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It's only been five days, but the grueling exercise known as the promotional tour has Elvis Costello slightly frayed. Every day is the same: Meet with the press, visit radio stations, talk to retailers. The locale changes, but the scenes don't — an airport lounge is an airport lounge, music-biz types ask the same questions everywhere.
Catching a quick lunch at the Swan Lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel on Tuesday, Costello is already talking like a weary veteran of the campaign trail. Dressed in a profoundly cool black leather jacket and glasses that exaggerate his buglike eyes, Costello — the guy who once sang "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused" — sounds as if he's back to being disgusted.
He's complaining about airplanes ("rather like getting on a bus anymore, which is a scary thought for me"). And interviews such as this one, done over a meal ("They always say 'and then he took a bite of his fish.' "). And the similarities he has noticed between politics and show business, particularly in light of former Sen. John G. Tower's nationally televised no-booze vow ("the mechanisms are almost interchangeable now").
No doubt about it: Declan MacManus, a.k.a. Elvis Costello, a.k.a. Napoleon Dynamite, is campaigning in behalf of Spike, his first album of new material in more than two years.
Nobody has to remind him that there was a time when he wouldn't have done promotion such as this. A student of the entire discipline of pop-music presentation, he burst out in 1977 with a look, a sound and an angry-young-man stance so fresh it couldn't be traced to any one place. It had the sophistication of Beatles-esque pop, and the raw, fitful energy of the then-exploding punk scene. In the years since, Costello, now 34, has pursued the path of the uncompromising artist, embracing as many forms of music as his muse can master. He hasn't sold out. But he has been far enough away from the public eye that even a song as irresistibly explosive as "Veronica," his new single, runs the risk of being overlooked.
To compound the matter, since his hitmaking days, there has been a change in the way songs get to the public. The increasingly tight clamp of formatted pop and rock radio has become very apparent on the promo trail, and it is another thing that disgusts him.
"It's cowardice. (The radio industry) has got more to lose these days," says Costello, a pop connoisseur whose current faves include the R.E.M. Green album and Bon Jovi's single "Bad Medicine."
"Whether it's some little group from Wisconsin, or something that none of us have heard of yet, or somebody like John Prine who is still writing these great songs and is just consigned to the oldies radio, (radio programmers) have more to lose by letting those people in because they show up the inadequacies of the format."
Costello believes that the mentality that excludes adventurous artists exists at all levels of the music industry. "It comes right down through the advertising agencies, who get on the record companies, who get on the artists, who get onto the market-research people, who get on the program directors, who get on to the DJs."
Costello knows that his tirade is not on the list of acceptable ways to tell the world about Spike, but he is onto something that genuinely makes him mad. He lets loose a hearty pub laugh. He's enjoying the verbal thrashing of easy prey.
"Money talks. In fact, it talks quite loudly — so loudly, you can't hear anything else. You can only hear that Michelob rock, or that Pepsi rock, Pepsi pop. It's the only kind of music there is these days, to most people. Ask a little 14-year-old — of course they like Whitney Houston. I wouldn't mind it so much if it were talentless people taking these big contracts because they needed the money, who couldn't provide for themselves any other way. But it's talented people who don't need the money.
"The really ironic thing is, I do firmly believe in 50 years' time nobody will remember Michael Jackson. He'll be like Zelig. He'll be like a statistic: 'He sold millions of records.' Like Rudy Vallee or something. Nobody knows what Rudy Vallee sounds like and he was like the most famous singer for a while. . . . He'll be like a forgotten kind of icon because the music won't last, because it's been superseded by another image and that image is fizzy sugar water."
The unspoken implication: that there are some pop performers whose work will be remembered in 50 years. Chances are good that Elvis Costello will be among them.
When pop historians review his output — 12 studio albums, various production assignments, the outtakes and the B-sides he has carefully compiled — they will be forced to acknowledge a number of successes. Not just the bitingly ironic, core-of-the-matter songwriting that distinguished pieces such as "Alison" and "Accidents Will Happen." Or My Aim Is True, This Year's Model and Armed Forces, the early albums that helped Costello establish new standards for buoyancy and barbed wit. Not merely the angrier songs, such as "Pills and Soap" from Punch the Clock. Or the sophisticated updates of Tin Pan Alley songform that crept in about 1982 with his orchestrally decorated Imperial Bedroom.
True, there will be the less artistic footnotes — Goodbye Cruel World, the country-standards homage Almost Blue — but there will also be evidence of grand experiments that worked. Like 1986's King of America, a collection of jaundiced love songs that pitted Costello's vividly wrought pathos against spare, acoustic-based settings that screamed Americana and featured members of Elvis Presley's rhythm section.
And then those archivists will encounter Spike.
