Sour Milk Cow Blues: Goodbye Cruel World at 40

“Congratulations! You’ve just purchased our worst album.”

As first lines you could never hope to better go, this Elvis II opening thrust, to his notes for the Goodbye Cruel World entry of history’s finest reissue series, rivals “What is this shit?”. 

Incidentally, the latter is a line many die-hard fans might’ve echoed when first dropping the needle on this never-beloved album – one whose title caught the casually caustic Costello failing to conceal a funk through which he’d found himself stumbling. He might not have let himself get so sullen if he’d known how little time left he had atop said cruel world. The ten years after My Aim is True knocked the socks off rock nerds everywhere certainly proved to be a long honeymoon. But by 1987, that was it – an artist who two years earlier had charted five albums on the NME’s all-time 100 LPs would swiftly calcify into a permanent novelty.

That’s right – your beloved uncle with the thick rims, strangled larynx and taste for cameos, who every two years or so releases a record with some stylistic signature you’ll never give a heck about like he does, once looked like he could do no wrong. Yes: of the 14 LPs he put out that first decade, ten are unquestionable masterpieces. The four that aren’t include 1) a Best of only people who have never heard his music should play (and as intros go it still won’t beat “now that your picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired…”), 2) a rarities compilation that, while no Taking Liberties, is littered with victories, 3) a country covers LP where his aversion to vocal understatement does him few favors, 4) this sad-sack-a-thon.

But here’s the thing. Even those, down to this one, are good – brimming with talent, ready to surprise you with sideways rewards. Something about the young Elvis could never measure up to the overfed showbiz institution of the old. But baby, that is rock ‘n’ roll. This fellow was never better than when he was young and fresh – before he stuck a spike in his own coffin. A consummate Beatle fan, he had a Lennon way with frontal assault and a McCartney ear for fetching melody. A consummate Dylan fan, he hung excessively around the inkwell, but you didn’t have to be a real double duchess to dig his double dutch. (Semi-skeptic Robert Christgau sums up his lyrics thus: “all wordplay as swordplay and puns for punters – one of which means something, one of which doesn’t, and both of which took me ten seconds.”)

It was clear when he first hit the scene in 1977 that he was something unique and exciting. But Costello was much more like his hectoring cousin Graham Parker than his punk fellow travelers – there was something retro about him, something too in love with old records to wholeheartedly deploy the shock of the new. Whatever kind of amalgam the new Elvis was when he first broke out – clothed in indie rags, but as mad about pop as Buddy Holly – the closest thing to last year’s model was Bruce Springsteen, and the two men resemble each other more and more as the years crow their eyes. And where Parker, a man of less catholic taste, revved up his anger as he repeated himself, Elvis was always more at home playing the sugary romantic, that beautifully ugly voice at full yearn. And boy: girls got him down.

No doubt, loving Bebe Buell – purported to be the subject of “Little Red Corvette” – isn’t as easy a ride as most trips through tunnels of love. But Costello does seem to have been a bit of a messy bitch throughout his heyday, a heyday which was beginning to wear thin when F-Beat put in their order for album number nine. Our man was at the drag end of a jet-lagged bad jag by the time he came up with Goodbye Cruel World’s songs, which catch a perpetual pill at his bitterest. Just two years later, renewed by a break from his band, he found the right kind of ventilator for the same rancor on Blood and Chocolate. There’s something liberated about that record’s anger, where here it just feels dampened, more like malaise – a cluttered and distracted ill will, often turned inward, which no state-of-the-art production can brighten.

Each Costello album had been a kind of sonic elaboration on the previous one; that Best of proves they were never as blendable as the artiste’s awesome consistency might suggest. As with Bowie records, the vocal imprint was the only reliable unifier. Ergo, while Punch the Clock – a brilliant title which undermined and threw light on its radio-eared sheen at once – was the closest thing to trend-capitulation Costello had ever risked, its change in style felt no more startling than that of Imperial Bedroom: another shift of dimensions from the man who could pull anything off, or had earned the right to try. Costello was feeling puckish on Punch, working up a verve that met the pop-drunk production halfway, with its audacious brass and backing vocal stabs. It was as great as ever, and more fun than usual to boot.

