Being an Elvis Costello fan has been like being a Bob Dylan fan, or a Neil Young fan.
There is too much to keep up with. Too many alternate takes. Too many collaborations. Too many lyrics. Too many recordings to keep track of, new and old. Worse, a lot of this abundance is compelling, rarely easy to ignore. Even at 70, that famously wiry frame much fuller now, the man seems incapable of phoning in it. At Park West on Tuesday night, for the first of four largely sold-out, partly striped-down shows concluding a three-year-long, occasional tour with his longtime pianist Steve Nieve, if you watched closely, you could see a Costello still capable of surprising himself, whistling through the end of songs, stomping a foot, extending tunes past a natural end.
Not even Elvis Costello, it seems, knows everything about Elvis Costello.
This show, he explained, was a conscious attempt to tear back the “artifice” from the material, discover stark new reinterpretations, find strange tricks in old dogs, whittle out unexpected arrangements or just recognize the sadder song he didn’t realize he wrote the first time. It was often lovely and wildly ambitious stuff, by turns soulful then menacing, rollicking then bittersweet, though if you came expecting something more traditional and danceable, I regret to inform you:
This, too, was not business as usual.
A couple stood up about midway through the show and hovered in back a moment, looking unsure if they wanted to stay or not. They sighed so loudly I could hear it over the music. “Let’s go,” the guy said, and the woman nodded. I leaned over and asked why they were leaving: The woman rolled her eyes and laughed bitterly. Because if they knew “it was going to be like this,” she said, they wouldn’t have come in the first place.
To be fair to them, most Elvis Costello concerts do have the rough outline of other Elvis Costello concerts: You get what you come for. He still spits lyrics like it’s 1978. Unlike Dylan, his voice still sounds familiar — like an old barfly somehow going through puberty.
And yet, like Dylan and Young, Costello has outpaced a chunk of his old audience. His shows with Nieve have been typically two-man affairs, Costello on guitar, Nieve on piano. The Park West concerts, however, are special: About midway through the two-and-a-half hour performance, Costello introduces a small assemblage of musicians, carrying nontraditional instruments: A fiddle, double bass, cornet and uilleann pipes — the latter a reedy-looking cousin of the bagpipes. Nieve bounces from a Steinway to a melodica to an accordion; Costello goes from guitar to the banjo to a drum machine.
It’s all less challenging, and much warmer, than that sounds. It’s Costello playing an American music savant and historian, drawing on torch ballad traditions one song, Fats Waller the next, then slashing rock, then industrial, then folk, blues … you’ll likely need a verse or two to recognize a song you’ve heard a million times before. “Clubland” now has a flamenco shuffle, before veering into “Ghost Town” by the Specials. “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” becomes a jangling, off-kilter, almost Mardi Gras-style rave-up. On Tuesday, he paid homage to Chicago electric blues with Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance.” He complimented that with Dylan’s “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Which morphed into a slow rockabilly of Costello’s chestnut “Mystery Dance.”
Needless to say, the casual Costello fan need not apply this time. But fans of reinvention, and of mining possibilities from vast catalogs, will be fascinated. He opened with a pointed triptych pulled from the headlines, all deep cuts, starting with the little-known “Deportee” (an early version of “The Deportees Club” on his 1984 album “Goodbye Cruel World”), then into “When I Was Cruel No. 2” and “American Gangster Time” — later adding “American Without Tears.” The closest he came to outward politics was asking the audience to picture the protagonist of “Deportee” as anyone looking for a new life, “maybe washing dishes at the Green Mill right now.”
He let the diversity of American music he played say everything, throwing in a moody unreleased song named “John Went Walking” that tiptoed between beat poetry and hip hop, and ending with an early St. Patrick’s Day waltz around a tune written with The Chieftains, performed like a lush Irish wall of sound: Look out below where you tread / For the colors bled as they overflowed / Red, white and blue / Green, white and gold.
And still, some shout out a favorite song, a pebble in a vast ocean of choices.
He did not dismiss them. Tomorrow night, he promised, will have new songs. And presumably, the night after that will be different, too. Not that you’ll hear your favorite, he mumbled. Which may be the most Elvis Costello thing that Elvis Costello said all night.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve through March 15 at Park West, 322 W. Armitage Ave.; tickets from $129.50 (ages 18+) at www.jamusa.com
If you were expecting your favorite hits from your favorite Elvis Costello albums, this was not your show.
