"Deep down in the jungle where the coconuts grow / There's a signifying monkey that the WORLD should know … ”
-- "The Signifying Monkey" (Willie Dixon)
It was already humid inside the Beacon Theater when Elvis Costello and his backing band The Imposters took the stage on an April night to play the single New York show on their recent tour schedule. By the end of the two-hour performance, the building was a virtual tropic zone, the seats were vibrating, and the crowd had gotten funky in more ways than one.
The star came out wearing a Stetson, a black suit, and cowboy boots covered with tiny mirrors -- a country gentleman with a touch of glam. The Imposters -- keyboardist Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas, bassist Davey Faragher -- were their usual modest, uncostumed selves. The show started with "Welcome to the Working Week," the first song on Costello's first album, 1977's My Aim is True, and ended with "The Scarlet Tide," the final track from his most recent, 2004's The Delivery Man. If the show was not quite the choreographed career retrospective those bookends might imply, it ranged widely enough to remind one of the many shapes and shades this trickiest of pop stars has taken on: his adrenalized peaks and alcoholic valleys, all the times he has put his audience to sleep, all the times he has taken its head off.
My Aim is True was the first LP I laid down money for, and to a middle-class kid in 1977, $11 was no passing amount. Costello had been featured in Newsweek and elsewhere, and his look was transfixing: oversize glasses, ill-fitting suit, misshapen Fender Jazzmaster guitar -- everything about him looked awkward and miscalculated. His songwriting, though, went right to the point, and My Aim is True was heralded as a New Wave testament, first strike of the young punk genius. To me the album sounded pinched, fussy, and irritating, a series of little tantrums. I never grew to like it -- but I never got rid of it.
This Year's Model came next, then the unbelievable Armed Forces; as Costello's tantrums got bigger, they got better. Until one night in March 1979, that is, when he got drunk at a Columbus, Ohio, motor lodge and made a racist slur about Ray Charles. Without warning, the fledgling star was embattled, and a real career was under way. He'd known love, and now he would know hate. He'd asked his listeners for an extreme response, and now he got it -- for the wrong reasons. Few artists have ever gotten themselves in such a horrible, life- and career-staining mess. But instead of finishing him, the mess fed him. Whatever turmoil he went through personally (apparently it was extensive), Costello kept growing as an artist, and the music kept coming.
Over the next 20-odd years there were soul albums and country albums and hodgepodge albums and return-to-rock albums, along with voluminous collaborations, guest appearances, soundtrack cameos, and anomalous one-shots. Some of these were brilliant and some were boring and some were neither. But in the best of Costello's music, the warmth grew deeper while the anger got sharper.
Appearing in 1985 to modest acclaim and meager sales, King of America -- rereleased last month by Rhino as the final installment in its five-year-long series of Costello reissues -- marked one of those junctures in an artist's career when emotional walls come down and the floor falls away from all you thought the artist had to give. Suddenly Costello's voice was graver, more haunted and thoughtful; his lyrics captured love and pity along with malice and outrage, as if his eyes were now seeing into people, not just through them. Both carnivorously angry ("Little Palaces," a punk-folk broadside against Margaret Thatcher's slums, doubtless influenced by Costello's then-recent work with the furious Irish band The Pogues) and dreamlike in its passages of empathy and remorse ("American Without Tears," "Sleep of the Just"), King of America revealed an artist in full -- one who'd learned sadness through success, who'd seen compassion through contempt, and who now knew that life was long.
Halfway through the Beacon Theater show, Costello brought out a surprise guest, introducing him with great portent as "the man who brought it all together." There was a ripple of high expectation: Could it be Bob Dylan, who everyone knew was scheduled for a five-night engagement at the Beacon a few days later? No, it was better than that: Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's lead guitarist, the wicked fretboard magician whose rhythms and solos filled the great Chicago blues singer's definitive records of the '50s and '60s ("Killing Floor," "Wang Dang Doodle," "Goin' Down Slow") with white sparks and knife points and city heat.
Sumlin, who will be 74 this year, came out for one song -- "Hidden Charms," a Wolf tune Costello recorded in 1992 for his Kojak Variety album. An immaculate gray suit draped over his bony frame, Sumlin resembled an elegant old spider creeping around his corner of the stage. But when he took his solo, he ripped and funked the song like a young hotshot, and age was a mere earthly veil.
