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Is Elvis Costello the Bob Dylan of the '80s? One could draw that conclusion from Taking Liberties (Columbia JC 36839), a collection of 20 Costello B sides, English album tracks and unreleased cuts, and A Singing Dictionary (Warner Brothers Publications), the complete words and music to Costello's songs.
Listening to the new album, and to the rest of Costello's output with the songbook in hand, I hear descriptions of surreal nightmare worlds with a Dylan-like twist ("Waiting for the End of the World"). I hear putdowns of women ("This Year's Girl," "You Belong to Me") in the style of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Positively Fourth Street" (although Costello seems to be growing out of this style; on one recent song he admits: "I miss talking in the dark / Without you I'm not conversational"). I even hear straight musical steals. "Pump It Up" is this decade's version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues."
A Singing Dictionary is especially valuable because Costello has never included a lyric sheet with his albums, and his twisted delivery makes it difficult to appreciate the puns and wordplay that mark nearly every song. I've been trying for three years to figure out the opening of "Watching the Detectives," which is here revealed as "Nice girls, not one with a defect / Cellophane shrink-wrapped, so correct."
The book has other treasures, like "That's What Friends Are For," a song written but never recorded by Costello. Then there's the "Dallas version" of "Less Than Zero," in which the "Mr. Oswald" character isn't Oswald Mosley, of the British neo-Nazi party, the National Front, but Lee Harvey Oswald. "Calling Mr. Oswald, calling anyone at the scene," goes the new version, "if you were taking home movies there's a chance you might have seen him."
Costello rewrote that song because American audiences, ignorant of British politics, thought it was about the Kennedy assassination in the first place. For similar reasons he excised "Night Rally" (also about the National Front) and "I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea" from the American version of This Year's Model. They're both included on Taking Liberties, and they're among its finest cuts.
Of necessity, the album is fairly inconsistent "Radio Sweetheart" and "Stranger in the House" are country songs, reflecting the time Costello once spent in a country rock band (where he learned to admire George Jones and Gram Parsons). "Getting Mighty Crowded," on the other hand, is pure '60s soul — a cover of a 1964 Betty Everett single, executed even better than the Sam & Dave B side Costello covered on Get Happy!!, "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down."
"My Funny Valentine" is positively eerie, even though in this context the Lorenz Hart lyrics ("Your looks are laughable / Unphotographable") sound like they could be from Costello's own pen. For a song that lasts less than a minute and a half, it makes quite an impression.
Taking Liberties is Costello's equivalent of the Dylan bootlegs of the late '60s — the live concerts and the studio outtakes that showed there was a lot more to Dylan than what he'd allowed to appear on record. Like him, Costello is an artist whose major work is of such stature that even his castoffs are of interest.
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