originally posted by Yule Kim:
'77 was the year My Aim is True came out, correct? And, checking out Wiki, it looks like it was the year he formed the Attractions, so '77 was probably not just impressive, but his most important, breakthrough year.
Hard to disagree with any of that. I've only recently (last coupla years) become a Costello adherent. I mean, I've always
liked his music but he and the Grateful Dead were probably the two artists who I was never quite able to figure out why people named their children after them (ie: Elvis Mitchell, Lou Costello, Jerry Lewis, Britney Pigpen Spears, et al) and went to great lengths to obtain recordings of all of their music. I've got a friend who worked in the record business for about 25 years and he was able to retire after overseeing multiple reissues for multiple labels of the catalogs of Elvis Costello and ECM. I tried to get him to put Costello in a studio with Karen Mantler for a Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell tribute album but it didn't work out because Mantler fancied herself more like Tina Turner than Terrell and despite the similarities in Terrell's and Turner's initials, she wouldn't make the leap due to the variance in hairstyles.
So at this late stage of my life, I've begun to spend more time with Elvis' music. It's not that I'm not rabid for it or anything, but when you're stuck in an iron lung as I am your musical choices aren't always your own. I'll admit that early on I kind of got sidetracked by Joe Jackson's records of the late 1970s and while I fell off of
that turnip truck long ago (said fall being part of the raison d'etre for the iron lung), I still enjoy listening to Jackson's core group of albums more than I enjoy listening to Elvis' recordings (although the Memphis Sessions is a certifiably brilliant piece of work, and "Burning Love" is as good of a song as "Every Day I Write The Book" or "When Green Eyes Turn Blue". I'm sure that if he had it to over again, Elvis would have overcome the Colonel's objections and would have gone ahead and cut "Toledo" with Burt Bacharach, but at least he did a good did a good job of further confusing Toledo Ohio with Toledo Spain in the minds of people who don't do so good with geography.
As for
my 1977 anniversary commemoration, I think I started music school in Hollywood back in 1977. I would hope that the port of that vintage has evolved more than my musical aesthetic has.
-Eden (it's not bad, just unfocused and scattered all over to hell and back, but that could be due to the meds)