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Who needs drums? Who needs bass? Who needs piano? Certainly not Elvis Costello, who is on a do-it-himself college tour. Tuesday night at C.W. Post's Tilles Center, he proved that if you can sing a song convincingly and strum a guitar urgently, everything else is frou-frou.
From the first notes of "Accidents Will Happen," his opening song, you could see why Costello, despite his predilection for melody, was affiliated with the punks when his music hit these shores in the late 1970s. He stroked his guitar with such emphatic fury that it seemed only kryptonite could weaken the strings. And he spat out his carefully crafted lyrics with such controlled hysteria that a word like "love" sounded like a curse.
Without a band, Costello was able to rewire his material, with spontaneous arrangements illuminating new angles. On "Mystery Dance," Costello sounded like prototypical '50s greaser Gene Vincent with a lit degree. "Watching the Detectives," originally done as a brooding reggae, was a breathless, double-speed joyride played with caveman simplicity and brutality. The new "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," which features soul horns on his current album, Spike, was presented with a country twang.
Costello also made witty free associations and joyful juxtapositions. During "God's Comic," Costello's mordant vision of a crude stand-up jokester meeting his maker, he digressed with snatches of the Monkees' hits "I'm A Believer" and "Last Train to Clarksville." During the cutting but poignant "New Amsterdam," Costello managed to segue into Lennon and McCartney's "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," a splendid mix-and-match. More literally, he broke away from his new "Pads, Paws and Claws" (a Costello-McCartney collaboration) to include Little Willie John's r & b classic with a similar lyric theme, "Leave My Kitten Alone." The humming melody of "Radio Sweetheart" seemed to inspire Costello to jump into the scat bounce of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said."
A combination of buoyant spirits and clenched-teeth intensity made Costello look a little like the wired, mischievous 6-year-old Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon fame. And the mischief never seemed to stop.
Just when the concert seemed "over" with a rattling, electric guitar version of "...This Town..." and the Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," Costello came back with his opening act (and longtime record producer) Nick Lowe for a pair of duets. The first, "(Marie's the Name) His Latest Flame," was from the Elvis catalog — Presley, that is. "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding" was, as Costello said, "a song Nick wrote and I stole."
Still ebullient, Costello added a postscript to the show that was a kind of musical Wheel of Fortune. Dressed in a hideous velveteen jacket in the guise of "Napoleon Dynamite," one of many pseudonyms Costello has used over the years, he played a diabolical talk show host while a large, broken satin valentine was wheeled onstage. Inside. a number of compartments were printed strips with the names of "deadly sins." Members of the audience were invited up to choose a sin at random; then they could request a song.
The first young woman drew the "deadly sin" of "Awesomeness" and requested "Alison"; another such sin was "Trump" (the builder-real estate mogul is a current obsession for Costello), and the song requested was "Pump It Up," which was accompanied (for the only time that evening) by a pre-recorded backing track.
With one foot in the '90s and the other in the '50s, opening act Nick Lowe is the perfect complement to Costello's fierce modernism. Highlights included his signature tune "Cruel to Be Kind," the marvelous neo-doo-wop "Heart," a savvy tune with a kind of Creedence Clearwater boogie called "Refrigerator White," and "So It Goes," a tale of rock-star wanna-be-ism just as shrewd now as it was a decade ago.
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