Whereupon Costello, creeping toward Sumlin, shouted his vocal into the face of his own guitar, using its electronic pickups as microphones and producing a hollow, cheesy, sci-fi resonance. Lord, what a strange little scene! For these moments, the stuffy but expansive Beacon was a sweat-dripping Arkansas roadhouse, circa 1953 -- or 2053. And in a flash I saw Elvis Costello many years from now, in his twilight, looking as Hubert Sumlin looks now: a hunched little glasses-wearing bluesman, creeping away from the spotlight as he weaves funk from amplified steel, at once carrying a tradition and twirling it like an old keychain.
That tradition, as Costello sequenced it this night, encompassed a passionate delivery of "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" -- Smokey Robinson by way of the Beatles -- and a version of "Mystery Train" that I can categorically say was the hardest and loudest ever heard by anyone, anytime, anywhere. It also encompassed Costello's knowledge that his own early recordings have themselves entered the tradition, that young bands like The Hives and The Strokes continue to recycle the sound of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" even if they can't get anywhere near its feeling; and that the "five little fingers" climax of "Watching the Detectives" is as immortal a moment of rock 'n' roll stop-time as the Coasters' "Yakety yak -- don't talk back" or David Bowie's "Awwwwwwwwwhambamthankyoumam!"
In a sense, Costello is the tradition. He switches regularly and easily from the punk's snotty stance to the codger's throaty nostalgia, from absurd to deadly serious, from country to rock to soul to classical -- all without ever effacing his identity or telegraphing his next move. Which is to say he preserves an active sense of perversity and surprise to complicate the respect and affection he's earned over the decades. That perversity has to do with growing old, not just gracefully but slyly; with wanting to creep in and out of the spotlight, tossing down the mic and bellowing into his guitar; with wishing to be heard clearly but never understood too easily. It has to do with all the times he wanted the world to listen, and it wouldn't; and maybe still with that time in Columbus, Ohio, when he found that the world was ready to listen, but only when he said the wrong thing.
It has also to do, somehow, with Costello casting himself as a signifying monkey in our popular culture. And what does that mean? I'm still not certain, though there are clear parallels between The Monkey and The Man. The Monkey natters and chatters, is obnoxious and lovable at once. It's peripatetic and forever searching. It fascinates for its ability to imitate human behavior -- a kind of behavior that Costello, though estranged from and suspicious of it, has always attempted manfully to understand in his reports from the social and emotional front lines. ("Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being," he sang in 1978's "Lipstick Vogue.")
But the Monkey image is Costello's, not mine. At the Beacon, he declaimed an absurdist narrative that has been stuck in my head ever since -- because I suspect it may have been offered as a metaphor for himself.
"On this very day, 50 years ago -- or maybe it was 51 -- The Monkey spoke." Costello identified the beast no further, leaving those of us who needed an explanation to supply our own. But he told of how The Monkey had once emerged from obscurity to stand before the people of the world and declare himself -- his presence, his truth. Whatever the precise nature of that truth, the people of the world chose to turn away from it.
Costello erupted in comic fury. "Did they listen to The Monkey?" he shouted.
"No," we replied.
"Did they listen to The Monkey?!"
"No!"
"Did they listen to The Monkeeeyyyyy???!!!"
"Nooooo!!!"
Then he and The Imposters did "Monkey to Man," a comedy song from The Delivery Man, sung by a band of zoo-dwelling simians to their less-evolved human servants.
This line of inquiry could lead to some interesting places -- among them the racist and racialist connotations of the word "monkey," and the painful fact that Elvis Costello, a longtime anti-racism activist, will forever be considered a bigot by some for having once uttered a few really stupid, drunken words. Maybe Costello is viewable as a white version of the signifying monkey, the shape-changing, double-dealing, multi-voiced trickster figure that's been tracked through African American folklore by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and other black scholars. Maybe Costello and Sumlin should have dueted on "Signifying Monkey," the first song ever written by the same Willie Dixon who penned "Hidden Charms" and gave Sumlin and Howlin' Wolf their highest moments.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Costello is in command of his voices and diabolically precise with his effects, so if the Monkey story was an open-ended metaphor -- for himself, his mission, how he conceives his role and his status -- it's because he chose to leave it open. Enough that he teased out a question, popped open a possibility. All I know for certain is that Elvis Costello, who as it happens is 50 right now (or maybe it's 51), still has it in him to go anywhere, scramble up any tree, and drop anything he wants on us.
On a steamy, near-tropical night at the Beacon Theater, The Monkey signified.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
