![]() “It’d be fantastic if we could actually imagine doing this in other cities,” he said. He wasn’t encouraging, making it seem like this was a one-and-done undertaking, although he’s open to abbreviated versions.Įlvis Costello with Steve Nieve at the Gramercy Charles Martin Is there a chance he would do “100 Songs and More” in other locales? Variety put the question to Costello in an interview a week before the engagement began. (“Alison” and “A Face in the Crowd” were the only two other numbers to get even a second airing.) A bit of trainspotting: Of the 250 songs played, 239 were unique, with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” being a singular constant and climax across all 10 nights - albeit in a different arrangement each time sometimes a raging rocker, sometimes a heartbreaking gospel ballad. A couple of drunks who hadn’t gotten the memo did make their presence known, like the “Radio, Radio”-yelling ”fucker who thinks it’s request night,” as Costello noted, shutting him up by adding, “If you don’t have any curiosity now, you never will have.” The following night, when someone in the back similarly yelled for “Pump It Up,” he was slightly gentler in making quick work of someone who didn’t know to “not bother dad at work.” Costello still being Costello, there was also a passing aside about what kind of connection his 1890s acoustic guitar could make with the catcaller’s head.īut for 99% of ticketholders, and even their possibly less suspecting dates, these were dream gigs in which the absence of the aforementioned songs until the final night left room in the intermediate sets for album cuts, B-sides and deluxe bonus tracks that, in Costello’s mind, were essential to each night’s story. In-between, the shows were more oriented toward the vast majority of attendees counting on deeper and deepest cuts. For closing night, he was joined by the Imposters for a three-hour show that almost had more “hits” than the preceding gigs put together. For the first night, the only chronologically themed one, Costello did only songs written prior to 1977, which allowed for a crowd-pleasing preponderance of “My Aim Is True” material. Some of the Gramercy setlists had more grist for casual fans than others. And then he casually reiterated that “Angry” might be one of the songs he would never get around to playing again after this engagement. Was it really only the 10th time he’d dusted off his own “I’m Not Angry” since it was a late ’70s set staple? Yes, and on opening night he performed it on a clangy electric guitar with an intensity erasing the 46 years that’d passed since he recorded the man-doth-protest-too-much anthem. Could it be possible, for instance, that this could be only the eighth time he’d ever played Gram Parsons’ “How Much I Lied” since recording it for the “Almost Blue” album in 1981? It could. Taken in more or less in a fell swoop, the breadth of it all was, for lack of a more original alliteration, beyond belief.Įlvis Costello with Steve Nieve at the Gramercy Theatre in New York Charles Martinīut for his most hardcore fans, some of whom had purchased 10-night passes before they quickly sold out, there was fun to be had in the numbers-crunching of the residency, too, the following mornings, looking up on the most accurate Costello concerts source, the gigography at the Elvis Costello Wiki, just how rarely - if ever - some of these 250 songs had been played. The other three aren’t likely to attempt it any time soon, so Costello’s epic journey inside a 450-seat theater felt like a historic feat that might never again be repeated by someone of his stature and longevity. It’s hard to think of many other all-time great rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriters who could merit, or pull off, such a sprawling, genre-diverse, thematically varied, crazily career-encompassing gambit - think Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and him, basically. (Which, in some of the material from his earliest albums, is not always easily distinguished from hate.) His aim is encyclopedic. It’s an indication of just how much conceptual ground Costello has covered in 46 years and more than 30 studio albums that it wasn’t until halfway into the run - on Valentine’s Day, appropriately - that he got around to focusing a night on the subject that consumes most musicians’ entire catalogs: love. The nightly topics of these Gramercy shows ran to such atypical fodder as dystopian politics, or travel and immigration, or the dirty underbelly of entertainment across the years. Most of the nights in this stand had vintage or recent material loosely grouped around a specific theme. Impressing the bookkeepers at Guinness with dealing in volume was not his goal.
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