Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Pretty self-explanatory
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johnfoyle
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Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by johnfoyle »

Who's going ?

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/sto ... 393083001/

Elvis Costello moves into the Imperial Bedroom with a revival of one of his classic albums
Jeff Spevak

June 13, 2017

Elvis Costello was just short of 23 years old when he released his debut album in 1977, My Aim is True. New Wave, they called it, or pub rock, delivered with a big dose of punk sneer. And he kept evolving, moving like a shark, lest the creativity die. Country, blues, folk, jazz, classical, soul, even orchestral re-arrangements of his work. “I’ve stayed on the stage singing the best of them,” he says of his songs. Teaming up for more inspiration with Paul McCartney, The Roots, Allen Toussaint, Burt Bacharach, The Brodsky Quartet and the Dutch big band Metropole Orkest.

So Costello — and any prolific composer has likely faced this challenge — has reached the point where four decades of creation has left him with a thematically unmanageable catalog. At times he’s resorted to gimmicks such his “Spinning Songbook,” a wheel that he’d spin onstage, and whatever song it landed on, he would play.

Was it a gimmick? Or was it a search for art as accident, the incidental confluence of where Costello was at that moment, which followed that other moment, and on to this moment now. Costello’s version of Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on a canvas. “Accidents Will Happen,” is how Costello might put it.

Costello and The Imposters return here for a July 17 show at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center. This tour is sort of what many longstanding artists with a wealth of material are doing these days. Revisiting an old album. Like Bruce Springsteen, playing The River in its entirety. Or Brian Wilson when he comes to Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre on Sept. 19, performing Pet Sounds from start to finish.

Except, “I wanted to make a story out of it,” Costello says. “And not simply say, ‘Remember this one?’”

Remember Imperial Bedroom? Released in 1982, it was adored by critics for depth of songwriting and its intricate soundscape. But commercially, it didn’t get the reception Costello was accustomed to. Perhaps eight albums in five years is a bit too much for public consumption.

“At first, you’re kind of offended by the lack of response to your work,” Costello says. “Every record was a hit. We were still knocking on the door in 1982, yet people knew our name. The audience was maybe a little bit shocked. The songs were so dour.”

We’ll stop right here and acknowledge that Costello, during those five years, had also been building quite a career as an insufferable snot. He’s a legend in Rochester for the night he was thrown out of Scorgie’s. But either that was an act, or he’s changed, learned how to deal with other humans. The Costello of this interview answered questions expansively, his mind darting to places he didn’t need to go, but went anyway. He’s also quite funny, dryly self-deprecating.

“I love the record, I never had the time or resources to play the songs properly,” Costello says of Imperial Bedroom. “When I look at any songs I play, I try to bring something to bear that I’ve learned.”

The resources in his current band, The Imposters, include two musicians who were with Costello in those early days, in his band The Attractions. “Now that we’re talking to one another a bit in complete sentences, we’ve had conversations about where these songs can go,” Costello says. “Instead of having the no-singers Attractions version of the record, we have four singers.

“Jazz musicians play songs 60, 70 years old, and try to import them with new ideas. What we wanted to do with this was open the door to other rooms, a series of interlocking passages, and we hope to find our way to them, with the audience’s approval.” Those passages allow songs from My Aim is True to cross paths with Imperial Bedroom, so that “you can hear the connection musically when you play it,” Costello says.

“This just made me think a little more clearly. Finding some of the same things in other songs, songs from other records, that are compatible. Sequencing songs together, so they could accumulate a story of their own.”

Familiarity is the enemy, at least for the artist, Costello says. “It’s like Godzilla, every time they kill that lizard, it comes back. There’s your explanation why we chose to do this, about how we do look at things.”

So this tour, while ostensibly being about Imperial Bedroom, will hardly be recognizable as the album. And there may well be unfamiliar songs as well, if Costello delves into one of his newest projects, “a musical presentation in development,” he calls it. It’s a musical of A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 film in which Andy Griffith plays a drunken drifter who becomes a manufactured radio star, until he’s destroyed by his own arrogance. Costello’s been trying out a few songs from the production, “so I know more about them.”

