Spike
Flowers In the Dirt (Archive Edition)
Mighty Like A Rose
I've been feeling nostalgic for a particular moment of my listening life: stuff that I was listening to around the age of 14-17. This isn't unusual: I remember reading somewhere that one's musical taste develops around 14 years old and that music someone discovers around that age tends to be fondly remembered later on in life. Of course, where the artist finds the listener isn't the same as where the listener finds the artist. I just wrote a blog post about the Bob Dylan albums that were released around those ages. I love Oh Mercy, but the other records released around that time don't really trigger any nostalgia or excitement within me. That makes sense since I was a 14 year old looking to a middle aged man to offer me a memorable experience. If I feel nostalgic for music I enjoyed at that age, I tend to look to artists who were a decade or so older than me: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, etc, not artists who were part of my parent's generation.
There were, however, bands and artists that lay somewhere in-between the 1960s generation and the 1980s generation: these are the artists and bands who emerged from punk and new wave, though most of the artists who were still making music in the late 80s and early 90s from that era had left those labels behind. For all of the discussion (including in my last post0 of the aimlessness, the untimely/too-timely quality of the music 1960s musicians made in the 1980s, there's less discussion of the aimlessness, untimely/ too-timely quality of the music 1970s musicians made in the 1980s. If Paul McCarney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, George Harrison and countless other musicians had a tenuous grasp on the musical production and styles of the 1980s, an argument could be made that the musicians of the 1970s had similar difficulties adjusting to the music of the 1980s, as odd as that might sound.
Take Talking Heads for example: their run of albums from Talking Heads 77 to 1983's Speaking In Tongues is rightly regarded as one of the best runs from any band at any time. They seemed to effortlessly move from punk to new wave to post-punk to afro-influenced disco-adjacent art rock to art rock funk during that time without losing credibility or inventiveness. However, they made three records after that run that are almost completely forgotten or, at least, never discussed with the same reverence as the first five records. Yet, Little Creatures, True Stories and Naked are my Talking Heads records: the ones I bought when they first came out, the cassettes (and, in the case of Naked, CD) I wore out by playing every day. These were the albums whose every note and lyric I had memorized. I had a Little Creatures poster on my wall. I'll do another post on those three albums another time (I actually want to write a series about these artists/albums with the possibility of turning it into a book), but there's a similarity to the Elvis Costello records I will discuss here that needs to be investigated. Why do those Talking Heads' records fail where the first five succeed?
If we think back on the albums 60s artists made in the mid to late 70s (ten years out from their "classic" work) we see bands and artists that attempt to merge their sound with more contemporary sounds which, from our perspective, were more inventive than the contemporary sounds the 1970s bands tried to incorporate into their mid to late 80s sound. For example, what makes Some Girls a good to great album is that the Rolling Stones seem to incorporate disco and punk/new wave ("Miss You" and "Shattered" respectively)--the "cutting edge" music of 1978--into their classic rock sound. "Miss You" not only played in the big discos of the time but also would be spun at more underground, influential discos like the Paradise Garage. Paul McCartney's McCartney II incorporated the sound of groups like Talking Heads, Yellow Magic Orchestra and dub reggae into the typical sweet and joyous sounds of McCartney's music. The last track John Lennon recorded before his assassination was "Walking On Thin Ice," a Yoko Ono single that explicitly honored the downtown New York punk and disco scenes that seemed to finally respect what he and Yoko were doing with the Plastic Ono Band in the late 60s and early 70s. The newer sounds the older musicians were drawing from still sound to our contemporary ears as, if not still groundbreaking, then forward looking.
Perhaps because the musical culture was already splitting pretty significantly in the late 1980s, it became harder and harder for bands ten years out (Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Public Image Limited, etc) from fully engaging with the popular cutting edge of the late 80s. If it was easy for a band like the Rolling Stones to adapt their music, already heavily indebted to R&B and soul, to disco, it became harder for a band like Talking Heads to adapt their music to the dance music of the late 80s. Talking Heads had adapted their sound successfully to disco and funk in the early 80s, but seemed to retreat from adapting their sound to everything that came after. For example, there's a 12" remix of their track "Blind" that attempts to turn it into a sample driven house track that, while admirable, strips it of anything resembling the original and could be any track of the era being remixed to sound more "house-y."