But it always helped to have his heart in a concept, and being a star in 1984 meant being a part of some big machine, which left little time to concoct yet another one. Many a label’s appetite was whetted for records that sounded a little like, oh, Punch the Clock; several of the brainier, more innovative artists of that moment made albums which are either slightly sabotaged or juicily complicated by excessively mechanized production. In any case, ‘84’s consensus best albums (Born in the USA and Purple Rain), which also sold the most, both sound very much like they were made in 1984. In gloomy rebellion, Costello had written a bunch of downbeat bad-love and protest songs, fashioned as if to resist the application of anything “contemporary”, and then stared down Clive Langer & Alan Winstanley (the pair of hot commodities who’d punched up Clock) to what sounds like a halfhearted standstill.

It’s true that the smears of prefab glop and sparkle gracing “The Only Flame in Town” and “I Wanna Be Loved” function as pure vulgarity, recall though they do the dryer-sounding prior release. With none of the spritz of Clock’s ebullient singles, Costello’s election of the “full plea” vocal approach feels like a bad nightclub act if in a bad mood – even when he nails a sincere reach of a note, he sounds self-important. King Shit Daryl Hall joins in on colorless harmony on “Flame”, and has never sounded less interested in hogging a spotlight. (Shout-out to Gary Barnacle’s tryhard saxophone squeals.) The dissonant wash of Green Gartside over “I Wanna Be Loved” wears better; though it’s the only cover, it’s efficiently centralizes one of the album’s two themes (see title, and for the other one see “Peace in Our Time”).

Mr. C makes for an inelegant valentine on these two tracks, but Cruel would be a somewhat hateful affair if he didn’t redeem himself at side one’s end – with the airily expansive “Love Field”, which uses resonance and dynamics to justify its every synthetic soundwave, and on which Elvis sounds as teddy-bear tender as he ever aimed to true. In between that song and side-opener “Flame” come four cranky curios: too-fussy-for-soul “Home Truth”, dottily percussive “Room With No Number”, sour lounge act “Inch by Inch” and feebly self-hating “Worthless Thing”. The pissy roasts and Dylan twists grow disinterested as you look closer, but the general impression is of an overdiverse, overconceived album – Spike without frills. The melodies are as lazy as the wordplay and production, yet every one ingratiates itself.

This proceeds through side two: after “I Wanna Be Loved,” a lilting change of rhythmic pace (“The Comedians”), a prescient rush of rousing folk-rock (“Joe Porterhouse”), a feisty burst of something like… funk-punk? (“Sour Milk Cow Blues,” great vocal), one more overworked non-necessity (“The Great Unknown,” its best moment a doleful Tom Jones joke), one more sign he’s awake (“The Deportees Club,” feat. the incredible if inexplicable lyric “In America, the law is a piece of ass!”). More songs that sound perfectly serviceable from a distance (like all Elvis Costello songs, smart and well-turned from a distance) – just not like ones that will bring you back. But it all winds down to another gorgeous side-closer, “Peace in Our Time.”

The song is the most pointed symptom of the pugnacious restlessness ‘80s international affairs were stirring up in our man, who could spot a great protest singer from cliffs away, but was rarely the clearest-eyed (not to mention -throated) protest singer himself. But this time his allusiveness serves him well – all the hard-edged details glint like scrapmetal, and the tone of elegiac obscurity is shrewder than the unedited venom on which “Tramp the Dirt Down” wastes its winsomeness. It’s like an optimistic sister for “Shipbuilding”, a reminder that it’s not just the love he wanted but had to give that made Elvis so exciting. Not just love for whichever ladyfriend he was mad at, but for all those records, and also his fellow man. He doesn’t look like he’s having much of a good time playing it on Johnny Carson – but he looks cool, and he sounds just great, even coughing out remnants of a tourborne illness.

I don’t hear those boos he claimed he got during that performance, but you can at least see phantom ones firing him up as he gets to his line about the spaceman in the White House. Breaking out of several self-imposed chains – Langer & Winstanley, the Attractions, at least one of those entanglements – he’d soon listen to the lion in his soul (and the Pogues), and come up with some of the best work of his career. But there are still a few true blue flames flickering out of Goodbye Cruel World. That’s the thing about ol’ (young) Elvis (II) – he’s such a deft melodist and wordsmith, there are too many little things to love on all those albums. We don’t need him ten feet taller or almost handsome. We don’t need him at all anymore, really. But he can stay – he once numbered among our cruel world’s foremost attractions.

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Ryan Maffei

Ryan Maffei is a freelance writer, musician and actor in the Dallas area. He was a member of the lost punk group Hot Lil Hands and the lost pop group the Pozniaks. He loves the Go-Betweens and was lucky enough to write liner notes for their box sets.

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