“History repeats the old conceits:” Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom Turns 40

Well, we haven’t done one of these for a while, and being in need of distraction from the news and locked in one of my periodic bouts of pathological procrastination (sorry editors! sorry everybody! I am the worst person!) I thought it might be diverting to discuss Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom which is turning forty (40!) over the summer.

Five years into his career as a recording artist Costello had moved at astonishing speed to establish himself as the de-facto next link in the chain that connected Hank Williams, Sun Records, Motown, Dylan and the Beatles and Stones. Legacy conscious from the gate, the pale and small one time bank employee and frontman of the largely undistinguished pub-rock outfit Flip City had transformed, as if by sorcery, into a song machine so startlingly prolific that his outtakes and throwaways were gobbled up as material by legends like Dave Edmunds and George Jones. 1980’s odds-and-sods collection of B-sides and abandoned ideas Taking Liberties would make a fine career Best Of for many a quality act. Talented songwriters abounded in the early ‘80s, but Costello was separating himself from the field.

There was a toll. Bob Dylan in 1966, at his most prolific and deranged, once acknowledged: “It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace.” So it was for Costello in those first five years, burning the candle at both ends until there was no candle remaining and then just burning himself. All five albums of original songs he recorded between 1977 and 1982 — My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy!! and Trust — are bonafide classics. Had he left off there, or more realistically exploded in the flames of excess and exhaustion, his place in the pantheon was guaranteed.

But like Dylan at the beginning of his career, the heroically hectic writing, recording and touring schedule began to fray and get scary. Dylan had his fabled motorcycle accident in ‘66, which took him off the road and allowed him the long moment to collect himself that probably saved his life. The true history of this event is a bit opaque — most agree he did crash his bike riding near his Woodstock home, but the rumor that his injuries were exaggerated as a pretext for getting him to safe harbor has persisted for six decades to the extent that “motorcycle accident” has evolved into a sort of euphemistic shorthand for “your pushing too hard and you need a rest.”

Costello’s motorcycle accident — the point when it all caught up to him — came at the Columbus, Ohio airport while on tour in March 1979 — when he and his hard-drinking bandmates happened to run into Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett, and during an escalating series of intoxicated hostilities he preceded to defame James Brown and Ray Charles in unprintable terms. The impact on his career and reputation was swift and in some ways ultimately insurmountable in spite of countless florid, articulate apologies. It was terribly sad, especially since literally no evidence points to him harboring anything but the most worshipful attitudes towards those artists. It was a failed attempt at career suicide, but it almost worked.

In the States in particular, he was damaged goods professionally, a hole he never completely fought his way out of. Nevertheless, his genius proceeded shockingly undisrupted. The two LPs following the Columbus catastrophe — 1980’s Get Happy!! and 1981’s Trust were wildly different in tone and feel but both objective masterpieces. Still, 1982 felt like a tipping point. He was no longer the new kind on the block, he had offended an incredible amount of people, and perhaps so overwhelmed his audience with miraculous three minute confections in such a short time that they had begun to run together. “Imperial Bedroom” was a conscious break from the chaos tornado of his first half decade. It was time for punk-rock Pinocchio to become a real boy.

Out as producer was “Basher” Nick Lowe, and in was Geoff Emerick, sound engineer on Sgt. Peppers and Abbey Road. The symbolism of Costello embroidering himself into the Beatles legacy is obvious, but it really would represent a change in his sound. Imperial Bedroom is all effects driven slap back, “Penny Lane”-horns and trad-British Music Hall touches. It’s dominant mood is stately and unhurried, as if Costello had traded in trucker speed for strong English tea. It contains several of his greatest songs, and is to many Costello obsessives, his finest work.

I don’t find it such, but I do find it fascinating. If the first five records (six if you want to be picky and include the intermittently charming country covers LP Almost Blue) was the artist establishing a kind of rakish literary character built entirely from bile and genius, Imperial Bedroom is much closer to Costello showing off who he truly is. Erudite and musically promiscuous with respect to genre, vacillating between extremes of profound self-loathing and vaulting self-regard, and capable of a fussiness we’d not previously had access to but would see much more of moving ahead. Costello would periodically return to the abrasiveness of his early years — particularly on 1987’s bracingly enraged Blood & Chocolate –– but by and large this was the version of him we would have to come to love.

Let’s take a track-by-track look:

“Beyond Belief”

A bold piece of music which emerges mysteriously from an ether of atmospheric bass and drums, “Beyond Belief” is a top-notch scene setter which casts into bold relief the theme of attempting renewal in the face of a checkered past: “History repeats the old conceits/ The glib replies/ The same defeats.” If Dylan’s songs commonly revolve around epic karmic reversals — “the first one now will later be last,” “you’ll find out when you reach the top/ you’re on the bottom” — “Beyond Belief” suggests something darker still, a world wherein personal and political acts cast an unshakeable shadow over future events, with only the most fleeting odds of redemption.

It’s one of Costello’s best songs and one of the unchallenged triumphs of the LP.

“Tears Before Bedtime”

A domestic tragi-comedy featuring an admirably ambitious dueling male-female narrative, this is catchy and trenchant as well as strange and subtly disjointed. It’s very much the sort of thing you might hear in a late-Sondheim musical: “For the tears that you boo-hoo-hoo/ There can be no defense/ You say you’ll forgive and forget/ But it’s only a pretense.” It’s all very arch and entertaining, and is evidence of the overflow influence of Costello’s friends Squeeze, whose East Side Story LP he had produced the previous year. A second-tier Costello song in my estimation, but his second tier is higher than the best of us mere mortals.

