OK, so Elvis' choice of name lacked a certain subtlety, but rock and roll isn't particularly about subtlety anyway. The backlash against him went well and beyond the call of duty, or even of nature. (Hey, his real name is Declan McManus. You'd change it too. What works for Bob Zimmerman is good enough for the Decmeister.) Let's not forget that immortal quote from David Lee Roth: "The reason rock critics prefer Elvis Costello to Van Halen is that most critics look like Elvis Costello and not like me. Hey, it's true!!!" Back then I used to be told I looked like Steve Perry from Journey. (Whether that was intended as a compliment or not I'll never know.) Maybe it's because I was parting my hair down the middle at the time. Oh, speaking of hair, Elvis and I still have ours.

If you got past the name and the look and picked up on the music, here was some perfectly acceptable, in fact vital rock and roll. There was a spiritual kinship to the best of the UK scene, yet with enough musical credibility to make it to stateside radio, helping to open the floodgates to all the rest of the sludge. My Aim Is True has aged well; certainly Elvis has nothing to be ashamed of.

Although--it must be noted--Graham Parker has much to be bitter about. Everything GP had been doing, Elvis was now doing in spades. He sounds so much like Parker on parts of My Aim Is True that some thought "Elvis Costello" must be a hoax. (Geep was magnanimous: "He's exciting. His image is fucking exciting.") Furthermore, it's long been a mystery to me why Nick Lowe always did such a shitty job producing Parker (costing Graham airplay thereby, bleeding his audience dry) when he always did such remarkable work for Elvis. Nick has something to answer for here, and it did please me to see Nick's own sorry popstar career down the toilet so quickly.

(Not that he didn't have a hand in his own demise--I mean, c'mon, what sane man expects to get traction out of an album entitled Pinker and Prouder Than Previous?? That li'l doggie featured the only album cover in all of [pseudo]-rock'n'roll resembling Aerosmith's Done With Mirrors--but even uglier--and Aerosmith were so strung out on heroin at the time that Jerry Garcia was worried about them. What's Nick Lowe's excuse?)

With or without excuses, life trudges on. The fact is, Graham Parker was born to be a journeyman. The modest success of Squeezing Out Sparks freaked him out, and his next several albums carved a niche for him out of the mainstream but still in the game. The new century found Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello both in a jazz-crooner phase. And why not?

Unless of course you're dealing with the 20th century Elvis, so I'll get back to that. Sad to admit but I haven't kept up with his recent music, fine as much of it is. I'm ambivalent about high school reunions too; there are people you'd love to see, and others you want to remember as they were. And so I thank Rhino for their entire series of 2CD reissues--there's new Elvis Costello to be heard, and it's THAT Elvis Costello. All this, and no distractions...

[ September 2005 UPDATE -- Yet another reason to thank Rhino! The end of this month will see the release of The Right Spectacle: The Very Best of Elvis Costello- The Videos, which is pretty much exactly that. 27 vids are included, many barely ever seen since first airing, with over an hour of rare bonus Euro TV footage. If you can't thank Rhino enough, then click here to order it from them. We now return you to 1978, already in progress... ]

His second disc, This Year's Model, most perfectly captured the Zeitgeist. It's a musical time-capsule of its year. Everything hip and cutting-edge in 1978 as New Wave was morphing to Power Pop was at least alluded to in the grooves of this record, which set as many trends as it summed up. And oh, the sheer ferocity of it! Particularly the initial four cuts--the opener, "No Action," boasted better Keith Moon drumming than Moon himself had been able to manage for over ten years. Throughout the record creepy-crawly organ hovered over every song, making the paranoia nearly palpable. With every break in the fog those Bigfoot drums and elvisceral guitar slash through ("Pump It Up," to this day, boils my blood whenever I hear it, while the Pistols merely make me smile and tap my foot).

The thing with Elvis back then, though, is that it wasn't an "act." Everyone seems to have forgotten now, but as far as anyone could tell he was genuinely psychotic back in 1978-79. His first major tour of America (for Armed Forces) found him playing 45-minute shows, and instead of an encore he'd blast white noise to drive any stragglers from the venue. He surrounded himself with a goon squad whose job was to physically intimidate anyone who dared try to interview him, even to rip the film out of the cameras of anyone attempting to photograph him. Maybe Led Zep could get away with crap like this, but coming from a paranoid-schizophrenic little simp with a few gold albums and half a tour under his belt, it was beyond bizarre. It was explicitly, deliberately, defiantly, publicly self-destructive.

