Elvis Costello: Classic or Dud

In my mind, "Glitter Gulch" is tied with "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" for worst song on an otherwise great album.

It's just a coincidence that they're both internally long stupid Western pastiches in 2/4 time.

*infernally

heard a new single by him the other day ("Hey Clockface"), man his voice has changed in recent years

I'm a very dilettante listener after Juliet and Memory, but imo it"s a feature (not a bug) of Elvis that both his voice and his singing change every few years

spike was my intro to elvis -- iirc rolling stone was all like 'best EC record since some girls!' which is weird because both king of america and blood and chocolate are obviously better

i liked it fine -- the mccartney tracks are great and still have a hard time thinking of a song more vitriolic yet appealing than tramp the dirt down. but also it was an early example of CD bloat and it gave me the wrong idea about EC, which would be corrected with the 2 1/2 years box set

not sure but i *might* actually like mighty like a rose better

The problem with MLAR is his singing is the equivalent of the beard. The arrangements too.

i really like the outro on invasion hit parade. that's all i've got, really

"Glitter Gulch" was the only song I liked on King of America when I bought it at 15. I liked Blood & Chocolate more, but that was the end of my EC phase, which had begun with the purchase of a cassette best-of, followed by Trust, the year before.

The problem with MLAR is his singing is the equivalent of the beard. The arrangements too.

lol i first saw him on tour with burt bacharach

I've never bothered with any of the Costello albums post Spike. It's an hour long with four good songs, and the thought of listening to at least twice that many less-good songs on 30 years of less-good albums is unappealing. More to the point, none of the singles that I have heard made me feel otherwise.

King of America was a bold sonic statement in 1986, but it only has the same number of good songs as Spike (and I include Glitter Gulch as one of them). I agree that Blood and Chocolate is better than either.

The point when contrivance began to overtake inspiration was Imperial Bedroom, which was loved by critics at the time and is not mentioned much now.

I almost agree with Puffin, "Glitter Gulch" is the worst original song on King of America, but the pair of covers thrown in are even worse. In a lot of ways King of America is my favorite Elvis Costello album, but that's only because I've ignored those three tracks and replaced one of them with "King of Confidence" (MacManus originally debated on whether to use that track or "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and unfortunately he made the wrong choice). That 13-track program is what I think of when I think about King of America, and I absolutely love it.

Blood and Chocolate is his last truly great album. He's made some awful, AWFUL albums since then, but he's also done a handful of good ones that I quite like. A few of them are technically "bonus disc" material (what I mentioned about Spike, the acoustic demos with Paul McCartney), but he considers them to be albums in their own right. What's essentially a two-hour live album with Steve Nieve may be my favorite release from him since the '80s. When I Was Cruel is probably my favorite of the studio albums since then (again, some clunkers padding a very long album, but still good). The Burt Bacharach album is an acquired taste, but it's the only left-field side trip that I really like. An anthology covering his post-Demon/Columbia years would be highly useful. It wouldn't be on par with his earlier work, but it could be a nice distillation of highly listenable material from a wildly uneven mountain of recordings.

"Glitter Gulch" is the worst original song on King of America,

Nope. Competition: "Poisoned Rose," "Eisenhower Blues." And the Animals cover, for god's sake.

Only one of those is an original, though.

Not true.

OK, if you're counting: "Eisenhower Blues" is the cover. Throw in "Glitter Gulch," mentioned earlier, and we still got dead space.

the last three tracks on king of america are among my favorite things he's ever done

The point when contrivance began to overtake inspiration was Imperial Bedroom, which was loved by critics at the time and is not mentioned much now.

!!! This album is great. It's definitely the last album where the Attractions get to be the Attractions and not basically hired guns constrained by EC's controlling tendencies/specificity. Though I guess "Blood & Chocolate" has some real oomph to it, too. I find a lot of his subsequent albums ... fine to good, with moments of greatness and moments of really not greatness.

