After twenty plus years, 15 albums, and hosts of live recordings, London-born rocker Graham Parker has enjoyed (and endured) a prolific and storied career in the industry that young bands of today can only dream of. Mixing R & B with about five other elements, he has made a career out of being of artfully raw. Parker is a singer and a songwriter of merit, a true patriarch of rock and roll. His latest releases, Acid Bubblegum and The Last Rock and Roll Tour (on Razor and Tie and backed by punk band The Figgs) show, a few years shy of 50, he's still a little pissed off.

Parker started writing songs seriously at age 24. In the early days, he fancied himself as a "singer/songwriter lonely guy thing." The world was in the grips of psychedelic music, punk had yet to explode, and Parker found himself tiring of visiting friends convincing him to listen to Pink Floyd's alarm clocks, smoke dope and drift off to sleep. "I wanted to get more grounded than the airy fairy psychedelic music," he said. "I started getting into soul music and the roots of what I really dug was the three and half minute pop songs with the soul influence," he explained.

With this in mind Graham Parker and his band The Rumour (an affiliation that lasted over six albums and five years) began making music that acknowledged their influences with equal parts cutting assaults and sensitive caresses. Their releases in 1976 (Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment on Mercury) received some favorable press, which throughout Parker's long career hasn't always been the case. Heat Treatment shows Parker getting more intense and soulful, with classics like "Hotel Chambermaid." He wasn't particularly pleased with the sound quality of the record, however.

Such concerns were nothing compared to the fiasco of 1978, the recording of their next record, Stick to Me (Mercury). The original masters of Stick To Me were ruined when everyone involved ignored black goo dripping from the recording instruments. With the help of producer Nick Lowe, they recorded the album again in two short weeks, albeit with some unfortunate changes. The Stick To Me we know has a 13-piece string section. "On the original album you could have filled up Abbey Road with the fucking people we had," he said. The 60-piece section on the lost tape produced a "deep and grandiose" sound. "Stick To Me ended up sounding really gnarly. It sounded like the kind of record people are trying to make today," he said.

The quintessential Crown Jewel in the Parker catalogue is the 1979 release of Squeezing Out Sparks. Your older, overly opinionated brother said it was great then, and in this case he was correct. It took all of 11 days to make, the first three days of which Parker, The Rumour and producer Jack Nitzsche spent looking at each other, scratching their heads. "It took a bit of cajoling to get Jack Nitzsche to understand why he was in London doing this record by this group who was a 'punk band'," said Parker of the early confusion. "He didn't really understand it and didn't know if I was any good or not," he recalls.

Other problems began to emerge as the session continued. "The first problem was to get the band to play the songs as I had written them," he said. Parker said that the Rumour were becoming famous (infamous) for dismantling his songs and adding clever personal touches. "Sometimes it made for pretty wild arrangements and sometimes it just destroyed the song and we'd have to go back to the original idea," he said. Squeezing Out Sparks became an exercise in getting back to the original idea and simplifying.

"I wanted a much more straightforward beat, and if you listen to 'Love Gets You Twisted', that's the kind of beat I was after," he said. In discussing the song "Discovering Japan" Parker concedes that "I couldn't write anything like that any more." It's one of those songs that "will never go away," he said. "Passion Is No Ordinary Word" is another classic song that has become a sort of Graham Parker catch phrase.

Graham Parker and band knew they had something with potential, as they were charting in both England (#18) and in America (#40). America was the challenge. "We were touring to support Squeezing. The record company and my manager, in desperation to break us to this bigger audience, put us on some opening act gigs with very unsuitable people," he said. (Interestingly enough, Parker's voice began to change ever so slightly while telling this story, and the same thing happens on his records when he sings one of his many antagonistic songs, like "Mercury Poisoning"). He sets the scene - Flint, Michigan, opening for Journey (!) and a crowd of 12,000. "The crowd screamed at us. They hated us. They had flared trousers and long hair and were smoking dope. You know it's 1979?! What are you doing, these people? There we were with short hair and straight trousers playing rock and roll with a soul influence," he said, barely taking time for a breath.

"There we were in 1979 playing this stuff and these people hated our guts, they had no idea," he recalls. "I'll never forget with Journey, we were backstage, we did a few gigs with them in Flint and Port Huron," (with voice getting more acidic each minute.) I remember them sort of apologizing saying, 'We're just doing rock and roll,'" he said. "I remember thinking, 'You're not really doing rock and roll, this is more like pantomime fucking music,'" says Parker. "Then Journey took the stage after us. I remember that Steve Perry twerp, actually, they didn't walk on stage, they were raised from behind the stage, and they came up waving like they were the Queen!?" he said. "I remember thinking 'Man this is the most unhip thing you can imagine and these kids think this is hip, they think this is rock and roll in 19 - fucking - 79?'" he asks, with comic bitterness.

It was precisely this moment when it all clicked and Graham Parker realized he wasn't going have that big American breakthrough: "It ain't going happen, we aren't going to get through to these fuckin idiots," he remembers. And to make matters worse: "Steve Perry, when he came up waving his hand there, if you can imagine him rising up with the smoke bombs and the lights with a mic in his hands and he said, (in twerp voice sneer) 'Now do want to hear some real rock and roll?' I swear to God that's what he said," recalls Parker. "I looked at him, and thought oh man ... I'm not a confrontational person, but I should have taken the stage and put my fist so far down his throat that he'd need an operation to get it out," said an earnest Parker. "It was just obscene, really," he said.