could cop the unusual vocabulary and dramatic tension, but this was no garage band amateur noisemaker. Genius.
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