Just Like Watching the Effectives

Album: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1985

Best Track: "Beyond Belief" (There is not a bad song in the collection, however.)

Lasting Memory: In the spring of 1997, I gave two of my grad program classmates rides up state. Frankie accompanied me all the way from Blacksburg, Va., to Washington, D.C., where I had what turned out to be an unsuccessful interview with The History Company and Frankie had one of, it seems, seven older brothers living off 17th Street.

My other ride-along was Alison, who had grown up in rural Saskatchewan. She needed a ride to the Roanoke airport because she was flying home to visit her ailing cattle-ranching grandfather. Even though she was Canadian, Alison's English was excellent.

Years after driving Alison to the airport, I made her older sister shoot red wine out of her nose with the "excellent English" line during a dinner party. I can never hear Elvis Costello's "Alison" without thinking of that drive and that dinner party.

I can also never think of that trip without flashing back to a joke from my old stand up routine that ran along the lines of "I'm a student at Virginia Tech. Excellent engineering school. Physics. Chemistry. Health Sciences. So, of course, I'm a history major. I figure once I graduate, I'll just go to work for the history company."

I'll probably get fired, though."

My boss will be all, like, 'Lamb! How many times do I have to tell you it's chronological? Chronological!"

Serious problems like training hard for assured eventual unemployability is one of Elvis Costello's pet themes. Just check out "Shipbuilding."

This is no doubt reflective of the former Declan MacManus' Irish heritage, which my bother decries -- and I embrace -- as not exactly defeatist but most assuredly expecting of the worst. Summing this worldview up nicely is an anti-Successories placard my sister Clair brought back from Ireland for me:

Being Irish
he had an
abiding sense
of tragedy
which sustained
him through
temporary periods
of joy.
-- W.B. Yeats

What has really paid Costello's (it's his mother's maiden name) bills and fed his muse for what is going on 33 years now, however, is the underlying philosophy of "Alison." To hear the man himself tell it on VH-1 Storytellers, he wrote this particular song about a woman he knew he could never be with and, deep down, knew he didn't really didn't want to spend time with.

What is one to to do with love that that is both unrequited and unwanted? Costello's answer is to write songs such as "Everyday I Write the Book" and "Watching the Detectives." The less said about the simple-minded but largely unobjectionable politics behind Costello's angry young man songs like his cover of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understnding" or his own-penned "Oliver's Army" the better, except to point out that they rule the rock world as protest songs that have a good beat you can dance to.

The other thing to do with feelings of unworth, unbelonging, and uncertainty is to drink those emotions into submission. Costello did exactly that until about 1991, when he graduated from AA and released an album called Mighty Like a Rose, whose name makes no sense.

Anywho, The Best of is sequenced chronologically, which tracks Costello's 1975-1985 personal and professional lives from horny/angry to drunk/resigned to drunk/sentimental. The best part of Costello's career, in my opinion, was his resigned phase in which he created and recorded the three-song set of drinking praise and regret included on this greatest hits collection. "Clubland" concludes the spot-on description of the functional sot:

You barely get required sleep to go lingering with contemptment
Thursday to Saturday
Money's gone already
Some things come in common these days
Your hands and work aren't steady

The third song, "Watch Your Step," is self-explanatory and riffed on in a nonalcoholic vein below.
But the apotheosis of Costello's epiphanic dunkardom is "Beyond Belief":

History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues

I'm just an oily slick
In a windup world with a nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
I hang around dying to be tortured
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard
This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel

So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice

You know she has no sense
For all your jealousy
In a sense she still smiles very sweetly

Charged with insults and flattery
Her body moves with malice
Do you have to be so cruel to be callous

And now you find you fit this identikit completely
You say you have no secrets
Then leave discreetly

I might make it California's fault
Be locked in Geneva's deepest vault
Just like the canals of Mars and the great barrier reef
I come to you beyond belief

My hands were clammy and cunning
She's been suitably stunning
But I know there's not a hope in Hades
All the laddies cat call and wolf whistle
So-called gentlemen and ladies
Dog fight like rose and thistle

I've got a feeling
I'm going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing
Now I am beyond belief

You could spend a lot of time unpacking those lyrics, which I'll leave you all to do. Me, I've got unpacking of actual boxes to which to attend. The move is complete, and thanks to James, successful.

Up Next: Mark Erelli, Untitled EP, Sometime before 1994 (dubbed off my roommate Toby in 1995)

Note from Management: According to Google, this blog post is the first-ever Web-published usage of the phrase "epiphanic drunkardom." Please use the phrase to mean "drinking until it all makes sense" as often as possible. I've always wanted a coinage on my resume.