By DCist contributor Chris Klimek
“What song is this?”
Every Elvis Costello concert is a game of trainspotting. It’d be tough to name another songwriter who’s produced as much original material over the last 35 years, and it’s impossible to name another who mines his back catalog as equitably onstage. Most artists have only a handful of songs they’ll ever play from any particular album. With Elvis, any tune he’s ever released is fair game. You’re likely to hear one or two he’s never released, too, which he might have written himself or which might have been written by Johnny Cash or Rodgers and Hammerstein or George and Ira Gershwin.
Is this exhausting or confounding or simply boring to the casual fan? (Does this guy have casual fans?) I don’t know. At my first Costello concert, back when I knew only a two-dozen song compilation of his work, the mystery felt like a selling point to me. I left the show feeling like I’d been assigned a ton of homework, and I loved that. I wish Spotify had existed back then; it would’ve saved me a lot of cash. One day you, too, will be old.
Costello has always been a promiscuous collaborator. His latest album, Wise Up Ghost, was recorded with The Roots, whose historical grasp on pop music is as broad as his own. They weren’t with him at Lisner Auditorium Friday night. He performed alone, using a sequencer and an array of effects pedals to swell the sound when he felt like it. At other times he eschewed even a microphone, a trick he uses a lot, and it’s a trick worth keeping. As always, he found room in the 28-song, 130-minute set for stuff that would (that is, did) set even the most pious of fans a-Googling to identify. Several of the songs on Wise Up Ghost repurpose Costello lyrics from songs he wrote 10 (“Bedlam”) or 20 (“Invasion Hit Parade”) years ago, which just makes the game more intriguing and/or frustrating.
DCist is happy to help. Here’s the half-dozen deepest cuts from Friday’s concert.
“Invasion Hit Parade” — This the sort of paranoid folk song that Costello writes like no one else, though the line “I know my neighbor because he’s the one who always turns me in” always felt like Lennon at his most cynical to me. The song comes from 1991’s Mighty Like a Rose, which is essentially the point at which Costello gave up on stardom and became a musical character actor, though he’d make a few attempts to return to pop relevance. He reused the words in “Refuse to Be Saved,” the funkiest song on his new Roots album. The horns and the rhythm section help a lot.
“Ascension Day” — Jazz legend Allen Toussaint and Roy Byrd share writing credit with Elvis on this eloquent protest song from 2006’s The River in Reverse — Costello’s album-length collaboration with Toussaint, recorded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed the latter’s home. Toussaint has turned up unannounced at Costello gigs in D.C. before, but we had to make do with Costello’s keyboard playing on Friday’s version.
“Walking My Baby Back Home” — The educational portion of Friday’s set began with this cover a song written in 1930 by Roy Turk and Fred E. Ahlert, which became a hit for Nat “King” Cole 21 years later. Costello cited “Owls go by and the give me the eye” as the sort of line he aspired to write at the beginning of his career, but you couldn’t get away with that in the punk era.
“Radio Sweetheart” — This was supposed to be Costello’s professional recording debut on Stiff Records, but it was just too cheerful for 1977, the year of Never Mind the Bollocks. When he plays it nowadays, he likes to segue into Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said,” perhaps copping to its derivative chord sequence.
“That Day Is Done” — One of a dozen or so songs Costello wrote with one Paul McCartney — the most talented guy in Wings! — in the late ’80s, this first surfaced on Sir Paul’s Flowers in the Dirt album in 1989. Costello noted that while he’d never played at Lisner Auditorium before, he’d rehearsed there for the June 2010 White House ceremony and concert when McCartney was awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Music. His voice was starting to fail by the time he performed this on the keyboard late in Friday’s show. It’s a big song that needs big pipes, which is why the version where the Fairfield Four back him is my favorite.
“Radio Soul” — Another happy song that had to be, as Elvis explained, toughened up and angered before it could be released as “Radio Radio,” the media critique that got him banned from Saturday Night Live. He stopped a live-on-air 1977 performance of “Less Than Zero” mid-song to do this one instead. Decades later, The Beastie Boys backed him on a tribute version on an SNL music special, complete with the fake-out “Less Than Zero” beginning. But on Friday night, he played the sunnier original. That lyric about wanting “to bite the hand that feeds” me was nowhere to be heard.
