Former Attractions bassist Bruce Thomas (not pictured) titled his Elvis Costello-offending memoir "The Big Wheel."

Even so, he changed things up impressively from when he brought his Spectacular Spinning Songbook to Wolf Trap’s Filene Center back in June, repeating only eight tunes from the three-dozen-song epic he performed then. (You’re welcome, trainspotters. Someone has to pay attention to this shit.) You need a deep catalog of strong material to get away with that. (I'd already heard Nick Lowe play "Alison" when he opened for Wilco Sunday night, so I didn't mind that Elvis, or perhaps his wheel, chose last night to give his most resilient crowd-pleaser a rest for once.)

The Spinning Songbook is a game-show-style wheel Elvis has been using this year to keep his setlists from becoming too predictable. He first toured this concept in 1986-7, when these songs would’ve been fresh; he hadn’t revived it since. There’s a carnivalesque atmosphere to these shows, with Elvis pulling double duty as event MC Napoleon Dynamite, abetted by two lovely assistants and a go-go cage audience members can dance in if they’re brought on stage to spin the wheel. (Guest hosts on the 1986 tour included Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits. That’s some inspired casting, there.)

Anywho, here’s the rundown on five of the wheel-selected songs performed last night that you won’t find on the many, many best-of (and rest-of) compilations Mr. Declan Patrick MacManus has given us over the many, many years.

(1) “The Other End of the Telescope.” Elvis shares credit on this farewell ballad with Aimee Mann, which first appeared on the third and final ‘Til Tuesday album, Everything’s Different Now, in 1988. Elvis’s own version opens his marvelous 1996 set All This Useless Beauty, an attempt to reclaim some of the songs he’d written for other artists.

One of that album's strongest tracks is “Complicated Shadows,” a don't-take-your-guns-to-town sort of thing he wrote for Johnny Cash. Cash never recorded it, though he did cut a different song Elvis wrote for him called “Hidden Shame", and he also used a cover of Elvis’s “The Big Light” to open his Johnny Cash is Coming to Town album in 1987. Of the sole song Cash and Costello ever recorded together—a cover of George Jones’s “We Oughtta Be Ashamed” cut at then-Cash-son-in-law Nick Lowe’s home studio the day after Christmas, 1979—Costello once quipped, “the title proved to be prophetic.”

Elvis has a history of singing Johnny Cash songs. When the spinning songbook landed on “CASH” last night, the result was back-to-back covers of “Cry, Cry, Cry” and a haunting, solo acoustic (2) “I Still Miss Someone.” It wasn’t as great as the many occasions on which he has performed this song with Emmylou Harris, but it was pretty goddamn good.

Another of last night’s jackpot selections was “TIME”, prompting performances of Elvis’s “Strict Time,” “Man Out of Time,” and “Next Time ‘Round,” followed by — and this was a delightful surprise—(3) The Rolling Stones’s “Out of Time,” from the mid-60s, when they could do no wrong. Elvis wandered the Warner’s aisles as he dug into the kiss-off's refrain, finally inciting the largely trousers-and-Blackberries crowd to stand and sing.

Other surprises? Well, Elvis got the crowd to sit still for four tracks from his most recent release, National Ransom, a generally well-regarded effort that even I haven't spent much time with. He performed three of them in a single solo acoustic sequence, after the Imposters had taken their first bow following a smoldering “I Want You.” Near the end of the fizzy (4) “A Slow Drag of Josephine,” he broke out one of his better tricks, stepping away from the microphone to fill the hall with his unamplified voice. You know who takes this as an invitation to clap along? The kind of jackass who needs to have his hands amputated, that's who.

The Imposters returned to the stage to join him on “Sleep of the Just,” a ballad from 1986’s King of America that felt of-a-piece with National Ransom’s caravan of weary hustlers, deserters, and entertainers.

Imperial Bedroom, the 1982 album that brought a previously-unsuspected lushness and gloss to the Attractions's sound, got a lot of play last night. A pair of its selections, “Beyond Belief” and “Man Out of Time” appear on the long-supplanted single-disc compilation The Very Best of Elvis Costello & The Attractions (my personal gateway drug to this music) and thus can’t really be counted as rarities. But two IB album cuts made the gig, too, "Town Cryer" and "You Little Fool." Please enjoy these official music videos for (5) "You Little Fool" and (6) “New Lace Sleeves,” which showed up as another audience-pick late in the show. They differ radically in their approach, hiding their singer and putting him front and center, respectively, but they wear their early-Thatcher-era incept dates with equal pride.