“The reaction was immediate,” he says. “It’s a story worth telling. But 18 months ago, when we first starting talking about this, the intention was a little different.”

What changed?

“Current reality. Events that have overtaken us. The power of television to drown out the crowd and an individual, you could say that’s something we’ve seen.”

He’s talking about Trump, of course, and easy-to-digest populism as presented on television and the internet. But Costello is not interested in allowing his songs to be just another face in the crowd. “Playing them in a facile way that is only making people feel nostalgic, because they recognize them. That’s not what we’re doing.”

Costello’s building new art from old artifacts. “Everything I do is the opposite of the internet,” he says. “You want to do it for the right reasons.”
johnfoyle
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

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http://www.democratandchronicle.com/sto ... 392149001/

Elvis Costello breaks the silence on the night he was thrown out of Scorgie's nightclub

Jeff Spevak , @jeffspevak1

June 14, 2017

Legend has it that Elvis Costello got kicked out of a Rochester bar after a show in 1979. Costello finally comes clean. Sort of.

Elvis Costello getting thrown out of Scorgie’s remains one of the enduring urban legends of the Rochester music scene, perhaps trailing only David Bowie’s arrest for marijuana possession following a 1976 show, and the police breaking up a Rolling Stones concert in 1965.

Now, after 38 years, Costello – who has a June 17 show at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center – has weighed in on what happened that night at the downtown Rochester club.


Costello exploded on the music scene in 1977, the same year that Scorgie’s opened on Andrews Street. Two years later, after three hit albums, Costello was one of the most-talked about performers in rock. And Scorgie’s was building its reputation as well, one that would soon lead Rolling Stone magazine to name it one of the top 100 music clubs in the country.


The two would seem to be a perfect marriage. Specializing in the same punk and New Wave sounds that Costello was a part of, Scorgie’s brought to Rochester The Ramones, The Bangles, The Go-Go’s, The Replacements, Alex Chilton, John Cale and 10,000 Maniacs, as well as providing a stage for local bands such as New Math and The Chesterfield Kings. The Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior ripped down the ceiling tiles during a show as fans tore off his pants. The crowd often brought that kind of intensity to the room, with The Fleshtones’ Peter Zaremba once recalling how someone stuck a fork in his arm while he was onstage. It was a scene that projected the same agitation with the world as did Costello.

There are several versions of the Scorgie’s Costello Crisis floating around. Costello and his band, The Attractions, had played for 2,000 people at the Auditorium Theatre earlier in the evening. Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union reviews of the show both remarked on how Costello never smiled during the concert, and seemed the Angry Young Man throughout. Pointing to the first row, at one point he shouted, “Don’t sit down, you lout!”


And afterward, here’s how owner Don Scorgie described what happened when the singer, allegedly, walked into his bar:

“He was a little verbally abusive and a little demanding,” Scorgie told the Democrat and Chronicle in 2008. “Words were exchanged. He had to walk the length of the bar to get out, pass the gauntlet, so to speak, but I think he got cheered pretty good going out the door. I think it was over something like a cigarette, or a lighter. Wrong place, wrong time for Mr. Costello.”


Scorgie had the reputation of not suffering fools gladly. Or suffering anyone gladly, for that matter.

“He asked, or told, Scorgie to get him a cigarette, or a pack of cigarettes,” Danny Deutsch, now owner of Abilene Bar & Lounge, said in the same 2008 story. “Scorgie isn’t the sort of guy you ordered around.”

During a phone interview from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Costello at first said he did not recall the incident, suggesting that such behavior would be out of character for him. “I was usually up to something else after shows,” he said. “I would usually go back to the hotel and work on songs.”

But in actuality, Costello was getting out quite a bit those nights. In the most-notorious episode of his career, just nine days before the Rochester show, he was drunk in a Holiday Inn bar when he made denigrating comments to Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills – although some stories claim Stills had gone back to his room – about James Brown and Ray Charles. Costello’s insults included what we euphemistically call “the n-word.” Bramlett slapped Costello and a brawl ensued.


