Notes

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Most of the bonus disc of Rhino's 2001 expanded reissue of Spike, Elvis Costello's first album for Warner Bros., consists of demos for the record. All but four of the songs are present in demo form, primarily culled from two sessions and featuring Costello on all instruments. There's also a demo of the previously unreleased "Put Your Big Toe in the Milk of Human Kindness," which was initially planned (and later scrapped) for a Disney animated feature (Costello later cut it with Marc Ribot and Rob Wasserman for the latter's Trios album), the alternate vocal take of "Stalin Malone" (a spoken recitation that irrefutably proves that releasing the instrumental take was the right thing to do), plus four B-sides, all covers -- Brinsley Schwarz's wonderful "The Ugly Things," an eerie version of Betty Everett's "You're No Good," Goffin/King's "Point of No Return," and John Sebastian's "The Room Nobody Lives In." Not a bad haul at all, especially because most of the demos are quite good, with some being particularly good (noticeably different versions of "Satellite" and "Coal Train Robberies," while "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," "Tramp the Dirt Down," and "Let Him Dangle" all benefit from the stripped-down setting). Then, there are Costello's frank notes, which offer considerable insight to one of his messiest, most idiosyncratic records -- as he says, "I had the blueprint of five albums in my head...I seem to have elected to make all five albums at once," and he admits that he finds it rather "curious" that it was the best-selling album of his career to date, "not because the songs are bad but because they are rather odd, each track being very different from the next." The demos reveal that the record was as searching and eclectic in its original incarnation, even before all the guest artists and showy arrangements came along, and while that may not be a revelation, it's certainly worth the time of Costello diehards.