Movie/DVD Review

“Club Date is the gig you always dreamt you’d be at,” harkens the rear of the packaging of Club Date: Live in Memphis, a DVD of the performance Elvis Costello gave at the 200-person-capacity Hi-Tone Café in Memphis. That boisterous decree, however, only refers to the desire of being witness to wasted irony. Who wouldn’t want to go see Costello in the same city Elvis Presley called home? (“Elvis and Elvis,” you childishly chuckle.) The ticket stub gives you bragging rights for whenever your friends ramble on about when they saw the singer/songwriter in Milwaukee. “But I saw him in a small club near Graceland,” you respond with smirk of wicked sarcastic glee.

But while you continue with your immodest tongue-in-cheek boasts, your friend that was lucky enough to see Costello in Wisconsin will have you putting your foot-in-your-mouth after he views the disappointing documentation of the habitually commanding Costello’s intimate gig. See, you failed to tell him about how the cramped quarters, not the camera’s cockeyed camera angels, seemed to have Mr. Diana Krall and his Imposters askew, a feeling immediately apparent as Costello struggled in his vocal delivery throughout the opener “Waiting for the End of the World.” And sure, you were witness to a rare performance of “Blame It on Cain,” as well as a few duets with Emmylou Harris. But now that the DVD allows you to view this historic show without someone’s head obstructing your view, you can see Harris struggling to follow Costello’s lead during the cover of “I Still Miss Someone,” throwing the once-cruel Brit flashes of stank-eye in the process. Even “High Fidelity” manages to sound cold and lifeless in DTS digital surround sound (The rear speakers are only utilized when a song is over so you can hear the crowd cheering.). Hearing Costello pay tribute to The King by discreetly segueing into “Suspicious Minds” toward the end of his signature song “Alison” gives viewers a fantastic gift, but the moment provides a highlight that is too little, too late. For once in your life, Milwaukee is starting to look really good right now.

Since DVD gives viewers the opportunity to skip over a song that they don’t like, why didn’t Club Date’s creators simply take the four “bonus songs” that appear in the disc’s special features and include them with the rest of the concert? There really isn’t anything too spectacular about them, just like the additional road trip documentary Off the Beaten Path. The hour-plus video follows Costello and Pete Thomas as they visit Memphis’ historical musical haunts as they prattle on in the back of a car about the state of the music industry. A victim of poor editing, the tour is simply a vehicle for Costello’s normally off-the-cuff views, but instead leaves the viewer completely uninvolved. Watching paint dry is more extraordinary than anything Club Date: Live in Memphis has to offer.