Vinyl Tap: Elvis Costello - Get Happy!!
Published June 04, 2006
I get a new turntable and dust off some old albums. Vinyl Tap #15:
One of my favorite advertising slogans centers around Get Happy!! — Elvis Costello's fourth studio album: “20 Songs — All Different!” was not only amusingly pithy and startling in the pre-CD era where the standard-issue LP rarely reckoned beyond the dirt-cheap dozen, but it alluded to the kaleidoscopic gladdening and maddening crowd of blue-eyed surging soul-raves and Motown bass-backed manic pop-rock thrills, peppered with a little poignancy here and a little country twang there.
On the lyrical and thematic side, Get Happy is a wonderfully sloppy sketchbook, bursting out of the bulging binding and tattered covers with ideas, cynicism and bliss, wordplay of the clever, non-sequitur and quotable kind — all anchored to Costello’s innate hook-filled melodic sense and his explorations of emotional relationships that pass in the night or of the longer-lasting love-lashed kind replete with hand-wringing entanglements and recriminations.
We can find “Lovers laughing in their amateur hour” in the booming Gordy Records-glory of “High Fidelity,” but communications soon break down with “signals indistinct." In a larger sense, as outlined in “Temptation,” the marital rigmarole from courting rituals to court proceedings finds “You’re just itching to break her secret laws / As you go from claws to clause.” Leaving you, as sung in the ska-punched “Human Touch,” in a state in which you’re “Left with just a house to hold / Drinking your way to drydock.”
In the well-crafted and perfectly-honed 1986 album King Of America — in many ways the polar opposite anti-Get Happy!! album — Costello mentions, in “Our Little Angel,” someone who is “so contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary.” The same song also cites “the place where I made my best mistakes.” Both qualities — the prodigious, prolific and all-over-the-map hyperdrive, and the experimental self-assured chance-taking that produces the goods and the goofs — infuse Get Happy!! and make it a rough-edged and raw happy accident classic.
Costello’s aim is equally untried and true. Some tracks are just more equal than others, and you’ll only have to wait a couple minutes for a proper pendulum equilibrium. If, for some reason, you find in the propulsive “5 Gears In Reverse” that “All of this acceleration is driving you to death,” or the rapid-fire “Beaten To The Punch” commands you to “better get out now because you’ll never go the distance,” — just wait a couple minutes and the gorgeously lilting “New Amsterdam" will crop up, or the soothing textures of the death-shuffle melancholy of “Secondary Modern” will grab you with its sinister sibilance that prefigures the insidious tone of “New Lace Sleeves” and “Watch Your Step” from Trust. As "Secondary" asserts, “Nobody makes me sad like you / Now my whole world goes from blue to blue.”
Gordon Hauptfleisch, alias Neanderthal Hawthorne, is a Blogcritics Books Editor, free lance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. He's also an enigmatic visionary of unfathomable secrets and many a guise, or at least he plays one in his delusions of grandeur. His mandate also includes weird bugs.
In a previous life he was a leprous horse thief. - Vinyl Tap: Elvis Costello - Get Happy!!
- Published: June 04, 2006
- Type: Review
- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Adult Alternative, Music: Classic Rock and Oldies, Music: Rock
- Part of a feature: Vinyl Tap
- Writer: Gordon Hauptfleisch
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My fave of the early Costello bunch. Running a close second, my other fave isn't even a proper album, but the compilation Taking Liberties (called something else in the UK). Both are similar in the 20 - odd song "All Different!" approach - throwing so much at the listener that in the end, the whole isi greater than the sum of the parts. The Ryko CD of Get Happy! has many of those Liberties' tunes as the bonus tracks.
Thanx for the article. Mr H. Now I'll have to go give it spin fer fun.
Thanks JP--for a long time this was my favorite EC album (still in top 3) mostly for that "sketch book" quality that showcased his restless (dare I say it?-yes) genius.
Thanks Vern--in many ways, Taking Liberties clinched the deal for me--his cast-offs and B-sides were better than most artists' best stuff. "Hoover Factory" and the great, stinging "Big Tears" especially.
"Restless genius?" Maybe so, but rumour was they spent a lot of time down at the pub while they were working on this(!).
Yeah, maybe off-target and may becasue its 8am here and I haven't slept yet. But maybe the pub was an inspiration for "King Horse":
"He'd seen the bottom of a lot of glasses
But he'd never seen love so near"
Thanks again, Gordon. This is a great series you're running here.
Get Happy!!! is my personal favorite Costello record. The Rhino re-issue has 30 (!) bonus tracks from these sessions, including a really cool early version of "New Lace Sleeves."
I agree with Kevin, this is a really cool series. Lets see we've had Darkness from Bruce, Planet Waves from Dylan, and now Get Happy from Elvis. Whats next Gordon? Maybe On The Beach from Neil Young?
Get Happy isn't my favorite Elvis album. I actually felt it was a bit of a letdown after "My Aim", "This Years Model" and "Armed Forces". But it definitely has some fine moments. I'll probably have to pull this one back out and reexamine it too.
See what you make me do?
-Glen
Thanks Kevin--As I've been buying the Rhino re-issues, I've been passing along the older CDs (not the LP versions) to friends who are not for some reason Costello fanatics like me. My indoctrination as Dr. Luther's sinister Assistant continues...
Glen--I'm thinking "Zuma" or "Live Rust"--one of the best live albums ever, especially the grouping of "Cortez," "Powderfinger," "Cinnamon Girl," and "Like a Hurricane."
This is a great series you are running. Coincidentally, the discs for each of the albums you have spotlighted had been put in my car for drive time listening within two weeks before your write up. If your next album is Double Nickels on the Dime, I am going to think this is more than a coincidence and probably constitutes enemy action.
Get Hppy is my favorite EC album. The Rhino reissue is highly recommended both for the demos and alternate takes, but also for the live verions of some songs plus a bonus version of the Peter Tosh song 'Don't Look Back.' The bonus disc also includes a great radio commercial for the album.
Thanks Sean--well, my next album was going to be Double Nickels on the Dime...
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Nice review, and I love this album!