Being an Elvis Costello fan has been like being a Bob Dylan fan, or a Neil Young fan.
There is too much to keep up with. Too many alternate takes. Too many collaborations. Too many lyrics. Too many recordings to keep track of, new and old. Worse, a lot of this abundance is compelling, rarely easy to ignore. Even at 70, that famously wiry frame much fuller now, the man seems incapable of phoning in it. At Park West on Tuesday night, for the first of four largely sold-out, partly striped-down shows concluding a three-year-long, occasional tour with his longtime pianist Steve Nieve, if you watched closely, you could see a Costello still capable of surprising himself, whistling through the end of songs, stomping a foot, extending tunes past a natural end.
Not even Elvis Costello, it seems, knows everything about Elvis Costello.
This show, he explained, was a conscious attempt to tear back the “artifice” from the material, discover stark new reinterpretations, find strange tricks in old dogs, whittle out unexpected arrangements or just recognize the sadder song he didn’t realize he wrote the first time. It was often lovely and wildly ambitious stuff, by turns soulful then menacing, rollicking then bittersweet, though if you came expecting something more traditional and danceable, I regret to inform you:
This, too, was not business as usual.
A couple stood up about midway through the show and hovered in back a moment, looking unsure if they wanted to stay or not. They sighed so loudly I could hear it over the music. “Let’s go,” the guy said, and the woman nodded. I leaned over and asked why they were leaving: The woman rolled her eyes and laughed bitterly. Because if they knew “it was going to be like this,” she said, they wouldn’t have come in the first place.
To be fair to them, most Elvis Costello concerts do have the rough outline of other Elvis Costello concerts: You get what you come for. He still spits lyrics like it’s 1978. Unlike Dylan, his voice still sounds familiar — like an old barfly somehow going through puberty.
And yet, like Dylan and Young, Costello has outpaced a chunk of his old audience. His shows with Nieve have been typically two-man affairs, Costello on guitar, Nieve on piano. The Park West concerts, however, are special: About midway through the two-and-a-half hour performance, Costello introduces a small assemblage of musicians, carrying nontraditional instruments: A fiddle, double bass, cornet and uilleann pipes — the latter a reedy-looking cousin of the bagpipes. Nieve bounces from a Steinway to a melodica to an accordion; Costello goes from guitar to the banjo to a drum machine.
It’s all less challenging, and much warmer, than that sounds. It’s Costello playing an American music savant and historian, drawing on torch ballad traditions one song, Fats Waller the next, then slashing rock, then industrial, then folk, blues … you’ll likely need a verse or two to recognize a song you’ve heard a million times before. “Clubland” now has a flamenco shuffle, before veering into “Ghost Town” by the Specials. “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” becomes a jangling, off-kilter, almost Mardi Gras-style rave-up. On Tuesday, he paid homage to Chicago electric blues with Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance.” He complimented that with Dylan’s “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Which morphed into a slow rockabilly of Costello’s chestnut “Mystery Dance.”
Needless to say, the casual Costello fan need not apply this time. But fans of reinvention, and of mining possibilities from vast catalogs, will be fascinated. He opened with a pointed triptych pulled from the headlines, all deep cuts, starting with the little-known “Deportee” (an early version of “The Deportees Club” on his 1984 album “Goodbye Cruel World”), then into “When I Was Cruel No. 2” and “American Gangster Time” — later adding “America Without Tears.” The closest he came to outward politics was asking the audience to picture the protagonist of “Deportee” as anyone looking for a new life, “maybe washing dishes at the Green Mill right now.”
He let the diversity of American music he played say everything, throwing in a moody unreleased song named “John Went Walking” that tiptoed between beat poetry and hip hop, and ending with an early St. Patrick’s Day waltz around a tune written with The Chieftains, performed like a lush Irish wall of sound: Look out below where you tread / For the colors bled as they overflowed / Red, white and blue / Green, white and gold.
And still, some shout out a favorite song, a pebble in a vast ocean of choices.
He did not dismiss them. Tomorrow night, he promised, will have new songs. And presumably, the night after that will be different, too. Not that you’ll hear your favorite, he mumbled. Which may be the most Elvis Costello thing that Elvis Costello said all night.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve through March 15 at Park West, 322 W. Armitage Ave.; tickets from $129.50 (ages 18+) at www.jamusa.com
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