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Elvis Costello ran hot, cold, and lukewarm at his almost maddeningly uneven San Diego concert Wednesday night at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
Appearing before a near-capacity audience of 4,500 at the bayside venue, he delivered a performance that was alternately inspired and half-baked, focused and diffuse. What resulted at times seemed like several concerts combined, all delivered by an artist who boasts one of the richest, most stylistically varied repertoires of the past 45 years.
Costello’s spirit was willing and his heart was clearly in the music during most of his 96-minute performance. The 2003 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee benefited greatly from the versatility of his talent-packed band, The Imposters, which deftly balanced between pinpoint precision and jam-band fluidity.
But while Costello’s spirt and heart were in the right place, his voice was not.
His singing was so inconsistent, sometimes when delivering successive lines in the same selection — as was the case with “Radio, Radio” and “(The Angels Wannna Wear My) Red Shoes” — that it felt like a musical variation of whack-a-mole. In this case, though, the simulated carnival moles were replaced by raspy vocal clams (let’s name them Flat, Flatter and Flattest).
As a result, moments of palpable inspiration and in-tune singing alternated with off-key, pitch-challenged segments that induced winces. Or, as a multiple-award-winning San Diego singer who attended Wednesday’s performance noted in an online post on this writer’s Facebook page after the concert: “It was painful.”
When Costello’s voice remained steady and his musical aim was true, the show underscored the excellence and durability of his music, buoyed by the superb musicianship of keyboardist Steve Nieve and ace drummer Pete Thomas.
Standout songs included such early favorites as the rollicking “Pump It Up” and “Mystery Dance,” as well as an extended, noir-infused version of “Watching the Detectives” — in which Costello seemed to channel crime author Raymond Chandler by way of jazz giant Charles Mingus.
Equally memorable was the hard-driving “Farewell, OK,” the early Beatles-flavored opening track from Costello’s 2022 album, “The Boy Named If,” and his charged rendition of “So You Want to be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” the wry 1966 classic by The Byrds co-written by former San Diegan Chris Hillman.
But when things were off-target, as was the case at least half the time during Costello’s 103-minute performance, well — to invoke the title of his opening selection — accidents will happen.
Alas, Costello’s inconsistent singing is not new and probably no accident. He demonstrated as much during his largely one-man 2016 concert here at the Balboa Theatre, where he struggled during the first half of his nearly three-hour show, then hit his stride in the second.
He used a similar template at The Shell, where the first 61 minutes were more miss than hit and the concluding 42 minutes were more on target. But they were not consistently enough on target to make up for all the bumps and missed notes on such songs as “Girls Talk,” “You Belong To Me,” “Truth Drug” and too many others.
To his credit, Costello took some chances, including featuring multiple songs from his new album despite the majority of his audience’s lack of familiarity with them. And he changed the arrangements of some of his best known songs, no doubt to keep them fresh for him and his band.
Costello also changed the tempo and stretched out on his 1978 song, “I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea,” giving it a more pronounced reggae beat. He then segued into “Magnificent Hurt,” a snarling, mid-tempo song from “The Boy Named If,” adding a spacey, Grateful Dead-styled instrumental improvisation that featured guest guitarist Charlie Sexton.
That Costello is a longtime Deadhead is a matter of record, never mind that his songs do not lend themselves very well to extended jams.
In some instances Wednesday, the raggedness of his voice lent added pathos to the songs. This held especially true during his heartfelt version of The Flying Burrito Brothers 1969 country-music lament, “Hot Burrito No. 1/I’m Your Toy,” and the concert-closing medley of 1977’s “Alison” — Costello’s first great ballad — and “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” the 1966 Isley Brothers’ hit co-written by the recently deceased Lamont Dozier.
The concert opened with a superb, 12-song set by Nick Lowe, who produced Costello’s first five albums and was a key early mentor.
A wonderfully supple singer, Lowe shined whether crooning “You Inspire Me” — a heartfelt ballad that evoked early Elvis (Presley, not Costello) — or romping through “Cruel to be Kind” and the set-closing “I Knew The Bride (When She Used to Rock ‘n’ Roll”).
During the lilting “Without Love,” Lowe intoned one line in a deep, deep voice — an apparent homage to his former father-in-law, Johnny Cash. On “So It Goes,” Lowe’s 1976 solo debut single, he slowed the beat down to a more relaxed gait. It was a savvy move that served to diminish the original song’s striking melodic to similarity to Steely Dan’s 1972 breakthrough hit, “Reeling in the Years.”
Sadly, Lowe did not return to the stage — as he had on some previous dates on this tour — to duet on “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” the 1974 Lowe gem that was Costello’s penultimate selection at The Shell. Perhaps the vocal contrast between the mellifluous Lowe, 73, and the hit-and-miss Costello, 68, would have been too pronounced?
Lowe was ably accompanied by his longtime collaborators, the four-man Los Straitjackets, who — as has been their tradition since 1988 — performed while wearing Mexican lucha libre wrestling masks. On a night when the temperature was 82 degrees as the concert began shortly after 7 p.m., Los Straitjackets was the hottest act on stage, literally.
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