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English new wave rock and American country music may be strange bedfellows, but bedfellows is exactly what they are becoming. When the Clash, the most politically outspoken of the first wave of British punk bands, undertook their first extensive tour of America, they hired Joe Ely, a country and rock-and-roll singer from Lubbock, Tex., to open several of their concerts. Mr. Ely went over so well that in 1980 he found himself opening Clash shows in England, where he recorded his recently released live album Live Shots (MCA).
Earlier this year, Elvis Costello and his band, the Attractions, flew to Nashville, where they recorded Almost Blue (Columbia), an album of vintage country songs. Some of the arrangements include string sections, vocal choruses, weeping steel guitars, and other "countrypolitan" touches, courtesy of one of Nashville's most successful record producers, Billy Sherrill.
The Clash-Ely connection is not really difficult to understand. Whatever one may think of their guerrilla chic, the Clash have shown an abiding interest in American roots music — rhythm-and-blues, rockabilly, country. And Joe Ely is equally at home with honky-tonk music, the purest and most emotionally compelling of contemporary country music strains, and supercharged Southern rock and roll.
In the past, Mr. Ely's versatility has seemed more like a curse than a blessing. The songs he writes, and the extraordinary songs written by his friend Butch Hancock, are of a uniformly high standard, and they deal with subjects that are familiar to country music audiences — drinking, divorce, manual labor, and barroom romance. Mr. Ely's "Honky Tonk Masquerade" and Mr. Hancock's "Boxcars," to mention only two of their songs, should be country music classics by now. But because they were included on albums that also featured rock-and-roll numbers, they are still relatively little-known to devotees of mainstream country music. And the hardcore country numbers on Mr. Ely's albums have kept him from winning a broad rock audience.
Live Shots doesn't solve this problem; it is neither a rock album nor a country album, strictly speaking. But it is a great album, Mr. Ely's fifth and finest. Thanks are due to the Clash and their English fans for inspiring the confident, wildly exciting performances Live Shots documents so vividly.
Elvis Costello's Almost Blue is more curious. There have been plenty of hints that Mr. Costello, who is probably the most consistently invigorating songwriter to have emerged from rock's late-70's new wave, likes country music. He has included original tunes written in a traditional honky-tonk style on several of his albums, and on his most recent American tour he performed the Patsy Cline hit "She's Got You" along with dozens of his own songs. What is surprising about Almost Blue is not that Mr. Costello chose to make a country album, but that he chose to make it Nashville-style, with a "name" producer and some relatively slick orchestrations.
But one can't really fault the producer Billy Sherrill for giving Mr. Costello what is popularly known as "the Nashville treatment." Nashville producers have been adding strings, flutes, harps, and other "sweetening" to recordings by country singers for several decades; it's what one hires a Nashville producer to do. Besides, Mr. Sherrill's work on Almost Blue is relatively restrained. The Attractions, Mr. Costello's fine band, carry most of the instrumental weight.
The question one has to ask is whether Mr. Costello can sing country music. This is like asking whether a particular white artist can sing the blues; there can be no definitive answer, only opinions. As far as this listener is concerned, Mr. Costello has always been the most convincing interpreter of his own material. But when he attempts to sing straightforward country songs that have been recorded by masterly vocalists like George Jones, he cannot avoid exposing his own technical limitations. And when he attempts to turn Hank Williams's "Why Don't You Love Me" and the Joe Turner blues "Honey Hush" into hot, country-flavored rockabilly, he fails miserably.
His "Honey Hush" is patterned on the definitive rockabilly version by Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio, but while Mr. Burnette's urgent vocal pushed the song relentlessly, keeping it tottering on the edge of chaos, Mr. Costello lags behind the beat. His exaggeratedly coarse vocal timbre is no substitute for the rhythmic drive the tune requires.
Having castigated Mr. Costello for his miscalculations, one should also congratulate him for his successes. "Color of the Blues," one of the album's most attractive performances, works as unadorned, rock-ribbed country music; Mr. Costello sings it with feeling, and without sacrificing his own distinctive sound and phrasing — it sounds as if he could have written it. He is also effective on his imaginative remake of Don Gibson's "Sweet Dreams," which gives the Attractions' marvelous pianist, Steve Nieve, one of his few chances to shine.
What does the term "country music" mean these days, anyway? Mr. Costello certainly understands more about country music's roots and expressive nuances than enormously popular countrypolitan crooners like Kenny Rogers and Eddie Rabbitt. But if his new album, which will be released later this month, fails to win over country music disk jockeys and the country music audience, he will be in trouble, for with one or two possible exceptions one cannot easily imagine FM rock stations playing selections from Almost Blue. Fortunately, Mr. Costello is an incredibly prolific songwriter who probably has enough new material to start work on another album tomorrow. The question is, will he have to?
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