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Brilliant Mistake

Costello's iconoclastic "Girls Girls Girls," a greatest-hits-style retrospective that came out a decade or so ago, is a thrilling, kaleidoscopic account of his career. The enigmatic programming -- song following song in dizzying, nonsensical fashion -- keeps you off guard. His "Almost Blue," a rueful romantic envoi, is followed by "Riot Act," a blisteringly self-destructive one. "Night Rally," a furious, unrelenting portrait of fascism, is followed by "American Without Tears," an oblique, metaphorical dissection of capitalism. What it all meant was dizzying, impenetrable. In his typically scintillating liner notes, Costello makes vague reference to stories he wished to tell in the sequencing, but this never becomes clear as, of course, it couldn't, or wouldn't.

Costello understands the Faustian bargain rock 'n' rollers make -- and seems to accept as well the even rougher demands of the even more unforgiving milieu in which his persona was hatched. But he's never liked it. He dutifully wrote a minor hit or two (most notably "Everyday I Write the Book"), but by the mid-'80s, it was plain that he was never going to sell a lot of records. He was losing his looks, putting on weight and his hair was thinning.

What to do? The smarter stars from the '60s rolled on, cannily playing their greatest hits for aging fans and jumping on this or that fad, like disco. To the punks the very words "Rod Stewart" were synonymous with pop degradation, but that didn't stop Stewart from selling ever-increasing numbers of records in the 1970s and 1980s. But that wasn't an option for Costello. The musical genre he cared the most for was classic country; unfortunately for him, it was the only genre the mass audience liked less than punk.

Crueller yet was the other avenue open to him -- that of artiste. In the '60s, with few exceptions, the greatest artists sold the most records -- it was a given. By the '80s, a wide gulf had opened up between talent and record sales. And for that matter, for all his reputation, Costello could scarcely comfort himself with the consolation that his was an unappreciated genius. "Punch the Clock" and "Goodbye Cruel World" were hardly evidence of that.

At a certain point it must have occurred to him that his moment had passed.

So in 1985 he tried to kill himself off. He jettisoned his stage name and resolved to record as Declan Patrick MacManus. He was quickly disabused of this notion by Columbia Records, which wasn't about to let him throw away his one salable commodity. So he sighed and produced what from this perspective must be seen as the key album of his oeuvre, more than those corrosive first albums, more than the magnificent "Imperial Bedroom."

This was 1986's "King of America," his haggard essay on the pointlessness of his career. (It ended up being credited to "The Costello Show," incidentally. It was a full, uh, six months before he put out another record under the name Elvis Costello.) To make his peace with the past, his key backing ensemble, which he collected with producer T-Bone Burnett, included some former players from that other Elvis' TCB band. The result is the most frustrating of Costello's unquestionably great efforts: Puffed up by his sidemen's risumis, he throws in too many tired boogie rave-ups ("Glitter Gulch," "Loveable"); and some forced genre posturing ("Eisenhower Blues"); and an annoying, mood-breaking cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."

But buried in the record as well is a suite of major songs, their intents extravagant and plain, that together are a shuddering portrait of his condition. Each is quiet and soft, and sung and enunciated with a deliberateness that suggests that their composer wants them to be understood. In "Jack of All Parades," he lurches feelingly between his love life and the pop life. ("I was everybody's boy/But soon that thrill just fades.") In the quivering "I'll Wear It Proudly," he offers a sarcastic deal to his audience: "I'll wear it proudly through the dives and the dancehalls/If you'll wear it proudly through the snakepits and catcalls." And the grand, ragged "Brilliant Mistake" is a hugely ambitious song that eviscerates, in vertiginous order, the American way of life, romance and then the singer's personality itself:

I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense ...
I was a fine idea at the time
Now I'm a brilliant mistake

The last song of this suite is "Suit of Lights," an intensely allusive affair with a musical panorama stretching from the journeyman musician to Nat King Cole to that other Elvis to Costello himself. Deep inside the song you can find a grinning crowd tarring and feathering an artist it doesn't like. Some of us may think that there's not enough of that these days, but to Costello it's an important image, a symbol of the crowd's fascistic leanings. His commentary on "Suit of Lights" on the "Girls Girls Girls" compilation is so central to understanding his career and work that they're worth taking a close look at. I quote them in their dense entirety with his idiosyncratic punctuation and slightly odd grammar, and advise that they bear careful reading.

There are small demands of respect. They are denied in this song, which I wrote for my father, Ross. He has greater professional resolve in the face of the tiny indignities that every working person shares, but is somehow overlooked and even resented when expressed by a performer. It is assumed that the risk of humiliation is the price paid for the privilege. I don't believe that is right and I am not talking about someone like myself, who has already been spoilt by your affection, coming to expect it to the extent that I sat down to write all of this but it's all 'Work.' The same pig-faced lout or drunken bore who is very large in the dark of the crowd would be horrified if you were to simply trip him up on the way to work. Here endeth the lesson. By the way, we forgive nothing.

