Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Jun 10, 2002 | 1) Elvis Costello & the Impostors, Berkeley Community Theatre (May 23)
He played for well over two hours, and he needed the time. With original London Attractions Steve Nieve on keyboards and Pete Thomas on drums, plus Davey Faragher, a bassist from California, Costello looked sleek and ready, his voice was seamless and for more than half of the show little came across whole. "When I Was Cruel No. 2" and "Dust," terrific songs from last month's album, "When I Was Cruel," lost shape to visual fussiness, missed connections between musicians, lazy rhythms. New tunes "15 Petals" and "Spooky Girlfriend," along with "Man Out of Time," "Clowntime Is Over," "High Fidelity" and others of the older songs Costello chose lack shape as compositions, and the quartet had none to give them. Endings were often pointlessly extended with parodic extravaganzas; Costello played to the crowd, asking for singalongs or eliciting the slow, barely-on-the-beat clapping that has as much to do with music or performance as the Wave does with baseball. ("I liked it better when he was an angry young man and acted as if the audience wasn't there," said a friend.) As if searching for the spines of the songs, Costello's tone turned into a bleat.
With three sets of encores, everything changed. There was no "Alison," no "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes." There was, first, the new "Alibi." It went on and on, rebuilt from the ground up with radical shifts in pacing, silences yielding to shattered guitar notes, pantomime as words dropped out of the song or reached their limits. "Stop me if you've heard this but," Costello added to the recorded version, like a sadist who is also a flagellant: "Papa's got a brand new/ Alibi." That last word began to work as the clincher of any argument, a one-word summation of the human condition. As the song stretched, so did the idea.
"Lipstick Vogue" has been a heart attack on stage since 1978, but the lines "Sometimes I almost feel/ Just like a human being" always stop the song dead even as it rushes on. Regardless of his demeanor, weight, hair, Costello has always been able to put that version of the human condition -- feeling almost human -- across, and its sulfurous residue carried over into the new "Episode of Blonde," made into a stand-up comedy act, the sung parts breaking off for something close to a Lord Buckley routine with vaudeville moves and Nieve, his hair flying in full Professor mode, playing his theremin like a wah-wah pedal. Again, the performance seemed impossibly long. Not too long, but as if the recorded version was merely a template of what the song could be onstage, where there was room to move, to disappear, to come back as somebody else.
The finale was "I Want You," first heard on the 1986 album "Blood & Chocolate." It's Costello's epic, a template for so much more, including the best songs on "When I Was Cruel," but more than anything an irreducible thing in itself. The piece is all darkness, threat, death and punishment -- suddenly, that was the human condition, and no breath of any other air could make it into the music, or out of it. Now the silences in the performance were black holes, sucking in any intimations of only-kidding, of take-it-back. The jagged guitar notes that figured in "Alibi" were bigger, more unstable -- huge discords calling up Neil Young's improvised soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man." I cannot get to the bottom of this, Costello seemed to say with every two lines, but will not stop trying.
There was no bottom; there simply came a point where, for the moment, there was nothing more to say. Filing out music: Roy Orbison, "It's Over."
2-4), DJ Shadow, "Live From Austin" (Mothers Milk, 1999), DJ Shadow with Cut Chemist, "Brainfreeze" aka "Dance the Slurp" (Pirateria Fonografica, 1999) and "The Private Press" (MCA)
"Live From Austin": scratching. "Brainfreeze": humor. "The Private Press": vision, by means of a ready-made remake of "Dead Man's Curve."
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