Reading his book, I was impressed by his thorough musical knowledge, which made me modify my feelings that he was, especially later, being a dilettante. In turns out that, go figure, he just has broad, deep, encyclopedic music nerd interests in lots of music.

was just the other day marveling at nieve’s piano and bruce's bass on “human hands”

I actually think "Poisoned Rose" is all right, and it fits well within that extraordinary run of torch songs. (And I already mentioned both the Animals cover and "Eisenhower Blues," which as pointed out is a cover too.)

I was surprised how many Elvis Costello fans I knew actually singled out Imperial Bedroom as their favorite - this came up only because of that recent tour built around it (and the show I went to was pretty awesome). It took awhile for it to grow on me, but I quite like it as well. I'll add that his singing on it is pretty great, especially on "Beyond Belief" (one of my favorite tracks, period) and "Town Cryer" which I think he wanted Barry White to cover.

Elvis Costello reminds me of another lifelong student, Martin Scorsese, where their encyclopedic knowledge has enabled them to do an extraordinary run of work no one else could have done, primarily for the way they would recontextualize ideas in startling new and personal ways. It's also led them to go beyond their comfort zone, exploring other genres they've grown to love, and the results can be mixed. For example, New York, New York isn't wholly successful (though it's still aged pretty well) and Almost Blue never works though I always felt his cover of "Psycho" and King of America were successful and wholly organic manifestations of everything he absorbed from country music. So much of his post-2000 work, like so much of Scorsese's work from the same era, suffers from being too self-conscious and it does come off as being very academic. To be fair, sometimes it'll work better live than on record - it's startling how many latter day gems I'll see or hear on a live recording only to be disappointed by the studio version.

birdistheword are you actually marcelo, because i cannot think of another writer so easily reminded of other lifelong students whose encyclopedic knowledge has enabled them to do an extraordinary run of blogs?

i have long appreciated your writing but could you please be less of a prat

*yes the bass on paranoid expresses birmingham's hatred of thatcher*

I'm not marcelo and I don't know him, but am I being called a prat for what I'm posting here or what marcelo's written elsewhere (or maybe here)?

i apologise for mistaking you

Elvis Costello reminds me of another lifelong student, Martin Scorsese, where their encyclopedic knowledge has enabled them to do an extraordinary run of work no one else could have done, primarily for the way they would recontextualize ideas in startling new and personal ways.

marcello would never have wrapped up a sentence with this kind of bullshit

?

First, that was in response to Josh's comment that he had an encyclopedic knowledge, and I brought up Scorsese because I think they're alike in that way and it's the key to a lot of their best work. I actually link the two a lot, though more in open discussion rather than writing about it. If you think that's bullshit, then please articulate a reasonable response instead of stooping to petty insults.

A huge amount of expertise on Mitchell Froom here.

Makes me realise that I ... don't really even know who he is.

he's the only member of Crowded House who isn't descended from Tim Finn"s mum

Froom is a session dude who came to prominence producing the first Crowded House album then sort of made a thing of gussying up all these folk/roots acts with (often literal) bells and whistles. This excellent interview with Pete Thomas (which I have probably posted before) sums him up, for good or for ill:

What is it like working with producer Mitchell Froom?

Mitchell has a way of explaining things without being too serious, and he can get you in the mood when things aren't going quite right. If you can do that as a producer, you can draw out things that go beyond just good playing; you can get moods. Also, he doesn't flog a dead horse. You might have spent quite a long time rehearsing it, but you generally have it within two or three takes, and it doesn't sound played out. He can see when your brain is sort of fried. Mitchell and his engineer, Tchad Blake, also like to screw with the sounds. They've got these big flight cases full of the weirdest amps, African instruments.... It really encouraged me to get into a lot of things like that. It's the complete opposite to samples. You don't go out and get yourself loads of samples, you just get yourself loads of biscuit tins and bells and sort of invent the sounds that people will end up sampling.

