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The most exciting shmooze this week is that Bob Dylan attended a recent X gig in California. He was so impressed by the show he hunted down the apartment room where X's songwriters Exene Cervenka and John Doe were staying. Apparently the three talked about songwriting for some time, and Dylan expressed how taken he was with X guitarist Billy Zoom's playing.
Couple that with Dylan's reported retreat from born-againdom and his interest in the Clash, and suddenly his future seems a lot more interesting.
Barring whatever might happen next for Dylan, there is nobody in pop music with as much open ground before him as Elvis Costello. Who can guess what his next album will sound like? It's not that Costello is particularly likely to vault in a new direction. But there is nobody making vital music right now who has taken advantage of so many possibilities — and left so many available doors open.
Playing just over a week ago at Rochester's Auditorium Theater, Costello and his back-up band, the Attractions, were indefatigably fierce. On his last tour Costello acted as if he was settling up old scores on stage. He was ferocious but also unfocused. His hostility didn't cut cleanly like a knife; it bludgeoned even the devotees. In Rochester he was wary, but deep-down he just wanted to deliver.
Costello is the most thrilling and farsighted pop music figure to come around in at least 10 years. I'd say he has become as indispensable to rock 'n' roll as Sly Stone or Buddy Holly or Bruce Springsteen. And it's indicative of the moment that someone with such a knack for writing knowing, irresistible songs relegates himself and is relegated if not to pop music's Siberia, at least far from the center of attention.
I get accused of being pessimistic. When I was in New York a few weeks ago and talking late one night in a bar with a critic friend, he told me his worries. Virtually all new releases, he said, were lousy — he found nothing exciting. "I mean, I can't listen to anything that came out in 1977 anymore, it gets so depressing to hear all that stuff now," he said.
Well, I think things are going far from swimmingly for pop music. But I had to disagree with him. A steady stream of good records is coming out now, even some great ones — anybody heard the new Bunny Wailer? It's what happens to all these commendable releases that is the real problem.
There are plenty of artists out there making art. But I'd wager their art has less a chance of mattering than it did 10 years ago, Nearly every release, good or bad, comes out today with quotation marks around it — stamped "new wave" or "fluffy pop" or "disco" or "angry" or etc. The science of plate tectonics studies the pieces of the earth's crust — all land formations — as they swim over the earth's liquid core. They bump, move apart, sometimes rendezvous for a time before detaching: Nothing stays together. Today's popular music is like that. Every band is hovering above a core: cooled-off manifestations of down below, where everything begins. What is down below? An audience that can agree on a record, an artist. It's there somewhere, but it's hard to see from any present vantage point.
The pop audience is in confetti-like disarray these days, and it won't change tomorrow. I'd wager there's never been such blatant segregation of black and white music since rock 'n' roll started. Rock fashions have never been so ridiculous, the whole point seeming to be to say "I'm not like you; don't you wish you were like me?" Lester Bangs' prediction that someday soon there will be a one-to-one ratio of bands to fans, with each fan fighting to find a band that nobody else knows/cares about, doesn't seem like a joke.
This is where Costello comes in. Describing a recent change of heart, he told Rolling Stone: "We weren't actually achieving any change if we weren't selling more records than REO Speedwagon. That was the way I felt: that we were comfortably contained within the business, instead of having some dramatic effect on the structure of the business. You'd just be another pawn." Coming from the man who called Western Civ a "goon squad" and who still sings "I want to bite the hand that feeds me ... I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me." It's an important admission. Pop musicians live to matter to everyone. And that's still so today, even if topping the charts is a remote possibility and an ambiguous achievement.
Costello knows it. Many post-punk bands on both sides of the Atlantic opt for reaching a smaller, more specific audience. They take their cues subliminally from blues musicians, who sang of life and death stuff but for whom garnering a mass audience was out of the question. Such bands work on the fringe of popular culture, using it when convenient while being routinely wary of it. But Costello, having grown up on big band music, Otis Redding, Motown and the Beatles never left behind the dream of striking gold in the mass market. He doesn't want that pink Cadillac the first Elvis wanted from the beginning. But he'll do anything to not be ignored.
"The family in crisis," a German writer said in the '30s, "produces the attitudes which predispose men for blind submission." That is the theme of Imperial Bedroom, Costello's latest album, and of much of his music. Tyrants and servants come out of homes, get made at home. But those homes — and fundamental social units like families, friendships, loves — are corrupted by our society of tyrants. Home and the society around it have something to say about each other. That the fights for power in both personal and social situations are connected is the common denominator of Costello's music.
And that, along with a bitterness that can still be a shock, is not very pop. Costello stands on the fault line. He wants to connect, his music and his outpouring of honesty are keyed to reach people in a big way. But he wants to speak to a world he isn't happy with. And his rejection of the world will always put him — as an artist, as a human being — on the fringe of things.
So. What will Costello do next? Will he continue apace, packing places bigger than the Auditorium Theater (which he didn't quite sell out)? Is the excellent Imperial Bedroom, which cuts against the grain of this season's play lists, going to land anything on the charts? Will the restraint and generosity of that album remain important to Costello? Will he even want to be as big as REO the next time around? Stay tuned. This is a story worth following through every turn and change of heart.
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