01/11/02

It's easy to imagine that Graham Parker has had a frustrating career.

There's the fact the fabulous critical acclaim of such early albums as "Howlin' Wind" and "Squeezing Out Sparks" never translated into any commercial breakthrough. Instead Parker became a music-biz vagabond, bouncing among a half-dozen major labels before settling on the independent Razor & Tie in the mid-1990s and trying various bands and production approaches along the way.

Then there's the fact he's hardly been shy about expressing himself on the subject, most notoriously in "Mercury Poisoning," a hard-hitting kiss-off to his first label ("Their promotion's so lame/they could never ever take it to the real ballgame"), but also in later tunes such as the sardonic "Success" (note how he overemphasizes the first syllable). As he put it on a song from 1996, "I don't appeal to the masses, and they don't appeal to me."

But lest you think he's merely a bitter man with a guitar, notice the air of defiance and perseverance in that same song: "I can't stand it any longer, I can't suffer any more fools/I'm gonna keep on sharpening axes till I've got the sharpest tools."

And so he has. Parker has kept at his craft, continuing to grind away at such recurring themes as political hypocrisy, social absurdity and myriad frustrations of daily life. He's always had one of rock's greatest voices, yet over the past decade he has learned to use it more artfully without blunting its serrated edge. And in a Boston combo called the Figgs he's even found another band to suggest the kind of fire of his original unit, the Rumour.

Expect all these things to come together Monday night, when Parker plays the Aladdin Theater.

Whether Parker gets the recognition he deserves as one of the most trenchant and soulful singer-songwriters of the past 25 years, he's not about to change his ways, even though he did take a brief detour into short-story writing with "Carp Fishing on Valium" (St. Martin's Press, $22.95, 256 pages) published in 2000.

But the not-uncommon accusation that Parker is in fact bitter about his musical life -- or, more relevant, that his music has become bitter -- seems to stem from a misunderstanding about him. Parker earned his reputation as an angry young man, a pub-rock singer whose pointed social commentary and sharp musical instincts presaged the more meaningful aspects of the late-'70s new wave. But the old saw about scratching a cynic and finding a romantic underneath fits for Parker. He might view the world around him as craziness and chaos, but that just makes him value love's redemptive power like a survivalist loves his well-stocked bomb shelter.

He can still bite and snarl when he wants to, as the muscular snap of his latest album, "Deepcut to Nowhere," proves. But more so than perhaps any notable rock songwriter aside from John Hiatt, Parker has embraced not just maturity but domesticity in his work. As he announced in a tune called "A Brand New Book" more than a decade ago: "The words came out/Not twist and shout/'Cause that's not what a grown man writes about."

So what does he write about now? Well, he still skewers all manner of pomposity ("High Horse") and the cudgels of authority ("Syphilis & Religion"). Yet few others also could get such charming effect out of parenting's minor trials as Parker does in "Tough on Clothes" or pinpoint his own suburban foibles as directly as he does in "Socks 'n' Sandals."

It's enough to make you think that, somewhere amid the rock-'n'-roll road and the comforts of home, Graham Parker has found the dedicated artist and family man doesn't have time for too much frustration.