After a breath-taking 54-song year—20 on Get Happy!!, 20 on Taking Liberties, and a modest 14 on Trust—1981 was barely six weeks old and Elvis Costello was gone again. The Silver Train bus that carried E.C. and the Attractions and their old Chinas (whatever the hell that meant) Squeeze as they crawled across the U.S.A. is now schlepping Steve and Eydie or the Rossington Collins Band. Mr. Costello leaves in his speedy wake thousands of satisfied customers, a new album getting “very hot add-on action” (a highly technical trade term which means it’s getting played a lot on radio radio), and several reasonable questions. The questions, alas, will have to resolve themselves over time because E.C. doesn’t talk to the press.

He doesn’t talk so loudly that Jann Wenner (famous publisher of Rolling Stone) called Walter Yetnikoff (famous president of Columbia Records) asking for some divine corporate intervention on behalf of his mag’s planned cover story. My informant didn’t mention where Yetnikoff was at the time—combatting taping from the radio with Bruce Springsteen perhaps, or shredding newspapers onstage with Billy Joel but, whatever his feelings on the matter, the outcome was the same: no interview. Not wanting to shake the same foolish tree knowing the same result was inevitable, I opted for rummaging through the CBS files looking for clues. In a few short days I saw every E.C. videotape, read reams of prose, listened to countless tapes and generally glutted myself on scripture. In the course of this research one of the most interesting things I found was that he has been sighted on the Underground (subway to youse) on his way to London gigs. I was amused by this bit of intelligence and it certainly puts the lad in exclusive company. One night 25 years ago Benny Nadell saw the Cleftones in their stage tuxes taking the D train to a dance in Coney Island. Many years later my brother reported that the Dictators took the IRT from their lair in the Bronx down to the Palladium where they were headlining. (AC/DC, the opener, came in limos.) And now Elvis Costello had been positively sighted beneath the pavement, eschewing the protective hauteur of a stretch. Who says rock ’n’ roll isn’t full of surprises?