TURNING ON THE ENDLESS NIGHT
Graham Parker has made a new album which he reckons you
should buy. He
says it might brighten up your life. David
Hepworth tends to agree.
In the winter of early 1979
Graham Parker prowls the stage of Exeter University like a man
ready to explode. Song introductions are rasped at the
microphone, the climax of each song is driven home with a sudden
gesture, an arm upraised or a heel skewered into the boards,
while behind him The Rumour fight for traction and wrench the
feeling out of "Local Girls" and "Protection"
and "Love Gets You Twisted".
Parker claws at the audience for
more attention, shakes his songs of love, loneliness and victory
under their noses and then, when things have become a little too
claustrophobic for mere entertainment, re-asserts the distance
with "Don't Ask Me Questions", leaves them listening to
their own hearts.
It was a confused, maniacal,
extraordinary performance which only made sense a month later
when the Jack Nitzsche produced album, "Squeezing Out
Sparks", began to give up its secrets.
While records from waves both old
and new flinched from any theme which couldn't be reduced to a
set of familiar gestures, "Squeezing Out Sparks"
appeared like red meat in a confectionery age, slicing through
the myths and manners of beat culture and reclaiming the heart.
Like "Darkness On The Edge
Of Town" or "Do It Yourself", it was the work of a
man who had outgrown euphemisms, found his own voice and was
intent on examining himself and his audience close up. Without
surrendering an iota of the romance of rock and roll, it seemed
to be tunneling back back to reality, talking of things that
happened in your own life, not some pop singer's. The Seventies
have rarely produced a better record and never one more
fundamental.
A year or so later Graham Parker
sits above a West London taxi garage, in the offices of his new
record company, Stiff, and announces that he doesn't need the
hectoring stage manner anymore. The songs, these days, seem to do
the job. It was something that Jack Nitzsche initially forced him
to confront. Nitzsche, "a zone case", sallow veteran of
a hundred heart-stopping records, trying to hammer out a rough
approximation of the chords to "Love Gets You Twisted"
on the piano at Lansdowne Studios while yelling, now look, this
is damn serious, now sing it that way.
Halfway into the subsequent
American tour that took "Sparks" into the Top Forty and
sealed his status as a top flight act, there suddenly didn't seem
to be that much to prove anymore and he settled for singing from
the heart's bottom. The Australians actually missed the
histrionics, complained about their absence. The pantomime of
anguish is something he's put behind him.
Course, songs can still be
vehicles of revenge even though he harbours no specific grudges;
it's just that old slights resurface on occasions from the
muddied pool of adolescence and force themselves into songs.
The pre-Rumour days remain a
somewhat troublesome memory. The songs for "Sparks"
were born of a disillusionment with life on the road and its
attendant melodramas. In the end you go back to the hotel alone.
"I'm not too impressed
now," he states flatly. "I know what attention
is."
His attitude to the possibility
of Police-style acceptance in Britain is ambivalent. There's no
doubting his determination to improve on the sales figures of the
previous five albums, but there again; "if you sell more
than a certain amount, you're selling to dummies anyway."
"When I was 17 I didn't buy
the pop records I thought were great. I bought them according to
what bag I was into. Well, I don't fit into any bag. There's none
of that 'you must buy this because he's one of those
people'. I've always been ahead of or behind movements. My image
is not extreme. All I have is songs and the fact that I think I'm
the best singer in the world, blah blah..."
His current high morale is
nothing more than realism. All these claims have been backed up
numerous times and, although he admits that each new album is an
anxious business which brings him out in a rash, his confidence
does appear to have been hardened by every setback.
O.K., maybe they don't like me,
he seems to say, but surely they can't dismiss all that music.
Anyway, he says, you shouldn't be in this business if you can't
take the thought of somebody changing stations when your best
song comes up on the radio.
Looking at the chance of the new
album, "The Up Escalator", he asserts, "It's just
the fact that it's about time. It's about time all those idiots
had my records. It'd brighten their fucking lives up." Do
you construe that as ego malfunction? If he hadn't said it, I
would have.
"Sparks" was the last
of his commitments to Phonogram U.K. (it came out on Arista in
America) and there was never any question of the contract being
renewed. Neither he nor manager Dave Robinson (also the boss of
Stiff) have ever concealed their contempt for that company's
failure to translate Parker's critical status and popularity as a
live act into substantial record sales.
His parting gift to them was the
song, "Mercury Poisoning", in which he railed "I'm
the best kept secret in the West". A great song, but
Phonogram failed to see it in that light.
The recent unveiling of a
disgraceful retrospective album has re-opened year old wounds.
Dave Robinson reasoned with Phonogram to hold back till September
when it might profit from the potential success of "The Up
Escalator", the first release from his own label. Recourse
to the law didn't obtain any satisfaction either. Parker reads
the bad reviews and feels helpless.
"Nobody needs it and it
isn't going to sell. All it's going to do is put more product in
the shops when my new album's due out."
This is not the overstatement it
might seem. Many a record dealer will think twice about ordering
a new set by a man whose best work is supposedly gathering dust
on the shelves. Advance orders will suffer.
"It's almost like they've
done it deliberately to screw up my new record," he claims.
