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Not just a familiar feature on Elvis Costello's 2011 tour, The Big Wheel is also the title of a 1990 novel written by former Elvis Costello bassist Bruce Thomas, the only member of Elvis Costello's original Attractions not on stage with the Imposters last night. (He hasn't been since the 1990s.) The barely fictional novel is more like a transparent memoir about the drunk, bleak absurdity of lost-weekend-like touring with Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the 1980s.
The title isn't accidental. Perhaps The Big Wheel popped into Thomas' head when, in 1986, he first laid eyes on Elvis Costello's Spectacular Spinning Songbook, the same two-story, candy-colored, wheel-of-fortune setlist that nearly eclipsed the Imposters' bassist at last night's show.
If Thomas' whole idea was that the big spinning wheel made Costello into a grinning, gimmicky host whose fake Las Vegas game show invited spastic, helpless contestants to the stage rather than true fans, then you're much better off going to Costello's next show than reading The Big Wheel (if only just to disprove Thomas' bitter imagination).
Last night's Kansas City stop on Costello's Revolver tour, subtitled "The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook," was the novel's antithesis. It was a warm, personal invitation to Costello's thirty-year-long, waking Technicolor dream (or nightmare if you're Bruce Thomas) of brutal new-wave and baroque Americana. Like a four-headed, one-man rat pack, Costello and the Imposters burned through hits, covers and back pages like time was irrelevant.
Putting on his glistening top-hat and proudly reclaiming the name Napoleon Dynamite, his MC alter-ego, Costello mockingly peddled his own songs about "love, sex, death, and dancing," with a snake-oil American drawl. On one side of the stage, fans spun the wheel, which Costello boldly filled up with pennants of his songs next to potential Beatles and Dylan covers (no luck last night). On the other side, a go-go dancer shimmied through the beaded chains of the play bird cage. Behind him, a backdrop of color bars sprawled down an old TV tube, and toward the back of the venue, GM boringly gave away a car.
But down in front, a night's convention of happily married couples chicken-danced to devilish and desperate songs about the hells of divorce and infidelity. "I Want You," turned the stage lights blood red. In this trial-like song that throws a cheating heart and its victim through an incinerator, he wrenched and wailed some of his sickest lyrics three times over: "Did you call his name out as he held you down?" The irony was rich, jolly and irreproducible.
Then he sang the lines of the once-TV-banned "Radio, Radio." "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me / I wanna bite that hand so badly / I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me." In this bizarre world, Costello's conquest of America turns the would-be gimmick of the Revolver Tour into a rising phoenix, subverting the same decadence that drove Bruce Thomas to brood at his writing desk.
Known only as "The Singer" in The Big Wheel, the real Elvis is also a real court jester, a fool of genius. Almost like a real American, he cracked timely digs at pundits and politicos Glenn Beck (whose show appropriately ended this same day) and Michelle Bachmann (the queen Tea Partier who announced her presidential candidacy on Monday). Despite dusting off dated memes about Al Gore inventing the internet and the rapture dud, Costello knew when to stop and play his arsenal of razor-sharp songs, even if they weren't spun. "Alison" unraveled into Smoky Robinson, Prince, and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The latter was not just another gimmick. Costello's played it all over the country. He just really likes the song.
He was at his most sincere during the encore. The soulful blues Barbies of the opening act Larkin Poe came back to join Elvis on his own roots-y songs, written with his "brother" T Bone Burnett. The first, "The Crooked Line," was introduced as his only about fidelity, though it too had "an escape hatch in the last verse." He sang another from his and Burnett's collaboration, "Scarlet Tide," and wished troops overseas that they'd get home soon, to which the crowd sobered up and remembered to cheer. At his last chance, Costello paid one last due to the American music to which the English-born Irishman indebts himself, raising high the back of his guitar to reveal a "Rebuild New Orleans" bumper sticker.
In a 2003 Simpsons episode, Homer meets a guest-starring Elvis Costello at a rock and roll summer camp, where he manages to swat off Costello's hat and glasses. Costello shrieks, "My image!" as he falls to the ground to pick them up. Costello's sense of humor, and his sense of suffering, are Shakespearean compared to the slim Big Wheel. Last night was a reminder that his long career of dramatically performed songs reveals more than Thomas' book — or anyone's book — ever could about Elvis Costello.
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