Elvis Costello breaks the silence on the night he was thrown out of Scorgie's nightclub

Elvis Costello getting thrown out of Scorgie’s remains one of the enduring urban legends of the Rochester music scene, perhaps trailing only David Bowie’s arrest for marijuana possession following a 1976 show, and the police breaking up a Rolling Stones concert in 1965.

Now, after 38 years, Costello — who has a June 17 show at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center — has weighed in on what happened that night at the downtown Rochester club.

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Costello exploded on the music scene in 1977, the same year that Scorgie’s opened on Andrews Street. Two years later, after three hit albums, Costello was one of the most-talked about performers in rock. And Scorgie’s was building its reputation as well, one that would soon lead Rolling Stone magazine to name it one of the top 100 music clubs in the country. 

The two would seem to be a perfect marriage. Specializing in the same punk and New Wave sounds that Costello was a part of, Scorgie’s brought to Rochester The Ramones, The Bangles, The Go-Go’s, The Replacements, Alex Chilton, John Cale and 10,000 Maniacs, as well as providing a stage for local bands such as New Math and The Chesterfield Kings. The Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior ripped down the ceiling tiles during a show as fans tore off his pants. The crowd often brought that kind of intensity to the room, with The Fleshtones’ Peter Zaremba once recalling how someone stuck a fork in his arm while he was onstage. It was a scene that projected the same agitation with the world as did Costello.

There are several versions of the Scorgie’s Costello Crisis floating around. Costello and his band, The Attractions, had played for 2,000 people at the Auditorium Theatre earlier in the evening. Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union reviews of the show both remarked on how Costello never smiled during the concert, and seemed the Angry Young Man throughout. Pointing to the first row, at one point he shouted, “Don’t sit down, you lout!”

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And afterward, here’s how owner Don Scorgie described what happened when the singer, allegedly, walked into his bar:

“He was a little verbally abusive and a little demanding,” Scorgie told the Democrat and Chronicle in 2008. “Words were exchanged. He had to walk the length of the bar to get out, pass the gauntlet, so to speak, but I think he got cheered pretty good going out the door. I think it was over something like a cigarette, or a lighter. Wrong place, wrong time for Mr. Costello.”

Scorgie had the reputation of not suffering fools gladly. Or suffering anyone gladly, for that matter.

“He asked, or told, Scorgie to get him a cigarette, or a pack of cigarettes,” Danny Deutsch, now owner of Abilene Bar & Lounge, said in the same 2008 story. “Scorgie isn’t the sort of guy you ordered around.”

During a phone interview from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Costello at first said he did not recall the incident, suggesting that such behavior would be out of character for him. “I was usually up to something else after shows,” he said. “I would usually go back to the hotel and work on songs.”

But in actuality, Costello was getting out quite a bit those nights. In the most-notorious episode of his career, just nine days before the Rochester show, he was drunk in a Holiday Inn bar when he made denigrating comments to Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills — although some stories claim Stills had gone back to his room — about James Brown and Ray Charles. Costello’s insults included what we euphemistically call “the n-word.” Bramlett slapped Costello and a brawl ensued.

When word got out about the incident, there were protests at some of his shows, and Costello held a press conference in which he offered a sincere apology. He has continued to do so, writing in the liner notes on a re-release of his 1980 album Get Happy! about the shame he felt over his behavior, indirectly referenced in the album’s final song, “Riot Act.” In a 2003 interview he told The Roots drummer Questlove, “It’s upsetting because I can’t explain how I even got to think you could be funny about something like that.”

Not incidentally, Costello has done a significant amount of work for a British campaign called Rock Against Racism, not only after his Holiday Inn bar rant, but before it as well.

So bars and Costello have not always been a productive situation.

Pressed a little more on what happened that night in Rochester, “There’s a very good chance it wasn’t me, there’s a chance it was someone in my band,” Costello said, casting suspicion on The Attractions. “I’ve read this story transplanted to a number of cities, where other people in the band were going out into the nightlife and causing mischief, and by the end of the story it’s Elvis Costello.”

Uh, no, says Deutsch. He was a Scorgie’s bar manager and booked shows at the club, and he fingers Costello. “I was there,” Deutsch wrote in response to an email question last week. “And he was thrown out.”

There may have been more to it than that. A tiny, yellowed newspaper clipping from the Times-Union, unearthed from the Democrat and Chronicle’s basement morgue, reports that Costello was actually accompanied by a “foul-tempered herd.”

“Fans approached him with napkins and pens requesting autographs, only to have him sign so violently that the napkins were reduced to shreds,” the single-paragraph item reads. “And when he made his exit – wearing dark glasses, of course – he was followed by such a mob of acolytes that one patron yelled, ‘What is this, the second coming?’ A member of Costello’s British entourage yelled something back about American stupidity.”

Today, Scorgie’s is now nothing more than a set of dark windows on a closed storefront. Don Scorgie is retired and living in Florida, probably playing golf at this very moment.

Costello was 24 years old at the time of the Scorgie’s kerfuffle. Now 62, he looks back at the Angry Young Man that he once was with bemusement and self-deprecation. Indeed, immediately after casting his admittedly time-dulled suspicions on his fellow Attractions, Costello conceded, “That wouldn’t discount that it didn’t happen. I think there were a few bars I was thrown out of. Nights when we decided we could play better than the band that was onstage.”

Two former members of The Attractions, keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas, are in Costello’s current band, The Imposters. This prompted Costello to return to the mistaken-identity theory before closing out the interview: “I’m going to ask them what they were up to that night.”

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JSPEVAK@Gannett.com