248: GET HAPPY!! | ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS
Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic: Get Happy!! was born as much from sincere love for soul as it was for Elvis Costello's desire to distance himself from an unfortunate verbal faux pas where he insulted Ray Charles in an attempt to get Stephen Stills' goat. Either way, it resulted in a 20-song blue-eyed soul tour de force, where Costello doesn't just want to prove his love, he wants to prove his knowledge. So, he tries everything, starting with Motown and Northern soul, then touching on smooth uptown ballads and gritty Southern soul, even finding common ground between the two by recasting Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up (For Falling Down)" as a careening stomper. What's remarkable is that this approach dovetails with the pop carnival essayed by Armed Forces, standing as a full-fledged Costello record instead of a genre exercise. As it furiously flits through 20 songs, Costello's cynicisms, rage, humor, and misanthropic sensibility gel remarkably well. Some songs may not quite hit their targets, but that's part of the album's charm -- it moves so fast that its lesser songs rush by on the way to such full-fledged masterpieces as "New Amsterdam," "High Fidelity," and "Riot Act." Get Happy!! bursts with energy and invention, standing as a testament to how Costello, the pop encyclopedia, can reinvent the past in his own image. [The Japanese edition includes bonus material.]
Wiki: Get Happy!! is a studio album by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. The fourth album by Elvis Costello, his third with the Attractions, it is notable for being a dramatic break in tone from Costello's three previous albums, and for being heavily influenced by R&B, ska and soul music. The cover art was intentionally designed to have a "retro" feel, to look like the cover of an old LP with ring wear on both front and back.
Like its predecessor Armed Forces, it was commercially successful, charting at number 11 in the US and number 2 in the UK, where it went gold. It was placed at No. 11 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. In 2000 it was voted number 298 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.
During the American concert tour for Armed Forces in April 1979, Costello engaged in a drunken argument with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in a Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn hotel bar, during which he referred to James Brown as a "jive-assed nigger," then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger." Costello apologized at a New York City press conference a few days later, claiming that he had been drunk and had been attempting to be obnoxious to bring the conversation to a swift conclusion, not anticipating that Bramlett would bring his comments to the press.
It has been suggested that the R&B influence on the album was an attempt to atone for his comments, but as Costello writes in the liner notes for the 2003 Rhino version,
It might have been tempting to claim that I had some noble motive in basing this record on the music that I had admired and learned from prior to my brush with infamy. But if I was trying to pay respects and make such amends, I doubt if pride would have allowed me to express that thought after I had made my rather contrived explanation ... I simply went back to work and relied on instinct, curiosity, and enduring musical passions.
The band had played some of the songs during the "Armed Funk Tour" and had rehearsed them for the record, but were dissatisfied with the sound, feeling it was too "new wave." (Some of the original versions can be found on disc 2 of the Rhino release.) They then went back and re-arranged many of the songs using an R&B sound. On their US tours, Costello had been able to find a number of R&B records of his favorite artists and having been listening to them during the rehearsals, decided to emulate the feel of those songs.
The band recorded the album at Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, Netherlands, in an attempt to isolate themselves from distractions, but they were still able to keep themselves drunk during the recording sessions. The exception to this was "New Amsterdam," which was recorded solo by Costello in a small studio in Pimlico.
With 20 songs on the original album, the vinyl cutting and pressing process had to be precise to fit all of them on the two sides of the record. A commercial for the album, added as a hidden track on the Rhino Records remaster, jokes about the album's length and number of songs.