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Elvis Costello is a self-styled enigma.
His rock 'n' roll career has been little more than a well choreographed mystery dance with fame and his fans. He has created a befuddling, inscrutable personna that he can neither escape nor explain. He has studiously avoided interviews and press coverage. And, with his songs and stage banter, he has further distanced himself from the media and the public by assaulting radio stations and assailing record companies.
No one seems to know much about Costello's personal life and background. But his music stands on its own. And critics and fans can't seem to get enough of it.
Costello, who performs tonight at Northrop Auditorium, is considered the most important practitioner of new-wave rock. He is the only new-wave songwriter whose tunes have been recorded by such diverse artists as Linda Ronstadt and George Jones. He has been widely praised by critics and his albums have been consistent sellers, more so than those by any other new-wave artist.
Certainly, Costello ranks with David Bowie as the most fascinating British rock figure to emerge in the '70s. His repertoire ranks second to none of England's recent exports, including crony Graham Parker, and even Bowie.
Above all, Costello has been prolific and prodigious. Since 1977, he has released five albums (four of which are essential), and a sixth one, a 14-song collection called Trust, is due next week.
No one knows what to expect from Costello. His three-minute songs have ranged from unrequited and occasionally happy love songs to comments about fascism. radio and fashion.
Anger dearly seems to be his style, at least judging from his first three discs. the buoyant My Aim Is True, the hard-edged This Year's Model and the heavily political Armed Forces.
Last year he offered Get Happy!!, a trove of 20 songs of love that are musically lean and upbeat, and lyrically involuted but clever. He is caught in a love affair that seems like a no-win situation, yet he can't seem to remove himself from it. Then, late in '80, Costello's name graced another record. Taking Liberties, a collection of B-sides of singles and other odds and ends, including "My Funny Valentine" and the classic "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" that had never appeared on a Costello album in the United States.
All told, Costello's music has been well-crafted. As Rolling Stone put it, his music is an "utterly original fusion of the bittersweet tenderness of jazz, the self-pity of country and the vitriolic contempt of rock 'n' roll." Costello's twisted, often surreal lyrics have painted a picture of a bitter, if sometimes confused, young man bristling with hostility and a belief that music is something more than a product to be marketed by impersonal, insensitive corporations.
"What I do is a matter of life and death to me." Costello said early in 1978 in one of the few interviews he has given to an American journalist. "I don't choose to explain it, of course .... I'm more interested in people dancing than thinking. I don't like concepts. Individual things are more important."
Despite the artist's reluctance to expound, his producer, Nick Lowe, was able to provide some insight in our subject in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
"He's a very bitter guy," said Lowe, who met Costello several years ago when the singer was starting out. "He's had to go around making a prop of himself in people's offices. I mean, people who don't know anything about music at all; who took one look at him and thought, 'This guy ... I can't sell this bloke!' So he's very bitter and twisted about it."
There were too many hard knocks and, for Costello, recognition did not come soon enough.
He was born Declan Patrick McManus in 1955. He took his stage name in 1975, reportedly using his mother's maiden name as a surname and taking the first name of a famous American rock singer.
Although there is no official biography for Costello ("I feel the past is boring," he once said), some information has become widely accepted. He grew up in a working-class household split by divorce. His father, Ross McManus, was a jazz trumpeter and cabaret singer who took his son to a few live radio shows before leaving permanently for life on the road. (Dad now makes his living playing lounge shows and recording jingles.)
In 1971, at age 16, Costello left his family home and went to work in a London cosmetics factory as a computer operator. In '74, he married, and his son, Mark, was born two years later.
He had been playing music gigs when he had the chance, hating his life, biding his time. In '75, he quit his job and decided to pursue music full time. He sent his tapes to various English music companies. He even knocked on doors, guitar in hand, hoping for some direct communication.
One day, Lowe, then a member of the pub band Brinsley Schwarz, ran into Costello at a subway station. Lowe took him to Stiff Records, for which Lowe was working, and Stiff's Jake Rivera was impressed by Costello's tape. So Elvis began cutting singles for Stiff.
But the new recording artist also needed a distributor of his records in the United States. So he picked up his guitar and amplifier and crashed a convention of CBS Records in London. He got tossed out, but eventually won a contract with CBS.
Costello's debut album, My Aim Is True, was released to widespread critical applause in late 1977. He toured the United States and performed on Saturday Night Live, during which he stopped a scheduled song after a couple of bars and then shifted into the cutting "Radio, Radio."
"I want to bite the hand that feeds me
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me ..
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Trying to anaesthetise the way that you feel.
Costello's stage performances were as quirky as his songs. He cut a captivating figure, wearing huge, horn-rimmed glasses, short hair, thin tie, polka-dot shirt and Rag-stock zoot suit. This mesmerizing, knock-kneed runt stood at the microphone, jerking like a robot in need of oil. His style was discomfortingly intense, unmitigatingly angry and frighteningly cold.
Critics pictured him as an emotional masochist. "My songs have to do with situations," he once defended. "They aren't philosophical treatises. I didn't name the songs 'guilt,' revenge' or 'sarcasm.' The journalists did that."
Indeed, Elvis Costello may have been a hard pill to swallow, but he was a necessary dose for ailing rock 'n' roll in 1977.
He found himself a three-man band, labeled them the Attractions, and continued to record and tour regularly. He became the most independent record maker and performing artist since Bob Dylan. He shunned musical, lyrical and studio conventions, and then he would turn around and jet to France to film one of his songs (with Minneapolis filmmaker Chuck Statler) and later carry on a well-known affair (with Todd Rundgren's ex-girlfriend, jet-set model Bebe Buell) that seemed inconsistent with everything he stood for.
No one could quite figure out this elusive character with the funny name who looked like Woody Allen trying to be Buddy Holly.
He was the one who created the image and fueled the mystique. And he had to live with it. "I've had image-building work for and against me," he told Crawdaddy magazine. "The images get to be a burden because people expect them. I'm always interested in undermining whatever impressions people have of me."
Costello certainly did that on his last tour of the United States, in 1979. In a barroom argument with veteran gospel-rocker Bonnie Bramlett in Columbus, Ohio, Costello sullied Ray Charles and James Brown with racial epithets, and he insulted the United States for its entertainers, customs and ways of life.
A few days later Costello found himself holding a press conference in New York to explain himself: "It became necessary to outrage these people with the most offensive and obnoxious remarks I could muster to bring the argument to a swift conclusion and rid myself of their presence... I'm sure everybody's had occasion to go to absolute extremes even to say things you don't believe. Ask Lenny Bruce."
Tonight, with his new songs. we'll hear Elvis Costello ask us to trust him once again and try to figure him out anew.
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