So, what a lot of late 70s bands did were to either sound as out of place in the Fairlight synthesizers and gated drums as their 60s counterparts (think of Public Image Limited's Happy? or 9) or to retreat into older sounds. XTC made Skylarking, Oranges & Lemons as well as the side project Dukes of the Stratosphere to sound explicitly like late 60s pop music (with a modern sheen). Talking Heads made two albums of roots rock Little Creatures and True Stories, the latter of which featured songs that were explicitly country. Their final record, Naked, tried to return to the polyrhythmic sound of their early 80s records, but it was almost as if the world had gotten too big, there were too many musical possibilities and, as things fell apart for the band, nobody was really paying much attention.
Elvis Costello (with and without the Attractions) has a similar story in the 1980s. His albums from My Aim Is True to Imperial Bedroom are considered (for the most part) unimpeachable. Even the one weird outlier from this period, 1981's Almost Blue an album's worth of country covers recorded in Nashville with country veterans, seems way ahead of its time: demonstrating the affinities between the working class fears and desires of punk and country music. When Costello decided to openly embrace the production technology of the 1980s on Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World, it kind of worked on the former and failed dismally with the latter. He also retreated into the country and folk tinged American mythology of King of America and the aging punk of Blood and Chocolate with the Attractions (produced by his old pal Nick Lowe, who never embellished a recording (for better and for worse)).
In 1989 Costello moved from Columbia records (where he sort of fulfilled the role in the late 70s and early 80s that Dylan had had from the mid 60s to the mid 70s) to Warner Brothers records. He seemed to get a much bigger recording budget, access to famous older musicians and the freedom to make longer records. This all coincides with the rise of what many have referred to as "CD bloat." Starting in the late 1980s, the storage capacity for the increasingly popular compact disc format was expanding, and artists could make albums as long as 79 minutes on one CD. Remain in Light, arguably Talking Heads' best record, is forty minutes long. Their last record, Naked, is fifty-two minutes long. Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, even factoring in all the tracks on both the UK and US editions, is forty-two minutes long. Spike, his first album for Warners, is sixty-four minutes long. There was less incentive to edit albums when you had all that space to fill up.
Then there's the notion of genre: thought Costello jumped from genre to genre quite easily in his early 80s records, each record stayed in a particular genre for its runtime. Spike begins with "...This Town...," an explicit Byrds homage with Roger McGuinn himself on guitar. Gated drums are the first sound we hear, and the whole thing gets more and more cluttered with effects and sounds, fighting to bury Costello's voice describing the soulless, greedy bastards populating "this town" (Hollywood? London?). It reminds me of both Oliver Stone's Wall Street (there's a reference to Mr. Gekko in the song, Michael Douglas' famous character in the film) and Martin Amis' novels (Success, London Fields). It also might be a critique of the person Elvis had become or was perceived to have become: a "bastard" who just happened to make it to the opulence of Warner Brothers records. Columbia, of course, is just as famous (and probably just as opulent) as WB, however Columbia/CBS (from its fonts to its bare-boned CD and cassette "Nice Price" reissues, wherein I first heard Elvis Costello's "classic" albums) seemed to give off an aura of independent, stripped down, no-nonsense sound that something like Spike was reacting against. In the liner notes to the CD reissue of Spike on Rhino records, Costello claimed that the budget for Spike was the equivalent of "a small independent movie."
