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Everybody has one of these stories.
Everybody, that is, who was wise enough in the late '70s to be sick of rock music whether it was English spaceship operas, East Coast blue-collar posing, Midwestern beerhall b.s., Southern longhaired redneck anthemizing, or the product of what someone called the Los Angeles cocaine-and-unrequited love axis — but who still had the ears to know when something was happening. Punk had gone from a rumor to a scream, and the venerable KSAN, years away from its demise as a rock station and rebirth as a country phoenix, was mixing the new sounds from England — the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks — in with Warren Zevon and Ted Nugent. That's where I first heard Elvis Costello, and after being taken aback by the plaintive, neurotic rockabilly of "Radio Sweetheart," I ran out to buy a ticket to see him live in 1978 at Winterland.
Of course, CBS Records was not so stupid that they didn't know a good thing when they heard one (more on that later); Elvis' image — knock-kneed, bespectacled — was everywhere, and at the beginning of this, his first American tour with the Attractions, he'd appeared on Saturday Night Live (but only after the Sex Pistols had canceled). This wasn't SNL's usual fare; it wasn't Paul Simon harmonizing with Phoebe Snow (who was soon singing "Reach out and Touch Someone" on ATT commercials). Elvis performed his lady-in-the-lake psychodrama, "Watching the Detectives," and then paced around the stage like a chained dog. It was during his second number, though, that viewers knew something was really amiss. The band was only a few bars into the Oswald Mosley cartoon, "Less Than a Zero," when Elvis stopped them and launched into his anti-Top 40 screed, "Radio, Radio." Viewers were puzzled, but the show's producers were livid. A cameraman gave him the finger — this was late-night television, sure, but you were still supposed to stick with the program — and, when Elvis left the stage, an underassistant producerman told him, as if in some rock 'n' roll biopic, that he'd never appear on NBC again.
By the time I got to that Winterland show, I was psyched — as were a few thousand other San Franciscans. The Rockpile (billed as Nick Lowe) opened with a half-hour set ("Maybe they don't know any more songs," Elvis quipped of his producer's band later), and then Mink DeVille came out and rocked the joint, alternately crooning and doing his James Brown take. Willie DeVille had disdain for the English headliner, as did most American rockers. ("I could never call him Elvis," Tom Petty, another critical favorite at the time, sniffed.) Elvis' first LP had already garnered too much attention, too many comparisons, for their taste, and now critics were trying to assimilate the Aftermath intensity of his second album, This Year's Model.
It had already been a great show, most everyone could have left happily after Willie split his pants doing the "Soul Twist," but we came to see the E-Man. By the time he took the stage, I'd worked my way to the front of the crowd, and I stood transfixed for the hour or so that he played. It wasn't just the manic intensity of the band (Bruce Thomas, bass; Pete Thomas, drums; Steve Neive, keyboards), it wasn't just the beautiful impenetrability of some songs (go and ponder, even now, "On the Beat") or the instant familiarity of others ("Everything means less than zero" was sung by the assembled with only slightly less gusto than its coda: "Hey, reahyah"); it was the possessed quality of the singer, coupled with his casually cruel asides.
"Welcome to the Last Fox Trot," he said at one point, desecrating the site of the farewell concert of the Band and all of their famous friends.
I left revitalized, believing once again in the beautiful, transformative power of rock 'n' roll, its ability to tear down without offering anything in return, certainly not apologies. I was a convert, and Elvis was my messiah.
Elvis was a man of mystery then, demonstrating cool PR savvy. One of my favorite stories was one that I considered apocryphal, until I heard it confirmed by a former CBS A&R man who was there. The scene was the 1977 CBS Records convention in London. As a group of heavy hitters, including company president Walter Yetnikoff, emerged from the corporate pow-wow, they were confronted by a young man with a guitar and a mini-amp hung on his belt. "My name's Elvis Costello," he proclaimed to the startled record honchos, "and this is 'Welcome to the Working Week.'" He managed to get through that under-two-minute ditty and part of another before a paddy wagon came and whisked the troubadour away. "I'm still not sure if those bobbies were real, or whether Elvis put them up to it," says the former A&R man. It is fitting (and less than coincidental) that CBS signed Elvis shortly after the incident, and after that the stories just multiplied as the truth struggled through. His real name was Declan MacManus; he'd been a computer programmer for Revlon; he was married and had a young son. And as the reality bore down on the myth — the affair with former Penthouse poser Bebe Buell, the "blind nigger" incident — and the albums came thick and fast, each more complicated than the last ("Writing songs faster than most people can listen," CBS desperately hyped the murky and underappreciated Get Happy!), a lot of Elvis' early fans came to wish that the myth might be simpler, that those bobbies, real or unreal, had locked him away forever.
