Review: 'Elvis Is King: Costello’s My Aim Is True'

In my recent review of Pop Classics’ installment on “Twin Peaks”, I mentioned that the new series is yet another in the vein of mini-book lines like Continuum’s 33 1/3. With just the fourth Pop Classics entry, rock journalist Richard Crouse gets even deeper into 33 1/3’s action by devoting his book to a single album. He also shows that increasingly self-indulgent and unsatisfying long-running line how to do it. There’s no pretentious navel-gazing or “how do I fill 100 pages?” tangents in Elvis Is King: Costello’s My Aim Is True. Like that no-bullshit debut album released at the end of a decade infamous for its poses and pomposity, Crouse’s book says what’s necessary in fast, furious fashion, covering Costello’s musical upbringing, his debut’s recording, its marketing, its songs, and subsequent stage and TV support appearances. Never does he lapse into obnoxious and very un-Rock & Roll pseudo-academic blather. Basically, he does what we always want 33 1/3’s writers to do. This isn’t a perfect book— Crouse’s disdain for all Rock & Roll made before 1976 gets tiresome quickly, he relies a bit too much on quoting a limited number of sources (particularly Elvis’s own liner notes to the 2001 reissue of My Aim Is True), and like Andy Burns’s Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks, his very short book suffers a bit from bad timing, since it comes so close on the heels of Richard Balls’ thorough Stiff Records Story—but as a pocket making-of/history/analysis of one of the great freshman records, Elvis Is King satisfies. When was the last time you could say that about a 33 1/3 book?

Review: 'Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story'

The pop landscape had changed radically in the ten years leading up to 1976. With albums such as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s, The Beatles had officially done away with the single as pop’s primary medium, ushering in an era of often overly-serious long players, possibly elevating pop to high-art, possibly helping to erase some of its intrinsic fun. We all know what happened in the seventies with the rise of progressive rock, that favorite bugaboo of rock and roll purists. While I believe the ill effects and, well, crappiness of prog have been highly exaggerated (and I’ll admit, it has often been exaggerated by me here on Psychobabble for no other reason than making fun of prog— quite a bit of which I really dig— is fun), I also believe pop really did need a high colonic around ’76.

It got that with two major events: the arrival of calculatedly “dumb” punk rock and an even more calculating new record label that consciously established itself as everything mainstream rock no longer was. Founded by brilliant iconoclasts/wise asses Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera, Stiff Records took a great, big whiz on the seriousness and ponderousness of current rock by returning the focus to singles with humor that might have made Rick Wakeman hide under his spangled cape. This was the label that had the great bolshie yarblockos to adopt “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King!” as a slogan promoting Elvis Costello mere days after Presley bit the dust. Less controversially they issued an LP called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, which naturally contained forty minutes of total silence. Robinson and Riviera were also reverent record lovers who understood that their fellow geeks would drool over limited edition, colored vinyl, ingeniously designed (most notably by legendary house artist Barney Bubbles) packages. Every indie label worth its salt followed suit.

Robinson and Riviera knew well the benefits of publicity bad and good, but they also knew that artists who don’t don superhero costumes and play half-hour Hammond organ solos need nurturing and exposure too. Thus, Stiff became home to some of the best and truest artists of late-seventies/early eighties pop— Costello, Nick Lowe, The Damned, Madness, Lene Lovich, The Adverts, Devo, etc.—if only before they passed on to bigger labels.

Richard Balls’s new book Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story is half great because it serves as a series of biographies outlining the early careers of such significant artists and half great because it’s so fun to read about all the outrageousness of and surrounding Stiff. One of the book’s weirdest tales involves Virgin Records founder Richard Branson getting Devo baked so he could ambush them with a surprise request from Johnny Rotten. One of its funniest involves Rod Stewart sabotaging Lou Reed on Ian Dury’s behalf. Perhaps its most shocking revelation is recording engineer Bazza’s declaration that The Damned recorded their anarchic debut album as “well behaved young gentleman.” Now that’s outrageous!