Elvis Costello: “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” Chicago October 13th, 1986

I saw this Elvis Costello show with my closest college friend at the Riviera Theater in Chicago. It was the second best concert I ever attended, but probably the most fun.

Elvis Costello also gave the worst show I ever attended at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles in 1991, but that doesn’t really matter.

A big part of the reason we were friends was Elvis Costello. We were roommates for a short time at Northwestern my sophomore year and stole an unattended USA Today dispenser together one rainy night that we used to hold our albums. Its front, which was designed to show off the day’s paper was perfect for displaying an album cover. This was the one we featured.

He was a bigger fan of it than I was, but I loved the cover, so it was perfect.

Sometimes, the people you spend a lot of time with during college are merely the first cool person you meet once you get there, which was true for both of us.

Recently, I was trying to recall the exact show I saw to a third friend and tried to find information about it on the internet, which was pretty frustrating.

Finally, I realized that I should look at my college archives, which were five feet away the whole time.

My college archives are this notebook.

Most of what I needed and a path to more was all there! It had the “Chicago Sun-Times” review of the show and my ticket stub!

Elvis Costello was having a weird sort of identity crisis at the time.

He released two albums that year “King of America” and “Blood & Chocolate.”

“King for America” was the first album he had recorded without the Attractions since his debut “My Aim Is True” in 1977.

“Blood & Chocolate” was with the Attractions, but for some reason he started crediting his songs to his birth name, Declan MacManus, and came up with a third alter-ego “Napoleon Dynamite,” who was the titular MC of the show I saw.

The guy who made the film of that name has said repeatedly that it had nothing to do with Elvis Costello, but it pretty much had to. It doesn’t really matter much to me. I’ve never seen it.

Costello did three shows in every town he played in on that tour, and the only point where my memory turned out to be inaccurate after almost 31 years was that I saw the second night, not the third.

The Rock Snob choice was the first night where Elvis played with his King of America band, the Confederates, featuring legendary guitarist James Burton and ace studio icon and future Wilbury drummer Jim Keltner.

I knew and liked them, but I only had $20, not $40 or $60. The last night was just a night with the Attractions playing their favorites. The night we quickly chose was the “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” show also with the Attractions.

It was in all ways a satire of celebrity and fame, but pure fun.
The way it worked was Elvis had a 12-foot tall spinning wheel with 38 songs on it that he would let people chosen from the audience spin.

Whatever song came up is pretty much what they would play.
The quirkiest choice was the song I most wanted to hear, “Pop Life” by Prince, but that never happened.

There was also a go-go cage on stage where men or women chosen from the audience could dance, and a Society Lounge to sit at featured a small black and white television.

The entire thing was like the “$1.98 Beauty Show,” and there was even a guy impersonating its host, Rip Taylor, choosing the contestants from the audience and tossing around confetti.

My friend and I got there very early, which meant standing or sitting on the sidewalk at the front of the line for hours. Elvis walked by at one point, and I almost missed it because I had my head deep into a copy of the New Musical Express.

My friend woke me up, and I was fascinated by how small Elvis looked. Years later, I looked it up on the internet, and some places claim that he is as tall as 5’10”, but my memory was something like 5’5″.

Getting there early paid off because I was standing right at the front of the stage and rested my hands on it for the entire show. This meant being crushed into its side for most of it, but it was worth it.

At various points during the show, Elvis wandered over to the television set and flicked through its five or six channels. Ronald Reagan was giving a speech that night and was on most of the stations for most of the night, but at one point, he did notice “Cagney and Lacey” and seemed to like it.
The entire show was very joyful.

He had celebrities at every performance, usually there to make some statement on fame and celebrity. Like the review says, Chicago got Chicago Bears’ Ken Margerum and Keith Van Horne, who didn’t do much compared to the bigger stars in other cities who did long skits with Napoleon Dynamite during their appearances.

That was the best Bears team ever, but not nearly the best Bears from that unit. Jim MacMahon and Walter Payton would have been fun, but Elvis didn’t have that cache in Chicago, and apparently, neither did Napoleon.

There were two big highlights.

The first was definitely rigged. A girl named Alison was chosen to spin the wheel. Who even knows if that was her real name. Of course, the crowd demanded that Elvis play the song he was most associated with at the time.

Napoleon Dynamite said, “Good luck Alison. I hope your song comes up.”

It almost did. The wheel was a mere fraction of energy away from clicking over to that song but stubbornly stuck to the song “Strict Time,” which I wasn’t that familiar with. Oddly it is on the album “Trust” that I saw every day from the front of our USA Today box. Had I ever played it, the front of the “USA Today” box would have looked empty and unimpressive.

“Sorry Alison, your song is ‘Strict Time.'” The Attractions did start to play “Strict Time” for about as long as they played “Less than Zero” before getting banned from Saturday Night Live for immediately switching to the song Elvis really wanted to play, which had been rejected, “Radio Radio.”

Elvis showed up here too. “Stop. Stop it. Who is this fascist Napoleon Dynamite? I’m going to play whatever I want!”

Of course, he did then play “Alison.”

Late in the show, he turned the television back on and found a replay of the Reagan speech, which he turned up and had a roadie hold a microphone up against.

Then he played one of his most furious versions of “(What’s So Funny about) Peace, Love and Misunderstanding” as all the Attractions grinned widely.

The best concert I ever saw? Prince at the Rosemont Horizon just outside of Chicago in 1988.

I’ve found that when music is involved if you ever have a list and you have a best on it? You are pretty safe changing #1 into #2 and figuring out why Prince belongs at the top of that list.

Elvis getting banned from SNL:

Elvis unbanning himself from SNL the same way with the Beastie Boys:

A later incarnation of the wheel. I saw the first, but you can’t keep that good of an idea in the vault forever: