BY KENT SZLAUDERBACHNot just a familiar feature on Elvis Costello's 2011 tour,
The Big Wheel is also the title of a 1990 novel written by former Elvis Costello bassist Bruce Thomas, the only member of Elvis Costello's original Attractions not onstage with the Imposters last night. (He hasn't been since the 1990s.) The barely fictional novel is more like a transparent memoir about the drunk, bleak absurdity of lost-weekendlike touring with Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the 1980s.
The title isn't accidental. Perhaps The Big Wheel popped into Thomas' head when, in 1986, he first laid eyes on Elvis Costello's Spectacular Spinning Songbook, the same two-story, candy-colored, wheel-of-fortune set list that nearly eclipsed the Imposters' bassist at last night's show.
If Thomas' whole idea was that the big spinning wheel made Costello into a grinning, gimmicky host whose fake Las Vegas game show invited spastic, helpless contestants to the stage rather than true fans, then you're much better off going to Costello's next show than reading
The Big Wheel (if only just to disprove Thomas' bitter imagination).
Last night's Kansas City stop on Costello's Revolver tour, subtitled "The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook," was the novel's antithesis. It was a warm, personal invitation to Costello's 30-year-long, waking Technicolor dream (or nightmare, if you're Bruce Thomas) of brutal new-wave and baroque Americana. Like a four-headed, one-man rat pack, Costello and the Imposters burned through hits, covers and back pages like time was irrelevant.
He was at his most sincere during the encore. The soulful blues Barbies of the opening act
Larkin Poe came back to join Elvis on his own roots-y songs, written with his "brother" T-Bone Burnett. The first, "The Crooked Line," was introduced as his only about fidelity, though it too had "an escape hatch in the last verse." He sang another from his and Burnett's collaboration, "Scarlet Tide," and wished troops overseas that they'd get home soon, to which the crowd sobered up and remembered to cheer. At his last chance, Costello paid one last due to the American music to which the English-born Irishman indebts himself, raising high the back of his guitar to reveal a 'Rebuild New Orleans' bumper sticker.
In a 2003 Simpsons episode, Homer meets a guest-starring Elvis Costello at a rock and roll summer camp, where he manages to swat off Costello's hat and glasses. Costello shrieks, "My image!" as he falls to the ground to pick them up. Costello's sense of humor, and his sense of suffering, are Shakespearean compared to the slim Big Wheel. Last night was a reminder that his long career of dramatically performed songs reveals more than Thomas' book -- or anyone's book -- ever could about Elvis Costello.
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK:
*Did that contestant whisper "I'm not married" to Elvis when they were dancing in the cage?
*The smile Elvis cracked during one of his mandolin solos was the least ironic thing to happen all night.
*The drinks served in the onstage social lounge were the same weird colors as the color bars.
*The guy in front of me, to me: "Last time Elvis was here, he was tuned to stink, but this time it's awesome."
*"Guy knows how to wear a lid," Elvis said about the only male contestant -- to an entire audience of males all wearing Elvis Costello lids.
SET LIST:
I Hope You're Happy Now
Heart of the City (Nick Lowe)
Mystery Dance
Uncomplicated
Radio, Radio
Talking in the Dark
Clubland
(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding
Earthbound
Human Hands
Watching the Detectives
Chelsea
Almost Blue
Shabby Doll
I Want You
Brilliant Mistake
Pump It Up
Alison/Tracks of My Tears (Smoky Robinson)/Somewhere Over the Rainbow/Purple Rain (Prince)
Encore:
Sulphur to Sugarcane
The Crooked Line
The Scarlet Tide
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