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I was lucky again last Saturday, when I attended a superrich person's Upper East Side birthday party. My old pal's sister married into a third-generation real estate fortune, affording my friend a speculum into the lap of luxury. (He's the opposite of upscale: "We have rent-control in our blood," he e-mailed me last week.) The food and drinks were just right, but the older, well-dressed crowd wasn't very engaging, and the Art Nouveau décor, though impressive from a Sotheby's perspective, left me cold. So why was I there? Tray-passed lobster canapés? Bottomless flutes of bubbly? Strained conversation with robber barons? No. I was there because Elvis Costello performed a two-hour set in the living room.
Playing a variety of guitars over a breathtaking sound system, he noisily yet carefully knocked out 25 songs from his rock years for the amusement of 150 docile guests. Predictably, the thirty- and fortysomethings were his loudest fans, while most of those outside the target demo tuned out and looked politely bored after the initial novelty had worn off. This seemed to me both funny and depressing.
Nothing seemed to depress Elvis. He bantered just enough, served up two requests, and mugged with the same wry, bemused look he trains on everything that appears to compromise his legendary integrity. He even amended the name in "Alison" to the birthday girl's own. Afterward, he posed for snapshots with the hosts and then vanished.
How do you get Elvis to play at your house? By paying him a lot of money. Anyone can well afford to look wry and bemused when making $1,000.00 a minute. (This preposterous figure is merely my estimate, and it doesn't reflect anything anyone told me -- except one guest, a former music biz guy who'd heard such gigs can fetch $200K.)
Elvis's deal forbade photos and recordings of any kind, but dozens of phones captured fuzzy images of the formerly angry young man.
It's hard to process an event like this. On the one hand, it's undeniably exciting to stand ten feet from a guy whose first album dominated my ears for several months in 1977, watching and hearing him play songs that used to mean a lot to me. (I was stuck on three of his subsequent records too.) And of course I was happy to have been invited, to have been there for such a weird scene. But if any of Manhattan's energy still derives from the unusual proximity of high and low culture (the way it used to before the rise of the freakish, isolated ultrarich class), that juxtaposition is an awkward place ... like the grinding edge of the San Andreas Fault. Caught between, no place to stand as the ledge shears away, and ever mindful of the hot magma future incinerating loose ends. Nothing evokes youth and its discontents like the music of long-gone malcontents, and few things cast one's accomplishments into a harsher light than exposure to the achievements or inheritances of others. Though I know comparison is not merely odious but idiotic, knowing isn't quite doing.
Oh, boo-hoo. I got to drink champagne and ride my sexy antique bike home through Central Park.
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