I remember vividly his first major American TV appearance, on Saturday Night Live. The Sex Pistols had been announced the week before, but they weren't able to make it into NYC. Perhaps Elvis was pissed off at being on the B-list? When he came on, the Attractions lurched into "Alison," and they'd barely gotten through half a verse when suddenly he's robotically waving his arms in the air and demanding that the band "Stop! Stop! There's no reason we should be doing this song!" (The people in the control booth froze, one guy was certain the next thing out of Elvis' mouth would be something like "Kill the n*****s, kill the j**s!" Honest.)

Exactly as when I first saw Devo (again, on SNL, doing "Satisfaction"), I thought it was one of the skits. Nope, this was liver than you'll ever be. He then launched into a particularly blistering (and relatively unknown) "Radio, Radio."

[ n.b. -- While it's no match for the SNL version, you can view the official vid for "Radio, Radio" here. ]

Even without a stump speech, it was such a Scare that he was never invited back, not until the Spike tour. To all appearances this was a genuine psychotic, utterly indifferent to his own impending demise.

The only thing that saved him was the songs, a catalog of bitterness, rejection, alienation, an eagle eye on everything wrong with the world around him, his partner, himself, everything that had brought him to this point--and a plea in back of it; a search for some kind of redemption, a desire to put things right. You can hear all of that just in "Big Tears." Even his B-sides were A-sides. He indicted everything so accurately that he really was a sort of Bob Dylan for those fucked-up times (yeah, a Dylan from that evil, parallel universe, y'know, the one where Spock had the beard...)

Any 20-year-old of average looks and above-average intelligence is put through all of this and more, but doesn't yet have the experience, confidence or clout to be heard and taken seriously. And so there's a deep, passionate identification with whomever is able to put this into words and force the world to listen. In the 60s it might have been Townshend, Lennon, Dylan, any number of people. The 80s were a much nastier decade, a particularly brutal time be young. And for any of us who might have fit into his particular, um, demographic at the time, Elvis was singing our song. What could be more rock and roll than that?

Armed Forces was even more brilliant than This Year's Model; keyboardist Steve Nieve had been weaned away from the tacky Farfisa organ, and the richness of the resulting orchestrations recalled everything from Abba to Kraftwerk. The songwriting was even better than the year before. This was the most zingy, poppy, insidiously infectious collection of melodies Elvis would ever achieve.

Two decades after the fact, it becomes apparent that Armed Forces was the beginning of his departure from trendsetting and into "his own thing." (Trust made it official--he of all people was smiling on an album cover.) But that's OK. You want legends, you got legends, dozens of them and Elvis Costello had become an archetype within three albums. What do you do for an encore? Nobody in rock and roll has ever been able to keep up that pace for more than a few years. The Beatles, Stones, Who managed a few more peak seasons than most, but everyone else who didn't die first had a brief flash of several genius albums followed by many more merely-good to sure-is-crappy ones. Nirvana's next studio album would have begun their downward spiral. No Code. Changing Horses. Diamond Dogs. The Blind Leading The Naked. Tusk.

For a time we were willing to let him get away with nearly anything because he'd seized so much latitude for himself already. The culture, the music biz, pride, joy, loneliness, hunger for success, sex and sex and sex and sex....this was the machine, and Elvis was all the rage. It was fun while it lasted, and of course nothing lasts forever.

It all blew up in his face in a bar in Columbus, Ohio, when he and one of his band members happened to be getting drunk in the same room as Bonnie Bramlett and various members of Stephen Stills' entourage. The shoptalk grew increasingly ugly between the two camps. Nowadays they're all Long Term Artists with boxed sets full of back catalog, but back then Elvis was the Next Big Thing and openly scornful of the old-wave artistes in his midst. (This was some years before he began covering Grateful Dead songs and gigging with Jerry. See, that previous Garcia reference wasn't utterly gratuitous after all.) The talk grew uglier still. Elvis, being severely drunk, thought he could put an end to it by saying something so ghastly they would shrivel into the woodwork upon hearing it. He made several racist slurs against Ray Charles and others; none of it bears repeating, so I won't. But People magazine had a field day with it.

He's apologized dozens of times. We've all been drunk and done something we wish we hadn't; so on that level not one may cast the first stone. That didn't stop stones from being cast, and that was nothing compared to what happened in his own head. All that legendary disgust at the world around him turned back upon himself. He took stock of his life and didn't like what he saw. If he was the Bizarro Dylan, then the Ray Charles incident was his motorcycle accident. The aftermath of that pathetic episode changed him forever. He would never be half so cocky again.