I interpret those words this way: People think performers have it made, that if they don't like it they should get the hell off the stage. But musicians are working people. Show them some respect, you pig-faced louts who buy my records, and by the way I'm not making this plea on behalf of a star like myself, but rather on behalf of my sainted father, though I'm holding the grudge personally anyway.

I'm fascinated by the epigram that anchors his words: "The risk of humiliation is the price paid for the privilege." Costello disagrees. But here he's finessing a crucial distinction -- the difference between a journeyman and an artist. The journeyman, like Costello's father, makes no claim to art: He's just giving the crowd what it wants, trying to make a buck as he launches into the nine millionth cover of "Louie Louie."

But if that's the noble proletarian work you've chosen, the drunken louts are the ones you need to please. If they're talking, you're not doing your job. Humiliation and privilege don't enter into it.

The only people who are contemptuous of such labor are, of course, critics, who paradoxically love the son. A true artist like him -- and particularly one from the punk era -- has a responsibility to his audience that transcends entertainment. As he acknowledges, artists are spoiled, but that doesn't mean the audience is not, at the same time, a scary sight. Costello has always viewed it with horror. But really, what can you do? It's terrible to stand on a stage and try to sing a new song with a drunken lout screaming, "'Pump It Up'!" especially if you haven't written a song as good as "Pump It Up" in quite a while. You might say that the humiliation is the price paid for the privilege.

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Man out of Time

Which brings us back to "Man out of Time."

For that song he drafted a line -- "He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege" -- that would find an unconscious but unnerving echo in the defensive words he wrote about his father for the "Girls Girls Girls" compilation five years later. For Costello, the man out of time is someone very much like a performer.

And suddenly the middle-class spy evaporates. In his place is a rock star -- a rock star who never was a star, really -- hooked on betrayal and on the run. "Man out of Time" is really about Costello and his career, practically from the first line to the last. With a nod to his namesake he describes himself wearing "dirty dead man's shoes." What is a star but someone who has "A tight grip on the short hairs/Of the public imagination" and who rather pathetically "listens for the footsteps that would follow him around"? The star on the run's affairs are splashed across the tabloids. ("For his private wife and kids sometimes/Real life becomes a rumor.") His minor celebrity and minor comforts are merely a reminder of the true stardom and riches denied him: "A tu'penny ha'penny millionaire/Looking for a fourpenny one."

That's the thing about Elvis Costello; he's been there before you. After "Imperial Bedroom" he recorded "King of America" and a solid Attractions follow-up, "Blood and Chocolate," and then slid quietly out of the artistic firmament. He moved to Warner Brothers; his albums there have been without interest, as have been his attempted collaborations with the likes of Paul McCartney, the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach. His most loyal fans will doughtily make a case for "Spike," or "Mighty Like a Rose," or "Brutal Youth." That is what one's most loyal fans are for; a disinterested listener hears that in the last dozen or so years he's written barely a song or two that have the unforced drive, sparkle and complexity of his best work.

At the same time, Costello gave up any pretension of discriminating behavior. He did reunion tours with the Attractions and high-grossing, low-overhead outings with Nick Lowe or Steve Nieve, the Attractions keyboardist. He makes grinning appearances on TV shows and movies, and is happy to grab a paycheck at disgusting corporate rock events like the Guinness Fleadh and Woodstock. And when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has its annual dinners, Costello joins hacks like Billy Joel to grin and perform for the assembled industry parasites.

It's an old story and a common one; Costello's only novel approach was to see it coming before anyone else; when he did, he tried to vaporize his career and his future in a metaphorical auto-da-fi. No other major rocker has even considered such a thing, and you have to credit the punk era for even raising the question. Buried in all the noise, the aggression, the affected nihilism was a commitment to something like honesty. This is why '60s artists like John Lennon and Bob Dylan retain their psychic pop force: For all their missteps, their honesty never wavered.

To be honest to an audience, you have to care for it. The bravest can be humble before it, acknowledging its hunger, its capacity for horror and its unquestioning love for the performer, which Costello, as one of rock's greatest students of the music, must appreciate as well as anybody. In this context, what is worse than the feeling you're letting it down?

Whatever his ambivalent attitude toward the crowd (as the picture in "Suit of Lights" makes clear), Costello must have sensed the devotion a great part of it had for him. Those of us in the punk generation were taught to hate the heroes from the '60s who went soft and ridiculous in the '70s -- the Stewarts, the Claptons, the Jaggers. (Not to mention the Stillses and Bramletts!) Costello stood for something more than pop glee; he knew that rock's reason for being, if the music meant anything at all, was its ability to provide an outlet for rage like his, and that he had nothing to apologize for. But he was cursed to have been part of the first great rock moment that did not change the world, and was as a consequence born to hate itself. Someone with his capacity for fury could scarcely complain, but he must also have felt the waste, of both his talent and a generation's affection. To have murdered our love was a crime. We forgive nothing.

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