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After decades of success in the music business, you might find yourself with a common pop-star problem. How do you go on tour and do something other than the predictable greatest-hits show, or the predictable (but less crowd-pleasing) plugging of your latest album?
The great British pop veteran Elvis Costello has solved this dilemma with what he calls the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, which he brought to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Friday night.
Actually, the Spinning Songbook isn't a new innovation. Costello used it for shows in the 1980s, only a decade or so into a career that now ranks as the most prolific and varied, yet consistent, of any singer-songwriter of his generation. But it's especially well-suited for the vast repertoire he now could draw on. Even if he doesn't play your favorite tune, you always can just blame the wheel.
On Friday, the set-up was simple, but colorful — part conventional rock concert, part midway carnival, part mod-era lounge. At stage left loomed a giant wheel, with song titles and phrases in alternating strips of yellow, red and purple. Nearby sat one of those contraptions you pound with a hammer to ring a bell and win a prize. At stage right, was a go-go dancer's cage and a small bar with high stools.
Costello and his band the Imposters (keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas, both from his great early combo, the Attractions, plus bassist/backing vocalist Davey Faragher) took the stage and roared into a batch of uptempo classics including "Pump It Up," "Mystery Dance" and "Radio, Radio." Thomas' piston-like rhythmic drive in particular was in fine form.
With his adoring audience suitably warmed up, Costello donned a top hat, grabbed a walking stick and introduced himself as "Napoleon Dynamite" (a pseudonym that dates back at least to the 1986 album Blood & Chocolate). "Shall we just play them all?" he asked, introducing the wheel, and the crowd roared its assent. "But that's not the way it works!," he replied.
Instead, a blond assistant in garish striped pants selected a series of fans and brought them onstage. On a couple of occasions, Costello himself stepped offstage to stroll around the auditorium, returning with fan in tow. Those thus chosen got to spin the wheel (or wield the "hammer of songs"), take a seat in the "Society Lounge" and maybe do a bit of dancing in the cage.
Some spins resulted in particular songs; others sent things in less obvious directions. "Paul, get ahold of that wheel with a manly grip," Costello instructed the second lucky participant, and Paul's spin landed on a "jackpot selection," the word "Time." That led to a themed mini-set: the quick-pulsed vivisection of courtship, "Strict Time," the simultaneously jaunty and jaundiced "Clowntime is Over," a cover of the early Rolling Stones nugget "Out of Time," and the melancholy "Man Out of Time."
When the wheel landed on "Joanna," Costello explained that that was Cockney rhyming slang for piano — meaning the next song was the piano player's choice. Costello then sang the rarity "Just a Memory," with just Nieve's piano accompaniment.
Taking over the reins from time to time, Costello still fit in newer material such as 2010's retro-styled "Slow Drag with Josephine" ("Rock'n'roll like it used to be - in 1919," he quipped), as well as such hits as "Alison" and Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding."
The wheel never did land on the jackpot strip marked "Happy." But you'd never have known that by looking at the crowd.
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