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The billboard is gone now. For two weeks it stood hidden under canvas before being unveiled to reveal a portrait of the singer, perhaps 30 times larger than life, crouched behind a camera, as if taking note of the industrial barons and tastemakers cruising below on Sunset Strip. In spite of its having been removed by some quirk of planning a week before the singer arrived in Los Angeles for a concert at Hollywood High School, everyone agrees it was great while it lasted.
But there are still enough reminders of Elvis Costello's presence. At The Whiskey, the club on the Strip where the music is loudest and the gloom most stygian, patrons can feast on the "Elvis Costello Special," a dish that turns out to be nothing more exotic than fish and chips, while across the street a record shop offers prizes to the customers who are dressed most like him. With his swept-back hair, horn-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting budget suits — a look best described as early '60s impoverished filing clerk — Costello is easily parodied. "That competition is nothing to do with us," snorts his manager, Jake Riviera. "It's bloody annoying. It makes Elvis look like some kind of geek. It's his songs they should be emphasizing. That's what's important"
Three North American tours in 12 months, too many hours in anonymous hotel rooms and the converted Greyhound bus in which the band travels, have dispelled whatever sense of wonder Costello might have felt about being in what he calls "the promised land." When he's on tour he seldom rises before noon. He and his group, the Attractions, are staying at the Tropicana Motel, an establishment that prides itself on its rock music clientele. It's cheap ($12 a night) but has a lot of atmosphere: 14 years ago Sam Cooke, the soul singer, was shot dead in the Tropicana's office.
Elvis Costello's ascent has been meteoric by any standard. Eighteen months before his North American
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