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It has to be said that my opinion of Elvis was much elevated by his recent appearance on the invaluable Tiswas. For a man not renowned for his forthcoming charms he came across a remarkably friendly and warm and generally void of those dark neuroses we hear so much about. He even threw buckets of water at the cage, though, and I think this might have been significant, it was noticeable that he didn't want to get his clothes wet.
Aha: now this might tell us everything we wish to know! Elvis the recluse, Elvis the neurotic thinker, Elvis with fists flailing and jaw set firm and solid, Elvis the victim of romance, and now Elvis the Kevin Keegan of rock; but he wouldn't launch himself at those buckets. The Elv image had gone a long way to brazenly de-mystifying itself, but there was still a part of it that wouldn't let go, a part of it that stayed indifferent and taut, perhaps the part that ran circles round you on "Oliver's Army" and still didn't tell you a thing. Elvis stayed hidden and a little smug.
With Get Happy!! the process is the same, and the red-herring clouds and mists are just as frustrating. The album title for start, unless I've missed a signal irony, seems to be Costello and producer Lowe's banner-attempt at crass, keeping in with the "liberated" Ska mood of the times, jollification. A scream of "who gives a shit" to match the squirming, half-convinced smiles on the sleeve and the groovy-fun notes on the back: hey let's get happy and daa-ance! Give anything two exclamation-marks and it'll make ya feel good, sort of thing, which is blundering and Godforsaken and just serves to trip you up before you've had the chance of uncovering the almost covert genius of this record.
I hope I've missed that irony because it's the difference between a "classic" pop album and a sadly-flawed attempt at a "classic" pseudo-soul album. The labels are playful but worth investigating.
For the moment I'll pump for Get Happy!! with flawed, half-formed revamped soul leanings which seem to gradually and wonderfully vanish as the album progresses (in turn establishing it as that unbeatable creature, an lp that starts off well and keeps on getting better and better until it touches brilliance). All across the first side (and this is a record of two distinct sides) there's the feeling that you are listening to a very good album with an unquestionably Great Album trying to struggle free; the marvelous point is, that this happens almost from the beginning of the second side of music, where Get Happy!! soars to a pinnacle of Costello's combined creative force, by the end leaving the listener quite breathless.
For this is a special album, one that confirms a number of points that badly need confirming at the present time. It shows that a relatively established artist, one who is assured of as many easy sales as Costello is, can, and indeed should still, be able to cut it after three lps and a large slice of high-flying controversial gumph under his belt. It provides standard pop music with the first, significant nudge ahead that it's lacked since Elvis's first album (and I'm sure the Jags and countless others will take note). It lifts Elvis beyond the state of stagnant-perfectionism wherein he appeared to be lodged with the lifeless, unfairly acclaimed Armed Forces, which saw the Elv head too close to perfect, computerised self-parody for comfort, and it wouldn't have been too precipitous, considering the stolid and seemingly unshakable coldness about Armed Forces, to perhaps have anticipated on the next album even further adventurings into those grey, unfriendly areas where Costello's considerable talents concentrated on hiding and being clever for no other apparent purpose than hiding and being oh so clever.
That Get Happy!! (that title really is beginning to annoy me) doesn't fall into those traps is a credit to Costello himself, the still criminally taken-for-granted skills and soul of producer Nick Lowe, and … perhaps a small piece of purest luck. As I've said, from the title down the album is ostentatiously "modern" in the sense that Costello seems overtly affected and stimulated by last year's tryst with the Specials. The record's initial thrust is like an active acknowledgement of the Specials' iconoclastically uninhibited verve and acute sense of "fun."
The result is that for a time on the first side we hear echoes and distinct but distant resonances of Elvis C.'s Soul Album, a chilling thought in itself, unfortunately, it seems abandoned soon after it found itself alive and bouncing inanely on vinyl.
The remnants shine unremarkably forth on only one or two tracks. The deftly named but spastically executed "5ive Gears In Reverse" is the worst offender, a too self-conciously Detroitsville, oily rocker, all mean and smooth and terribly disposable compared to the treats in store later. "Beaten To The Punch," likewise, is too retrospective in feel and appeal, though there's a good song, circa-the-first-album's manic muscle, trying to get out there somewhere "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," the (nudge, nudge, we know what this reminds us of!) opener you're familiar with, and I like it a lot as well while realising it's the merest whisper of the more closely-focussed gems that come after it.
No: it's how Costello USES the "modern," self-consciously liberated beat that matters more than how he can parallel its energies. The point is it's provided Costello with a change of emphasis, it's allowed him to re-evaluate his music, it's changed the focus away from the manicured ideal that was far too easily achieved on Armed Forces and brought it back to the wild, unshackled world of ideas, where perfection is not a thing easily grasped through a cushioned completeness of sound and diligently boring pap textures, but through a reminder that it's often the gaps that say most and that variation and a real, hard-arsed kind of soul count too, like it was on the first two albums.
