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As Pete Townshend now knows, it’s better not to die before you get old. As Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe gear up to play Levitt Pavilion on Tuesday, August 23, the two musicians could be Exhibits 1 and 2 for the musical upside of sticking around and claiming “Baby Boomer” as one’s generation. I first saw the two as a teen in 1978, with maybe 200 in-the-know music nuts at Norfolk, Virginia’s Chrysler Hall. Rockpile, with Lowe on bass and guitarist Dave Edmunds sharing lead vocals, kicked off its set with what remains a G.O.A.T. opening song: Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land." With its opening line of "Left my home in Norfolk, Virginia," the tune was a rock-and-roll shoutout to our little seaboard city that illustrated a dream idea for many of us in the audience. The band’s joyous, frantic set of neo/retro roots-rock songs started a lifelong appreciation for Lowe’s many gifts (including a knack for choosing songs to cover and producing early albums for Costello, Graham Parker and others).
Costello then knocked over the crowd with a short and furious set that showcased treasures from his mind-blowing debut, My Aim Is True, and snarling, twitchy songs from his then-new release, This Year’s Model. The record’s glorious attack on the awful fluff that mucked up the airwaves at the time, “Radio, Radio,” was one of his set’s highlights.
Forty-four years and dozens of recordings later, Costello has built on the wordplay, songwriting and performing depth of his early records. His plaintive voice has as much clutch and punch as ever, and his magic with words still thrills. Yes, his anger has mellowed. In addition to creating a handful of all-time-great rock records, he’s grown to be a freakishly good practitioner of numerous other genres, from country and soul to standards (with the mighty Burt Bacharach) and New Orleans-influenced art with the legendary Allen Toussaint. His new recording, A Boy Named If, rocks.
Lowe’s songs (including his biggest hit, “Cruel to Be Kind”) still hold up as bright and clever, and most have gained a little flattering weight over the years. Sure, “The Basher” now plays with less speed and more restraint than before. But he has been “aging gracefully” for a couple decades now, and has pulled off a very successful effort to (as he has said in a previous interview) to “use the fact that I'm getting older as a distinct advantage.” At 73, he’s at his song-smithing peak, and his most recent albums are considered his best by many longtime fans. (Bygone fans include Johnny Cash, who covered Lowe’s haunting dangers-of-drinking song, “The Beast in Me.”)
And while the Who and other aged rockers deal with the awkwardness of playing old songs that don’t fit old age, Lowe and Costello are largely exempt from such troubles. (Okay, “Mystery Dance” could be a little ill-fitting for Mr. Costello.) Lowe now plies his craft with a band of men in suits and lucha libre masks (the stellar Los Straitjackets, his backing band). And in recent and expertly rocking live-in-the-studio clips he filmed for the BBC with his current band, the Imposters, Costello performs dressed in what look like his pajamas. (It takes a lot of candles on the cake to get away with that, right?)
The double-bill tour Lowe and Costello are on is a bucket-lister for those who were around for the arrival of punk, new wave and all that followed. Better still, this is the only double bill in which both acts can play their version of one of the greatest — and, sadly, still very timely — songs of all time: “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” A questioning masterpiece penned by Lowe and transformed into an urgent anthem by Costello, the song is still a crucial query for people of any age who are “searching for light in the darkness of insanity.” Where are the strong? Who are the trusted? Two of them — who have fit that lofty description for a very long time — will be on the Levitt stage Tuesday night.
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