Elvis Costello - 1979-03-18 Louisville

<<   1979-03-18 Louisville

Elvis Costello And The Attractions
Memorial Auditorium
Louisville, KY
18 March 1979


01. Lip Service (audience source)
02. Goon Squad (slice of audience and soundboard)
03. Two Little Hitlers
04. B Movie
05. Oliver's Army
06. Green Shirt
07. Opportunity
08. Moods For Moderns
09. The Beat
10. Big Tears
11. Accidents Will Happen
12. Alison
13. Big Boys
14. Lipstick Vogue
15. Watching The Detectives
16. Radio, Radio
17. Pump It Up
18. You Belong To Me


Elvis Costello - vocals, guitar
Steve Nieve - keyboards
Bruce Thomas - bass guitar
Pete Thomas - drums

Soundboard recording from JEMS, lineage unknown.


Comments by area51GM:

40 years on ................................................
A rare treat here, and one which to my surprise I found I only had as an audience recording until my recent contact with those heroes at JEMS. Many thanks to them for the original recordings and the encouragement to make these available to you. My original tape didn't have the opening track and the most recent version of this from JEMS states that the first track is from the audience tape and then part of the audience recording is spliced to the soundboard recording of Goon Squad. According to the Elvis Costello wiki, the concert begins with Goon Squad but there's no definitive acknowledgement of which is true. It seems to me, purely as an act of conjecture, that the recent concerts were more likely to start with Lip Service but it's a bit of a puzzler that this wasn't on the totally audience sourced recording that I had received in trade going back to the 80s. Add to that, Going Through The Motions, the bible for the early concerts and written by Richard Groothuizen is much more likely to reflect closely the actual events, and also documents the show as beginning with Goon Squad. We'll probably never know the truth.

Elvis' voice just shows the faintest signs of wear and tear by this stage in his mammoth tour and we hear a little quaver on the first "I will return" of Two Little Hitlers and, in a rare outing, Moods For Moderns has some vocal echo put on, possibly to disguise some tiredness in his voice (perhaps?). Oliver's Army is introduced as a song for the boys behind enemy lines and it may be that the media furore following the Columbus incident is now beginning to make the entourage feel under attack and that there's a desire to keep their heads under the parapets and remain firmly entrenched - to stretch the military metaphors used as a theme for this tour into no man's land.

Once again, the instrumental sections seem to have extended features maybe to also give some recovery time to Elvis' voice and there's a particularly loud solo on guitar in The Beat. Big Tears follows this with a perfect interpretation of the song with clanging This Year's Model style guitar playing and Alison follows Accidents Will Happen with Steve at his sympathetic best, gently coaxing out a tender vocal from Elvis. Lipstick Vogue features some psychedelic swirling organ in the introduction before Pete accelerates into his pounding backing and at the end of the instrumental passage of Detectives you can sense Pete waiting for Steve to finish his improvisation before pulling the song back into structure for the final verse. At this point there's a glitch and a few lines are lost just before the lines "I get so angry when the teardrops start". In Radio, Radio there are also some strange keyboard sounds in the bridge and when Elvis' guitar comes back in, it sounds out of tune and there's also a slight glitch in this after the bridge. There are two encores, Pump It Up and You Belong To Me giving us at least a reasonable assurance of the ending of the concert. I don't have any lineage for the original concert upped here, sadly.
My lineage:
FLAC > TLH > wav > Nero 9 for track separation, volume and pitch checking > TLH > FLAC