07.08.2024
‘No god for the damn that I don’t give’
Carl Wilson: Substack: July 6th 2024
Spending a misbegotten Fourth of July with Elvis Costello at Insert Beer Company Here Amphitheatre, Toronto.
Like you, I resist being reduced to a category. But if I am any type of a guy, there’s little question I’m the Type of a Guy Who Listens to Elvis Costello. More precisely I was the type of a teenaged guy in the mid-1980s who listened to Elvis Costello (we can throw Tom Waits in there too). And while I later saw their flaws, and have had greater musical loves, the candle remains lit in the window of the derelict carriage house of my soul: The artist born Declan McManus was among those who first helped show me how much songs could really do and, with his knack for being complex but not exactly subtle, educated me in how to catch songs in the act.
Given his importance to me, and how widely he tours, it’s bizarre how little I’ve seen Costello live. In fact before this week I’d only been to one show. And it was an odd one. It was 20 years ago, when he was touring North, his album of torch songs written for and under the influence of his then-new-spouse, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall. It was still a great concert, just E.C. alongside his chief co-conspirator Steve Nieve on piano, and taking advantage of the supreme acoustics of Toronto’s Massey Hall by delivering extended passages unamplified and a capella, crooning dramatically from the lip of the stage.
Yet since then I’ve missed every show, including several more at Massey, and I really can’t account for why. So, given that each year brings the deaths of more cultural heroes, I determined this time not to miss the 69-year-old E.C. when I saw he was playing the outdoor stage at beleaguered Ontario Place this summer.