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Elvis Costello — just mention the name and music writers knock over chairs to get to their word processors. And no wonder. He's got everything we pant to write about: lyrics you need a Cliff's Notes to translate, a personality nobody can predict; a certain danger.
He’s small, with a Napoleonic bad attitude to match. And he’s been practicing – Costello has been seriously honked off in public for 13 years now.
And hey, is this guy versatile or what? Just slap your eyes on Elvis’ new look. Is it Deadhead Elvis? Or Elvis Gibbons, ready to get down and boogie ZZ Top style?
Whatever, it’s a 180-degree turn from the literate king of the British punks, the wired-up, short-cropped, knock-kneed guy on the cover of his explosive 1977 debut, My Aim Is True.
After all, long hair, the Grateful Dead, funky hats – that kind of thing, was supposed to be swept away with the new order of music in the late ‘70s, when the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten snarled that the hippie dinosaur bands were history.
But from the beginning Costello seemed destined to outlive punk. His impact upon pop culture is rightfully likened to another literate wise guy, Bob Dylan, as both have had an influence on music and society out of all proportion to their sales figures.
Bret Easton Ellis took the title of his misguided suburban fable Less Than Zero from a Costello tune; the owners of the ClubLand chain of nightclubs admit they lifted their name from his song Clubland.
On the heels of his new Mighty Like A Rose disc, his 13th recording in as many years, Costello performs Sunday at the Fox Theatre.
But back in his punk years Costello had a burning secret. He was a closet Deadhead.
According to his own account, his musician father used to bring home records, and once toted home a slew of San Francisco psychedelia. Costello listened to it all, and nursed a then-unfashionable yen (it was, after all, Britain) for the Dead.
As Costello told a British writer earlier this year: “(The Grateful Dead) always gave me a good feeling. In the early ‘70s I’d listen to their records and it was like getting secret messages from the other side of the world… you’re cheating yourself if you can’t get past the image of the Deadheads.”
But even during his prince of punks days, Costello always had a refreshing antipathy toward whatever was expected, politically correct, or trendy.
How else to explain his late ‘80s collaboration with Paul McCartney? The first album a 9-year-old Costello (then Declan MacManus) ever bought was a Beatles record, but by the late ‘80s there was nobody less hip than McCartney. Not only was he musically prolific, but he was widely and erroneously believed to be a mush merchant who, in the Beatles, was only partially kept in line by John Lennon.
Thus when Costello and McCartney started writing songs together, the conventional wisdom was that the acerbic Costello was filling in for McCartney’s dead and equally acerbic songwriting partner.
Costello blasted that analysis. Although many Lennon-McCartney songs were collaborations, just as many were written entirely by one of the other. (Their song publishing pact dictated that all of their songs were credited Lennon-McCartney).
Furthermore, Costello explained, like many songwriters, McCartney worked best with somebody else in the room as a sounding board – not necessarily as a nasty antidote to Silly Love Songs.
It’s interesting that on the song The Other Side of Summer on Costello’s new album, he sings “Was it a millionaire who said ‘imagine no possessions?’”
Was Costello defending his new buddy, Paul?
“John Lennon wrote some wonderful songs,” Costello told the New York Times, “but Imagine, which has been so sanctified, was one of his worst. He didn’t think it all the way through.”
The Costello/McCartney sessions did yield a critically praised album for McCartney, his first in a decade. More surprisingly, it served Costello well too, giving him his first Top 20 song in years, Veronica, from 1989’s Spike album.
The new Mighty Like A Rose album contains two songs co-written with McCartney: So Like Candy and the “running around with your pants off” raver, Playboy to a Man.
The first single, The Other Side of Summer, joins a bouncy Beach Boys melody with Costelloian lyrics: “The sun struggled up/another beautiful day/ and I felt glad in my own suspicious way…” On the accompanying video, Costello, looking like a seedy Irish beachcomber/poet drives a passel of California beach girls around in a convertible.
Shockingly, for the fist time in modern memory, the album has drawn a few nasty reviews, most notably in the New York Times. For someone who was always the critics’ darling (partly because, a cynic once noted, he looked like most rock critics), this was something new.
Always accessible to journalists in the last few years, suddenly Costello has started to clam up. He talked very briefly to the New York Times, gave a longer interview to the Chicago Tribune, then refused any more interviews.
The music business, he snappted to Greg Kot of the Tribune, “is ugly, crass and demeaning.”
Furthermore, he feels that at this stage of his career he knows what he’s doing, unlike “most people in the music business and the press.
“Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing this for,” Costello said. “But I know there are people out there who really take things I sing to heart…. When it gets down to just the record and the headphones, just you and the listener, that can’t be quantified.”
Costello has always had a personal, if slightly demented relationship to his fans. During a recent tour he brought a huge “wheel of fortune” on-stage. A fan would be invited up to spin the wheel, which would determine which song Costello and the band would play.
On his current tour, it’s anybody’s guess what he’ll play on a given night. His record company doesn’t presume to know.
“I think he’s mixing it up,” said his Warner Bros. publicist, Karen Moss, with a laugh. “On some gigs he won’t do any old stuff, then at the next show he’ll do a lot of old stuff. So who knows?”
In San Francisco recently, Costello concentrated on newer material, performing half the songs from Mighty Like A Rose, including How to Be Stupid, Everybody’s Crying Mercy (And They Don’t Know The Meaning of the Word), and Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over). Older songs included Veronica from 1989’s Spike and the wonderful, lilting Temptation from 1980’s Get Happy! album.
His touring band, the “Rude 5,” consists of Larry Knechtel on keyboards, Marc Ribot on guitar, Jerry Scheff on bass, and former Attraction Pete Thomas on drums.
As usual, no matter what is on the musical menu, longtime fans know they’re in for an interesting if bumpy ride – although Costello is strangely modest about his skills as a musician.
As he said in the March Musician: “You know that stylized authority (Jerry Lee Lewis) has? He’ll play from levels of intensity from frenetic to completely maniacal, but it will never change that authority. I don’t have that; I basically steal from wherever I can. And create song structures. All I know how to do is write songs, really. I can’t properly play an instrument in any expressive way.”
As a critic…. Costello is a great guitar player. After all, who can forget the intro to his early cut Watching the Detectives, on which he played that mean surf/Starsky & Hutch guitar riff? And on Pump It Up he let loose with a guitar sound that went beyond heavy metal.
Apart from his live show Sunday, fans can look forward to an upcoming segment of MTV Unplugged, which Costello taped Monday. The show will air on MTV July 10 and 14. After he wraps up the U.S. leg of his tour in late June, he’ll play all over Europe this summer, possibly coming back to the U.S. in the fall.
Bill Holdship, Los Angeles editor of BAM Magazine, recently saw Costello’s show in L.A. An avowed Costello freak, Holdship was “disappointed”. My take on Elvis is, he used to be miserable and he was angry about it. Now he’s just miserable.”
Ooh, call him miserable or a cynic, and watch Costello snarl.
“Some critics call the record cynical, which I wholly reject,” an angry Costello told the New York Times. “I think it’s a very skeptical record. A cynic does not admit the possibility of hope, while a skeptic invites faith.”
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