Vic Firth makes these mallets with maracas in them. As soon as I'd got them out of the bag and showed them to Mitchell and Tchad it was, "Right. We'll have them on everything." It's also really good if you use a straight stick in one hand and do a tom pattern with a maraca with the other one; it sounds like this really tricky maraca part. It's better if you don't think about it and just play naturally. A couple of really surprising little rhythmic patterns have come out of it. There's a track on Elvis's Brutal Youth called "You Tripped At Every Step," where I've got a maraca in the right hand and a stick in the left hand.

Mitchell also produced Richard Thompson's Mirror Blue, which you played on. You mentioned to me earlier that there were times when you played different parts from various kits at the same time.

Oh, every track. It's a complete stripdown. It's finding things that work. I've always been vaguely musical on the drums. I always try to tune them well and find cymbals that are in tune, and this was just a progression from that. There is a track on Richard Thompson's album called "Fast Food" that's supposed to sound like the tills going in a fast-food shop. I used this Red Indian bass drum, and it was like, "Well, that tambourine doesn't work; we'll tie some gaffer's tape around this triangle and hit it on the second beat." Half the time you've got a piano stool with something gaffered to it, something else taped to your knee, some African or Indian ankle bracelets around your bass drum foot.... One of my favorite tracks from that album is "Shane And Dixie." I actually used a children's beginner snare drum on that.

The only problem with all this is that occasionally Mitchell will say something like, "Okay, Pete, in the third verse just play the bass drum half as much," and you just fall apart. You begin to quiver and go, "I can't play." Every now and then you just have to go for a walk around the block or something. It's not like you are playing anything that resembles something you've done before. It's not like you're playing rock 'n' roll. With Los Lobos, they had me playing cumbia beats and things, which I had never played before.

The first time you were approached to do that sort of unusual stuff, with all of this freedom of choice as to sounds and techniques, did that freak you out?

Yeah. It caught me unaware to start with. It's like when anybody asks you to do something different, it's like, "Hmmm, why should I?" But I cottoned on pretty quick because the whole thing with them is that it's fun. Quite often they'll just use a pair of mic's. So that might mean that your crash cymbal has got to be sort of behind your right shoulder, you have to put tape over the hi-hats because they are too loud.... I've done sessions for them where I'd go to bed at night and it's like, "Why does my neck hurt like this?" And it's because I've been sitting all day with the bass drum way over here, just because it sounds great like that. I try to sneak things in, move a cymbal so it's easy to hear. Then it's like, "Have you moved that cymbal?" (laughs)

But like I said, the important thing is that it's just fun. Sixty or seventy percent of the time, everyone is really pleased with the end result. It's as if everyone has been working together on a surrealist painting. When you've got chains hanging off a cymbal and some old bells tied to your leg, and it comes back sounding like a tom cat in a scrap yard or something — and as a total piece of music, it works — then it's a real thrill.

When it came time for you to do other albums....

Oh, I've gotten into terrible trouble like that. I've wasted a lot of people's time, (laughs) When I did Squeeze's Some Fantastic Place album I was like, "Why don't we try this: I'll get this old steel drum and some claves and this African bongo and then we'll make up a loop and put it through a fuzz box and then we'll all play to that...." We'd be listening back and they'd be looking at me like, "What are you doing to our song?"

Were you able to get any of these ideas through in the end?

No. But it is fun to go through the conventional thing as well. I did come unstuck, though. I was all full of it — "Oh, I know how to do this funny stuff — and they were all just like, "Well we don't want it."

Back to Marty Costello, I actually think the Scorsese comparison is pretty apt. They're both in a sense technical savants with really identifiable personal trademarks, with a "core" catalog buffered by several conspicuously stylistic deviations over the years that nonetheless below the surface fit right in. I'd say, with minimal thought, that "Gangs of New York" may be his "Mighty Like a Rose."