More than the showmanship, it was the songwriting that held our attention. The visions were plangent, apocalyptic, the words furious and fast like a chain saw running through a dictionary. "Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times they had," he sang, "while everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed" — a perfect ponder, with no direction home. Some questioned his sexual politics and missed the humor of lines like, "Don't wear your heart out on your sleeve, when your remarks are off the cuff." Call him a romantic humorist or a stand-up tragedian — none of the simple labels stuck.
As the years passed, Elvis continued to confound. He went to Nashville when Nashville was considered uncool and recorded an album of country standards with producer Billy Sherrill (Tammy Wynette, George Jones) at the helm. He did a straight, impassioned reading of that old chestnut, "My Funny Valentine," and a lot of his fans thought it was a joke — but not the fans who'd heard him do a live version of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition, "Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself." Elvis rode punk like a rocket, but he always knew popular music inside out. As he mellowed (a notion that fits his persona as well as a leash fits an octopus), Elvis began to sample from other people's songs while he played. At the Warfield, touring in the wake of Trust, he segued from "Watching the Detectives" into Stevie Wonder's "Master Blaster," and a few years later at the same venue he blended the macabre, Hitchcock-inspired "Tiny Steps" with "Ferry 'Cross the Mersey."
"He's not punk anymore," someone complained to me after Imperial Bedroom, but she was only half right. The music had become more complex, the words more imposing, but he was still setting out to disturb. That was the first album where he'd printed his lyrics (answering a complaint from many an English-major rock critic), and almost spitefully the words all ran together in a wild Joycean mix, a tongue uncontrolled. Where once his persona had been that of man denied a voice, now he seemed like someone who wouldn't shut up. Moreover, it was an album about (gulp) marriage, and what punk wanted to hear about that?
A few bad albums followed, along with rumors of the band's demise. Goodbye Cruel World was so lame that Neive kept his name off of it, appearing in a photo wearing a fencing mask. Critics began to suggest that Elvis take a long vacation, and he did — long, that is, for Elvis. After nearly two years of silence, King of America appeared, featuring Elvis as a bearded king, wearing a crown as phony as that in the Imperial Margarine ads. The Attractions appeared on only one song, "Suit of Lights," a semi-autobiographical meditation on the poisonous aspects of celebrity. That effort was followed with the counterpunch of Blood & Chocolate (with the Attractions) and a tour that mocked the whole of his career. On a game-show set, the band played songs from a spinning song wheel, while contestants were drawn from the crowd to choose the next selection. The proceedings made mincemeat of free will and artistic pretension, but the joke was on the cynics: Like an atomic jukebox, the Attractions played each song as if their lives depended on it, and Elvis sang standards like "Lipstick Vogue" as though they'd just occurred to him.
King of America's opening track was titled "Brilliant Mistake" — not his first Elvis Presley tribute, but probably his best. That's precisely what some fans call EC's collaborations; George Jones and Roy Orbison were one thing, even Paul McCartney could be borne, they say but the Grateful Dead? (He appeared on the Deadicated tribute album and on the cover of Musician magazine with Jerry Garcia, looking more gnomish than old Captain Trips.) But Elvis has always had his feet in myriad musical traditions. His father was a jazz musician, and Elvis was singing the praises of Frank Sinatra when scarcely anyone under 30 was; he even sent "Almost Blue" to Sinatra, in hopes he might record it. (Ol' blue eyes never got back to ol' four eyes, but Chet Baker did record the song before he died.) From the beginning, his songs sampled the Stones, the Beatles — his collaboration with Paul McCartney made a kind of sense. If any single songwriter could ever approximate the Lennon-McCartney partnership, he'd have to be a schizophrenic, and I always thought Elvis does, and probably is.
And what of Mighty Like a Rose, his latest release? Like its double-entendre title, it can be read a couple of ways. The critical line on Spike, 1989's model, was that it was half-great, and that if only Elvis put his mind to it, he could make a popular masterpiece. Mighty Like a Rose makes no concession to that thinking; there are again a few McCartney collaborations, such as the ready-for-radio "So Like Candy," but by and large the songs are difficult, best approached slowly. "Invasion Hit Parade" is one in a long series of Elvis songs suspicious of the industry, filled with Pepsi-Cola images like being pursued by "a limousine of singing rock stars and their brotherhood anthem." Elvis has always bitten the hand that feeds him — hell, he bit it before it fed him — and as some old fans drift away, he offers more and more complicated songs, more discordant music (here he makes good use of Tom Waits' guitarist, Marc Ribot, whose errant notes sound like the spring coming out of a clock).
On the album's Beach-Boys-in-hell opener, "The Other Side of Summer," Elvis poses this immortal question: "Was it a millionaire who said, 'Imagine no possessions?'" and while some Lennon fans might be appalled, I suspect the old Liverpudlian is laughing somewhere, while his body lies moldering in the grave. He knew as well as anyone the contradictions of art and success, and paid the ultimate price for his fans' expectations. It's easier to disappear into myth, to be carted away by the bobbies, than to remain sittin' on a corn flake, waiting for the van to come.
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