Music for chameleons

By Juaniyo Arcellana, philstar.com, October 06, 2002

There are stacks of vinyl records that remain unplayed in the old house, long unheard from since the phonograph player got busted years ago and has been permanently neglected with the advent of the cassette and the compact disc.

Just above the bookshelves filled with varied encyclopedias and esoteric reading material, by now rare copies of vinyl sit and wait patiently on the top shelf, until a handy man or some technician comes along to fix the phonograph player, hopefully armed with a brand-new needle the likes of which may only now be found on Raon Street in Quiapo.

Rolling Stones records when they were at their peak –Beggars’ Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street –rest back to back with albums by Joni Mitchell, Traffic, Derek and the Dominoes, Al Stewart, Rod Stewart, the Grateful Dead, whose group members may have since died or slipped into mediocrity, or else gone on to more exciting pursuits.

In this more or less august company are a few albums of Elvis Costello, who himself has held up well through the years and with his fans, a worthy chameleon who adapts to the times yet never compromising his own music.

A brother in the bay area sent us many years ago when the phonograph player was still working, albums by Costello entitled This Year’s Model and Get Happy, his second and fourth, respectively. Mother too took home from Hong Kong a copy of Armed Forces, the guy’s third album.

The three albums were recorded when Costello was still on the CBS-Columbia label, for which he recorded his by now classic debut album, My Aim is True, which phrase comes from a song therein, Alison, covered by Linda Ronstadt in her younger years.

If the record player ever gets fixed, then one of the first albums to return to the turntable would be This Year’s Model, what with its memorable opening cut No Action, that features Costello’s band the Attractions busting out of the tracks. Maybe we could again listen to a song like Lip Service and finally understand what it means.

Off Armed Forces, certainly a priority would be Oliver’s Army and even Chemistry Class and Two Little Hitlers, while in Get Happy, a necessary reacquaintance would be The Imposter, or New Amsterdam.

Get Happy, both CD and cassette copies, actually went on sale in the ShoeMart lobby when it became clear that Costello was not going to be a big hit locally.

Who knows if Costello has a best of or greatest hits collection from his Columbia years, though there may well be.

After Columbia, for which he recorded around six or seven albums, Costello signed up with Warner Brothers, the label on which he recorded about the same number of CDs in what could be phase 2 of his career.

On Warner he made Brutal Youth, which was not so much about his growing up years as the usual balancing act of love and deception dynamic, as well as the rather laidback All This Useless Beauty.

Then as if to mark a chapter with this particular record company, Costello came out with Extreme Honey: The Best of the Warner Years in the late ’90s, a summing up of an elder statesman of rock.

Indeed listening to Extreme Honey, one is struck at how Costello was now light years away from the angry young man who put out My Aim is True.

In a kind of transition period of many artists of his stature and temperament, Costello went through another phase, this time collaborating with artists as diverse as compositional pop genius Burt Bacharach and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.

With Bacharach, Costello recorded the melancholic, complex Painted From Memory, which was in turn interpreted in jazz mode by Frisell in The Sweetest Punch, that also went on sale in an SM lobby not too long ago.

Costello also has an album of duets with Frisell, whose jazz work is best known on the nearly underground ECM label.

The latest word however, after the experiments with Bacharach and Frisell and even a spot cameo performance in an Austin Powers movie to sing What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?, Costello is now back to his roots, coming full circle to return to the basics.

But the latest Costello album, which title we will have to research cyberspace for, might not really be a rebirth of the angry young punk. He’s certainly older, wiser, with eons of music and other junk behind him. Rock, if Costello can be trusted, has a way of aging gracefully, like records waiting patiently to be played again, and for realizing it’s like one never left.

Thanks to John Foyle