The Backstory on The Delivery Man: Elvis Costello and the Imposters' Clarksdale Sessions
Written: Apr 11 '05 (Updated Apr 11 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It boasts an appealingly nostalgic warmth.
Cons: It's more of a tangential curiosity that a work unto itself.
The Bottom Line: In which the author opts for vinyl.
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| plorentz's Full Review: The Clarksdale Sessions - Elvis Costello and the I... |
In 1939, there was an uproar over the casting of Vivian Leigh in the motion picture adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling tearjerker Gone With The Wind. Apparently, some folks were upset at the fact that a British actress might play a southern belle better than a real Hollywood southern belle could. And she did. It was no small feat in 1939, but she did the act one better by essentially refashioning the Scarlet O’Hara archetype into an aging woman of suddenly ill-repute for the character of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in essence not so much playing a southern character, but playing the South itself.
Elvis Costello has pulled off a similar feat musically. In 1986, he borrowed the other Elvis’s band, and inspired by the sights and sounds of Memphis, Nashville, and N’Awlins, crafted the brilliant King of America. Then, last fall, he re-visited that sound after a nearly two-decade absence, and re-tooled it into something dark, lustful, and murderous for his concept album The Delivery Man, one of last year’s greatest surprises, and very possibly the best record Costello has released since King of America itself. With The Delivery Man, like Vivian Leigh before him, Costello has transformed himself into something more Southern than Southern.
As with King of America, the songs of The Delivery Man seem to have been born directly from live performance, and they feel like the natural descendants of Costello’s varied influences – in this case, the hard delta blues and country sounds of the late 40s and 50s. All of which makes the recently released 10” vinyl EP The Clarksdale Sessions sound like source material – the research notes tucked away at the end of a history book (and indeed, a new edition of The Delivery Man CD includes The Clarksdale Sessions in their entirety… tucked away at the end.).
Now, anyone who’s ever taken the time to read those research notes at the end of the book proper knows that they can be full of nifty little goodies, delicious ephemera and unsubstantiated suppositions that would have no true place in a serious academic work. Then again, those treasures are usually scattered inconspicuously among source notations and dry bibliographical data. Simply put, the “notes” section might add a little depth and credibility to a book, but the notes section would not make a good book unto itself.
And so it is with The Clarksdale Sessions, which collects seven live-in-a-Clarksdale, Mississippi-studio performances (of which five are alternate takes of Delivery Man originals) on one ten-inch slab of special edition, 33 rpm vinyl.
Indeed, in these recordings, you can hear Costello and his band (former Attractions Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas, along with Davey Faragher of Cracker), working up the moods and grooves that would get fleshed out on the The Delivery Man - and the two covers included here, a sinister reading of Dave Bartholomew's "The Monkey" and an equally yearning rendition of the Moman/Penn classic "At the Dark End of the Street", are the direct forebears of Costello originals "Monkey To a Man" and "Either Side of the Same Town", respectively. But even the moods to those two covers bleed into the rest of the album: the band's intensity and Costello's bilious delivery of "The Monkey" are reprised on The Delivery Man's nightmarish opener "Button My Lip".
Like the dusty, brittle antiquities found in the darkest corner of a college library, these performances inspire the listener's interest with their tantalizing rareness; we want to pay attention to them because of the apparent inattention they've received, lo, these hundreds of years (or at least, these couple of weeks). Between songs, we are privy to the random chatter of the band, as if we're eavesdropping on them (and they sorta know it) - a sense of unspontaneous spontaneity permeates the disc.
But it's all good: Disconnect the ground wire on your turntable, and the resultant buzzes and crackles will make this sound like a fifty year old radio broadcast from some lonely pirate station tucked away in the Great Smokey Mountains, picked up on a barely functional kitchen radio - an effect which, I'm sure, would win the approval of Costello himself.
After all, Costello's career has increasingly become a grand musical theatre, with Costello as the starring actor, changing costumes from verbose punk rocker to studious classical aspirant, and in The Delivery Man, the voice of the weary, jaded narrator. If one senses a whiff of inauthenticity about The Clarksdale Sessions, it's probably because, here too, Costello's playing a role. Just as Vivian Leigh embodied the South as a whole and a history in her portrayal of Blanche DuBois, this is the sound of Costello attempting to personify the Southern country and soul music he so admires, finding the backstory, memorizing the lines, building a credible character from the inside out.
It's a little bit research, and a little bit rehearsal. (And incidentally, Costello has a history with this type of project. For instance, in 1993 to coincide with the release of his first foray into chamber music The Juliet Letters, he released a promo EP of live performances with the Brodsky Quartet, which included a gorgeous rendition of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows".)
Still, for what it is, this disc has an appealing warmth to it, a rickety charm. It's not an essential purchase by any means (and as noted previously, those not inclined to turntables can find The Clarksdale Sessions in its entirety on the newly expanded edition of The Delivery Man); and being a 10" EP, it's the quintessential musical knick-knack.
But then, damn! What a knick-knack!
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“The Clarksdale Sessions” by Elvis Costello & the Imposters
Lost Highway Records, 10” vinyl EP
Released 1/25/05
Produced by Dennis Herring
27 min.
SONGS: The Monkey – Country Darkness – Needle Time – The Scarlet Tide – In Another Room – The Delivery Man – The Dark End of the Street
Recommended:
Yes
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plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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