Josh, can you link to the whole Pete interview? That bit is great

Reading that, I think, wow, I bet that sounds completely amazing. And then I realize I haven't listened to Brutal Youth, or wanted to, since 1994. Very little of it stuck with me after (like my experience with Spike) many listens trying to figure out why it wasn't working. I think I remember the chorus of "20% Amnesia," but that's all.

I have nothing to add except this ever-amazing Pete Thomas performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYeouy9cXk8

Here you go!

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Modern_Drummer,_December_1995

Thanks for posting that, JiC. Thomas is one of my favorites. Love this part about working with Diamanda Galas and John Paul Jones:

I'd certainly like to work with him again. He plays great Tamla/Motown-style bass, and it was great listening to all his old stories. Having worked with him and having listened to the sort of riffs he comes up with, I think that old John Paul had a lot more to do with the writing in Led Zeppelin than a lot of people give him credit for. I felt a bit funny sometimes being his drummer. Every now and then he'd get all misty-eyed.

Sometimes I couldn't resist playing a couple of those John Bonham fills, and he'd be like, "Boy, it's like playing with Bonzo again." You could tell he really loved him and was quite gutted by his loss. John Paul was the one who found him, and he spoke so sentimentally about it.

Yeah, thanks, Malcman, I love the idea of a Pete Thomas/JPJ rhythm section.

I love (a lot of) BRUTAL YOUTH.

Thanks Josh

Back to Marty Costello, I actually think the Scorsese comparison is pretty apt. They're both in a sense technical savants with really identifiable personal trademarks, with a "core" catalog buffered by several conspicuously stylistic deviations over the years that nonetheless below the surface fit right in. I'd say, with minimal thought, that "Gangs of New York" may be his "Mighty Like a Rose."

Thanks Josh. If you ever sit through Scorsese's commentaries and old DVD extras (particularly for Raging Bull or Taxi Driver), what's extraordinary (yes, extraordinary) is how he applies his encyclopedic knowledge of film history to the way he crafts every scene. He references a wide array of films that on the surface don't have much in common with one another, and what he comes up with doesn't feel like a patchwork collage - it's seamless and organic, you don't mistake it for anything but a Scorsese film. One boxing scene was heavily modeled on the shower scene in Psycho, Jake and Vicki's first encounter on a scene between Terry and Edie in On the Waterfront, etc. None of this is obvious when you watch the movie, but it's clear when they point it out to you and put them up side-by-side or throw up a storyboard next to a scene.

When EC wrote the liner notes for those Rhino reissues, at least for some of the earlier albums he goes track-by-track listing every element from every record they stole. Get Happy!! always made its sources obvious, that was part of the concept, but on Armed Forces, he's listing everything from ABBA to David Bowie's Eno collaborations, Bacharach/David songs like "Anyone Who Had a Heart," etc. and it goes on and on like that. Again, it doesn't feel like a patchwork collage of other records thrown together, it's seamless and organic and you don't mistake it for anything but an Elvis Costello record. But when he points out the sources, the connection becomes clear. It's like that cynical axiom that says all art is theft and that the best artists know how to obscure that thievery more skillfully than others.

I was taken aback by mookie's response which to be blunt was garbage, but if he wants to live down to that, good luck to him.

I like your theory, birdistheword !

I quite like the idea of an artist who draws so deliberately on another thing, but not just by directly (maybe lazily) quoting it, rather by using it as inspiration for a creative act that has its own intensity or complexity.

Thanks pinefox! I remember David Byrne did a radio interview around 1999 or 2000 where they asked him about artists he or Talking Heads had influenced, and he kind of mentioned what you just said - he had a greater appreciation for those who didn't sound like his work. He liked inspiring artists to take similar risks, but the result really had to be their own rather than mimic or re-create something he or Talking Heads had already done.

