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Nick Lowe, who will be the headliner at the Ritz next Tuesday, and opening shows for Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall the next day, and the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium Aug. 18, has been a professional rock-and-roll musician since the mid-1960's. And though he has never made wheelbarrows full of money, he has managed something much rarer. He has stayed ahead of the pack consistently, reacting to trends that others had yet to notice, and initiating a few of his own along the way.
He first tasted success as a songwriter and key member of Britain's first and possibly only significant hippie-country-rock band, known collectively as Brinsley Schwarz.
After the group broke up, Mr. Lowe freelanced for a while, then found work as a singer, songwriter, recording engineer and producer at Stiff Records, Britain's first influential new-wave label. He produced the first British punk-rock album (by the now almost-forgotten Damned) and produced several albums for the brightest of Britain's new angry young men, Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. Then, or rather simultaneously, he and Dave Edmunds founded Rockpile.
Mr. Lowe's first album under his own name in the United States, Pure Pop for Now People was a delight, the first example (except for two little-heard disks by the Memphis band Big Star) of a genre that soon became known as power-pop. By the late 70's, power-pop had devolved into a crowd of lookalike soundalike bands wearing skinny ties and trying to sound like the mid-60's Beatles. Mr. Lowe had already moved on. He listened to obscure rhythm-and-blues, country, Louisiana swamp pop and other esoterica, fed them into his Mixmaster mind, and came up with fresh sounds. Some were heard on the final Rockpile album, Seconds of Pleasure.
After he married into Nashville royalty — his wife, Carlene Carter, was related both to the celebrated Carter Family and to Johnny Cash — he dabbled in country music. But his dabblings were tentative, and on his third and fourth solo albums one heard little of the ironic wit and amiably warped sense of humor that had made his earlier works so endearing.
Now Mr. Lowe is back, in fighting trim. His new album, Nick Lowe and his Cowboy Outfit (Columbia), is his best collection of original songs and carefully selected obscurities by other writers. But the key is the Cowboy Outfit — a group that has been playing together off and on for the last decade and that gives Mr. Lowe exactly the sort of rocking yet subtle, experienced yet spirited backup that he has needed since Rockpile's breakup in 1980.
With Mr. Lowe on bass and the powerful and precise Bobby Irwin on drums, the Cowboy Outfit has a rhythm section that can push hard or lay back and swing. The pianist and organist Paul Carrack has been a member of Squeeze and made solo albums and is a superb accompanist, sensitive to the stylistic demands of Mr. Lowe's exceptionally varied material. Martin Belmont, a former member of the Rumour and a sometime-Elvis Costello sideman, knows when to pick lacy patterns, when to kick the band along with incisively rhythmic chording and when to let go and howl. Music this infectious could finally make Mr. Lowe a star in the United States. But even if it doesn't, the album and the tour should offer audiences, and Mr. Lowe, the chance to have a lot of fun.
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