When word got out about the incident, there were protests at some of his shows, and Costello held a press conference in which he offered a sincere apology. He has continued to do so, writing in the liner notes on a re-release of his 1980 album Get Happy! about the shame he felt over his behavior, indirectly referenced in the album’s final song, “Riot Act.” In a 2003 interview he told The Roots drummer Questlove, “It’s upsetting because I can’t explain how I even got to think you could be funny about something like that.”

Not incidentally, Costello has done a significant amount of work for a British campaign called Rock Against Racism, not only after his Holiday Inn bar rant, but before it as well.

So bars and Costello have not always been a productive situation.

Pressed a little more on what happened that night in Rochester, “There’s a very good chance it wasn’t me, there’s a chance it was someone in my band,” Costello said, casting suspicion on The Attractions. “I’ve read this story transplanted to a number of cities, where other people in the band were going out into the nightlife and causing mischief, and by the end of the story it’s Elvis Costello.”

Uh, no, says Deutsch. He was a Scorgie’s bar manager and booked shows at the club, and he fingers Costello. “I was there,” Deutsch wrote in response to an email question last week. “And he was thrown out.”

There may have been more to it than that. A tiny, yellowed newspaper clipping from the Times-Union, unearthed from the Democrat and Chronicle’s basement morgue, reports that Costello was actually accompanied by a “foul-tempered herd.”


“Fans approached him with napkins and pens requesting autographs, only to have him sign so violently that the napkins were reduced to shreds,” the single-paragraph item reads. “And when he made his exit – wearing dark glasses, of course – he was followed by such a mob of acolytes that one patron yelled, ‘What is this, the second coming?’ A member of Costello’s British entourage yelled something back about American stupidity.”

Today, Scorgie’s is now nothing more than a set of dark windows on a closed storefront. Don Scorgie is retired and living in Florida, probably playing golf at this very moment.

Costello was 24 years old at the time of the Scorgie’s kerfuffle. Now 62, he looks back at the Angry Young Man that he once was with bemusement and self-deprecation. Indeed, immediately after casting his admittedly time-dulled suspicions on his fellow Attractions, Costello conceded, “That wouldn’t discount that it didn’t happen. I think there were a few bars I was thrown out of. Nights when we decided we could play better than the band that was onstage.”

Two former members of The Attractions, keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas, are in Costello’s current band, The Imposters. This prompted Costello to return to the mistaken-identity theory before closing out the interview: “I’m going to ask them what they were up to that night.”
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verbal gymnastics
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by verbal gymnastics »

Sounds like an interview Elvis really enjoyed doing! :lol:
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
johnfoyle
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

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johnfoyle
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017 - 'streaming live' ?

Post by johnfoyle »

Sorry about the dodgy link - deleted!
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And No Coffee Table
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by And No Coffee Table »

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elvis-cos ... 49f75.html

01. The Loved Ones
02. ...And In Every Home
03. Accidents Will Happen
04. Clubland
05. Tears Before Bedtime
06. Moods For Moderns
07. Shabby Doll
08. Human Hands
09. Green Shirt
10. Bedlam
11. Watching The Detectives
12. The Long Honeymoon
13. My Three Sons
14. Kid About It
15. King Horse
16. You Little Fool
17. Pidgin English
Encore 1
18. Alison
19. A Face In The Crowd
20. Shot With His Own Gun
21. I Still Have That Other Girl
22. Almost Blue
23. Beyond Belief
24. Man Out Of Time
25. Town Cryer
26. Everyday I Write The Book
27. Pump It Up
28. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?
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docinwestchester
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by docinwestchester »

My Three Sons was soundchecked before the Central Park SummerStage show.
bronxapostle
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by bronxapostle »

docinwestchester wrote:My Three Sons was soundchecked before the Central Park SummerStage show.
and in Canandaigua, doc, there went your perpetual IN THE SET boywithaproblem prediction! :lol: :lol:
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docinwestchester
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Re: Imperial Bedroom & Other Chambers -Canandaigua, NY, June 17 2017

Post by docinwestchester »

bronxapostle wrote:
docinwestchester wrote:My Three Sons was soundchecked before the Central Park SummerStage show.
and in Canandaigua, doc, there went your perpetual IN THE SET boywithaproblem prediction! :lol: :lol:
Too bad for them, I guess. Although the replacement song in that slot was pretty damn nice.
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