The Honky Tonk Demo

Like Roddy Doyle's Barrytown musicians at the end of The Commitments, maybe Elvis Costello's real calling was country music.

Elvis has had some notable performances with country luminaries like Emmylou Harris and George Jones, released his own country album with Almost Blue and wrote a whole mess of songs - like Complicated Shadows - that he wanted Johnny Cash to sing.

That may not sound like the seething post-punk Elvis Costello that you know and love, but it makes a ton of sense when you consider that punk and old-school country are close cousins, both full of angry outlaw songs about human ruin, blood and alcohol.

Costello's early Honky Tonk demo is a five song love letter to this sort of country music, an unpolished collection of songs about bitter drinking and domestic violence. Starting with Cheap Reward, the maudlin miniature rebellion of a drunk stuck in a failing relationship, continuing through the ugly singsong of Wave A White Flag ("Meet me in the kitchen and I'll beat you in the hall") and ending with the very Cash-sounding Poison Moon, the demo tears through four tracks, some of them a mishmash of the clever lyrics that made their way to My Aim Is True (Cheap Reward lends much of its hook to Lip Service, for instance). The fourth song, Jump Up, is possessed of the same bitter class consciousness that seeps out of Blame It On Cain.

The demo appears in both the Rykodisc and Rhino bonus material, but is sadly missing from the new "Deluxe" edition of Aim. If you have access to it and haven't heard it, give it a listen. Most of EC's demos are a great peek into his creative process, but the total regenrefication that occurs in Honky Tonk is an entertaining introspection into Costello's influences.

EDIT: As Matt pedantically points out, the demo includes early versions of Blame It On Cain and Mystery Dance (and the Mystery Dance demo has a fun little guitar riff that serves as a bumper between the verse and chorus). For the sake of completeness, they're part of the demo, but I really wanted to talk about the original tunes it contained.

Elvis Covered: Fiona Apple, "I Want You"

Covers like this are the reason why I love cover songs. The original track off of Blood and Chocolate is a favorite of mine (and probably every EC fan's - let's be honest), but this performance from 2006's largely-forgettable Decades Live: Elvis Costello and Friends concert is maybe the most perfect version of the song I've heard.

Fiona Apple's voice is so goddamn emotive, and she plays the thrill ride change in tone over the course of the song - from devoted and plaintive to jealous to raging - for every bit of chilling pathos it's worth. The original is much more even-toned, which is atmospheric in its own way, but this is just one of those 'reach-into-your-chest-and-tear-your-heart-out'.

Elvis's guitar is as big a factor in the shape of the song. Check out that opening snarl at 1:06, a full-stop punctuation on the sugary intro, and the frenzied screech of the guitar solo in comparison to the original, laid-back break. This is a song about love being twisted into possessiveness, yeah, but this track also has murder on its mind.

This is, far and away, my favorite EC cover, ranking even higher than Weird Al's perennial, impromptu runs through "Radio, Radio." What's yours, and why?

Two Little Hitlers

Emotional Fascism was the working title of Elvis Costello's 1979 release with the Attractions, what would become Armed Forces. It's no surprise that the record features military metaphors for relationships throughout, and perhaps nowhere moreso than on its closing track.

Yet at the risk of launching the actual content of this blog with a shit-stirring opinion, I have to ask: What's up with EC's use of Holocaust imagery and metaphors?

I'm not slamming the central concept of the song necessarily; "Two Little Hitlers" is as perfect a definition of an untenable relationship as I can imagine. I'm thinking more about the concluding lines of the chorus:

I will return
I will not burn
Down in the basement

It's a minor moment, perhaps, a passing nod at best; he gets far more explicit in utilizing Holocaust metaphors on other songs throughout his career, most notably the 1983 protest song "Pills and Soap."

With "Pills and Soap," however, the metaphor is a blunt object used to bring home a point about the political climate in Britain. On "Hitlers," it's a tossed-off bit, which makes it a little...disturbing to me? It certainly fits in the theme of the song--the brutal impasse between lovers when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object--but is the defiance of a passionate argument really deserving of comparison to the death of millions?

Aw, now, I think I've already lost some of you. Sorry. I know why he really did it--the early career of Costello was especially informed by a need to flout convention, to flagrantly defy expectations at every turn, while at the same time delivering exceptionally refined pop/punk/rock music.

"Hitlers" is no exception. You can feel the fluidity of the Attractions at their height in the backing track, Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas laying down a loose, sinewy rhythm while Steve Nieve provides light organ accents and EC himself weaves in slight guitar riffs. There's a nice contrast between the brutality of the song's central metaphor and the easy flow of the tune's melody.

