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Clever fellow, Elvis Costello. Not too cute, but he can write a mean song. In fact, he writes mean songs better than he writes love songs. He writes all kinds of songs — some better than others, but all clever — and Friday at the Greek Theater, he gave a polished exhibition geared to emphasize his Artistic Versatility.
At long last, this pioneer new wave songsmith and former angry young man has a genuine hit single currently scaling the American best-selling charts, a bouncy little piece of chewing gum for the ears called "Everyday I Write the Book." This irresistible ditty, which miraculously manages to combine the sentiments of "Every Day I Have the Blues" with "The Book of Love," could well introduce his prolific talent to a broad American audience after virtually spitting out seven albums in six years.
Gawky and bespectacled, Costello is nobody's idea of a matinee star, but his Serious Artistic Intentions rumble palpably underneath the surface of his every song. He sculpts attitudes as much as be writes lyrics, his raspy voice twisting in tortured angst or vitriolic anger with broad, grand strokes.
The show came in three parts. The first featured a sassy, bright soul band — complete with four-piece horn section and two female background vocalists —fitting Costello's songs to time-honored Stax-Volt soul sounds drawn from records by people like Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.
The long second act served as the arena for Costello to reveal his sweeping Artistic Versatility, as the horns and the ladies left the stage to Costello and his three-man accompaniment, the Attractions. For more than an hour, this core group veered wildly through diverse stylistic territory, madly juxtaposing disparate songs, lest anyone miss the point.
In one stretch, he went from a boozy, melancholy ballad to a crunching, angry quasi-punk rocker to a dense, complex piece with more modern styling, to the unabashed romanticism of vintage rhythm and blues crooning.
For the final section, he called hack the soul band accoutrements and drove the two-hour show to its close with a flourish. It was almost like seeing two different bands — the tight. shimmering soul band and the Artistic rock quartet.
One of the troubles with Art in rock is that fine-point detail tends to get lost in the crude confines of concerts. Filtered through the thick mesh of a not-so-spectacular sound system at ear-crunching volume in front of nearly 10.000 fans. Costello's carefully fractured metaphors and sly, wry twists sort of fall between the cracks.
The subtleties, for instance, of "Shipbuilding" must have been largely lost on the enthusiastic crowd, even though they gave the slow, quiet song great attention. But his pacifist appeal, directed at England's military excursion to the Falklands, is so understated that it takes a while for the meaning of the song's major symbol to sink in — oh, yeah, building ships is something of a long-term commitment to waging war.
But the song's real courage is wasted on a crowd of young Americans probably unfamiliar with the rabid chauvinistic fervor that ran through England in sup-port of what Lyndon Johnson might have called a pea-shooter war.
Costello is brainy, sarcastic, witty — so hip and so smug. Actually, his songs provide him with such a mind-boggling array of roles to portray that it is difficult to figure out which is the real Elvis Costello, or to truly believe any one of them.
But what do you expect from a guy who got his stage name from the king of rock 'n' roll and the dumb comic of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein?
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