Man, this cat has written a lot of good songs, holy cow.

Oh, here's the complete setlist:

01 Lipstick Vogue
02 Watching the Detectives
03 So Like Candy / Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (The Animals)
04 The Other End of the Telescope
05 All-Time Doll
06 Strict Time
07 Man Out of Time
08 Next Time ‘Round
09 Out of Time (The Rolling Stones)
10 Cry, Cry, Cry (Johnny Cash)
11 I Still Miss Someone (Johnny Cash)
12 Town Cryer
13 You Little Fool
14 Pump It Up
15 Heart of the City (Nick Lowe)
16 (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea
17 I Want You

ENCORE

18 All These Strangers (solo acoustic)
19 A Slow Drag with Josephine (solo acoustic)
20 Bullets for the Newborn King (solo acoustic)
21 Sleep of the Just

ENCORE 2

22 Welcome to the Working Week
23 No Action
24 Uncomplicated
25 Beyond Belief
26 New Lace Sleeves
27 National Ransom
28 (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?

Good mornin', wenises! So, as I told the man himself, cruising around former-WCPer Joe Eaton's Rumble Note blog over the weekend got me pining for my old motorcycle. But because that sweet-ass Suzuki 805 is  1,000 miles away in some boomer's driveway, I decided to cruise craigslist, where I found a Honda Nighthawk 750 with the coolest gas tank ever for sale in Glen Burnie, MD.

Too bad I am a journalist and have zero moneys with which to buy motorcycles.

After the jump, watch Johnny Cash and Lorenzo Lamas break out of prison together on a motorcycle!

Good morning, y'all! Top of the news pile has Maura Johnston leaving Idolator, and Ron Charles, aka, the muscle at Book World, getting his space in the Style section, goddamit. (For those of you who are not ravenously digesting R.C.'s every tweet: He nearly lost his slot in Style due to the insane number of inches required to review Sarah Palin's new Inuit romance novel, Pantsuits with Wolves.)

Strange ways to write a novel, Johnny Cash's love for Native Americans, the many manifestations of Watchmen, the best songs of the decade, and more, after the jump.

- Big news on the DVD front: Yet another "special edition" of Watchmen is being released, this time with just enough additional footage to give some nerd a boner-induced aneurysm while still barely registering with those of us who fell asleep in theaters (Guilty!). Bill Gibron of Pop Matters goes on ad nauseum about these DVD special features, and I can dig that. What I cannot dig–will not dig–is this nonsense: "[I]n a few short years, when critical opinion has been snatched away from the grinning maw of Geek Nation, Watchmen the movie will be viewed in a similar light as Watchmen the literary icon–as one of the most powerful, forward thinking, and visually stunning stories of the last 50 years." Look, Gibron, The Mothman Prophecies is one of my favorite movies–definitely somewhere in the top five–but I'm not gonna bullshit you: it sucks. For all her chops, Laura Linney can't even handle the part of a hick cop, and Richard Gere's underbite really gets away from him, oh, once every other scene; so frequently, in fact, that you want to hold his mouth still for him. All that aside, the movie appeals to a part of me that doesn't really give a damn about Richard Gere's teeth or that Laura Linney is insanely overrated; a part of me that loves wonder and mystery. You see where I'm going with this, Gibron? The Watchmen movie sucked, and that's coming from a guy who liked The Mothman Prophecies. Don't shit the shitbird.

- Justin M. Norton compiled a list of 10 essential grindcore albums. AxCx's 40 More Reasons to Hate Us didn't make the list and I don't know enough about the internal dialogue of the grindcore scene to tell you why. It really is a terrible album, and seeing as shittiness is grindcore's guiding aesthetic, I think AxCx may have been cheated for political reasons.

- WWJD? For instance, if he had been around during the enlightenment, would Jesus have endorsed the castration of little boys with pretty voices in order to keep the Backstreet Boys alive forever? The tradition of the castrati, writes Jan Swafford in Slate, "rose from an unholy trinity of religion, money, and art. The church forbade women to sing in services. There was a standing ban, enforced primarily in the Papal States, on teaching women to sing professionally at all. Church choirs were staffed by boys, castrati, and adult tenors and basses." The Papal States have been fucking boys for so long, you think they'd be better at getting away with it by now.

