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Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Donny Osmond: We suffer for his art
It's a neat trick when Mr. Squeaky-clean produces a flashback more terrifying than any acid reflux.
By Steve Burgess
[09/21/99]

Nothing Personal
The hooker under Lenny Kravitz's bed
A tale from beneath the mattress; Andreessen's dogs' wonder diet; the struggles of Ivanka Trump. Plus: Platform shoes kill!
By Amy Reiter
[09/20/99]

People Feature
All hail the queen
Think watching talk shows is bad? Try making them.
By Caroline Sommers
[09/20/99]

People Feature
Horror show: The nightmare of making tabloid TV
You think waking up to find a neatly arranged pile of rocks just outside your tent is bad? I've interviewed Joey Buttafuoco -- now that's scary!
By Caroline Sommers
[09/18/99]

People Feature
The "Blair Witch" itch
When couples see scary movies together, pulses race and hearts quicken. The subsequent biological imperative? Fight, flight or spend the night.
By Jennifer Kornreich
[09/18/99]

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The king of the unforgiving is the rock star who never was.

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By Bill Wyman

Sept. 21, 1999 | In 1982, Elvis Costello was in something like a state of shock: He was exhausted by an unremunerative fame, wired on speed and slightly disgusted with his career. He'd entranced the rock world with his tautly assembled first few releases, each produced by the shambling Nick Lowe. But for a new album he enlisted an engineer named Geoff Emerick, who'd worked on both "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Sgt. Pepper," to help him conjure up a twisted pop extravaganza.

The record that resulted was called "Imperial Bedroom." In it, he outfitted his arch, peevish songs with every armament the studio could muster, from soaring synths, sharp as razors, to treated vocals, dark, discomfiting and vengeful. A famous song called "Man out of Time" is this deadly work's scariest musical concoction, a caustically inflamed track of shimmering pianos, cascading melody lines, overwhelming dynamics and unbridled vocals.

On his first few albums Costello had laid out sweeping, ever-more-paranoid romantic equations -- love as civil disturbance, as propaganda, as global warfare; in "Man out of Time," this area of lyrical inquiry climaxes in a portrait of the unfaithful lover as unmasked international spy. Costello delivers his most feeling vocal track. The singer is standing at some sort of "traitor's gate" with a cast of social parasites ("the biggest names in industry," "the minister of state"), all set against a tableau of bleak geographical sarcasm. ("Days of Dutch courage/ Just three French letters/ And a German sense of humor.") The portrait, sprawling and fractured, seems to be of an adulterous father and husband whose bourgeois self-satisfaction masks an internal degradation:

He's got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge
He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege

Funnily enough, "Man out of Time" is a love song. "To murder my love is a crime," wails our burgher, inexplicably and unforgettably. And over those words, Costello and Emerick craft a production coup; Costello's voice is echoed thickly, flattened electronically. The layered, slightly awry vocal tracks precisely limn the man's fracturing persona. "But will you still love/The man out of time?" Costello's singing here is definitive; I can't think of an instance of rock vocalizing so simultaneously lost and controlled. You'd think he was singing about himself.

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High Fidelity

The most salient fact about Elvis Costello, in many ways a traditional talent, was that he had the misfortune of coming of age in a most untraditional time. As the 1970s deepened, the most influential figures in white rock were throwbacks -- Dylan and Neil Young were from the '60s, and Bruce Springsteen might as well have been. Punk changed all that. Suddenly, it was a given that most of the stars from the 1960s were full of shit. The punks and new wavers adopted frequently harsh music, often deliberately unpleasant subjects and striking, virtually nihilistic attitudes, all with an irrational Jacobin vehemence.

Musically, Costello came out of a relatively genial strain of British pub rock, but by the time he got his record contract, in England at least it seemed as if a generation was aflame, and his natural, gripping sarcasm seemed a piece with it. His attitude toward rock history was encapsulated nicely in his withering choice of a stage name. While possessed of a certain brutal charisma, he looked pinched and dorky, in keeping with the perverse fashions of the time. Indeed, Costello soon became the avatar of the reed-thin, narrow-tied, short-haired new waver.

But it was a tough posture. While indubitably possessed of nearly everything one could want for significant and lucrative rock stardom -- head-snapping songwriting skills, a rabidly supportive critical corner, a clue to the pop moment, ambition of a heroic size and the necessary accompanying ruthlessness besides -- he was unlucky enough to be possessed of all that just as the pop audience balkanized and, with frayed nerves, stopped doing its part. For one, it suddenly refused to reward its most talented stars financially; Costello was a major figure from the start, but never sold records in any significant number. (Even Linda Ronstadt's cover of "Alison" was never a Top 40 single.) At the same time, driven by the contempt of the punks, the audience suddenly stopped giving artists a moral pass as well. In other words, Elvis Costello became a star just when the fun was taken out of it.

Next page | He introduced himself as a folk rocker cum sex-killer