Tippling Tinctures

The Other Side of Substack, Special Edition: I was thrilled at the invitation to submit a guest post to Ray Padgett’s indispensable Flagging Down the Double E’s, his newsletter on Bob Dylan live. Thank you Ray! Check out the post below and when you’re done, subscribe! He also has a book coming out, Pledging My Time, which will feature more than fifty interviews with musicians who’ve played with Dylan from the 1960s to today.

“She Was No Good” is another somebody done somebody wrong song, to quote B.J. Thomas. It’s from Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, and there’s no burying the lede on this one—”She could be no good, I’m telling you,” Elvis Costello sings in the song’s opening line, and so the stage is set for the tale he will tell. 

Musically, there’s almost a stately effect to the song’s intro, as though Costello is about to intone a hymn set to acoustic guitar. It creates a self-serious atmosphere that he can puncture with his torrid tale. He’s creating a tone, a mood, an environment; “gather round boys for a tale that is tragic and true.” It’s self-conscious storytelling, not just a song that has a tale but a song that knows it’s telling that tale. He fills the milieu with rowdy characters and fictionalized riverboats.  

Costello breaches that fourth wall again in the song’s second verse when he sings “...and several drunken players ran amok,” to which the band in the studio responds with their best imitation of wild musicians. Sure, it’s a tale of romantic betrayal, but there’s a wink in its eye. 

There’s a musical trick EC pulls off in the verses that’s hard for me to describe with my street-corner music theory degree; if I’m understanding correctly, the second and third lines extend the meter and melody past what you expect after hearing the first line. It draws your attention, yanks the rug out from under your ears.

It was often said that Costello crammed his lines full of syllables, and he still does sometimes, but with a trick like this, he’s playing that ability to his advantage. It’s a feature, not a bug. 

Listen on the streaming service of your choice.