On the first day of the rest of his life he released Get Happy!!. The record sounds better with every passing year but its 1980 release marks the point when he first began to slip off American radio. "Opportunity" was played for perhaps a week, but it would be over before it ever got a chance to sink in. The DJ would crank Judas Priest next and in your haste to change stations you'd forget Elvis had even been on. Perhaps Get Happy!! failed to connect because his bad karma was catching up with him, as it will to anyone as genuinely hateful as he was back in them thar days...but even if it hadn't, his Moment was passing as well.

It doesn't matter. Get Happy!! transcends its time and all the circumstances that surrounded its making. If you're a boy hearing it at the point in your life when you need it most, you will soon learn that no better boy-girl what-the-fuck's-gone-wrong-now?-argggggh album has ever been recorded. Get Happy!! is Elvis' greatest achievement--20 songs, enough for a double LP, and not one of them a second longer than it needed to be and not one of them filler.

[ The vid for "High Fidelity" can be seen here. ]

It was his most bitter offering ever, since he was finally singing about L-O-V-E and nothing else but...and in the context of having dumped his wife of five years, being dumped by his girlfriend (served him right), then having the whole world come dumping down upon him for that drunken incident in Columbus, OH.

Rolling Stone noted of the vocals that this was the sound of a man who was "so far gone his bitterness is the only thing that keeps him sane." In a better world (perhaps the one in which Spock wears the beard), Get Happy!! would have nudged The Wall off the charts at #1. As it is, its epitaph was contained within its own lyrics: "You lack lust--you're so lacklustre/Is that all the strength you can muster?"

Sadly, this was the beginning of the end--at least for the concept of Elvis Costello, Superstar. He could have saved us all, led the revolution, been the Pied Piper Piss-ant Puissant, Prophet of Pixilated Poindexterism for the accursed Decade of Ugliness that was even then taking shape around and within each and every one of us. But unlike Ian Curtis for one, Elvis (as had the pinker [Cadillac], prouder, previous Presley), gazed into the maw of darkness, shuddered, tucked his tail between his legs and yipe-yipe-yiped it all the way home. I mean, forget Johnny Rotten, who by this point had been reduced to the brilliantly malarial self-mutterings that were PiL's first few albums--ElVoid had had authentic American consumer-units buying and accepting his product pretty much as proffered. (Sorry. I'll try to be good. But this is the guy who once wished someone luck "with a capital F" and rhymed that with "treble clef.") Unlike El Presley, he was fully aware of his own power. He could have been far more than a mere contender--he could have been the true Antichrist saviour of rock and roll!

But this realization scared him shitless. Rather than opting to make a shorter but apocalyptic career out of inflicting his demons upon the rest of the world, he traded them in. He apologized publicly to the world within the pages of Rolling Stone, and promised to mend his ways. And who among us would contend with the sentiment that informed the "The Loved Ones"--i.e., "fuck all that rubbish about burning out before you fade away. Somebody in your family still has to bury you, you know?" So he didn't save rock and roll after all--he chose to redeem himself as a human being. Therefore as a rock star (note the polarity), he screwed up bigtime.

Especially since he followed Get Happy!! (in the States) with Taking Liberties, a collection of B-sides, outtakes and such, then by the uneven Trust, then by the downright boring country homage of Almost Blue (his bizarro-world Nashville Skyline--it was said that he should've made a soul/r&b album and called it Almost Black), a triple-whammy of overexposure and declining quality control that saw to it (deliberately?) that his next one, the superfine Imperial Bedroom, for all its "masterpiece" hype would be simply one more Elvis Costello album, as would everything released afterward.

[ The vid for "Veronica" from 1989's Spike can be seen here. ]

In his most infamous early interview he sneered that all his songs were motivated by "revenge and guilt" and suicidal ideation--"I don't want to be around to witness my artistic decline." His actions over the next couple of years certainly bore this out until he stepped away from the cliff. History doesn't record whether the fallout from the Armed Forces tour was catalytic in the long run, or whether perhaps he simply went into therapy, but he survived his own psychosis somehow rather than dying at age 33. While his posters will never adorn teenage bedroom walls (as, in a more Spock-bearded world, they just might have), his true fans are much the richer for it. His loved ones as well.

He's so well-adjusted nowadays that he didn't even seem to mind back in '89, returning to Saturday Night Live and being outdistanced in outrageousness by the likes of Mary Tyler Moore. ("And now, ladies and gentlemen: Elvis Costello's penis!!!" To his credit, El followed this intro with a rendition of "Let Him Dangle.") Everything's just fine with Declan McManus these days, he's so contented he even threatened to retire for awhile and go fishing. That would be our loss, but he's earned the right to do whatever he likes. When he dies, Elvis Presley will be there to tell him to go to The Light.