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.