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"You'd really like Elvis Costello," the J. Geils Band's vocalist Peter Wolf assured me one night when he was ransacking my record collection. "He'll listen to an old rock and roll record and then turn around and want to hear some bebop, then maybe some African music, then Billie Holiday..." I'd figured Costello would have broad tastes and a healthy curiosity about lots of different kinds of music. His music just keeps growing, gaining maturity without losing its emotional honesty or its edge, and it stands to reason that he must be growing right along with it. "But Costello doesn't seem to like music critics much," I said. "He hasn't even given an interview in almost five years." Wolf promised to have a talk with Elvis about that.
And it worked. I met Costello in the lobby of the Parker Meridien Hotel in New York City, and he came strolling in carrying his guitar, Just as friendly and cheerful as you please. He'd bought a suitcase full of records at various Manhattan stores, and he showed them to me — Richard Hell's Destiny Street was right in there with a couple of super-rare Chet Baker items ("my favorite singer") and some Ella Fitzgerald.
We began by talking music, but it was evident that Costello had a lot on his mind and the conversation quickly turned to that fateful night in Columbus, Ohio, when he became involved in a drunken brawl with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett that ended in a round of insults which reportedly included Costello referring to Ray Charles as "an old, blind nigger." His comments were reported to the press within a few days, and Elvis flew to New York to face a roomful of angry rockcrits and reporters in a press conference that began as an apology but degenerated into a shouting match. Costello wound up the tour and didn't return to the U.S. to perform until 1981, almost two years later.
But on records and in concert, Elvis hasn't let the lingering fallout from Columbus slow him down. His recent albums, particularly the new Imperial Bedroom, leave little doubt that he is the most talented popular songwriter of our time, and he just keeps getting better — more assured, more versatile, more in control of his material and its nuances of feeling. His concerts used to be short, almost unbelievably intense, and perhaps a little overbearing. Now they are long (the last one I saw was well over two hours), wonderfully varied, and bursting with a more open, less self-absorbed brand of energy. As of this writing, Costello and the Attractions (a tight, powerful, utterly distinctive band that doesn't get nearly enough recognition) are embroiled in another lengthy American tour.
Talking with Costello was something like listening to him sing. In conversation he is intense, full of ideas that just have to come out, but he's also very precise about the way he says things, very conscious of how they'll sound and of all the ways they might be taken. Still, I wouldn't call him guarded. He's very enthusiastic about all the music he considers good, and very eager to let people know that he considers the sincerity and feeling in his own music at least as important as its craft. And he's ambitious. If he isn't already our generation's Cole Porter, he isn't going to be satisfied until he's exactly that.
Since this is the first interview you've given to the press in more than four years, the first question has to be why? Why have you closed yourself off from this kind of thing?
I held off doing interviews because I didn't feel I had enough to say. What was I going to do, go through the albums track by track and explain the songs? That doesn't leave the songs open to interpretation; it keeps the listener from using his own imagination.
I can understand your not wanting to talk to some of the English music writers, who seem to be mostly fashion-conscious and not very knowledgeable musically. But that's no excuse for just avoiding doing interviews with anyone.
There were very few journalists I wanted to talk to. So many of them just ask idiotic questions. But more than that, it was important to me to be very clear about what I was doing. I read a lot of interviews in which the artist betrays artistic confusion. And during the early part of my career, I wasn't too clear about what I was doing; I just did It. At this moment, though, I feel very clear about what we've done and what we're doing. I can look back and see that there was a distinct break in my career after we made Armed Forces, for example. I think of the albums we've made since then as running together very distinctly — Get Happy!!, Trust, Almost Blue and Imperial Bedroom. Before Armed Forces, we were constantly touring, trying to attack America. And then we stopped... I'm sure you know why.
I wasn't going to bring up the Columbus incident until later. I was going to talk about music first, jolly you up...
No, I want to talk about it. Obviously, it was the most horrific incident of my whole career.
So you were in this hotel bar, right? And you got into a drunken argument and said the one thing you knew would really outrage them more than anything else you could say. That was the impression I got from the accounts of what happened. ..
That's pretty much what happened. It was a drunken brawl, really, and I did want to say the thing that would outrage those people the most. I was very drunk... but that's no excuse. Those words that I said certainly don't represent my view of the world. I suppose if you allow uncontrolled anger to run away with you, and if you make a career out of contriving anger, up on stage, whether you're feeling angry or not, sooner or later you'll find yourself saying things, using words you don't mean. It'll all come back at you. That's no excuse. People were angry, and rightfully so. There was a very intense press conference, the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Before that, I had just always assumed that people would recognize my allegiance to R&B, to black music. But it wasn't obvious enough.
But don't you see that by refusing to talk to the press, projecting all that anger, building up that whole mystique, you set yourself up for a fall?
You may be right. One writer in Rolling Stone actually wrote, "This is just what we've been waiting for. He fed himself to the lions." There was a lot of righteous indignation at certain publications, on the part of the sort of people who go home, play their Sandinista albums, and worry about El Salvador. But I don't want to talk about other people, really, because it will sound like I'm trying to make excuses, and I'm not. It's just that I've never been able to sit down in an unemotional atmosphere and say that I'm very sorry.
And of course I have to live with the fact that people hate me because of it. You work so hard, and then you become best known for a confused, idiotic incident... Everything I've done since has really been colored by that incident. When we went In to make the next album after that, Get Happy!!, I think that, subconsciously at least, we set out to make a soul record. Not just in terms of style, but a record that was warmer, more emotional. And I think all the records we've made since have had those qualities. They've been more personal than the three earlier albums, they were made at a higher emotional pitch. The whole
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