Talk:Rolling Stone, June 29, 1978

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WHEN THE last encore was finished— the band gone and the houselights coming up—Elvis Costello didn't leave. He switched off his onstage presence like it was another piece of equipment and came down front to confer with the promoter's staff about an incident that had occurred a few minutes earlier. Costello had been closing a brilliant show with "I'm Not Angry "—biting the words back to a terrifying, sweet reasonableness just as the crowd was expecting a shout of defiance—when someone in one of the front rows collapsed. The flashlights, the running figures, the current of curiosity closing in on the emergency were the kinds of distractions most performers would have wished away by playing like nothing was happening. But Costello signaled the drummer to carry on softly, motioned the video cameras that had been taping the show to back off, and went to see what the trouble was. When it was time for his guitar solo, he played it on his knees, alone at the edge, personally exorcising the crisis. Costello's performance was the climax of a triple bill, featuring Nick Lowe and Mink DeVille, that could have been titled Meet the Nouvelle Rock & Roll. On paper it was a bargain pack: three artists who have in one sense or another repudiated the studio-sterile, big-business-cautious music of the rock establishment, and its affluent isolation. In progress it was ill assorted. Nick Lowe—friend, producer, influence on and perfect foil for Costello—was just hitting his stride when his half-hour was up, and though his brief set was punchy enough to earn him an encore from a crowd who knew his name better than his music, he wasn't allowed to take it. Onstage, Lowe recalls Ian Dury's description of Gene Vincent in his white face, black shirt, black pants and white shoes. His rock & roll is equally lean and classic. Almost abstract, deliberately impersonal. He has a formalist's delight in pattern and contrast, a phenomenalist's fascination with the absurd and a healthy inhibition against taking himself too seriously. Mink DeVille, on the other hand, has come to take itself very seriously indeed. The group's set was as cool and conscious as its looks—perfect, and perfectly remote. During the encore, James Brown's "Just You and Me, Darling:' Willy DeVille stirred himself to some Brownian acrobatics, sinking to his knees—but languidly, you understand—so as not to disturb the hang of his suit, the fall of his hair, the reserve that kept the audience at arm's length, the unexpected from intruding. Mink DeVille's roots are in urban, predominantly black music of the early Sixties, but the band has borrowed more of the forms than the fire. Its style is drawn from the street, where such studied unconcern is the badge of a man ready for whatever comes along. But it seemed an empty pose onstage, where nothing was allowed to put it to a test. It took Costello to remind us that a concert can lay down a challenge to both audience and performer, that the stage is not a fortress or a sanctuary, but territory that is won the more it's risked. He took both the stage and his opening number, "Red Shoes," at a run and had covered most of This Year's Model before he was through. But there were still surprises. A lucid, furious "Chelsea" (a song included only on the British edition of his latest album), a made-for-U.S. version of "Less than Zero"—the references to "Oswald" (Mosley) changed to mean Lee Harvey and Dallas—and a ballad so new it didn't have a name. And as his clenched-teeth delivery of what used to be his most cathartic song ("I'm Not Angry") proved,, even last year's models can't be taken for granted. Neither can an audience. Costello was determined to grab us—with the unexpected as well as the tried and true, with concessions and confrontations. He was ready to rewrite a lyric we didn't get or bully us for not ignoring the theater rules against dancing. Instead of hiding behind the music or treating a concert as a shadow play of style and pose, he stepped out of character—and out of a song—when things didn't go as planned. But that wasn't so surprising. His whole performance was an acknowledgment that the man who holds the center of the stage is nothing if not accountable. Costello's final exit was an anticlimax—he could have been a stagehand walking back to the wings—but he left no doubt that he was the main attraction.