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LOS ANGELES — "Well, shake it up baby, twist and shout..."
While a raucous "Twist and Shout" was just one of the surprises from Elvis Costello's concerts, the tour he launched with five shows in L.A. represents a determined effort to shake it up, to stir things up, to turn a rock concert into a roller-coaster rather than a pat performance.
Each night of the engagement had a different theme, a different flavor. The audience had no idea who might pop up to play with Costello. With audience requests and the "Spectacular Spinning Songbook," Costello often had no idea what he'd be singing next. Risking chaos, he was attempting to kick some life into the rancid corpse of rock 'n' roll.
"It may be a complete mess," said T Bone Burnett, Costello's producer on the King of America album and his partner in the Coward Brothers, one of the featured acts on the tour. "I know it's out of control, and hopefully that'll be good. It's brave; it's taking a chance."
The tour will begin a three-night stand Sunday at the Riviera Night Club, 4746 N. Racine. Although the schedule is subject to change, Costello is expected to play Sunday night with the Confederates, a band comprising many of the American musicians who played on his King of America album earlier this year. The concert might also feature Costello solo and some Coward Brothers duets.
Monday's show should unveil the "Spectacular Spinning Songbook," a Wheel of Fortune-style device that will turn the concert into the rock 'n' roll equivalent of a game show. The Attractions, his longtime British band, will provide the musical backing. Tuesday night, Costello and the Attractions will play old favorites and new material from the Blood & Chocolate album.
There's no question that Costello is making things harder on himself. It takes a lot more work to rehearse with two completely separate bands, and a lot more money to bring both on the road. It's a lot easier to compile a standard set of hits and play the same stuff night after night.
Financially, it would make more sense for Costello to take the money and run, to play larger arenas in cities across the country, rather than limiting the tour to a half-dozen American cities, with extended engagements in small halls in each. Costello would have to play the Riviera for a week and a half to equal the crowds he drew during previous area appearances at Poplar Creek and Alpine Valley. The shows throughout the tour have been quick sellouts.
One could argue that the tour represents a promotional ploy, the ideal way to focus attention on both King Of America and Blood & Chocolate, Costello's very different releases from 1986. Such an emphasis on commercial cause-and-effect, however, would seem at odds with the spirit of the tour, and with Costello's entire career.
After all, this is a guy who is refusing all interviews, which would turn the tour into a bigger promotional deal. He is balking at making the obligatory visits to radio stations playing his records and sponsoring his shows. In Los Angeles, he began a minor war with the Los Angeles Times, after the newspaper complained about the tour's "no photographers" policy and published a positive review that was a little less glowing than he might have wished. Manager Jake Riviera told the Times that the shows were not "media events," and that "most newspapers and magazines in this country aren't worth reading."
So if he isn't making things easy on himself with this tour, he isn't making any media friends, and he's costing himself some money, why is Elvis Costello doing it? It may be an old-fashioned reason, but I think he's doing it for fun. It's more fun to set up camp in selected cities than to rush through a series of one-nighters. It's fun to play with a variety of musicians that you respect. It's fun to keep things fresh night after night, to make the shows loose enough that neither you nor the audience knows what to expect. It's fun doing something different.
"Each night will be given over to a different mood or idiom, featuring acts comfortably familiar and disturbingly strange, both internationally famous and locally obscure," writes Costello in the tour program, under his current guise of "Napoleon Dynamite." Although there's no way to predict what musical surprises the Chicago concerts might feature, here's what I heard in Los Angeles.
SHOW ONE: "Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated," exclaimed Costello of his reunion with the Attractions. Of course, those rumors were started when Costello recorded most of King of America without his longtime band, said he wanted to change his name back to Declan MacManus, and expressed dissatisfaction with most of his albums. It seemed that the former Mr. Costello wanted a fresh start.
All that aside, the launch of his first tour in two years presented the return of the Costello of old. "Oh, I just don't know where to begin," he sang in the concert-opening "Accidents Will Happen," and then proceeded to lead the band through a bunch of old favorites at a break-neck pace. "No Answer," "You Belong To Me," "Lip Service" and other rarely performed selections from the 1970s revived the sound of Costello and the Attractions in all their post-punk fury. With Steve Nieve hunched over his keyboards like a mad rock 'n' roll scientist, the music showcased the edgy, aggressive, emotionally brittle side of Costello.
