Declan Patrick MacManus had neither a name nor
a band that anyone cared to remember in late 1976. If anything
made an impression, it was his obscenely large spectacles. The
son of a dance band singer and a record department manager, Declan
sang away his weekends fronting the country-rockers Flip City,
while working weekdays feeding punch cards into room-size computers.
Unlike his colleagues, Declan realized rock stardom was imminent
and consequently had mastered the art of showing up at the offices
of record labels. Once there, with guitar in hand, he gave the
executives an audience, rather than demanding an audition.
It's little wonder he wasn't signed until he mailed out demos.
Stiff Records chief Jake Riviera heard one, and MacManus' literacy
convinced the would-be mogul that he'd found Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland
all in one person. It was the urgency of Declan's voice that told
Stiff's house producer, ex-Brinsley Schwarz bassist Nick Lowe,
that the indie label had found its first talent. MacManus got
a label, a producer, and a name: Elvis Costello. In the earliest
instance of his subversive iconoclasm, he mated the King's name
to that of his grandmother mostly because he thought "Elvis
was a better name than Jesus and almost as exclusive."
Elvis' extraordinary
curse is to be a Technicolor member of the black-and-white world.
His songs start like power pop, but their twisted melodic inventiveness
becomes the perfect counterpart to his stunningly articulate lyrics.
He aims for the truth and he's never better than when he is exposing
unacceptable optimism. Elvis never rings false, despite the dangers
posed by the reflexive wordplay and his inability to keep his
narrators out of their own songs. Elvis' chosen space is the margins
of our society, and he shows us that what we thought was the safe
center is actually the cutting edge.
Elvis came to
Stiff with acoustic music and left "surfing the new wave"
with 1977's My Aim Is True. Here he first presents his bittersweet
view of a society caught in the clutches of businessmen and savagely
warped out of its humanity. Intensity comes from his voice's uninflected,
matter-of-fact delivery, a style he mastered from years of shouting
over indifferent pub audiences. The invariable first-person narration
rejects the comforts of distance, and the pithy writing makes
it impossible for us to escape. "Welcome to the Working Week"
takes only two minutes to dissect the stultifying reality of adulthood,
and "Mystery Dance" captures the awkwardness of adolescent
sex. The Stiff-provided backing band, the Clovers, provides anachronistic
relief from the very contemporary and darkly cynical lyrics.
As a guitar player,
Elvis is not a melody maker, and even today he remains traumatized
by the bloated solos of the mid-'70s' dinosaur rockers. He uses
his Fender to create sonic texture, although his fans continue
to suspect he's a more skillful guitarist than the concise punk-based
structure of his three-chord songs might suggest.
Elvis belonged
to the fringe of the punk scene; from the beginning, his songwriting
style and big-band background set him apart. He was too slick
for the punkers and too punk for the slicksters. He certainly
doesn't belong in a media-created catchall like "new wave."
He was never drawn into what many suspected was the movement's
manufactured rebellion and alternative conformity. When he went
shopping for a band after My Aim Is True, authentic punk credentials
were not on his mind. From the want ads he found two unrelated
Thomases, Bruce and Pete, who became respectively his melody-carrying
bassist and his drummer, with Keith Moon-size ambitions. From
the Royal College of Music, he poached Stephen Nason, a pianist
whose only previous rock exposure had been an early Alice Cooper
concert which earned him the sobriquet Steve Nieve. In trademark
style, Elvis made light of his mates' scruffy, unassuming appearance
by christening them the Attractions.
The new combo's
first outing, 1978's This Year's Model, is Costello's adolescent
masterpiece. With the swinging Clovers, Elvis could do little
more than mine punk's subversive potential as an outside observer.
Now with a band capable of expressing his attitude, he opened
up full throttle. Elvis' narrator has stumbled into our world,
and he can't stop for breath as he makes us aware of its cruelty
and injustice. Telephones never connect, cars don't take you where
need to go, cameras snoop instead of snapping shots, and guns
kill you instead of the burglar. It's impossible to forget the
invective of "This Year's Girl" or "(I Don't Want
to Go To) Chelsea." Yet the tunes were the very opposite
of depressing because Elvis and the Attractions distill punk and
power pop into a singularly uplifting organ-driven beat. Elvis
had found his signature style, which, in redefining the options
of punk, gained for his subsequent release the largest audience
of his career.
Armed Forces
was the definitive, post-Vietnam protest album. Elvis reminds
us it's the old men who start the wars and that the volunteers
in the trenches are not the enemy but the victims. This is Elvis
at his most political, setting aside the self-deprecation and
calculating cool to step into a more provocative role. The Attractions
did their part to create catharsis with an upbeat mix of quasi-'60s
rock reminiscent of the pre-psychedelic Beatles and the Byrds.
Elvis and company
chose an appropriately ironic title for their next release, 1980's
Get Happy!! The album was Costello's homage to the American R&B
tradition that has sustained British rock since its inception.
It was reputedly produced as penance for a disastrous brawl on
their 1979 American Armed Forces tour that devolved into racial
slurs. The band's constant touring had tightened its unmistakably
extreme sound into the perfect medium for transforming the sound
of Motown and Stax classics into rocking originals like "Opportunity"
and "King Horse." This cross-fertilization resulted
in what is arguably the band's tightest album. With virtually
all of its 20 songs under three minutes, the album is a testament
to Elvis' power that its challenging lyrics can be both deeply
personal and intellectually moving.
Changes were
apparent on 1981's Trust. The seriously ironic lyrics of "Clubland"
and "New Lace Sleeves" replaced straight-up laments
of broken love and injustice with world-weary ambiguity and oblique
volleys against misspent youth. Trust showed that Elvis had tempered
his anger. Continuing the band's breakneck album-a-year pace,
Costello and the Attractions released Imperial Bedroom in 1982,
and they surprised their fans by replacing producer Nick Lowe
with one-time Beatles engineer Geoff Emmerick. The band evoked
the jazzier sound of pre-British Invasion pop; "Man Out Time"
suggested Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, if he happened to have
been in an introspective mood.
Imperial Bedroom
introduced the balladry that has become the defining feature of
Costello's late '80s and '90s work. The notable exceptions were
Blood and Chocolate (1986) and Brutal Youth (1994), conscious
attempts to recapture the organ and electric guitar sound of This
Year's Model. Elvis' quintessentially British crooning has unified
such stylistically disparate outings as King of America (1986),
a series of tightly wound narratives featuring the members of
the other Elvis' TCB band; Mighty Like a Rose (1991), a collection
of meticulously textured tone poems; and Painted From Memory (1998),
a fully orchestrated collaboration with Elvis' longtime hero Burt
Bacharach. This album signifies a certain closure: Costello's
first cover was a 1977 version of Bacharach and Hal David's "
I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself." In all likelihood,
Bacharach would have had nothing to do with the snarling Elvis
of the late '70s; it's a testament to his latter-day sophistication
that the two met as equals 20 years later.
The raw quality
of the early Elvis has been replaced with mature ballads and sonic
experimentation, but the results continue to be marked by Elvis'
healthy skepticism, his smart wordplay, and his desire to explore
the varied roots of pop music. His work has lost neither its urgency
nor its poignancy. His aim, as always, is true.
