Elvis Costello, _Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink_, part two

WHAT TURNED THE Jazzmaster-wielding nihilist on the cover of this volume to the bemused old pro with a vintage acoustic who graces its back? Costello seems inclined to date the shift to the repercussions of that drunken night in the Ohio Holiday Inn bar where he accosted Stephen Stills and slung around the n-word in reference to Ray Charles and James Brown.

The books lacks an index, and is only roughly in chronological order, so I'm going to tell you that the episode gets its own brief chapter, Chapter 21, "What Do I Have to Do to Make You Love Me?" (I think the title is quoting Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," but I'm not positive.)

Let's take a moment to remember where Elvis Costello stood early in 1979. Armed Forces had just come out, his third brilliant album in a row. For just about everyone I knew who took music seriously, Costello was the songwriter. Bob Dylan and Lou Reed were still capable of gems like "Señor" and "Street Hassle," but their best work seemed  to be behind them. Joni Mitchell was re-inventing herself as a jazzer. Having put out an album produced by, of all people, Phil Spector, Leonard Cohen seemed out of ideas. Bruce Springsteen, who had been the future of rock and roll for about five years at that point, seemed stuck in Spector-meets-S.E. Hinton pop operettas. When he moved to the short and punchy in The River, he actually seemed to be following Costello's lead, as did Neil Young in Rust Never Sleeps.

Meanwhile, even Costello's B-sides were staggering. I wouldn't have traded "Big Tears" or "Tiny Steps" for all of Darkness at the Edge of Town or Street Legal or Death of a Ladies' Man. Still wouldn't. I saw him in Chicago with the Attractions on that Armed Forces tour, maybe a month or some weeks before that Holiday Inn incident, and it still stands among the greatest shows I have ever seen. They were incandescent, a rock and roll tiger burning bright in  the Aragon Ballroom.

Such is the context in which either Costello himself or his manager Jake Riviera (he doesn't remember which) says, "I think it's time for a motorcycle accident" (374). It's an apt allusion--at the apogee of the white-hot flight of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and the 1966 tour, having discernibly shifted the whole culture, Dylan had to either stop and reset or implode. That accident, which could have killed him, saved his life and meant he could and did go on to do a lot of amazing work. The god-like phase, though, was over.

So with Costello: "that Ohio evening may well have saved my sorry life," he declares, by derailing him from his "ferocious pursuit of oblivion."

So what if my career was rolled back off the launching pad? Life eventually became a lot more interesting due to this failure to get into some undeserved and potentially fatal orbit.

Fair enough--only I would say he was already in that orbit and fell out of it. Excellent as much of the later work is--I love The Juliet Letters, The Delivery Man, and Momofuku--I can't help feeling the first four albums are the heart of the legacy and that they will matter for as long as people care about the music produced in my lifetime.

Which is why I was a little stung by the remark about Almost Blue, the C&W covers album that told Costello's fans, "I'm not who you think I am." He writes: "I felt as if I'd slipped out of this tricky, bitter little songs that only appealed to a certain kind of creep" (431).

Ouch. Thanks, Declan. I hope I'm not the creep I was in 1979, but I'll always cherish This Year's Model.