It's hard to imagine the level at which Costello was working through these early years; churning out albums at an alarming rate, each of them seemingly more packed with unforgettable tunes and endlessly clever lyrics than the last. I mean, does it get any better than this:

Dial me a valentine
She's a smooth operator
It's all so calculated
She's got a calculator
She's my soft touch typewriter
And I'm her great dictator

That is, as they say, the SHIT right there.

There's also a slight hint on "Hitlers" of EC's ongoing fascination with ska-tinged music; the organ part certainly provides a light ska touch. He would go on to produce the debut album by English ska stalwarts The Specials. One of Costello's first great songs, "Watching the Detectives," delivers its own jerky ska beat; his next record after Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, would include the driving ska of "Human Touch."

(I mention it cause I did a paper on it in college. Yes, I wrote about Elvis Costello in college classes--I was one of THOSE people. You should see my Springsteen paper on the myth of the American dream.)

Buy mp3 from Amazon: "Two Little Hitlers"
Buy CD from Amazon: Armed Forces

Jeff and Elvis, 4 Ever

It was Top 40 radio that introduced me to Elvis Costello.

That's ironic not only because Costello and Top 40 radio were rarely friends in the US, but also because the tracks and albums of his I've embraced the most wholeheartedly are the ones that never found purchase in the mainstream.

I was ten years old. The song was Veronica. I didn't understand the song beyond the driving, poppy beat and the voice that sounded nothing like a voice that should be, given my limited musical understanding, on the radio, and I was captivated by the difference. I waited and waited to hear the song again, and then used a tape recorder held in front of MTV to make a copy of the audio.

It's not surprising, then, that Spike was the first CD I bought with my own money. I'd purchased a few tapes, sure - albums like Thriller, that I'm not disappointed in picking, and No Jacket Required, which - well, the less said about that, the better. I'd just gotten a Discman for Christmas, and Spike got the most rotation out of the half dozen or so shiny silver discs I owned.

The music...challenged me. Most of it wasn't the polished-yet-snarling McCartney pop that had lured me in. But it was great. I needed to absorb it to understand its nuances - which was something I'd never had to do with music before. My parents have never been what I'd call 'music people' and my sister was a disciple of the sort of pop-packaged dreck that dominated (and still dominates) most every corporate-owned radio station. It was a religious experience.

From Spike, I kept buying EC's new releases - Mighty Like A Rose, Brutal Youth (my perennial favorite), Kojak Variety and All This Useless Beauty. I saw Elvis in NYC when he toured in support of Beauty; I don't remember it in any real detail, the way that you might not remember any details after meeting God.

It wasn't until then that I delved into the pre-Spike catalog and discovered how wonderful and different and angry and cruel and righteous it was. The visceral power that raw, underproduced talent has in its earliest work, I'd never experienced it with Costello before, and so My Aim Is True and This Year's Model were like a gut-punch from an angel. As it stands, my entire perspective on the artist is backwards, and I think it helps me be more of an ecumenist about his catalog - especially the divisive, experimental music he made during the mid-80s.

For better or for worse, I've continued to be an Elvis devotee for two decades. I've seen him in concert twice, own virtually every album of his, and can recite most of the lyrics from memory. I've devoted an uncomfortable amount of my brain to Elvis Costello, and I have no regrets about it.

It's fitting that Poisoned Letter launches on Elvis's birthday (he's 54) - I have to credit him with waking my younger self up to what music could be when it didn't give a shit about being popular and just cared about being good.

Except for Goodbye Cruel World. That's kind of terrible.

Matt's EC Story

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977.

Just a few weeks earlier, Elvis Costello was born, with the release of his first album, My Aim is True. Those obsessed with symmetry (namely, me) could pour plenty of meaning into that coincidence. In the foreground, you have the death of a man whose early career gave rock 'n' roll its legs but whose later years represented every bloated excess that the music industry had come to embrace. In the shadow of that death, one of the most intelligent and passionate musical artists of all time quietly set his first album onto record store racks, with every intention of tearing the world apart with his melodic punk. One star fades from the pop hemisphere; another flares to take its place. Out with the old, in with the new.

Yet if the artistic agendas of a frustrated truck driver from Memphis and a frustrated computer programmer from England can have anything in common, it's a constant fire to incite, one that Presley slowly extinguished as his popularity skyrocketed and that Costello has fed as the fuel of his career. The same instinct that propelled Presley to mumble "Let's get real gone" into a Sun Studios microphone and ignite his band into a frenzy on "Blue Moon of Kentucky" would drive Costello in his early concert appearances to tear through a furious set, then storm off stage without so much as a "Thank you" or an encore. At the same time, their respective furies have never claimed a particular focus; for Presley, his literal goal may simply have been to get his listeners "real gone" with his music, while Costello was probably claiming a hefty chunk of the same righteous anger that fueled much of the punk scene in England.

