Events

[ROCK] “I’ve got a feeling/I’m gonna get a lot of grief…” sings Elvis Costello in “Beyond Belief,” the tune that opens Imperial Bedroom—an album with which many folks seem to feel he crossed a line, and the centerpiece of his gig with The Imposters at Shea’s Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, November 2. Really, though, he’d already crossed it in the two years prior. Costello had burst on the scene some five years earlier with My Aim is True and cemented his stance as a pub-rocking wordplay champion with both punk and new wave overtones. It’s an oeuvre that carried through the follow-up, This Year’s Model, and 1979’s Armed Forces, but much like Joe Jackson (the two are oft-compared), it didn’t take long for him to veer off into chameleonic style shifts. Imperial Bedroom came on the heels of Get Happy, a disc of soul-pop originals, Trust, for which he began composing on the piano, and Almost Blue, an unexpected collection of country covers that, ironically, did not include the song of the same name. That distinction was saved for Imperial Bedroom itself, which Columbia issued in the summer of 1982 alongside an advertising campaign that featured adjacent images of Costello and the album cover (a rip on Picasso’s “Three Musicians”) with the word “Masterpiece?” printed beneath. Costello didn’t like the presumptuous tone of the ad, and neither did fans of his once-punky, off-the-cuff image. But by the time it came out, all bets were off – Costello had already made it clear he wasn’t interested in what his audience expected of him. That said, the craft and versatility of the album was undeniable. It was his first set of originals done without producer Nick Lowe. Opting instead to record with Geoff Emerick, known for his work with the Beatles, Costello created a sprawling set of tunes that were largely studio-born (as opposed to road-tested, prior) over a 12-week period. The results testify to his creative malleability and that of The Attractions as well, so able to shape-shift along with him. Moving from soul to tangos to bits of psychedelia and balladeer-pop, Costello and his cohorts created a baroque showcase that reset the musical tone of his work forever. It was an immodest ad campaign, but in retrospect, Columbia got it right.