I've listened to Clockface - I liked it the for the first six tracks, but it kind of falls apart after that, with experiments that don't work and soft-jazz ballads that are hit-or-miss (and even then the performances of those ballads may be an acquired taste - I'm not really a fan of his wife's music, but those songs feel like they'd fit better on her albums).

Wait, is this a new EC LP again ??

It is! Crikey!

What about LOOK NOW?

I have still not heard that but think I might like it.

I thought Look Now was okay. Greil Marcus described it as "12 songs baked in a cake" in his dismissive review, and to be fair that's a good description for how it sounds.

I liked "Under Lime," "Unwanted Number" and "Mr. & Mrs. Hush," they were immediately engaging. ("Unwanted Number" is actually an old song - it was written in 1995 or 1996 for Grace of My Heart as a fictional '60s hit, and it fits very well with Look Now. This may be the first time he's recorded it himself, barring any circulating demos.)

"Suspect My Tears" was pretty good too, albeit a little overdone for my taste. I'm not a huge fan of "Stripping Paper" but quite a few people seem to believe it's one of the highlights.

Marcus actually preferred the four-song EP that came with the expanded edition. (It's all streaming on Spotify.) He singled out “The Final Mrs. Curtain" and I have to agree, it's an excellent track that should have been on the album proper.

(Forgot, "Unwanted Number" was also performed on the All This Useless Beauty tour, albeit re-arranged as a dirge.)

Is 'Unwanted Number' in the film? If so I really liked it.

Surprised at how prolific EC is being, again.

The SPIKE demos (CD2?) are not on Spotify.

I finally played '... this town ...' again last night. Remarkable. The lyric is finally too obscene for me, but the music - I'd not realised wuite how powerful, pervasive and creative Roger McGuinn was on this track. It's curious that he only ever played on *one* EC track - so superbly - but never again.

Speaking of which, I had no idea untucks today that he made a video for "This Town", and I was paying attention at the time. If I had seen it I might have recognised the references to Donald Trump, I wonder if I'd heard of him back then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXzkG4LK9gY

Tim: yes, I saw this the other day and my thoughts were precisely the same!

I'd not realised wuite how powerful, pervasive and creative Roger McGuinn was on this track. It's curious that he only ever played on *one* EC track - so superbly - but never again.

Well, "You Bowed Down" isn't McGuinn but also kind of IS McGuinn.

As luck would have it, someone uploaded the clip on YouTube (albeit squashed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPcoREKDW30

The R&B group For Real is credited with performing (or at least singing) the film recording. It's also on the out-of-print 1998 compilation Bespoke Songs, Lost Dogs, Detours & Rendezvous that Rhino put together before they licensed his back catalog. Not a bad compilation.

The deluxe edition of Look Now is on Spotify, but yes, the Rhino bonus discs (covering everything up to and including All This Useless Beauty) are all out-of-circulation. Elvis Costello's talked about this in interviews because he considers each of those bonus discs to be an album in its own right. Unfortunately, their availability seems to be out of his hands, so it probably has something to do with his deal with Universal. No idea what, it could be a lot of things: maybe Universal has the final say on whether to make them available, maybe they don't but the release for that material is tied up by some disagreement between both parties (or maybe even with Rhino/WEA), who knows.

FWIW, "You Bowed Down" was originally written for McGuinn, and it's on his album Back from Rio. It's been mentioned in several places (probably the Rhino liner notes too), but EC re-recorded it for All This Useless Beauty because he didn't believe they recorded it quite right. (The producer for Back from Rio didn't see eye-to-eye with McGuinn and he even tried to bury his 12-string in the mix before McGuinn objected.) EC's version sounds even more like a note-perfect re-creation of the Byrds (specifically 1965).

Thanks, bird, for more of the story on "You Bowed Down." A high quality song.

I love Bespoke Songs..., though my CD got scratched at some point and now won't play correctly. Loads of great stuff - Aimee Mann, Zucchero, Don Was, Christy Moore.

Back In Rio is a really good album!!!