|
Elvis Costello, the angry young man of his generation, is now a revered songwriter's songwriter who possesses a poet's talent to say so much with so few words.
Wednesday at the Supper Club, Midtown's swank concert hall (which could double as an Egyptian tomb), Costello played a two-and-a-half hour concert that showcased his stylish, energetic soul with a balanced program of his best-known and almost unheard songs.
The show was an intimate acoustic evening with E.C. strumming and singing the melody and lone Attraction Steve Nieve pounding the percussions and easing grace notes out of a Steinway baby grand.
Most of the evening's many tunes were played slowly, deliberately placing all of the emphasis on lyrics, as if Costello was saying, "Listen, the words have meaning." In spite of that, and a plea over the house PA that requested the crowd to be mindful of chitchat, there was plenty of annoying chatter during the concert.
Costello — dressed comfortably in black slacks, a lifeguard-orange shirt and an open leather vest — was relaxed as he sang, told rock 'n' roll war-horse stories, recounted dreams (in which God asked him to explain modern rock) and even did impressions of the other Elvis. He seemed to be having as good a time at his concert as the fans.
Although the songs were tapped from almost every part of his career, Costello returned again and again to mine from his disc All This Useless Beauty. The title track was wonderful, especially hearing him sing the chorus in Italian, but E.C. was incredible during a song he wrote with Aimee Mann, "The Other End of the Telescope."
That song's poignant lyrics — such as "Words that turn out to be big as smoke, a smoke that disappears into the air, there's always something smoldering somewhere" — in many ways seem to describe the striking yet elusive nature of Costello's poetry.
Of the oldies, the crowd, as always, loved "Alison" (his first single, from 1977) with the encore version of "Watching the Detectives" being the showstopper of the evening.
Costello punctuated "Little Atoms" with a story about an interview he termed "an interrogation" with a young German man who accused E.C. of destroying pop music and stealing from the German national anthem for the chorus of "Atoms." The German was right (there are four swiped notes from the anthem) and even righter when he said Costello has done his best to destroy pop — the mush-minded kind that is. What he didn't say was that E.C. has also done his best to replace it with intelligent songs that aspire to speak eye to eye with the listener, rather than talking down to us.
| 
