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Elvis Costello shared the bill with the Rubinoos (Rubin-news) in a concert at Kiel Opera House Tuesday night. Most often there's good and bad in everything. This concert was no exception, but the audience loved it all.
Costello emerged on the pop music scene about the time of Elvis Presley's death. When I saw the first album, I thought it was a bad joke. But Costello is no joke. That debut album did reasonably well as did his second release, This Year's Model. His current album, Armed Forces, is in the top 10 on the charts, and be recently was nominated for a Grammy Award as the Best New Artist of 1978.
The performer and his band looked like math students unsuccessfully trying to figure out a problem. All were expressionless throughout the concert. But they were loud.
LOUD!
Costello's singing on record is understandable. In concert his words are muffled in the volume. He introduced only "Oliver's Army," went from one song to the next with hardly a pause, and managed successfully to hide his voice in the musical noise of his quartet. Consequently, there was a certain sameness in everything he performed.
The Rubinoos — Jon Rubin on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Tommy Dunbar on guitars and vocals, Royse Ader on bass and vocals, and Donn Spindt on drums and vocals — were loud, too, but everything they played sounded different. And they were full of good humor.
In fact, the entire time they were on stage I had the feeling that they were putting on the audience; that their part of the show was a satire on rock music.
Dunbar is a real character, who will stare at the audience and then begin to vibrate as if he somehow were wired into his guitar. In one instance he did a fine tongue-in-cheek imitation of Ted Nugent, sliding across the stage on his knees, picking his guitar with his teeth, playing the electric rifleman intent on wiping out the first four rows of the audience.
The Rubinoos opened a capella with a hand-clapping tune that had words that made no sense and the vocal sound effects of birds squawking. That seemed to put them and the audience in a good mood, and nothing seemed serious from then on. Everything played sounded a bit like something from the past, and yet each song had a modern emphasis in the way it was performed.
A few of the songs — "I Think We're Alone Now," "Driving Music" and their current single, "Hold Me" — gave them the opportunity to be a bit serious. No chance. They were having a good time, and so was the crowd.
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