To borrow an opening line from Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding”: Is it worth it?
That’s the question hardcore fans are asking themselves as they weigh buying “The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!!,” an extravagant boxed set priced so super-extravagantly that Costello himself took to the web to urge his flock to skip it.
Calling the package a “beautifully designed compendium” and “vivid snapshot” of his 2011 tour, Costello wrote that he was nonetheless “unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire. All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless,” he added, alluding to a dispute with Universal over pricing, before suggesting that fans buy a Louis Armstrong boxed set instead (or “steal this record,” as his Abbie Hoffman-esque headline recommended).
Indeed, maybe there should be three dollar signs instead of three exclamation points in the title: At press time, the autographed, very limited-edition set is selling on Amazon for $260.92 (although yours truly snagged a pre-order for a rock-bottom $202).
We’ve come a long way since 1981, when Tom Petty publicly battled the same corporate giant over its plans to release his “Hard Promises” LP with a list price of $9.98. (That one, the artist won.)
But if you’re as big a Costello fanatic as I am – which puts you in a different kind of 1 percent than the 1 percent who can reasonably afford the set – then the answer to that opening query is “of course” … muttered through violently gritted teeth.
However much you’re shelling out for it (or using Rapidshare to skip out on), the music therein really is spectacular and unironically merits every bit of the title’s ironic punctuation.
Hard as it is to believe, 34 years into his career, Costello has never before issued a contemporaneous live album. Until this week, if you owned a concert version of “I Want You” -- which has stood for decades as one of the most riveting experiences anyone can hope to experience in a concert hall -- you owned a bootleg. That one is finally legitimized here, not just on CD but DVD, in case you want to see up close just what level of perspiration attends a reading of rock’s bitterest eight-minute ballad.
Of course, the shows documented in this set were part of a still-ongoing tour that has Costello inviting fans to take a turn at a giant roulette wheel, then sip a cocktail on-stage or dance in a go-go cage while listening to the song their spin landed on.
As Costello says in a tour diary included in the hardback book that encases this set: “’I Want You’ came up on the first spin [at the May 12 Wiltern performance filmed for the DVD]. It certainly changes the mood to play that song in the first twenty minutes of the show.”
