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Elvis Costello may have been pushing his luck by choosing the name of the late king of rock 'n' roll, but it's hard to knock Costello's audacity at this point. In the past half-decade, the former Declan MacManus has not only emerged as the young lion of British singer-songwriters but seems closer than ever to clinching the crown as the king of '80s rock.
On Saturday night, Costello — who rarely charts hit records or enjoys airplay on mass-appeal rock radio — drew a standing-room-only audience of some 4,500 to the Open Air Theater of San Diego State University. It was one of the biggest concert crowds to swell the campus this season, as Costello and his three-man band, the Attractions, responded with more than two hours of extraordinary music.
The show ended only after four encores which themselves amounted to a miniconcert of such vintage rockers as "Slippin' and Slidin" and "I Feel Good" along with some unrecorded new material.
By the time Costello sent the standing, shouting, dancing crowd home with the pure pop positivism of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding," there was no doubt that San Diego had witnessed one of those rare rock-communal moments wherein artist and audience can't seem to get enough of each other.
Obviously, Costello has reached this pinnacle despite his initial image of an angry, latter-day version of Buddy Holly. Slight and bookish-looking, with close-cropped hair and those thick-framed Holly eyeglasses, Costello is an unlikely idol.
Brandishing his electric guitar like the defensive weapon of a threatened soldier, his movements are jerky, pained, inward. But the quirky invention, keen edge and unpredictable melodic charm of his music reaches out powerfully, making a vital connection between his style and substance.
Mainly, Costello's songs are anthems of romantic disillusion, domestic disappointment, public parasitism, but they are fueled by an exquisitely bittersweet sense of romantic, domestic and even public possibility. At best, his songs strike forcefully yet forgivingly at our most contradictory human impulses.
By now, Costello's music has grown warmer, richer in mood and sophistication, as tinged by jazz as his early material was touched by punk. His gray sharkskin suit and black shirtings were as much the costume of an elegant, time-warping crooner as of the strangely poetic rock 'n' roll hit man he once seemed to be.
Indeed, the songs from his new album, Imperial Bedroom, are beautifully and often painfully drawn vignettes of a marriage on and off the rocks. The most effective of these tunes — "Kid About It," "Shabby Doll," "The Long Honeymoon," "Pidgin English" — caught Costello at his most expressive.
It took him some time to loosen up his vocals, but by the time he did, his whispery, tough-and-tender voice was the most evocative instrument on stage —flashing from the unlikely smoothness of Bing Crosby to the scabrousness of Bob Dylan or the urgent wail and gnash of Bruce Springsteen. Though Costello's music evokes a remarkable grab-bag of pop influences, the signature is unmistakably his.
That signature was no less evident on the material from his earlier albums with which he interwove his new songs — alternating between old and new, savage rock-out and elegant slow-down, ceaselessly changing pace and, in the process, stunning his audience with the sheer variety of his output. For example, on one of his earliest tunes, "Alison," the SDSU crowd punctuated the delicate love ballad's poignant silences with whoops and squeals of appreciation.
On the menacing reggae-rock of "Watching The Detectives," Costello sparked an ovation with his dramatic pauses. On more recent tunes such as "Watch Your Step" — a gentle yet ominous cautionary tale — or "New Lace Sleeves," with its tensely beautiful poetry of seduction. he cast a memorable spell. Yet the down-to-earth emotions of a country-and-western ready-made, "Wondering," or the good-time rock of "Little Sister" proved that Costello, like Bruce Springsteen, can make non-original numbers his own with equal, crowd-rousing ease.
A good deal of credit for Saturday's crowd-rousing goes to Costello's Attractions, who are shaping up as one of the greatest sections in rock history. On Farfisa organ, Fender Rhodes and synthesizer, Steve Nieve is a keyboardist of protean talent. He can follow the staccato musings of Costello's guitar with telepathic ease, assault with the bracing stride piano of a Jerry Lee Lewis, or cushion the sound with rich atmospheres, mimicking everything from string sections to French horns.
Carrying the rhythm are drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas, who perform with the sort of drive and conviction that could only be inspired by music of such inspired scope as Costello's.
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