Costello seems to know that he's got something here. It has to do with the album's songwriting — more allegorical, less woe-is-me personal. Spike is Costello looking outward, admitting that perhaps the early oh-so-carefully crafted couplets don't quite tell all.
But it's also in the album's arranging. This time, really for the first time, he has provided aural aids. Train sounds accompany "Coal Train Robberies." The clang of a ship's bell enhances the feeling of separation found in "Last Boat Leaving." Less literally, there is the rhapsodizing, lonely-blues piano provided by Allen Toussaint that says as much about betrayal as Costello's words on "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror." And the plaintive guitar strum that frames "Baby Plays Around" replicates the sound of the song's protagonist walking "the worn-out floor."
Costello views the basic rhythm tracks as "interior" playing, and the arranging stuff — which also includes bellowing brass, glockenspiel and marimba, all vital to the needlepoint-precise fabric of the songs — as the "exterior" playing.
"When you do just interior playing, it really puts all of the weight of the song on the vocals, which is what King of America was in one respect. And Blood & Chocolate was in really a whole other way — me being pushed to the limit of vocal harshness, being pushed to the very lip of the stage. With this (Spike), there's lots of angles to it."
Costello credits his experience writing the soundtrack for the English film The Courier — and the influence of longtime production collaborator T Bone Burnett — with helping him realize that his music could be orchestrated in this way, that the angles could be worked for strikingly different perspectives.
"He (Burnett) said, why don't you arrange some of the music like the film score, so that it plays commentary to the lyrics. So the interior players — there it is, a ready-made cliche we just created — are doing one thing, playing the changes and creating the structure, and (the rest) are playing commentary a little bit more. Without the intelligence of the interior players, the other stuff wouldn't have worked. It's more interrelated than many people think."
Throughout his career, the singer/songwriter/guitarist has volleyed between elemental recording and more elaborate production. He calls Spike the product of "serial spontaneity" — a series of songs that began one way, and through the contributions of the performers, ended up quite differently.
"If recording it totally live creates one type of chemistry, then this creates another. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other, but this method was necessary to achieve these results. Quite often, layered recordings follow pretty much a stock journey up through the rhythm section, through the pianos and guitars, until you get to the angelic voices at the top of the picture.
"We didn't do that. We didn't have a plan. At times it was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture, but that made it a lot of fun as well. You never knew what was going to loom large in the final mix — Roger McGuinn playing guitar first on 'This Town,' or Paul McCartney playing the bass last."
(Though Costello prefers to write alone, he says that his collaboration with McCartney, which yielded "Veronica" and "Pads, Paws and Claws," as well as five songs McCartney may use on his forthcoming effort, was a rewarding education. "That song 'Veronica' is clearer for having two heads work on it. I'd been taking too much for granted in expecting people to follow my internal logic, you know?")
Costello says that the layering method enabled him to put the Dirty Dozen Brass Band right in the front of the mix on "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," where he felt it belonged. It also led to the inclusion of another element — voices hollowly intoning the word dead — over the chorus of "God's Comic," a song sung by a dead entertainer now in heaven.
Though the album has the feel of a music-hall production, Costello says that he tried to avoid musical cliches. While he sought to evoke moods, he wanted them to be contemporary moods. "I don't like that time-capsule notion, re-creating things. It's like 17-year-old kids trying to do rockabilly. They don't even know where the beat goes. They've got the dress right, they've got the shoes on, but they're not breathing the same air as Charlie Feathers, there's no way they can sound totally the same. I listen to all types of different music, obviously, but how much creeps into your stuff is hard to ascertain."
Spike has been getting generally strong reviews, and has begun to climb the charts: After just two weeks, it jumped to No. 6 on Billboard's compact-discs chart, and has risen from its debut at No. 98 on the pop-albums chart to No. 70.
As for a tour with the ensemble that contributed to Spike — 32 musicians in all — Costello says he doesn't think it'll happen. Everybody has careers, and schedules. And he dreads what it might sound like.
"You've got to give some credit to Kevin Killen as the engineer-producer. There are musician collisions on this record that just wouldn't work in a concert hall. The effect might be one of organized chaos, or some wonderful disaster. But it could be a very unwonderful disaster. If you try to put uilleann pipes and the brass band together onstage, it wouldn't necessarily work just because it did on record. He really achieved some remarkable
balances of instruments.
"So I think solo is the way to go," Costello says. "You can jump off the stage. It can be as rock-'n'-roll as you want it to be. It was like that in the beginning, with Elvis and Jerry Lee. The notion of big, loud guitars and millions of drums is something that's been built over the last 20 years. That's rock, which to me is rather boring. Rock 'n' roll is a lot more exciting, you know — it swings, it moves, it's a human thing. Rock is inflexible, immovable. There's nothing more impersonal than a rock."
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