Elvis Costello was three albums into his career and still desperately trying to conquer America on yet another tour when he nearly derailed his career entirely on March 15, 1979. After a gig in Columbus, Ohio, he was drinking heavily in the Holiday Inn bar, which is where Stephen Stills and other similar performers from rock’s old guard were also imbibing. Costello proceeded to taunt this group by loudly disparaging American artists, escalating to N-word laced insults concerning James Brown and Ray Charles. One account of the resulting melee claims Bonnie Bramlett knocked him out cold with a single punch. Typical of this kind of event, accounts vary wildly, but I do know she once threw a bottle of whiskey through the control room’s window of Stax studios, so I believe she was at least capable of it.
I wasn’t aware of that when I first encountered Costello’s next album after that incident, 1979’s Get Happy!! As expected of his work, the title is more than a bit ironic, though this is largely an up-tempo work that at least superficially scans as party music. Then there’s the slight evolution in his sound, with some obvious Stax and Motown influences creeping in, including a cover of Sam & Dave’s “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down”, which I was stunned to learn, once I finally heard the original, is at least twice as fast as the Stax version.
It is effortless to perceive this as a response to the allegations at the time that Costello was racist. But that is just one of the twenty tracks spanning this single disc of songs that are rather short, even for that time. And many of these tracks are still firmly rooted in his signature New Wave sound at this point in his career.
More than a few critics took issue with the sheer volume of songs and gave restrained reviews which suggested they would have been more favorable had there been more judicious editing. As for myself, I was stunned the first time I encountered this album, and it continues to be my favorite of his considerably vast catalog.
It almost feels like a collection of both sides of ten singles, and it is the only album I think would make sense if presented as one of those box sets that spreads an album across 7″ singles. That approach is almost uniformly, and rightly, disliked, but it would make sense this time.
Two songs I can especially imagine as the sides of one single are “Black & White World” and “5ive Gears In Reverse”, one of those back-to-back pairings where I always have to listen to both if I even hear either. They are also two of the tracks here with the least soul influence on them, though that isn’t why I’m so fond of them. The former is very simple and straight-forward, while somehow also being unlike any other song I believe I have heard. The latter is one of Costello’s very best rockers and the groove it locks into in the fadeout always leaves me wanting more. And, yes, title foretells that annoying trend of the 90’s and 2000’s of numb3rs b31ng us3d 1n place 0f l3tt3rs. At least it was highly novel when nobody else was doing it.
There’s also a frantic, almost desperate, energy to the proceedings from the first track, “Love For Tender”, and it almost like Costello can’t get the lyrics out fast enough. It’s like the words are spewing full blast from a fire hose, and it can be a bit much at time. Critics may have taken issue with the number of songs but, if I have any reservations about the work, it is the deluge of words. And everything feels quite clever on first pass, but much of it seems a tad empty on retrospection. I like the line, “The chairman of the boardroom is a compliment collector/I’d like to be his funeral director”, but an earlier line from that same verse feels empty: “The Fitness Institute was full of General Motors men”. And “New Amsterdam”, one of the most beautiful pieces on the collection, has a line equally poetic and vacant, in which he longs to “speak double-Dutch to a real double-Dutchess”. Clever and cute, yes, but also a hair too much.
An odd aspect of that song is was the only one appearing in demo form after attempts at re-recording in a proper studio failed. Admittedly, there is some indescribable quality to this track which feels like magic that cannot be recaptured by force. Fortunately, subsequent reissues of the album have included demos of almost every track, and some of those merely show how later course corrections were an improvement. Others, however, seem to me to be the superior version, such as an earlier take on “Riot Act”, the demo of which is one of my favorite Costello recordings. That song is supposedly the only one of his to directly address the controversy surrounding him at the time, though that wasn’t my take on it.
Get Happy!! is a fast and wild side through fast tempo and mad-doctor concoctions of various musical hybrids, all accompanied by machine-gun volleys of lyrics. I don’t know what my reaction to the album would be if I had known about the Columbus incident before already having loved it for more than a decade. What is odd is what tempered my enthusiasm for his work over time wasn’t learning about that drunken tirade, but rather what I increased came to interpret as misogyny in his lyrics. I was a deeply bitter, and much younger man, when I immersed myself in his catalog. I am now far more subdued in my later years, and with musical tastes that somehow are much broader and more selective than before. I don’t listen to many of the man’s albums nowadays, but when I do, this is one of the three or so I always reach for.