The effect is both somewhere between My Aim Is True and This Year's Model, and somewhere way beyond those two records, reflecting the first's brute muscle and the second's tempered sophistication while shifting the emphasis and extending the scope to whole new areas. It's the scope that Costello has acquired that's most noticeable.
Take the second track, "Black And White World"; the feeling is hard and shakey like anything on My Aim and the band kicks like it hasn't kicked live or on record for ages. Then move to "B Movie," a quivering skeleton of a song that nearly topples over more than once, a soft-shoe shuffle where the theme of intangible romance is imaginative and pointed and after a while even moving: "just a soft sob story/ I don't want the woman to ignore me/ b-movie that's all you're to me.."
Sure, the theme is nothing new for Costello: what is new is the scope of angles he treats the theme with, and the way he now comes up with a telling phrase or two that suddenly turn three quarters of the twenty songlettes on display into little scraps of pure emotion, something that for me he never did the whole way through Armed Forces.
We switch to "Motel Matches" ("boys everywhere fumble with the gadgets/ I struck lucky with motel matches."), which again is only "clever" as a starting-point before it moves silkily towards Gram Parsons at his most acerbic, his most helplessly bitter. "Temptation" is a sign of what's to come: "This kid livin' in conditioned limbo/ he drinks in self-defence." The theme seems to be alcoholism and defencelessness and the song trades-in a delicious "Green Onions" keyboard-line, which like so much of Side Two is particularly effective through subtle understatement and that clipped, flowing brevity featured throughout the twenty tracks. 2 minutes, 32 seconds that are quite immaculate.
The first side closes with "Riot Act," a silky lounge-lizard melodrama complete with sprawling strings and lonely piano-ing. Here it's clear for the first time that Costello and Lowe are having their own kind of party at last, forgetting any "Soul Album" designs for a truer, more spontaneous attack upon every favourite musical nuance that comes to mind, and using each as a base to build something new and invigorating for Costello's flickering, smouldering toil with his emotions. Oh "Riot Act," astonishingly enough, the underlying nuance seems like Gary Brooker, and the notion's given credence later when the antique "Whiter Shade Of Pale" organ riff crops up.
It's the second side, however, that holds all the aces. The big, Spectoresque bounce and sparkle of "Love For Tender" shows us how far Costello's come with that "soulful" germ of an idea. Here the band use the old Stax/Tamla structure for themselves, whereas on "Beaten To The Punch" it sounded the other way round. "Love For Tender" has the sound mastered and Costello's band revel in the room and space they find.
"Opportunity" is an exquisitely understated piece of social observation, stringing together the Elv's facilities for wit, irony and anger ("the government collector / I'd like to be his funeral director.") with a direct and telling pertinence ("this is your big opportunity/ whatever you do don't turn around.").
"The Imposter" shows an unobtrusive Specials influence in its seething dynamics, and the subject is misconstrued male roles ("all the boys are girls at heart.") Hereafter comes a stunning rush to the end, encompassing what are probably Costello's finest songs yet, beginning with the scintillating simplicity of "Secondary Modern," where female sexual roles are now the centre of ideas, and swerving into the album's highpoint, the crushingly effective "King Horse."
This song is what "Oliver's Army" should have been: the little man in the vastly hopeless romantic situation, and he knows it, and it provides the song with muscle and a drive that comes from self-seeing and an exuberant self-confidence in the face of familiar heartbreak. A marvellous song.
The same short fuse burns on; "Possession" is velvety and moving with a wonderfully loose and unfussed feeling about it; ditto, "Man Called Uncle," where the whole invigorating spontaneity of Get Happy!! is summed-up in the closing, carefree drum-clatter; "Clowntime Is Over" has that familiar feeling of aggressive assurety, relayed in a sudden jerk, at the end of each verse with the words "somebody's watching while the others just talk."; "New Amsterdam" steps outside the album completely with a few minutes of acoustic plaintiveness that draw parallels closer between Get Happy!! and Van Morrison's Moondance, where likewise on the very penultimate track the whole mood switched with "Everyone" (and Morrison used a similar white-soul base as the album's starting-point); "High Fidelity" pounds the album to a close with a rising chorus and a shimmying, irresistible rhythm track. Outstanding!
By the end, Elvis does reach the transcendent, "classic" heights of a Morrison or a Mitchell or a Dylan, and the feeling is still fine and simple and uncluttered, like for the first time Costello is relaxed and unfettered by external demands. It feels good to listen to.
Get Happy!! is a welcome wonderfully-flawed creation: Get wet (!!!) has been more like the symbolic attribution of that creation. Like the sleeve notes say, "Get It?"
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