Parker's still pretty angry

By J.D. Considine

There was a time when Graham Parker was cast as one of English rock's premier angry young men. He wasn't exactly a punk rocker, but along with Elvis Costello, his songs seemed to zero in on the discontent of a generation of young Britons.
From the blunt hostility of "Don't Ask Me Questions" to the brusque passion of "Love Gets You Twisted," Mr. Parker seemed to epitomize the emotional foment of rock's new wave.

These days, though, Graham Parker, who will be opening for Eric Clapton at the Merriweather Post Pavillion on Thursday, seems to have calmed down. Perhaps it's the unexpected gentleness he invests in his material; maybe it's just the backwash from writing songs like "Life Gets Better" or "Wake Up (Next to You)," but Mr. Parker seems to be mellowing. Could it be that this rabid young man, who once expressed his discontent with his American label through the pointed sarcasm of "Mercury Poisoning," has finally begun to look on the brighter side of things?

In a word, no.

"Basically, I don't scream as much," Mr. Parker explains. "That can often be seen as 'angry,' and now that I sing in a more controlled way, I don't seem as angry. But the only thing you have to do is look at the lyrics to 'Break Them Down' to realize that I am pretty" angry.
Indeed, the song, which opens Mr. Parker's new album, "Steady Nerves," fairly quivers with rage as it describes the systematic destruction of an Indian community in the name of Christianity. "The missionary's position is clear," he sneers. "Break them down." Mellow, this isn't.
Then again, neither is it as snarlingly aggressive as the music Mr. Parker performed on such classic examples of new wave as "Howling Wind" or "Squeezing Out Sparks." Where once he would pack a song like "Saturday Night Is Dead" with desperate intensity, new numbers like "The Weekend's Too Short" channel that energy into a more stylized fusion of rock and R&B.
But, he explains, "'Weekend's Too Short' is definitely a song not written from my point of view. I mean, I don't care about the weekends particularly, do I? I don't work 9 to 5 all week and let loose on Friday night. There are other things to encompass in songwriting than 'Saturday Night Is Dead,' which is a pretty angry song, I suppose.
"But that's about growing up, as much as anything. 'Saturday Night' was not just about controlled fun for the masses on the weekend; it was also a personal thing about growing up, and, it was delivered in a very angry way. Attitude is what's behind it. If you sing in a sort of wimpy attitude, that shows you've been distorted by getting old, that shows you've mellowed, more than the specifics of the songs.'
A "wimpy attitude" is one thing Graham Parker will never be accused of having. "When I do something, I don't know any other way to do it than with conviction," he says. I write the songs with determination. I don't use average chord sequences, I strive to make things that really fire me up. And, once you've got to that, you've got to keep firing. You've got to keep firing all the way until the end of the record."
If Mr. Parker hasn't mellowed, he has matured in a lot of ways. These days, he's even developed a knack for writing love songs, as the tender "Wake Up (Next to You)" amply demonstrates. Part of it is simply a matter of improving his craft, although Mr. Parker as usual takes a curiously individual approach. "If you can imagine something, you can do it. That breathy voice - I wrote the song like that. It was in my imagination, and when it came to recording, I could do it, with a bit of tuning up and stuff.'

But it was getting out of the England of his youth that most balanced his perspective. "I'm not trapped in the suburbs of England, as I was in 1975," he says. "Everything was from the media, which is very much what it's like In England. People are addicted to the gutter press, you know. They read those awful tabloids, and it seems to rule everyone's life. Even the three channels on television reflect that. All you do is go out to the pubs and see an endless continuation of it. I think that is something that frustrates a lot of people, and I just happened to put it in songs, in a very non-specific way.
"Now, I don't have that. You know, you can't keep that kind of root forever, because all you will end up doing is parodying yourself. Obviously, I'm a much broader person that I was then. I've been around the world and stuff, so it just doesn't occur in the same way.'

Furthermore, it doesn't sound the same as it did then, in large part because Mr. Parker is working with a different band, the Shot. Three out of the four members have worked with him since 1982, but guitarist Brinsley Schwartz is a holdover from the singer's earliest recordings.

Why? "Basically, he comes up with complementary stuff." Mr. Parker says. "He can come up with things that take my springboard and really bounce off of it. And he's not that polished, really. However good he is, he makes mistakes, he's fallible. There are these technicians you can see on MTV all night long, who run their fingers all up and down the fretboard. I don't get too much feeling from them. But Brinsley, he gets to the backbone.'

Which, after all, is what Graham Parker's songs are all about.

Reproduced with kind permission from J.D. Considine.

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