Creem, May 1981

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications — Clown Time Is Over Jeff Nesin After a breath-taking 54-song year — 20 on Get Happy!!, 20 on Taking Liberties, and a modest 14 on Trust — was barely six weeks old and Elvis Costello was gone again. The Silver Train bus that carried E.C. and the Attractions and their old Chinas (whatever the hell that meant) Squeeze as they crawled across the U.S.A. is now schlepping Steve and Eydie or the Rossington Collins Band. Mr. Costello leaves in his speedy wake thousands of satisfied customers, a new album getting "very hot add-on action" (a highly technical trade term which means it's getting played a lot on radio radio), and several reasonable questions. The questions, alas, will have to resolve themselves over time because E.C. doesn't talk to the press. He doesn't talk so loudly that Jann Wenner (famous publisher of Rolling Stone) called Walter Yetnikoff (famous president of Columbia Records) asking for some divine corporate intervention on behalf of his mag's planned cover story. My informant didn't mention where Yetnikoff was at the time combatting taping from the radio with Bruce Springsteen perhaps, or shredding newspapers onstage with Billy Joel but, whatever his feelings on the matter, the outcome was the same: no interview. Not wanting to shake the same foolish tree knowing the same result was inevitable, I opted for rummaging through the CBS files looking for clues. In a few short days I saw every E.C. videotape, read reams of prose, listened to countless tapes and generally glutted myself on scripture. In the course of this research one of the most interesting things I found was that he has been sighted on the Underground (subway to youse) on his way to London gigs. I was amused by this bit of intelligence and it certainly puts the lad in exclusive company. One night 25 years ago Benny Nadell saw the Cleftones in their stage tuxes taking the D train to a dance in Coney Island. Many years later my brother reported that the Dictators took the IRT from their lair in the Bronx down to the Palladium where they were headlining. (AC/DC, the opener, came in limos.) And now Elvis Costello had been positively sighted beneath the pavement, eschewing the protective hauteur of a stretch. Who says rock 'n' roll isn't full of surprises? The biggest surprise this time around was the notorious Costello demeanor or, more accurately, its total absence. On the Trust tour E.C. was a real mensch: warm and gracious from the stage and, in his ten minute chat with Tom Snyder on Tomorrow (Sample dialog TS: Do you love your Dad? EC: Oh, yeah.) the very model of good humored decorum. In fact the two of them fell all over themselves to be nice — Torn didn't ask any blind, ignorant questions and Elvis didn't bite the hand that fed Text part 2 Text part 3 Text part 4 Creem, May 1981 Jeff Nesin profiles Elvis Costello. Richard Riegel reviews Trust. Images Page scans. Elvis Costello Trust (Columbia) Richard Riegel "Access" is a word that has never tripped lightly off Elvis Costello's devilishly silver tongue. As in "Access All Areas," rockbiz parlance for an unlimited backstage pass, the type Costello and manager Jake Riviera have been only too glad to issue to hopeful interviewers and photographers, over (these same journalists") dead bodies. Or consider that recent minority-rights cause, access for the handicapped." Even for the disabled group potentially most amenable to Mr. Costello — rock critics, with their "special" need to take their audio-visual reality cut with a minimum of print coherence — there were no lyric sheets. The gimpy textual analysts among Costello's public could be damned. All of which made it so shocking to see Elvis Costello talking turkey to Toni Snyder on Tomorrow, volunteering the same accessibility he'd never permitted us. Or to confront the new Costello LP, Trust, with its cover photo of Elvoid the Pelvoid, almost (thinking about it) smiling from behind his rosy-guilt & rosy-revenge-tinted glasses. Still no lyric sheet, but Trust is the first Costello album to list the Attractions' surnames (a state secret evidently as sensitive as the Queen's bra size, heretofore) on the package. Where will all this soul-cleansing confession end?!? In decent amounts of U.S. airplay and resultant record sales, hopefully. Costello's last previous all-new album, Get Happy!!, turned out to be another of those depressing 60's-euphoria vs. 70's-&-80's-we-have-our standards-thank-you confrontations: with its 20 intensely realized, insanely mature Costello songs, Get Happy!! was every bit as modern-age Blonde On Blonde, a highwater mark every bit the equal of Dylan's, yet hardly anybody, even many writers previously sympathetic to Costello, seemed to notice. Because, I guess, Get Happy!! was so rich it invited its own invisibility; it's such an inconceivably extended tour de force of rock 'n' roll that the listener, after a disbelieving spin or two. is no longer sure it really exists. (A state of affairs not much helped when Columbia dumped the similarly 20-cutted, similarly exhilarating Taking Liberties, a collection of Costello B-sides and other odd tracks, onto the U.S. market a few months later.) Elvis Costello on record was just too mind-boggling a subject to deal with, throughout 1980. Trust is hardly another. Get Happy!!, but it's far more accessible (a timely term, that) in ways which should bring Elvis Costello and the Attractions many new listeners who, once they're hooked, can work their way forward or backward in the band's catalogue, at will. At once, of course, Trust has "merely" 14 cuts, a manageable but still generous number; playing a side through isn't so exhausting in its unrelenting stimulation. Elvis Costello's vocals on Trust are projected and mixed right up front, smooth to the point of crooner-like clarity on cuts like "Shot With His Own Gun." Steve Nieve's beloved pump-it-up organ pulsebeats are replaced in many of the song by slow-rolling, majestic grand-piano flourishes, almost worthy of a post-electroshock-therapied Barry Manilow. The heart of Trust is suitably hard-rocking (check the electric opener, "Clubland"), but late-night mellowness, if not the mixed fortunes of "adult contemporary" radio-radio, beckon from around the edges of nearly every song (cf. the straight-country "Different Finger"), all without compromising the basic Costello artristry. After all, Elvis always almost said that he wanted to go Nashville/Broadway, in good time. It was us who demanded that he go ever onward as the punks' (surviving) elder brother. The Costellovian lyrics on Trust are as obliquely provocative as ever, whatever musical contexts they occur within; always clearly enunciated, they're easy to grab in one-line or couplet-length meteor chunks, but the songs' controlling-imagery plots continue to zoom in cryptic clusters, like those neon borealises in 2001. It's still difficult, this early in my acquaintance with Trust, to say precisely what Costello's singing about, but his tone is clearly far more conciliatory than on his previous efforts. Far from his early misogyny, Elvis has become precociously feminist, as on "White Knuckles" and "You'll Never Be A Man." I could hazard an educated guess, and say that Costello has discovered that women are just as moral as he is but still, what's it all mean? Interesting, these transitional albums. Still to be revealed, in future Costello lyric and/or interview confessionals: Does E.C. push a power mower during family yard-duty? Is easy-going Nick Lowe allowed to call him "Elvis" when they work late in the studio? Did the incipient Elvis ever assemble Airfix model-plane kits, in his narrow Catholic youth? Stay tuned. Photo by Ebet Roberts. Photo by Paul Natkin. Cover and page scans.

External links

• Wikipedia: Creem