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Give the English credit. They consistently come up with a more interesting lot of rock and rollers year after year than does Uncle Sam.
Last year it was the "punks" and "new wave" and this year they've come up with something called "power pop." But for all the labels and poses that attract the media's passing fancy, it is still the music that carries the message, not the clothes or hair or stance.
That is why Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe are currently causing such a fuss around pop music circles. Their music has put punk right in the garbage can because its message is tougher, its beat stronger and its appeal more universal. They, along with Mink DeVille, gave a nearly sold-out San Jose Center for the Performing Arts a look into rock's future last night.
Costello, 23, was born in London as Declan Patrick MacManus and reared in Liverpool. He was working as a computer operator at a division of Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics until he was discovered playing in front of a London hotel where CBS was holding a convention.
He looks every inch a computer operator even now in his conservative gray suit, skinny tie, short-cropped hair and horn-rimmed specs. He's the kid who always walked around school with a slide-rule and a million pencils in his shirt pocket, the kind no one ever talked to, but everyone called a dock behind his back. Now he is getting even.
In one interview, Costello said the only motivation points for writing his songs were revenge and guilt. Many of his songs back up this claim.
Costello writes his songs with a cutting edge that slices straight to the heart of a society that he sees as being as mixed up as the society that Bob Dylan and others wrote about in the '60s. "This Year's Girl" is a quick cut at the Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Cheryl Tiegs-types who parade across the tube and magazine covers selling their smiles.
His set last night, coming at the end of his current stateside tour, was tight and well-planned. He's only been performing for large audiences for little more than a year now, but each of the 16 numbers he performed with his backup group, the Attractions, was full of confidence and fire.
Aided by Steve Naive on electric organ, Bruce Thomas on bass and Pete Thomas on drums, Costello started off with "Mystery Dance," then crashed right into "Lip Service." "Alison," from his debut album, My Aim Is True, was the only ballad mixed in with rockers like "Less Than Zero," "Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes," "Stranger in the House," "The Beat," "Chelsea," "Watching the Detectives" and a new song, "Busy Bodies."
If Costello's only motivating emotions are guilt and revenge, then his friend and record producer Nick Lowe must be motivated by humor and irony. He opened the show last night with a hard-driving set of rock that featured material from his debut album Pure Pop for Now People, an album that contains songs about an old silent screen starlet who became supper for her pet dachshund after she died, and one in which Castro is castrated. Evidently neither of these transferred well to live performance for they were omitted from Lowe's set.
Unfortunately, Lowe appears to be a creature of the studio where he can create his and Costello's records with technical genius, rather than a performer, where he comes across as amateurish and vague.
Finally, a good portion of the crowd seemed to have turned out for Mink DeVille, a band with some loose ties to the Bay Area, some looser ties to the New York punk movement and a lead singer who is a throwback to the early '50s.
DeVille started out playing clubs in the East Bay and around San Francisco and later moved to New York when it appeared that nothing was happening in this area. There they were able to land a recording contract, largely due to exposure at C.B.G.B.'s, a seedy, run-down bar in the Bowery.
Theirs is a raunchy style of rock, with lead singer Willie DeVille spitting out the lyrics in a gruff, bluesy voice. DeVille has all the rock poses down pat and he cuts quite a stage presence in his tight black trousers, black T-shirt and black pompadour. His street-wise hipness came through on "Mixed Up Shook Up Girl," "Cadillac Walk" and "Soul Twist," but I found his set to be too long and somewhat of a bore after awhile. The whole thing will be repeated tonight at Winterland in San Francisco.
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