All Fired Up
by David Okamoto
Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News
Graham Parker's hardly changed at 43. In high spirits,
the rocker with an attitude focuses on older songs for his solo tour
His snarl has turned into a sneer, and his vision of the world is more hopeful
than harrowing - but don't let anyone tell you that Graham Parker has mellowed.
True, the bile-spitting, spleen-venting performer behind such frenetic, R&B-soaked
classics as 1976's spunky Heat Treatment and 1979's magnificent Squeezing Out
Sparks is now 43 and has begun working on his first novel. And yes, such recent
albums as Struck by Lightning and Human Soul have found him celebrating the pleasures
of fatherhood (Children and Dogs, The Kid With the Butterfly Net) and confronting
the pressures of adulthood (Big Man on Paper).
But at a point when most veteran rockers might be feeling their age, Mr. Parker
is still feeling his oats.
"There are some who might argue that I had lost a bit in the '80s, that I was
going a bit soft," Mr. Parker says in his gruff, animated British accent.
"There's a certain amount of vitriolic songs you can write. But when it starts
to become too literal, then it's not so good anymore. You've got to be careful
with that. So I've just found a way of writing about other things, stuff
like Platinum Blonde (from 1992's Burning Questions), which is like this
mini-novel. It's not angry, but it's got all this longing in it and this need
and this emotion. At the same time, it's not he-she, male-female.
"There used to be two kinds of songs - songs about getting it and songs about
not getting it. But since Dylan, it hasn't been that way. So I'm just
carrying on the idea that you can be literary and make pop songs, or you can
say Yeah baby baby' as well. It's all equally valid. It's an attitude thing.
And if I've got anything, I've got attitude."
No kidding. Mr. Parker - who performs a solo show Wednesday at Caravan of
Dreams - has earned a reputation as one of the record industry's most
idealistic artists and harshest critics. One of his fiercest commentaries,
That Thing is Rockin', attacks the mind-numbing redundancy of Top 40 radio
("You got 24 beats to the minute/not much substance in it"), while
Museum of Stupidity honors the PMRC and other free-speech villains.
Mr. Parker's strained relationships with his record companies are almost
folklore among his fans. In 1979, he celebrated the end of his contract
with Mercury Records by releasing Mercury Poisoning, a scathing indictment
of the company's lame promotional support ("Their geriatric staff
thinks we're freaks/ they couldn't sell kebabs to the Greeks"). Indeed,
Mr. Parker has left, or been dropped from, six labels over the last
17 years: In 1988, he jumped ship from Atlantic Records before he even
delivered an album; his most recent falling-out came last year when Capitol
Records, reportedly spurred by MTV's refusal to even entertain the idea of
airing a Graham Parker video, refused to finance a clip to promote his Burning
Questions album. Mr. Parker says he eventually spent $ 4,000 of his own money
and made a video for the album's leadoff track, ironically titled Release Me.
And don't get him started on MTV, which he calls "the prime practitioners
of musical fascism." And that's one of his more complimentary observations.
But Mr. Parker is equally critical of his own work, the best of which is
spotlighted on Rhino's Passion is No Ordinary Word: The Graham Parker Anthology
(1976-1991), a superbly chosen two-disc compilation. In his self-penned
introduction, Mr. Parker draws attention to his gargling vocals on the otherwise
swinging White Honey ("Surely I was suffering from advanced throat cancer"),
the "desperately out-of-pitch" chorus on the hard-rocking Discovering
Japan and the overly long bridge of You Can't Take Love For Granted.
"I'll leave you to pick out the clams yourself," he writes.
"I can make gallons of chowder out of this lot."
"I just wrote what I feel - really, some of these recordings make me wince,"
Mr. Parker says, noting that he's still surprised by the relentless intensity of his
early recordings with his first band, the Rumour. "It was just so strange
that everyone had their ears closed to the terrible mistakes. Now you can't get
away with that. Everybody is so attuned in a recording studio now. If there's a
slight flurry in a drum pattern, everyone goes, Ooh, ooh, don't know about that.'
