LIVE FROM NEW YORK, NY, Classic Compact Discs RTHCD 5051, 5/29/96, USA


(Liner notes for the US version)

Sitting within earshot of Seersucker, my talking parrot, as he mindlessly intones last night's basketball scores, and with a clear view of the 20 gallon aquarium housing my ever-growing sea monkey collection, I find myself in a pensive, reflective mood as a new snowfall further impedes my ability to leave my home where I have been a virtual prisoner of the inclement weather since Thanksgiving.

I listen listlessly to this live album knowing, as all musicians do, that the best gigs are always unrecorded, always beyond reach of posterity, always occurring in the obscure provincial towns beyond the realms of the blasé, sophisticated audiences of the big cities. Like the one on the very tour that spawned this record, in the Ratskellar, a campus bar in Trenton State College. For this little cracker of a gig, my diary entry reads simply: "Tiny room, tiny stage, tinier crowd." Or that absolutely beauty in The Roach House, La Bocca Nostra. My cryptic notes here announce: 'Dead sounding room. Not many here. Why is my audience now confined to republicans in last year's K-Mart fashions?

Ah, those were the shows where we really played like demons, our bile and disgust billowing from the stage in black waves and the angst in my voice pouring across the empty spaces and emptier heads like a kamikaze cockerel from hell. And let's not forget us the show at Manchester University where I asked the old, cardboard audience: "Is there anyone out there who is actually a student here?" and was greeted by a stunning silence! The students, I had noticed earlier, were jamming the multitude of on-campus bars, watching soccer, drinking beer, eating greasy chips, entirely uninterested or unaware (or both!) of the killer gig that was about to unfold not meters from their intellectual pursuits.

Yes, those were the shows that should have been recorded.

Still, I must confess that even with the odds against us, I think we have something here. Disgusted as we were with our performance on the first show on Saturday night, and none too enthused about the second one, we pulled out the stops for our final appearance in the USA on Sunday, June 4th, and produced a recording worthy of release. The decision to issue this little nugget on vinyl and gold CD available by mail order only is, of course, due to the trend started by Spinal Tap some years ago to become more 'selective' with one's audience. To weed out the riffraff, trim the fat, eviscerate the hoi polloi so that you, gentle listener, are getting an item of such obscure speciality that your hip credentials are boosted accordingly and that when this record hits your Dansette you can feel with utter certainty that you are the only one on your block privy to the subtleties and nuances of side one, and the slowly accumulating aggression of side two.

But there again, if you've bought this, you've probably got the bootleg from Trenton State College, or The Roach House, La Bocca Nostra, or...

GP, The Catskill Mountains, NY



Thanks to Allan Pepper & all the staff at The Bottom Line
This has been a GP Production for Oo, Wedgie! Inc.

(Liner notes for the UK version)