“Shabby Doll”

One third Sinatra torch song, one third stab at White Album style psychedelia, and on third ersatz Raymond Chandler-noir “Shabby Doll” succeeds as a deeply peculiar and memorable contribution to the Costello catalog. It’s sort of like “Watching The Detectives” as reimagined by Burt Bacharach. Classic laugh-out-loud EC couplet: “Being what you might call a whore/ Always worked for me before.”

“The Long Honeymoon”

Another track characterized by the Bacharach influence, this four minute infidelity soap-opera commences with the tell-tale minor key fanfare and slow burning atmospherics of “What The World Needs Now” or “Reach Out To Me.” From there it’s all psychic bloodletting and relationship horror depicting that particular, Hitchcockian realization that your partner isn’t remotely who you thought they were. Strong stuff.

“Man Out Of Time”

The highpoint of Imperial Bedroom and one of the unimpeachable standards of his catalog, “Man Out Of Time” starts with a manic band freakout before coalescing into one of the Attractions’ greatest-ever performances backing a classic self-inventory as harsh as Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” and Dylan’s “What Good Am I?” Having attained the heights and privileges of stardom and all the death threats that go along with it, the same Costello that had been the hunter in “My Aim Is True” becomes the hunted. What if all your dreams come true?

“Almost Blue”

A Chet Baker-inspired ballad so great that Chet Baker himself simply had to record it shortly before falling to – or being pushed to – his death, “Almost Blue” is a legit entre into the tradition of Johnny Green and Edward Heyman’s “I Cover The Waterfront” or Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” Classic lyric: “Flirting with this disaster became me.” What came first, the disaster or the man?

“…And In Every Home”

My personal least favorite track on the album, this is a baroque tsunami of heavy production, long winded storytelling and an unearned sense of pomposity, the point at which someone wishes Nick Lowe would have parachuted in and made this a minute shorter and a lot more stripped down. In my opinion — and it is just an OPINION, old men of Twitter — “…And In Every Home” would have been better off left on the cutting room floor.

“The Loved Ones”

And then there is this. One of the great rockers in Costello’s stocked armory, “The Loved Ones” weds an urgent groove to an existential question: how long until the best of us are put to pasture and what happens next? A kind of comedic reversal of Keith Richards’ “Before They Make Me Run,” “The Loved Ones” is all about cutting loose before a youth based industry turns you into an aging parody: before they make me stay.

“Human Hands”

A track which always struck me as a sped up ballad or a balls-out rocker taken at half-tempo, “Human Hands” is a knotty and emotional composition that never quite coheres. Even Costello’s trademark wordplay and phrasing seem askew: his delivery of the repeated line, “Do I have to draw you a diagram?” comes out about as smoothly as it reads. Not remotely awful by any stretch, but as one who finds Imperial Bedroom’s fifteen-track running order a bit overmuch, I’d have delegated “Human Hands” for interesting outtake duty.

“Kid About It”

A gem of a lovelorn, piano-based waltz which benefits greatly from the Beatles-esque production touches, “Kid About It” is a deep catalog gem which again demonstrates Costello’s growing comfort in the ‘40s Tin Pan Alley idiom. Wry, witty, self-reflective and sad, it also feels like a musical forerunner to the all-time classic anti-war ballad “Shipbuilding” which would emerge soon after.

“Little Savage”

A bitter little two-minute-and-forty-second confection of the kind that had long been his stock in trade, “Little Savage” is a fun if inessential palate cleanser depicting a doomed romance in comic freefall. Lots of funny lines, my personal favorite being: “Actions speak louder now than words/ but only by a fraction.”

“A Boy With A Problem”

An odd little collaboration with Squeeze’s Chris Difford, this jazzy confessional lasts barely over two minutes while still featuring a handful of melodic digressions and perspective shifts. With its wandering tune and dark intimations of problematic consumption and domestic violence, this may be the guiltiest we’ve ever heard Costello on a track, which is saying something. It’s like Richard Thompson’s “I’ll Regret It All in the Morning” rendered on a player piano.

“Pidgin English”

One part character study, one part self-flagellating promise to behave better for a while at least, “Pidgin English” would be my personal choice to be the third song left off in the interest of making Imperial Bedroom the streamlined twelve song tour-de-force of my dreams. Lots of studio effects, ornate arrangements and baroque backing vocals over the course of its four minute run time. It sounds like they had a lot of fun recording it. I find it less fun to listen to.

“You Little Fool”

An odd entry into the Costello sub-genre of “songs weirdly obsessed with the interior lives of debutantes,” “You Little Fool” is narratively inscrutable but wildly catchy from its harpsichord intro to its fetching harmonies to its singalong chorus. For three minutes and twelve seconds, all of Costello’s high dudgeon obsessions are in evidence: fraudulent love and fake wealth, women who are assertive, women who are unassertive, his self-evident genius, his glaring inadequacy. If by the end it remains unclear whether the titular little fool is the girl he’s singing about or the singer himself, well, at least it remains unclear.

“Town Cryer”

A big swing ballad at the ending of a big swing of a record, “Town Cryer” evokes the emotional and musical pyrotechnics of Harold and The Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by way of Ray Davies’ idiosyncratic English touches. Here Costello ends his most ambitious album to date with a beautifully downbeat analysis of the sensitive soul behind the angry-young-man trappings: “Just a little man lost in a big man’s shirt.” It’s a fitting end for a rich and draining LP which would meaningfully alter the trajectory of his career moving ahead. Imperial Bedroom was all about moving out of the garage and into the tony altitudes of high culture — a prestige move. And a grand one.