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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.
Dressed in a 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 ("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'").
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. He'll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow for a solo concert at the A.J. Palumbo Center at Duquesne University. Nick Lowe will open.
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. 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 muster. He hasn't sold out. But he has been far enough away from the public eye that even a song as explosive as "Veronica," his new single, runs the risk of being overlooked.
To compound the matter, since his hit-making days, there has been a change in the way songs get to the public. The 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 favorites include the R.E.M.'s Green album and Bon Jovi's single "Bad Medicine."
"Whether it's some 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, (programmers) have more to lose by letting these people in because they show up the inadequacies of the format."
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.
"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.
"The really ironic thing is, I do firmly believe that 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'... 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 out-takes and the B-sides he has carefully compiled — they will be forced to acknowledge a number of successes. Not just the bitingly ironic 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. Or the sophisticated updates of Tin Pan Alley songform that crept in about 1982 with his orchestrally decorated Imperial Bedroom.
True, there will be less artistic footnotes — Goodbye Cruel World, the country-standards homage Almost Blue — but there also will be evidence of grand experiments that worked. Like 1986's King Of America, a collection of jaundiced love songs that pitted Costello's pathos against spare, acoustic-based settings that screamed Americana.
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.
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