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From the outset, the Armed Forces tour of America seemed destined to draw fire, set tongues wagging. turn heads in its direction. Eyes, for a start, will have popped when they saw Costello and The Attractions rolling into town in their maroon-trimmed Silver Eagle tour bus, especially since the bus had "DESTINATION CAMP LEJEUNE" emblazoned across its front in letters a foot high.
This was obviously just bloody-minded provocation. Camp LeJeune was the United States Marine Corps training camp in North Carolina, and no one will have been greatly amused by Costello's smirking, smart-arse declaration that this was where he was headed. This was March, 1979. America was only four years out of Vietnam, and memories of that dreadful debacle were still raw; rasping echoes of the conflict and its consequences still hung in the air. The country was in no mood for caustic reminders of its recent military disasters.
Costello's manager, the famously truculent Jake Riviera, nevertheless, was ruthlessly determined to pursue the aggressively militaristic promotional campaign he had devised for Armed Forces in the UK and followed it through now by dressing the entire Costello road crew in Army fatigues, giving them the look of a marauding squad of renegade commandos. This might have seemed like a grand joke to Costello and his entourage. a bit of a lark, something to laugh at, wired, drunk, in desert motels and downtown bars as the tour dragged across the country. For less partisan observers, though, it was just another example of Riviera's belligerent insensitivity. There was another message being spelled out here, of course. "Nobody Fucks With The Marine Corps" was a popular military boast. The clear implication of the "Camp LeJeune" sign was that nobody better fuck with Costello and his people. either. The sign was a kind of mobile hands-off warning. a stark reminder to anyone even thinking about getting anywhere near them that they'd be better off keeping their distance.
Fred Schruers made the connection vividly in a dramatic report on the tour for Rolling Stone. "A mixture of paranoia and arrogance," he wrote, "made the Armed Forces tour party as mean and as squirrelly as any platoon of marines trapped behind enemy lines." Schruers was not impressed by Riviera's confrontational tactics, predicted nothing but grief for Costello if he didn't ease up. "By turns petulant and rabid," he observed, reflecting upon the generally unhinged behaviour raging around him. "Elvis and his troops did not seem equal to the grand military metaphors of the promotional campaign that preceded them: they seemed, rather, to be conducting a messy police action bound to make doubters and even enemies out of his strongest American partisans."
Given their highly-strung, combative mood, it came as no surprise to find Costello and his hyped-up wrecking crew quickly at war with the local civilian population. Hostilities broke out first in Seattle, where the audience reacted violently to Costello's appearance at the Paramount Theatre. The Attractions were by now geared up to scorching 50-minute sets, intense, concentrated hit-and-runs. This sort of show had become standard in England, punk had seen to that, where there had been a rapid stripping down of performances after the indulgent spectacles of the early Seventies. The crowd in Seattle, however, weren't used to this routine. They just thought they'd been short-changed, and there was bedlam when Costello refused to return to add anything more to what had already been said, which he was convinced had been enough. Roaring their disapproval, the audience refused to leave the theatre until the Costello road crew turned up the amps and produced a multi-decibel shriek that drove the irate masses into the street, where they made a bonfire out of torn-down concert posters.
There were similar scenes further down the coast. at the Berkeley Community Centre. where Costello was in a bitter, recriminatory mood. Maybe he'd been incensed by The Clash, Who were playing San Francisco the same night and had plastered the Bay
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