If the truth be told, Graham Parker would have probably preferred skipping his current tour (which brings him to Hammerjacks' Inner Harbor Concert Hall Wednesday) altogether. "I'm not exactly a road hog," he says over the phone from New York. "lt's not my idea of fun to continue touring all year."

Nor is that sort of continuing roadwork likely to benefit the singer, either. Although constant concertizing may be the way to break in heavy metal and hard rock acts, it really doesn't do as much for new wave veterans like Parker. And despite the fact that "The Mona Lisa's Sister," Parker's latest album, has earned him more radio interest than ever, the singer remains convinced that touring as an opening act - the standard record-industry route to bigger sales - wasnt for him.

Or, as he told his manager, "I can go and disappear in America for four weeks on an opening act tour, but what's the point? I don't think it's going to do me much good. And bringing the band over [from England) and spending another 40 grand which is what it costs to do five weeks of touring with a band - doesn't seem to me a great idea.

"So I just put my foot in my mouth and said I'll do a solo tour, and eventually my manager took me up on it in desperation to get me on the road. That's what happened. So now I'm stuck with it, and I'm scared stiff."

Scared? Is this the same Graham Parker that Rolling Stone called "tempestuously articulate" and "a volattle singer of vehement songs"? Well, yeah - after all, playing solo is something he hasn't done "since I was 20 or something. I was James Taylor mixed with Pink Floyd at the time," he laughs. "I haven't done it [since]. But I'm real excited about it - I'm worklng on it every day, and it's starting to feel like something."

Although he jokes that the main thing he's learned from working up his solo show is "what a terrible guitar player I am," Parker says that one of the advantages of playing without a band is that he's able to do a much wider range of songs than usual. "The thing that should be good for fans of mine who come to gigs and are always shouting for 'Hotel Chambermaid' and things that I never do with a band is that I can do that kind of number.

"l can rehearse more stuff because, with a band, you get like five days and it's costing a fortune; you've got to get it down, and that's it. You get time to do 20 songs, if you're lucky. (With this) I've got the luxury of thinking, 'Oh, I can try that one,' and just banging around with it, listening to the old record to figure out what I was singing."

Still, the biggest difference in performing as a solo, says Parker, is that "I have to be about 10 times more emotionally committed to singing the song when I'm just on my own. You have to be really into it, and I'm finding that, as I'm playing, I'm losing myself in it.

"Normally, I'm not worrying about just getting tnto the emotional thing because, with a band, you're always thinking about what the drums sound like in your monitors, what the guitar sounds like. 'Why is that girl looking at [the guitarist] and not me?' A lot of nonsense goes through your head. Sometimes at the end of a song, you're just getting involved with it, and it's too late the next songs comes, and you change guitars, and you're thinking about the sound of the guitar again."

Most musicians resent the extent to which the business of music-making intrudes on their art, but Parker has a special gripe about the way record companies often ruin the artists they're trying to promote. Early on in his career, he angrily struck back at Mercury records, which he left after recording his first four albums, with "Mercury Poisoning," a song so vituperative that it left his new American label afraid to release the single.

Ten years and three record companies later, Parker still found himself duelling with the dimwits in the corporate suites. Before signing with RCA last year, Parker was under contract to Atlantic Records, which he looks back upon as "just a very bad situation."

What was wrong? "They just didn't like my songs," he says. "I couldn't get anywhere with them. I just argued with everything they proposed to me. They were in a kind of Genesis frame of mind - that was their big group - and I was in a totally different state of mind. I think this desperation to be like Stevie Winwood or something is wrong.

"I want to produce [the album] in a way that's realistic, and not pay some guy loads of money, and not waste the record company's money to see him take two weeks to mix a record, something that could be done in three days. I'm just not in that frame of mind."

Curiously, Parker's desire for a low-budget approach puzzled or appalled record company executives not only at Atlantic, but at other labels he'd approach afterward. It's an unhealthy situation, this business of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into state-of-the-art production instead of focusing on the music. "Maybe you can do that with those people who just want a hit, and don't have the integrity a songwriter would," Parker says. "But that's what they were trying to do to me, which is ridiculous."

Eventually, Parker found some sympathetic ears at RCA, where the staff members "were going along with that kind of flow with me," he reports. Better still, the label agreed to the singer's terms, which were a bit unusual: "What I said to RCA was, 'Give me a minimal budget. Let's not spend all your money. It can be done; the musicians will just have to earn an average wage for a change, like the average person in the street. Maybe it'll be more realistic.'"

Indeed it was; not only that, but "The Mona Lisa's Sister" (as the resultant album was called) wound up being one of his best-selling albums to date - proof that thinking small can lead to big results.

And though Parker is technically still touring behind that album, he's already thinking ahead. "l want to do some stuff that nobody knows," he says of his solo tour. "I've got loads of songs I've written over the last few years; I'm starting to write a few new ones now.

"There's one brand-new song that I'm kind of keen on, this extremely heavy-duty reggae thing with a very blatant political lyric, called 'Soul Corruption.' I've been doing that in rehearsal; hopefully, it's going to work OK.

"But I don't want to do too many of them, because the first time you hear a song, it just goes past your head," he adds. "I don't want to go out there and bore people."

Graham Parker bore people? He's got to be kidding.

Reproduced with kind permission from J.D. Considine.

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