Although the attempt at letting audience requests determine the last half of the show should have resulted in an even looser, more lively performance, what might have sounded exciting in theory became chaos in concert. Everybody shouted at once, while some were handing printed requests to the stage. Rather than test themselves with unfamiliar requests, Costello and band mainly limited themselves to the tried and true, to such expected demands for "Alison" and "Everyday I Write the Book." The result was a strong show, but a slight disappointment after all the pre-tour emphasis on special guests and unusual surprises.
SHOW TWO: The first hour was Costello solo, performing a mixed bag that included the Hollies' "King Midas and Reverse" and the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty in Pink," as well as non-album obscurities such as "Heathen Town." The highlight was a taut, bare-bones rendition of the new "I Want You," with the last verse performed as chilling a capella.
For the encores, T-Bone Burnett joined Costello for Coward Brothers renditions of "Ring of Fire," "Tom Dooley" and "Ragged But Right." The Confederates took the stage as well, featuring former Elvis Presley sidemen Jerry Scheff on bass and the legendary James Burton on guitar, along with organist Mitchell Froom and drummer Jim Keltner. David Hidalgo from Los Lobos added vocals to "Lovable" and accordion to "American Without Tears." The concert marked Costello's performing debut with these musicians, and he thanked the audience for attending "our first paid rehearsal."
SHOW THREE: Here's where the tour began paying off on all its bets. The Confederates returned for the second night, and the show threw all predictability out the window. Much of the material was either new, outtakes from King of America or obscure covers. The musical mood mixed Stax/Volt soul with jump blues and country weepers. The sound of the show was as distinctly American as the performance with the Attractions had been British.
As Costello and the Confederates powered their way through "That's How You Got Killed Before," "The Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line" and Mose Allison's "Your Mind Is On Vacation (And Your Mouth Is Working Overtime)," the band and the audience seemed to have found their way to heaven's own honky-tonk. Few of the concert favorites usually associated with Costello were performed, but I didn't hear a single complaint on the way out.
SHOW FOUR: Thirty-eight songs were included on the gigantic "Spectacular Spinning Songbook," the piece de resistance of Tour '86. Round and round it goes and where it stops, nobody knows. Will it be Prince's "Pop Life" or Skeeter Davis's "End of the World"? Will it be "Clowntime Is Over" or "PLU" — recognized by Costello fans as "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding"?
For the first half of the show, a tuxedoed John Doe from X acted as master of ceremonies, inviting selected audience members to "come on down" and give the wheel a spin. For the show's second half, Tom Waits approached his duties like a carnival barker. "Each one of these songs corresponds with deep places inside each one of us," he growled. Both Doe and Waits shared a song with Costello, and three of the four Bangles joined him for a brief acoustic set. There was a go-go cage to the side of the stage, where the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs took a turn with one of the wheel-spinners.
The entire evening was ruled by inspired lunacy, with Costello himself in particularly animated form. As if to soothe any ruffled feathers among the Attractions, after his two nights with the Confederates, he introduced them as "the best band in the world." And they played like it.
I had to return to Chicago before the fifth and final Los Angeles show, which was expected to feature most of the new Blood & Chocolate album. After four nights of Costello, I was sorry to miss the fifth. Rather than diminishing the impact of his music, the repeated exposure left me more impressed than ever with Costello's range, his craft and his daring. The two bands emphasized completely different sides of his artistry, while the interaction with the audience in the intimate theater gave a fresh edge to the most familiar material.
Because of its hit-and-miss nature, this isn't a tour for the casual Elvis Costello fan, the one who wants to hear the songs he knows from the radio. This is a tour that is best appreciated through obsessive commitment, through investing the time and money to go all three nights, or five nights, or however many nights he's playing in a given city. Then again, Costello has always appealed most to the most obsessive fans. As this tour makes plain, he's a musical obsessive himself.
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