Background
During the American concert tour for Armed Forces in April 1979, Costello engaged in a drunken argument with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in a Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn hotel bar, during which Costello referred to James Brown as a "jive-arsed nigger," then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger." Costello apologized at a New York City press conference a few days later, claiming that he had been drunk and had been attempting to be obnoxious in order to bring the conversation to a swift conclusion, not anticipating that Bramlett would bring his comments to the press.
It has been suggested that the R&B influence on the album was an attempt to atone for his comments, but as Costello writes in the liner notes for the 2002 Rhino version,
| “ | It might have been tempting to claim that I had some noble motive in basing this record on the music that I had admired and learned from prior to my brush with infamy. But if I was trying to pay respects and make such amends, I doubt if pride would have allowed me to express that thought after I had made my rather contrived explanation... I simply went back to work and relied on instinct, curiosity, and enduring musical passions. | ” |
The band had played some of the songs during the "Armed Funk Tour" and had rehearsed them for the record, but were dissatisfied with the sound, feeling it was too "New Wave." (Some of the original versions can be found on disc 2 of the Rhino release.) They then went back and re-arranged many of the songs using an R&B sound. On their U.S. tours, Costello had been able to find a number of R&B records of his favourite artists and having been listening to them during the rehearsals, decided to emulate the feel of those songs.
The band recorded the album at Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, Netherlands, in an attempt to isolate themselves from distractions, but they were still able to keep themselves drunk during the recording sessions. The exception to this was "New Amsterdam," which was recorded solo by Costello in a small studio in Pimlico.
With twenty songs on the original album, the vinyl cutting and pressing process had to be precise to fit all of them on the two sides of the record. A commercial for the album, added as a hidden track on the Rhino Records remaster, jokes about the album's length and number of songs.
Read more about this topic: Get Happy!! (Elvis Costello album)
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