Happy Fake Irish Day, everyone! I swear, in this town St. Patrick’s Day is a bigger deal than New Year’s Eve. On Saturday afternoon, driving through Wrigleyville was almost as bad as during the Cubs playoffs – the same milling throngs of drunks spilling and staggering out of the bars and into the middle of the street – just in green this time instead of red and blue. I wonder if the Hidden Shamrock is packed even as I type. I’m half tempted to grab a camera and head on down there, but the other half is terrified at the very thought, so it’s not likely to happen.
And now, I need to mention the Elvis show last night. Of course it was spectacular, and his voice is amazing and Steve Nieve on piano was killer and the music was grand, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, there were two non-musical moments that are going to stick in my memory for some time.
1. The Heckler. First off, why someone would pay $65 for main floor tickets to the Elvis Costello show, only to then shout, “Elvis! You’re an asshole! Fuck off and die!” during the quiet intro of a lovely song, is utterly beyond me. But someone did. Elvis stopped the music, took two steps in the direction of the offending party and invited him up on stage for a little mano a mano. When it became clear that this was not going to happen (“I don’t know about you, but I’m here to play some music. If you want to take it up with the rest of the crowd, be my guest”), he picked his guitar up again. “Got anything else to say, motherfucker?” he asked. Apparently not. And the song began.
2. Hobbits. The basic shape of the show was a one-hour set followed by roughly an hour and a half of encores. Toward the end, maybe during the 3rd-to-last encore, Elvis grabbed a ukelele and played The Scarlet Tide, the Oscar-nominated song written by himself and T-Bone Burnett. Not that the nomination was anything to cheer about, as “it didn’t fucking win.” Then: “I’ll tell you one thing about the Oscars…” we waited. “Fuckin’ hobbits.”
Favorite musical moments are hard to pick when I’ve got so many to choose from, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. In no particular order:
Watching the Detectives. An incredibly chaotic arrangement of this track, especially considering there were only two people on stage playing it. Elvis came up with some almost Fripp-like sounds on his Gibson, and the guitar, piano and synth were in a constant state of rhythmic shift held together solely by the vocals. As Coz put it in the train on the way back north, “coffee shop cabaret from hell.” Fantastic.
Almost Blue. This song is a heartbreaker no matter how you slice it. For me it packs an extra punch, in that the lyrics remind me of a piece I wrote years ago in the throes of a breakup. I can’t really say anything specific about the performance that will explain why it was so transcendent a moment – maybe it was just me. But I doubt it.
This House Is Empty Now. Elvis played a lot of love songs, including most of the tracks on North. This one came early in the first set, shortly after we arrived (we were late). At the end, on the final chorus, Elvis stepped away from the microphone and walked out around the monitors to the apron of the stage. He sang the final lines unamplified and a capella: “This house is empty now/ There’s nothing I can do/ To make you want to stay/ So tell me how/ Am I supposed to live without you?”
God’s Comic —> (What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding. God’s Comic lends itself well to musings on the afterlife, where Elvis imagined Heaven with the Supreme Being reclined on a faux-fur waterbed filled with tropical fish, in an 80s nightclub with Hungry Like the Wolf being played over and over and over again… and then it was monologue time. After a series of excellent shots at the Bush/Cheney administration, an anthemic rendition of the Nick Lowe classic drove the idea home. I particularly liked the part where Elvis, after mentioning the creationist push against the teaching of evolution in bible belt schools, imagined chimpy looking in the bathroom mirror in the morning: “what a waste of a good ape.” Indeed.
We also got to hear a lot of the new stuff from the forthcoming record, which sounds really promising. And did I mention about the sparkly silvery shoes? I thought about hanging around the stage door after the show and trying to take them from him, but I figure hey, he’s Elvis. He deserves them much more than I do. Doesn’t mean I can’t covet, though.