- In somewhat related news, "Engineered Rabbit Penises Raise Human Hopes." (Steve passed that one along; round of applause for Steve, everybody.)

- All Songs Considered (or, All "Indie Rock" Considered) has assembled "The Decade Defined," a look at the "defining moments and trends" of the early 2000s. Is it interesting? Meh. Media attention is how we determine what's important, right? But there's a hand guiding the media spotlight, and that hand is attached to the arm of an old person whose other arm/hand is clutching a ratings/traffic printout with a Skeletor-like grip. If a bunch of public radio people are getting together and saying, "This is what we talked about for the last 10 years, so clearly it defined the decade–oh hey! remember when the Silver Fox won American Idol? Shit yeah! 55 is the new no, i swear i'm not old enough to be your father," then I don't really know what's going on. On the other hand, I was addicted to Contemporary Christian Music and the sweet stylings of the Dave Matthews Band for the first half of this decade, so it's likely that I have never known what was going on. For a detailed list of the best of the decade/best of the year lists (that's right–a list to keep track of all the lists), you simply cannot beat Largehearted Boy's continually updated list.

- Richard Powers, whom Mark Athitakis recently called "America’s most Wallace-ian living writer," is weird. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Powers...wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software." Based on my limited exposure to improvisational folk-ballad writing, speaking a entire novel sounds hard. Also, Junot Diaz writes his novels in the shitter.

- How many jobs do you have right now? Whatever number you just said to your monitor (psycho), Jesse Thorn has at least three more than that. He's got The Sound of Young America, Jordan, Jesse GO!, all those meet-ups and nerdcons and whatnot, and now this: "Put This On, a style series for men who want to dress like a grownup." So far, only the pilot episode is out (and you can watch it here), but Thorn is looking for cash so that he can keep this good thing going. Because working less than 80 hours per week is for commies.

- I didn't need to know this to like Johnny Cash, but I'm glad Salon had the good sense to take a break from stoking leftwing paranoia over Pantsuits with Wolves in order to share this kick-ass story:

"Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee."

Go, Johnny. Go.

Also, this mini documentary about baseball card collectors is cool as shit:

Seize the day, y'all!

Photo from Pantsuits with Wolves by Darrow Montgomery.

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo's 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn't take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band's long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick's "The Mountain Tapes." And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take "Grow," which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the "Be My Baby" beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family's breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow (2007): The members of this blissed-out post-rock band cloak their identities with costumes, pseudonyms, and video-heavy performances, hoping to emphasize their music by de-emphasizing the personalities making it. As the group has acknowledged, this strategy of willful obscurity hasn't exactly worked out. No kidding: When you record your breakthrough record in a Western Pennsylvania cabin and sing trippy, hypnotic songs about witches, you're more or less asking to be typecast as backwoods Svengalis.

American Recordings by Johnny Cash (2004): The cabin that the late Johnny and June Carter Cash built in Hendersonville, Tenn., in the late '70s is definitely that, rustic patina and all. But in the early ’90s, when Johnny began collaborating with producer Rick Rubin for a tetralogy of morose, mostly acoustic albums, the space became a full-fledged studio, which is now run by Johnny and June's son, John Carter Cash. You can't find a knobsman more pro than Rubin, but in this case, he simply captured Johnny singing and strumming in his living room. How the Man in Black then wound up with this terrifying Anton Corbijn video, I can't quite say:

Cabin in the Woods by Retsin (2001): The name says it all. Tara Jane O'Neil and Cynthia Nelson met in the early ’90s when their bands, Rodan and Ruby Falls, shared a tour, and they soon became romantic partners and musical collaborators. The final Retsin album, made more or less in isolation in upstate New York, is dusty and acoustic, drawing as deeply from the well of American folk music as the '90s indie-folk milieu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retsin contributed to a Jandek tribute compilation around the same time.

Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2003): This between-album project found the Olympia, Wash., singer Mirah retreating for a month to the Blue Ridge Mountains with an eight-track and some fellow musicians. There, she recorded some playful ditties—more washboard band than precise, lo-fi folk—and found sounds. And then she laid down this brassy jam, which recounts, doo-wop refrain in tow, the month-long experience:

Image courtesy of the Cash Cabin Studio MySpace page.