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The most striking thing about much of the New Wave rock 'n' roll is how old some of it sounds. Rock, like blues, is a limited form with room for nearly endless variation within its confines. After rejecting current pop conventions, a backward-looking band has 30 years worth of masterworks to plunder, so it's pretty odd to see so many of the New Wavers returning to those arid years in rock, 1959-63. For example, Elvis Costello and (to a lesser extent) Mink DeVille, both at The Orpheum Thursday night, live there, but manage to transcend their sources, too.
Lead singer Willy DeVille came out wearing a dark, ill-fitting three-piece suit, a pink shirt and a skinny tie. His hawkish features were framed by sideburns and his hair was slicked back in a big Elvis pompadour. He looked real sharp ... for 1962.
Willie has a good voice. Like Springsteen and South Side Johnny, he comes on with that anguished Drifters/Ben E. King romanticism, a similarity heightened by the moonlit urban melodramas he concocts. Instrumentally, he has the band going after that massive Phil Spector wall of sound — the grease worked up by keyboards, guitar and tenor sax sweetened with castanets and tambourines.
After he sang "Guardian Angel" (from the new album Return to Magenta) — jacket slung over his arm, smoking a cig, the very image of young Frank Sinatra — Willy kicked the band into "Cadillac Walk," a raunchy boogie of which John Lee Hooker would've been proud. "Soul Twist" was more good grease and "Just You and Me" recalled James Brown and the Famous Flames. You've got to hand it to this guy just for trying and one thing's for sure —the boy can scream. Get him a good drummer (like the one in Elvis Costello's band) and then stand back forever.
Meanwhile, there were times when his drummer was all that propped up the headlining Elvis.
Musically, he's very weird, nurturing a special fondness for the bleached-out forms used by teen idols like Dion and Frankie Avalon and the rest (with that cheesy Sixties organ adding a taste of Gary Lewis and the Playboys).
The fact is, Elvis looks like a nurd, too. One DeVille partisan was unkind enough to suggest to Geraldo Rivera's on-the-spot ABC-TV cameras that the boy reminded her of Woody Allen. Never mind. He's the angriest jerk you've ever met, a punk for real, and it's precisely that anger (and his great Keith Moon-like drummer) that transports his teen-time plaints.
He certainly comes over much stronger live than he does on his records, and particular standouts were "Less Than Zero," "Pump It Out," "Radio, Radio," and "I'm Not Angry." It all made for an exceptional, if reactionary, evening of rock 'n' roll.
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