Albums by this artist

So Elvis Costello was booed at Woodstock '99. What is this world coming to? Or rather, how did I get so detached from my generation? I'm 19 years old -- right smack in the middle of MTV and Woodstock's target demographic. Yet my favorite recording artist is a "relic" whose best material came out before I was born and the majority of people my age have never heard of. What a fucking travesty.

I'm going to go ahead and generalize wildly, because this is my page and I can. I'm going to go ahead and say that Elvis Costello and The Attractions -- along with a few other late '70s "pre-postpunk" bands, like Television and Devo -- really saved rock and roll. Certainly, the Ramones were a great band, but punk rock -- as confirmed by the incredible low imagination, diversity, and quality of the punk scene today -- was a musical dead end. "Classic" punk's biggest band, The Sex Pistols, crashed and burned before they even made it to a second album. The Costellos and the Tom Verlaines are more important twenty years on for the same reason the Velvets are ultimately more important than the Stooges -- they didn't want kill rock and roll, or escape from it. They wanted to make it better.

That said, Live At El Mocambo is as loud, fast, and vicious as any punk rock live record, albeit with a great deal more musicality. Recorded immediately before the release of This Year's Model in Canada, 1978, copies of the initial promo recording have become some of the most revered bootlegs of the modern era. Thankfully, Rykodisc finally put the thing out commercially several years back. Technically it's only available as a bonus CD in the boxed set 2 1/2 Years, but you should own every album in that set anyway. Failing that, you can find it used every now and then in your finer indie rock record stores.

Mocambo presents The Attractions -- who, as it should be taught to everyone at the first-grade level, comprised bassist Bruce Thomas, keyboardist Steve Nieve, and drummer Pete Thomas -- at an intensity level never really captured in the studio. Just check out the Mocambo version of "Welcome To The Working Week," which was recorded with session musicians on Costello's debut My Aim Is True. The Attractions. The Thomases (who weren't actually related, and Steve Nason briefly flirted with the idea of assuming "Thomas" as a stage name before settling on Nieve) kick the song up to a one minute, nineteen-second blur. Costello strains to cram all of his literary lyrics in there, and the band doesn't let up for a second.

Mocambo is the best live document of Elvis back when he really was an angry young man, and as raring to piss off as many people as possible as Johnny Rotten at his nastiest. The difference is Costello picks his fights intelligently, and disarms his audience with fantastic songs. The legendary "Dallas Version" of "Less Than Zero" is included here, where Costello revises the song's lyrics to viciously skewer an American holy cow. OK, it's the Kennedy assassination, which maybe isn't the most tasteful choice (note how EC brilliantly converts the original's "home movies" line to refer to the Zapruder tape), but it sure shows balls, doesn't it?

From "Radio, Radio" to the slinky Attractions arrangement of "Watching The Detectives," which personifies the menace the studio original only suggested, Live At El Mocambo is a document of a band at the height of their powers. There's something a little unsettling about an audience cheering ecstatically along as Costello spits out "Sometimes I feel / just like a human being," but isn't that the point?

MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.