Whereas in the old days, you could sing out of pitch and get away with it. There
was something nice about it. On the other hand, I have to live with knowing that's
there forever."
One reason it was easy to overlook the technical miscues is that the music Mr. Parker
made in the late '70s with the Rumour remains some of the most thrilling rock 'n' roll
of all time, mixing garage-band ferociousness with elements of reggae (Don't Ask
Me Questions), Motown (a scorching cover of the Jackson 5's I Want You Back),
rockabilly (Back to Schooldays) and horn-driven R&B (Fools' Gold, Heat Treatment).
Not bad for a band that was lumped in with the late-'70s new wave movement
because of their accents rather than their sound. But Graham Parker and the
Rumour were punks at heart.
"There was nothing going on when we were starting out," Mr. Parker recalls.
"We were playing to people with flared trousers and long hair who sat on the
floor. . . . At the time, what we were doing was extremely aggressive. I was
aggressively screaming. I really thought I was telling the audience, OK, you
don't have a clue. You are wrong. Progressive rock is finished. This is
what's happening, three-and-a-half minute songs.' What we were doing was what
came in the next year (1977), only it was done with harsh Cockney accents and
less musical smarts. It was more thrashy, but I thought it was
pretty much the same thing."
Listening to the anthology has helped Mr. Parker gain a new appreciation of
some of his early material. But the biggest revelations have come from touring
as a solo performer, armed only with acoustic and electric guitars. Touring in
support of his critically acclaimed The Mona Lisa's Sister in 1988, he stripped
back such obvious candidates as the twangy Hotel Chambermaid, the haunting Watch
the Moon Come Down and his urgent abortion commentary, You Can't Be Too Strong.
But he also recast such unlikely candidates as Protection and White Honey,
crooning where he once careened. The results were impressive enough to persuade
RCA to release an album called Live! Alone in America.
On his current tour, Mr. Parker is sticking mostly to the older songs from
Passion is No Ordinary Word. He's reworked Mercury Poisoning in waltz time (it
can be heard on the new import-only Live Alone! Discovering Japan, recorded in
Tokyo), and he's experimenting with the tempos of Fools' Gold and Pourin' It
All Out. He's also been throwing in some offbeat covers, including Bob Marley's
No Woman, No Cry, Billy Idol's Sweet 16 and a surprise Supremes number.
"It's done a lot for my voice," Mr. Parker says of his solo tours.
"I'm still learning to sing. I'm still expanding on my vocaltechnique,
but not in a kind of academic way. Just from literally doing this for a certain
amount of time, I've stretched out the capabilities of what I can do with a
voice and a guitar."
Don't accuse Mr. Parker of jumping on the latest MTV Unplugged bandwagon. He
was a guest on the second episode, which aired in January 1990 (he sang with
the Smithereens on Behind the Wall of Sleep), but that was back when the show
was designed as a hip hootenanny and long before it became fashionable. Still,
Mr. Parker sees some benefit from the back-to-acoustic trend.
"Eric Clapton's record (Unplugged), even though it sold millions, is brilliant,"
he says. "It was probably a great thing for him to find himself forced into a
situation where he was playing more acoustically. But I thought Rod Stewart's stuff was awful.
I thought he butchered that Van Morrison song (Have I Told You Lately). He sort
of spoke it. It sounded like his lungs were packing up or something, with his three chins
wobbling away there.
I thought that was pretty dreadful.
"For people like Aerosmith to prove they can actually play instruments - who
cares about that? Who cares if Poison can play their instruments? It still
doesn't mean anything."
PERFORMANCE INFORMATION
Graham Parker performs at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth.
Tickets are $ 15 at Ticketmaster. Call 373-8000.
Copyright 1993 by the Dallas Morning News
From the Dallas Morning News, October 21, 1993, p. 5C
Reprinted with permission of The Dallas Morning News and the kind permission of David Okamoto
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