Over the years, Costello has eschewed the "angry young man" label for which he first became known. But when you first hear Elvis Costello, whether it's his latest album with the Impostors or any of his previous work, it's that anger that hooks you in, the jerking, fire-spitting spite that is the soul of so many of his albums. It's always there, in a whisper or a scream, lurking deep within or burning on the surface. You can feel the fire; it singes your ears, maybe in a way that music really hasn't since the dawn of the King's reign.

I fell in love with Costello's music for the same reason that many other angry young men fall in love with it. He was a scrawny, clever pop star who said everything I felt incapable of saying about life and love; I was a scrawny, clever nobody who embraced his vicious tracts like a holy gospel. Like many geeks, my interests made me feel intensely alone even as they pushed me into cultish communities of Trekkies and fanboys. I often felt a few steps out of sync with the rest of the world; Costello took that feeling and turned it into pop brilliance.

My first Costello record was Spike, which I bought because it had the song "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" on it, as well as Costello's wistful pop hit "Veronica." The rest of the record grabbed me enough to send me out for My Aim is True.

But neither of those albums were the one that sent me swooning into the depths of my ongoing love affair with Costello. No, it was Blood and Chocolate that drove me mad with pop ecstasy. Again, part of it had to do with reading my own situation into one of the songs; "I Hope You're Happy Now" seemed written for a guy who had made my own life a living hell because he couldn't get over the fact that I'd started dating his ex-girlfriend. If there was anyone who I thrilled to imagine "like a matador with his pork sword while we all die of laughter," it was this guy.

Then I really stopped to listen to "I Want You," six minutes of pure seething desire burned onto plastic, and I could not believe my ears. Forget the invective in the lyrics themselves. Here was this guy who not only harbored all these sinister desires toward a woman who'd left him in the cold, but could also sustain this constant level of menace for a full six minutes, past any logical point of conclusion, and then let the song come to a gentle stop. Only it wasn't gentle at all, because you knew it was a conclusion and not a resolution; the singer would simply build up his anger to the point where all this fury would just come bubbling out again. We may never hear about it, but we knew it would happen. Again, it's the outsider's fury crafted into music. It made the "I Want You" songs by Dylan and the Beatles sound like frolicking musical postcards.

I've never been much of a rock evangelist, but I couldn't resist. I played "I Want You" for my girlfriend at the time; she hated it. Some of my friends were confused and it made a few people uncomfortable. Still I raved on throughout the dorm, until one guy finally paid me some real attention.

"This is amazing," I said. "I can't believe this exists."

"What do you expect?" he replied. "It's Elvis Costello."

And still, through the pseudo-intellectual approach and the personal perspective approach, I feel like I haven't really articulated why I adore the man's music so much. He has spoken to my heart in ways no other artist has, revealed hidden secrets in the people I know and the world in which I take up space. He has done all this through some of the most exhliarating tunes and ingenious words that I've ever heard. And he's still doing it; I'm still finding pieces of meaning in albums that I've internalized through repeated listenings.

As I'm sitting here and My Aim is True is firing up on the CD player, I'm thinking of the coincidence that each of Costello's first three albums opens with his voice. Before a note of music is played, you hear him sing.

There might be something in that. Just like Presley, Costello has always been known as a voice. For the King, it simply meant that vocal swagger that would never die out, even when the man was squeezed into sparkly jumpsuits a few sizes too small and lazily trotting through his past glories on a Vegas stage. For Costello, that "voice" means so much more. It's the scissors that jab into your soul every time he opens his mouth, and it's that fire in his music that never burns out, and it's the words that collide together in ways that I'm not even sure Costello himself could explain. It's a white-hot artistic totality that has yet to dissipate, even if it has wandered a bit too far afield on occasion.

It's a conclusion that sounds boring even as I type it, but darnit, his artistic voice is just so damn consistent. You can draw a line from My Aim is True to this year's Momofuku and find the same themes groping each other within his songs. At the same time, he's versatile as all hell, both for his stylistic variety and for his continually evolving songwriting style. They're all Elvis Costello songs, but his sound never gets boring. Somehow the style retains its most essential qualities and continues to evolve.

Maybe that's why I love Elvis Costello's music so much: the unending variety and brilliance in his voice.

Every album he's ever released has touched me in some way, whether it inspires me to jump around like an ass in my room or drives me to reconsider my views on the female species. And every time he puts out a record, I'm there the day it comes out, because he's uncompromising and he's almost never failed me.

But then, what did I expect? He's Elvis Costello.