The other big difference from the earlier recordings from Spike was with whom Costello was collaborating. Starting in 1987, Costello started writing songs with Paul McCartney. It was almost too good: along with Dylan, Costello had been compared to John Lennon as well. McCartney was in desperate need of legitimacy after the film/album Give My Regards to Broad Street and the album Press to Play. Having a bitter cynical songwriter who loves rock n roll and has a nasally voice compliment Paul's sweet, affable rock patriarch was almost too good to pass up. I think the songs they wrote together around this time are the best from the Spike/Flowers In the Dirt (Paul's record that came out in 1989) sessions. "Veronica" (co-written by McCartney) is one of Costello's best songs, as well as his highest charting hit. It's a rare contemporary pop song about old age, about growing old with dignity, something almost completely alien to rock and pop's obsession with youth since its inception. For example, the Rolling Stones released Hackney Diamonds last year (2023) with little to no indication that all the members are in their eighties. It's impossible to know what the Rolling Stones think about getting older, because to reflect on such things would be to break the spell.
Around the time of Spike's release, Costello appeared on the cover of Options magazine (a great music magazine that straddled both cult artists who had bubbled up to the mainstream, and reviewing mail order cassette tapes from bands you had never heard of) with Tom Waits. As a huge Tom Waits fan in high school, this was very exciting to me. Indeed, Costello uses a number of Waits' sidemen on Spike and a few of the tracks, "God's Comic," "Chewing Gum," and "Miss Macbeth" self-consciously echo Waits' interest in odd instrumentation and pre-rock n roll song forms. Costello had dabbled in that before, but not with these forms and instrumental juxtapositions. In fact, Spike seems to a response to the artist he had become on Columbia, alternating between punk anger, new wave pop sensibilities, and a deep and abiding love for country and folk forms. These still exist on Spike: "Coal Train Robberies" is a rave up that continues Costello's interest in the intersection between capitalism, liberalism and racism in contemporary England. "Tramp the Dirt Down" is his sincere hope that he lives long enough to see Margaret Thatcher die (he did). However, these are the outliers, and the album suffers from an over-stuffed, same-sounding template that bores after a while. Much better were the songs when I saw him live in 1989: a marathon show which ended with "That Day Is Done" and a promise from Elvis that he and his band literally hadn't practiced any more songs to play.
In 1991 Elvis was on another magazine cover: this time he and, of all people, Jerry Garcia posed on the cover of Guitar Player magazine. This was quite a shock for several reasons: first, EC had never indicated that he was a fan of the Dead (at least not anything I had read or heard up to that point). Second, while Elvis certainly wasn't as "hip" as he had been a decade previous, the Grateful Dead were very much out of vogue to anyone who had enjoyed the previous decade of music. Third, no one would have mistaken Elvis for a great guitar player (he called himself "the little hands of concrete" to dismiss his own playing). Yet, here he was with a beard and round glasses, arm around Jerry, with his own beard and round glasses. As if this weren't odd enough, Costello went on to record a fantastic version of "Ship of Fools" for the Dedicated Grateful Dead tribute album.
"Ship of Fools" is off of the Dead's 1974 album From the Mars Hotel, an album that reflects the Dead's fatigue from touring for the better part of a decade, as well as a disillusion with being countercultural left-overs. "Ship of Fools" is a final kiss-off: the Dead would take a year off after touring the album. "It was later than I thought," Garcia sings, "when I first believed you/ now I cannot share your laughter ship of fools." The ship of fools here could the be the ship of state (Nixon would step down summer of 1974), or it could be the ship of merry pranksters who had nurtured and followed the Dead since late 1965. Elvis Costello's voice and bitterness go hand in hand, and here there's more than a suggestion that Costello had become disillusioned with his own ship of fools following him for more than a decade.
Both the sonic time period (the 1960s and early 70s) and a disillusioned bitterness permeate Costello's next album Mighty Like A Rose, an album he describes as angry in the liner notes to the 2002 CD reissue: "This record says the world we are making is grim, and I believe that it is. We are cruel to each other, we lie and manipulate until the unworthy encounter a love to which we must surrender." Elsewhere he states that the dour mood of the record was a direct response to the success of "Veronica," and the popularity of Spike in general. While I wouldn't say that Mighty Like A Rose is a difficult listen, Costello is too married to the pop song format to give up on it, some of the arrangements and vocals on the album suggest the more classical oriented direction he would go with his next record The Juliet Letters (an album I have never liked).
