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It could very well be that the King of America has gone stark-raving mad. For there he stands on stage, in this Ivy League hockey arena, the back of his gray-suit jacket sopping wet with sweat, his Poindexter-glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. He's struggling with his guitar. He could smash it to bits-and-pieces if he loses control. He swings and then jerks and stops and then swings again.
It is the last song of this two-and-a-half-hour encounter, this one-night, one-man stand. He launches himself and the crowd into a tune he wrote early on in his career, "Pump It Up." Only now he is playing it like never before, weaving a hesitant, screeching, psychedelic electric guitar through a DC-style go-go heartbeat that comes from a drum machine.
A gigantic wheel-of-fortune spinning-wheel of songs looms on the wall behind him. Red lights, blue lights run in a circle and flash on and off; Two college women rock to-and-fro off to the side in a 60's-style dance-cage made of shimmering beads that hang from a ring on a post.
Suddenly, the singer transforms his song into Prince's "Sign 0' the Times," and as the lyrics bump and grind against the edges of his harsh, hoarse voice, he whispers about young children in the city and crack and heroin on the streets.
Pump it up, until you can't feel it.
Pump it up, when you don't even need it.
• • • •
Elvis Costello is a shifty character. In a press conference two hours before the concert, he cannot stand still, but moves from foot to foot, right to left. He sports a day's growth of beard. His grin reveals a large gap between his two front teeth.
Dressed in black-leather jacket and black-leather shoes, and a shirt buttoned tightly at the throat, he mugs for the camera and rolls his eyes. Wearing a black Spanish-style hat, he approaches the Harvard spokesman from behind like Count Dracula.
"When I was an undergraduate, I found a lot of shortcomings in the social life at Harvard," says Frank Rockwood, who three years ago founded the Student Production Association, the group that offered Costello $33,500 to play at Harvard's Bright Hockey Center — a pretty hefty sum, considering Costello would be playing a solo acoustic set.
Harvard doesn't have annual Spring Weekend concerts like MIT, Rockwood had revealed earlier in a private conversation. Harvard's last major concert was with REM three years ago, and a deal to get Talking Heads to play at Soldier's Field fell through because the administration would not approve it. Then, earlier this year, an anti-apartheid benefit featuring Sting failed to come to fruition because of conflicts in his recording schedule.
So here is Costello, being deified by Harvard students gussied up in sharp suits and ties and beautiful dresses. They offer him a red sneaker award for excellence in music. "We're glad that the administration accepted Elvis," Rockwood continues.
"Is that a compliment?" Costello asks.
(Please turn to page 11)
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