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BERKELEY — There are two things you can do when someone who makes great music puts on an awful concert short of leaving or being simply oblivious. You can wince with each song being demolished and feel so bad and defenseless that you just want to curl into a ball, roll away somewhere and die. Or you can get into more a comfortable mind-set and allow yourself to marvel at how bad good songs can get.
Elvis Costello's Saturday night show at the Greek Theater was shockingly dreadful for someone whose recording career hasn't plummeted over 14 years. All but the least judgmental Costello fanatics will admit that his latest CD, Mighty Like a Rose, isn't from start to finish up to the standard he established in the late '70s and early '80s, but not much is these days in the dying world of rock. Besides, it certainly has high points — "How to be Dumb," for example. Unlike so many of his "new wave" peers, Costello doesn't yet deserve to be tossed down the rock 'n' roll dumper.
But Saturday's show his second at the Greek last weekend argued to the contrary. It wasn't just that his voice was in horrible shape, a condition he blamed on "everyone who owns a car in Los Angeles." It wasn't just that his legendary between-song witticisms weren't witty this time around. And the fact that this was one of his shortest sets ever was a blessing. Even a bizarrely unsatisfying show can lose its perverse charm after awhile.
The main problem was the Rude 5, a collection of musicians who either couldn't hear each other or shouldn't have walked on stage together in such pathetic condition. They're not slouches: Guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Jerry Scheff, keyboardist Larry Knechtel and ex-Attractions drummer Pete Thomas have all proved themselves good-to-extraordinary players on Mighty Like a Rose and elsewhere.
But you wouldn't know that from Saturday's performance, where they seemed not only lost on the oldies, but also on the songs they themselves recorded. Ordinarily, Costello puts together bands who can reinterpret his music with startling grace. But rather than transforming the arrangements, these guys simply botched song after song. The new tunes were clumsy, the oldies a mess.
After Costello and the Rude 5 walked on stage and churned out hideous Holiday Inn versions of "Accidents Will Happen" and "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," it became apparent that one had to suffer what was to come, or turn the experience into a kind of a game to guess what songs would be utterly ruined and how. It was a challenge merely to identify the songs.
Promising versions of "Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head" and "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" provided a brief respite from the downhill pull that resumed on "The Other Side of Summer," which evokes a twisted Beach Boys arrangement on the new CD but was here butchered in 6/8 time.
"Watch Your Step" and "Temptation" were worse. When musicians can't hit a downbeat together and maintain a steady tempo, they have no business playing R&B-derived material like these two tunes. If you tried to tap your foot in time with the band, you had to speed up and slow down every few seconds.
Thomas a driving timekeeper in his Attractions days — took a submissive role and tried to follow the others. This was a mistake. Ribot — who came to prominence playing experimental jazz guitar with Tom Waits — also wasn't in his element. What elsewhere comes across as smart deconstructions of ordinary rock riffs here sounded like a lot of dumb mistakes.
Costello's instrumental presence was marginal at best. But he would have sounded better if he ordered the Rude 5 off the stage and played the songs by himself.
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