The effect of Graham Parker's music on an unsuspecting world has never been anything less than refreshing - a shower of cold water in a too-often tepid musical climate. That metaphor was to prove almost too accurate when the London-based record company executive who signed him to his first contract heard a rough demo tape on DJ Charlie Gillett's radio show: he leapt out of his bath to call the station and enquire the identity of this new guy 'who sounded like Van Morrison'.
      Parker's a true Brit, of course - so it's ironic that he now makes his home in Woodstock, New York State, the area Morrison inhabited while making his first and best solo music in the early 1970s. Graham married an American and put down roots in a country which accepts him and values songwriting abilities that rank with the best. Britain, meanwhile, still remains racked by trends and novelties. It's maybe no surprise then that this new live album is cut at New York's Bottom Line, a showcase for great song writers since the 1960s.
      The songs divide themselves into early and late-period Parker, digging back as far as 1976's 'Heat Treatment', for a fresh, acoustic take on 'Fool's Gold'. There's also the title track of the following year's 'Stick To Me', his first Top 20 entry in Britain, which emerges here, nearly two decades later, as a solo, vocal-and-guitar folk song far removed from the blustering original.
      Our recording sees him backed by the stripped-down, three-piece Episodes, but these early albums, fall of passion and fire, were cut with his first and longest-serving backing band. This was the Rumour, a seasoned outfit who'd been recruited two apiece from the remnants of pub-rock bands Brinsley Schwarz and Bontemps Roulez, plus former Brinsleys roadie Martin Belmont from the ranks of Ducks Deluxe.
      This crack London line-up, with Bob Andrews prominent on Garth Hudson-like organ, had been recruited when Parker, a former petrol-pump attendant from Camberley, Surrey, first got a record contract. Manager Dave Robinson, who later formed the sparkily independent Stiff label, opted to sign Parker to Phonogram, realising he had the prospects to break worldwide and so needed major-label resources.
      Graham had already seen the world, hitting the hippie trail to Marrakesh after getting bored with the early-1970s progressive rock scene, and offered an 'angry young man' persona the new wave-fixated Britain could deal with.
      Graham's first album, 'Howling Wind', was produced by Nick Lowe who later produced Elvis Costello and borrowed the Rumour's Rhythm section of bassist Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding for 'Watching The Detectives'. When he wasn't behind the mixing desk, Lowe also linked forces as a musician with Welsh retro-rocker Dave Edmunds in Rockpile. Parker offered the band one of his unreleased songs, the sparky 'Crawling From The Wreckage', which made the charts in 1979: by 1995, he'd reclaimed it for his own live set, though he claims in his concert intro it 'really wasn't good enough' for him to release himself. It's an artist's prerogative to change his mind!
      If Graham had quickly outgrown the 'British Van Morrison' label, comparisons at this stage tended to be with the likes of Stateside R&B veteran Southside Johnny: the pair toured Britain together in 1977, while Parker, like the New Jersey-ite, reinforced his band with a brass section which punched home his message while underlining the Stax influenees in his music.
      But time moved on, and after playing down the bill to long-time hero Bob Dylan at the giant outdoor Blackbushe Festival - held, suitably, just down the road from his Camberley birthplace - Parker released what many consider his magnum opus with the Rumour: 1979's 'Squeezing Out Sparks' from which 'Protection', a near-hit single, gets a welcome airing here alongside 'Love Gets You Twisted'. Then a live album brought the Parker/Phonogram teaming to a close, after which Andrews departed. The Rumour too would call it a day after 'The Up Escalator', a one-off 1980 album on Stiff where Rolling Stones sideman Nicky Hopkins helped out on the ivories.
      The rest of the 1980s saw GP struggling in Britain, where George Michael and gender-benders held sway, but quietly building a reputation for himself in the States. The mighty Bruce Springsteen had added backing vocals to '...Escalator', while one of his early-1980s bands even included Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar - a compliment that proved he still had fans in high places, even if sales figures no longer took him to the charts.
      Albums appeared regularly but on a succession of different labels - in Britain on RCA, Elektra und Demon - and sold to a small but devoted following who kept the faith and could keep track of bis release schedule. 'Wake Up (Next To You)', a track he revisits here from this period, comes from 1985's 'Steady Nerves' and was bis biggest ever US single, reaching Number 39.
      By 1988's impressive 'The Mona Lisa's Sister' (on which 'Get Started. Start A Fire' was first aired) Graham had reunited with Rumour-mongers Schwarz and Bodnar, bot a decision to play the States rather than return to bis roots, touring-wise, meant it didn't get anything like the UK sales it deserved. In 1990 he made a rare London appearance as 'special guest' alongside Dave Edmunds and Dion, the 1950s doowop star whose comeback album Dave had been producing. It was an all-too-tantalising taste of what we'd been missing.
      The following year saw a return to Europe, this time a longer tour supporting Bob Dylan. The Zim had also hung out in Woodstock in the late 1960s, while Graham had been nestling snugly in the Catskill Mountains since 1988, so maybe they were exchanging house-price details... On the other hand, you may conclude they share the same harmonica tutor: check out Graham's style on our opening track, 'Big Man On Paper'!
      Talking of paper, Parker's always had more in his drawer marked ambition than most rock'n'rollers. The Great Trouser Mystery, a comic book with cartoonist Willy Smax, was an early hint of things to come: 1995, the year of this recording, found him busy writing a novel, The Thylacine's Nest which, despite its offbeat title, may just turn out to be vaguely autobiographical.
      'lt's about a singer-songwriter who is thrust upon tours of obscure places like the Arctic Circle and Tasmania,' he explains, and that's where they discover the strangely-named (and supposedly extinct) wolf of the title. He's also branching out into short stories, a move which isn't so surprising given the lyrical content of his songs.
      Today's more considered musical climate has allowed Graham Parker a modest revival, so if you've bought this album on the basis of the tracks you know, he prepared to have your ears opened by those you don't. There's a worthy successor to Bob Andrews in keyboardist Mitch Margold, while the low-key acoustic feel of the performance lets the songs shine through. European audiences savour GP live far too rarely these days ... so until he next decides to pay a flying visit this is the best possible substitute.

Michael Heatley

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