The lights flickered. “Nothing like a little pressure,” the gentleman at the urinal next to me quipped as the Chicago Theatre let us know the show was about to start. For such an iconic city venue, I’ve never actually seen live music there before. An interesting show to be my first for sure, with Elvis Costello bringing his Imposters and the Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Essentially, the idea is that audience members get to spin a wheel with 40 songs spanning Elvis’s entire career and he has to play what comes up. This idea was reprised from when he first did it with the Attractions in 1986, and I wondered if this show would fare better than the one this reviewer from back then had witnessed.Well, unexpectedly the group completely ignored the wheel for the first part of the set. They jumped into classics like "Mystery Dance" and "Radio, Radio." These were played at a 1977 pace, with Costello showing no limiting signs of his 56 years. It took only till the fourth song for the pervasive scent of overly-buttered popcorn to begin being bothersome. Alas, a minor inconvenience, and fortunately, the wheel was about to come into play.
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