The first song on the album, and the album's first single, is "The Other Side of Summer," a direct homage to the Beach Boys, although, interestingly, in the liner notes to the CD reissue Costello claims to be echoing the less popular, far more interesting material the Beach Boys recorded in the early 1970s. Indeed, "The Other Side of Summer's" interest in ecological collapse echoes the opening track of the Beach Boys 1971 album Surf's Up "Don't Go Near the Water." For Costello it's not just the water that's toxic, the entire planet is on its last legs: "good night, god bless and kiss goodbye to the earth" he sings before singing "the other side of summer" into oblivion. This goes immediately (a popular feature of CDs in this era was to have the tracks feed into one another to make the album one, long continuous song) into "Hurry Down Doomsday (the Bugs Are Taking Over)," another cheery song about apocalypse and natural disasters. More importantly, with a Jim Keltner drum part looped on the track, this is Costello's first nod to then contemporary music in a while. After Costello stopped working with popular sounds in the mid 80s, he purposely removed himself from sounding "contemporary" by the later parts of the decade. Spike, with the exception of some dated production, seemed to be willfully eclectic in its musical nods, which, one could argue also became a signature of artists facing the pressure of CD bloat. The use of loops became a hallmark of "edgy" and "contemporary" production for a while. Though the use of loops in popular music goes all the way back to the 1960s, the type of loop that provides the basic rhythm track definitely seems borrowed at this time from hip hop and club culture (not just dance music, but genres like industrial and dark wave). So if the first track of the album is retrospective, the second track seems to be fully engaged with what was going on in music at the time. And yet, while the first song works (if being a little too obvious), the second song does not. The following song, "How To Be Dumb" (honestly, my favorite on the record) returns to Costello's classic, petulant, punkish sound that everyone associates with him.
And this returns me to my original point: though I love Mighty Like A Rose for personal reasons (I was just as pessimistic about the world as Costello seemed on this record), I can hear now why it sounds like a failure: it wants to observe and critique the world around it, but suits itself to the comfortable sounds of previous eras: "Now you can't afford to fake all the drugs your parents used to take/ Because of their mistakes you'd better be wide awake." Good point, while the sixties generation was enjoying all the drugs, their consumption habits significantly damaged the habitability of the planet. Every singer-songwriter who wants to point out this very fact is faced with a choice: does the comfort of the music made by that very same generation invalidate the critique being put forward? Is the ecological critique set forth in "The Other Side of Summer" doomed to only exist as irony, a meta commentary about how the very fun, fun, fun proselytized in the early Beach Boys song leads to "the other side" of summer? The answer would seem to be yes given that "Hurry Down Doomsday's" attempt to update the sound for an early nineties audience makes Costello (in his late thirties at the point the record came out) seem like an old man yelling at a cloud.
This is where my love of Costello's music ended. As I mentioned before, I couldn't get into The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky String Quartet. Brutal Youth and All This Useless Beauty were the final two albums with the Attractions and have some great songs on them, but, like the Juliet Letters in their own way, retreat into something like nostalgia for musical forms that seemed removed from what was going on in contemporary music. Contrast this with Neil Young who, during this same period, toured with Sonic Youth, made To Sleep With Angels about Kurt Cobain's suicide and eventually recorded an album with Pearl Jam. It's strange to think that the generation of musicians who emerged from the mid to late seventies, an era defined as an explicit reaction to what rock music had become, seemed to become less relevant with the passage of time as compared to the previous generation. This isn't true of all musicians from that era (Wire, for example, continued to make abrasively indefinable music during this time) but Costello's facial hair and round spectacles wasn't the only nod to comfort and retreat while he sang he couldn't believe he'd never believe in anything again.
