Graham Parker: Wired and Online Chris Nickson gets to the bottom of Parker's new CD marketing plan It's remarkable the changes the Internet has wrought in everyone's lives. Even if you don’t have a computer, you know what e-mail is, or a web site, or a modem. Six years ago hardly anyone was online. Now not only does it seem as if most of the country is wired (most of the world, come to think of it), but the Internet has become a flourishing way to market things. Amazon.com and people like CD Now do a booming business selling music on the Net, and the predictions are that it will become one of the massive industries of the new millennium. So what does this have to do with Graham Parker? Well, it serves as an introduction to the fact that he has a new record that’s only available for sale on the Net. Not strictly a new record, inasmuch as he didn’t recently record it, but twenty songs that have never seen the light of day before. Loose Monkeys, Spare Tracks and Lost Demos is pretty much summed up by its title, a collection of demos and unused tracks spanning the years 1983-1996. While that could have the connotation of barrels being scraped, it’s not that way at all. This is all quality material, up there with anything else he’s released, and, surprisingly, it all hangs together very well, perhaps because of the relatively sparse feel of most of the tracks. ‘The nature of it is like the title,’ Parker admits, ‘spare tracks and lost demos. It’s not an official album of new songs, so I really thought that the whole rigmarole of putting it into stores, where it wouldn't sell much anyway, would be pointless. It’s because of the Net that I was inspired to do it, in fact. A few people on the Parker website were saying have you got any spare songs from albums, so it’s their album in a way. For quite a few years people have come up to me and wondered what happened with that Atlantic album. Did you make an album? What have you got that's been left behind. So I thought it was a perfect thing to do. And it’s an experiment to see what this does, what this means, really, because it has turned out to sound more like a real album than I thought it would in a way. Cliff, the head of Razor and Tie, said it didn't sound like he’d expected, a lot of raggedy things, half-finished. But that's not the way I work when I go into a studio to do demos. None of them are done at home or anything. I try to make sure I’ve got the song where I want it to be. It’s very rare that it will not work. By the time I’ve got it to a studio, it’s working. But it’s funny, when you get it mastered and it takes on a feeling of being an album." Of course, Graham Parker’s not the first person to market a record in this fashion, but his name is sufficiently well-known enough to bring a fair bit of media attention, including an article in Ice. For him, it’s an experiment, and ‘the experiment is interesting, because I’ve heard there are people who are doing this already with albums of new material. If you can make your own record and do it real cheaply, then sell five thousand copies on the Internet, it’s better than selling 100,000 to a record company, where you’re still getting fourteen per cent of nothing. That's the way I look at records now. I see record companies for what they are - they're a bank. You borrow money and you have to pay it back. The only good thing is that they might spend a lot on promotion, which you don't have to pay back. Then they drop you and send you a royalty statement in parentheses, which is what they spent and your record is never going to make back. A bank’s not going to let you get away with that. But I don’t think I’m going to make my next studio album and sell it on the Net. I can’t imagine that I’d want to drum up thirty to sixty thousand dollars of my own money and sell it on the Net. Maybe that's the way to do it, though. You can make a record for ten thousand, so I suppose it’s all possible.’ Considering that Parker’s now been recording for over twenty years, it would be reasonable to assume he had shedloads of material to pick from for this record, but that turned out to be anything but the case. ‘I found three more songs,’ he says. ‘One was half-finished, on twenty-four track from 1983. I’d have had to have added vocals and other things, and I didn't want to do that. And I found two other things that were interesting, but they were only on cassette; it seemed I'd never done them in a studio, and that's all I had. This was really let’s get rid of it now. Even with the Rumour, we never went into a studio and did a load of stuff. I knew what I wanted. Once I’d written what I thought was an album, I pretty much stopped writing. So there might have been one spare track, and those have pretty much come out on reissues and stuff. So this is it.’ Two of the Rumour appear on the record, including the lead-off track, a cover of ‘There's a Ghost in My House,’ by R. Dean Taylor, who was probably best-known for a ‘Indiana Wants Me’ and ‘Gotta See Jane.’ His records appeared on Motown and, at least in Britain, he had a few hit singles, but he remains something of a mystery figure. ‘Do you know anything about this guy? I don't know anybody who does, and I haven't found an American yet who’s heard, or even heard of ‘There’s a Ghost in My House.’ It was a hit single in England, although I’m not sure when, except it was way back there. I thought it was a big hit, but maybe it wasn’t. I did record that, and the next two songs (‘Burnin’ on a Higher Plane’ and ‘Durban Poison’) just before I got my aborted Atlantic deal. When I signed, I was giving them original stuff, and they really wanted to hear everything, which was where it broke down. It’s a big mistake when a record company hears your material. I said let’s do an EP like ‘Hold Back the Night,’ which was a minor hit, and a good thing for my career. They said okay, and they’d never heard this song. Then Ahmet Ertegun’s assistant said he’d read something about someone else doing it. I said if someone does it, it’s got to be a hit. Not a big hit, but a hit, and that’s what I could do with in England. Let’s do it, let’s put it out. I did a few more overdubs on it, and then they lost interest in my songs, and they hated the idea of me producing myself. The communication broke down, and I got off the label, which is why the song was never put out. I found out that the Fall released it in the same year I was doing it - and it was a minor hit in England. I took it fairly philosophically, but at the same time I was really pissed off. The Atlantic thing was such a sour period.’ Actually, the demos he did for Atlantic make up a good deal of the material on here, slotting handily into a Parker chronology, and you have to wonder why Atlantic lost interest, since they’re as strong as anything off the first three records or the fabulous Squeezing Out Sparks. However, probably even God can’t explain the workings of corporate rock. If there’s one track that doesn’t fit with the others, however, it’s ‘Wherever You Are,’ a 1983 outtake from The Real McCaw sessions, lushly arranged, the kind of ballad that’s not too often associated with Parker. ‘Wherever You Are’ is a bit of an odd man out there. It was so well done I had to put it on. It sticks out like a sore thumb, the fireside Graham Parker, pipe and slippers thing. But the rest of it does fit together pretty good." It was actually a fan site (www.punkheart.com/gparker) that first alerted Parker to the possibilities of using the Net. They’d approached him and asked if he'd be willing to contribute, and the relationship has grown from there. Even so, don’t expect to find Mr. Parker talking knowledgeably about html, applets, and the like. ‘I'm not too great, really. I’m answering all these questions from the website, which requires typing, and I’m getting faster, using more fingers all the time. It’s a learning experience for me; I certainly never thought I’d be at a keyboard typing. I can generally find things. It just takes a lot of time to browse and search, and I’m not into sitting there for that long. But I mess around and do the most basic things.’ While the Parker website might have seemed the most obvious place to market Loose Monkeys, Spare Tracks and Lost Demos, when it came down to brass tacks it simply turned out not to be right. For information it was fine, and as a forum for fans, but not for sales. ‘I didn't want to get into the whole merchant account thing, and I just happened to be talking to Cliff at Razor and Tie (www.razorandtie.com), and he said he’d do it. I pointed out this wasn’t a record deal, that I make the profit. But they still wanted to do it. It’s a way of me not getting into the nuts and bolts of it. If I start getting into the business angle, which I'm no good at anyway, and have boxes of CDs around the house, it would put me off, so I agreed, in order to get it out now.’ Parker will, of course, be very much in the loop on it all. He’s touring, and his last album, Acid Bubblegum (Razor and Tie) was a great return to studio form, enough to make you hope there’ll be a follow-up sometime soon. He’s still a name, and deservedly so, dividing his time between America and England. ‘I have a place in London, and I was there all last summer. I don't like to think of myself as locked in anywhere. I have [had] my upstate New York place since 1988. Before that, in the early 80s, I had a place in New York, and I'd be literally six months on either side of the pond.’ If this record markets well on the Net, it could open quite a few floodgates for others. A lot of people are talking about the downloadable MP3 as the wave of the future, and maybe it is. But there'll always be a market for discs you can hold in your hand, and whose covers you can read and glean information from. For an established artist, Parker is taking a risk. You can only hope it pays off. Big.

Reproduced with kind permission from Chris Nickson and discoveries magazine.

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