Day After Day: Chewing Gum

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Chewing Gum

Elvis Costello has had a legendary career, but when people look back at his catalog, they probably don't spend too much time on the album Spike. It came out in February 1989, was his 12th studio album and his first since his 1977 debut that didn't feature the Attractions as his backing band. Instead, he worked with producer T-Bone Burnett and recruited four different sets of musicians from the four locations he recorded in: Dublin, New Orleans, Hollywood and London. As you can imagine, it's a pretty varied affair, which ranged from the lovely "Veronica" (written with Paul McCartney and Costello's biggest hit in the U.S., #19 on the Billboard Hot 100) to pissed off protest songs like "Let Him Dangle" and "Tramp the Dirt Down" to the perfectly sardonic "This Town" (featuring Roger McGuinn on 12-string and Macca on bass). The album received mixed reviews, but I quite liked it.

It was the spring of my senior year at UNH and I picked the album up on vinyl (didn't get my first CD player until a few months later) and played it constantly. I saw Costello play at UNH that spring; he was solo, doing songs he picked randomly using a huge roulette wheel. He played for three hours and it was amazing.

As for Spike, it's definitely a bit scattered, but I really liked the New Orleans songs, which featured the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and avant garde guitarist Marc Ribot. I started thinking about it today after reading this Aquarium Drunkard piece about the funky song "Chewing Gum," which features a skronky RIbot guitar solo that Les Claypool of Primus called one of the greatest he'd ever heard. The AD piece includes Costello and Ribot talking about the song, so I won't steal any of its thunder since it's new and really good, but it mentions the counterpoint between Ribot's out-there guitar work and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, specifically Kirk Joseph on sousaphone. I wouldn't describe the solo as one of my favorites, but it's definitely cool and interesting. The song ends with a big crescendo from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. It's just a lot of fun and different from just about anything else coming out from a major rock artist in 1989.

Meanwhile, Costello's lyrics focus on a sleazy guy and his mail-order bride, who he basically acquired as a living sex doll. "The nearest she comes to the 'Dynasty' life he promised her/Is a Chinese takeaway." The chorus brings it home: "There must be something that is better than this/It starts with a slap and ends with a kiss/Begins with you bawling and it ends up in tears/Oh my little one, take that chewing gum out of your ears." 

The summer before this album came out, I was working as an intern for The Peabody Times, a local daily in Massachusetts. One of the stories I wrote was interviewing this Danvers man who had married a mail-order bride. Not sure how the story came about; maybe the agency was promoting a success story? Anyway, the guy was a mousy little creep and the bride (who was from Eastern Europe somewhere) clearly looked bored and/or disgusted. It was definitely a strange experience. A year later, another reporter followed up to see how it was going and it turned out the woman had left him. Big shocker there. Guess she took that chewing gum out of her ears.