The sixth long player calls for a
new approach. Big record companies, he points out, invest all
their cash and energies into signing you up; after that you're
just another notch in the corporate barrel, a little credibility
for the mantlepiece.
This time he's putting his faith
in Stiff's ability to work a record very hard in the marketplace.
They're certainly going to need every ounce of promotional muscle
if he doesn't waver from his current position and refuses to go
out on the obligatory international tour.
"I'm not going to wipe
myself out anymore," he declares. "It's not creative.
When I was on stage in Australia on this last tour I didn't
really know where I was or why I was there. At the end of the day
you find yourself full of vodka and you've got veins sprouting on
your nose and grey hairs. My feeling is that I want to sell some
records this time."
Phonogram, he says, encouraged
him to tour endlessly. The Rumour, currently without a piano
player, Bob Andrews having moved into production full time, have
just finished their third album. Parker's sorry, but it's
impossible to be responsible for other people's income. Stiff
will pt pressure on him to tour, he knows; he'll deal with it
when it happens.
"The Up Escalator" was
recorded in New York with Jimmy Iovine and Shelly Yakus who,
after Mike Chapman and Peter Coleman, are probably the most
sought after record production team in the business. Iovine's
work with Springsteen and Patti Smith originally awakened
Parker's interest and the brilliant, vivid sound of Tom Petty's
"Damn The Torpedoes" was the decider.
"'Sparks' was a scratchy,
punchy, frightening record. It was great, but I like warmth,
depth. I like Little Feat records. They're not angry or edgy but
they have a fantastic sound to them and they come across on the
radio."
Yakus was particularly besotted
with The Rumour and, far from keeping tabs on any creeping FM
gloss, Parker had to intervene from time to time to prevent the
project degenerating into a shit kicking "rock and
roll" record.
"I don't want the band to
fall over themselves in an effort to get aggression. 'Empty
Lives', for instance, frightens the shit out of me; I can't
listen to it. But it's not like 'New York Shuffle'; It's not
frantic. It holds a groove. We're talking dynamics. You mustn't
fall in love with the fact that they're the punchiest band in the
world. I think they're the best and they mustn't fall for that.
They've got to make a pop record."
On the basis of this afternoon's
acquaintance with the master tape, "Endless Night", the
tune that prominently features Bruce Springsteen on backing
vocals, is the most immediately enticing; the very idea of these
two duetting on the line about reaching for the switch that turns
on the endless night is potent enough.
And, while "The Beating Of
Another Heart" is as urgent and beautiful a song as Parker
has ever written, it's the single "Stupefaction", and
the aforementioned "Empty Lives" that seem to embody
the themes; teenage wasteland, the conspicuous consumers of
emotion.
Although its author sees it as a
long way from the preceding album, the line from "Passion Is
No Ordinary Word" that goes "I pretend to touch you/you
pretend to feel" tends to echo back.
His songs, which were once as
festooned with metaphors as Christmas trees, are now denser, more
involved, but utterly direct. They all begin as love songs, he
says, but since "Discovering Japan", an awesome
composition that flashed images of love, rock and roll and
advanced culture shock before the eyes, he's unconsciously begun
to operate on different levels simultaneously. He didn't notice
he'd done it until a while afterwards.
I've got nothing to tell people
though, he takes pains to say. The last thing they should do is
use his songs to fill the gaps in their lives.
"They're all filling their
empty lives up with Margaret Thatcher or Jimmy Carter or
something; filling themselves up with the illusion that someone's
looking after you. I'm just the same. What else can you do? Even
writing a song like that is a contradiction. If people take it
literally, they're gonna say 'well I haven't got an empty life'.
Well O.K., but there's going to come a time when you're going to
sit down and you'll know you have an empty life."
I tax him that fashioning music
at this level of intensity is surely the most pernicious
life-emptier of all. Songs can be used as an alternative
experience.
"Yes, you have to battle
against that. I don't want to be a rock and roll animal. I want
to sit around and watch the ivy crawl up the wall and not have to
think about my career. Because it should be secondary to your
life. It's your life that makes the songs in the first place.
That's what it's about - your life."
The profound pleasure he gets
from making music is enough daily justification. Then maybe he's
cornered by fans who assure him that "Sparks" helped
them over a divorce or some comparable trauma and, well, you have
to take notice of those things.
"So it ain't just 'good fun'
either, is it? It ain't any one thing when it does that to
somebody, is it? It's never worthless. You just create something
and you give it to people. Of course it's no threat to the CIA,
but if people get disillusioned by that then they're
just stupid.
All you can ever seek from rock
and roll, from any kind of "art", is an intimation of
strength. Most pop records are just diverting items of consumer
software. Graham Parker's inhabit that tiny minority where the
purpose is enough to justify the passion.
We toss the contemporary scene
back and forth. He professes a liking for The Clash but never
hears "two people" in their songs. "I hear a lot
of records that people are raving about and to me they're saying
nothing. They're just full of devices that have evolved. A lot of
people fall into that trap. Course, it's not even a trap as far
as they're concerned - it makes hit records."
We talked on the day of Carter's
abortive Iranian rescue adventure and swapped a few glib
geopolitical predications.
"We're at a sticky point in
history," he mused. "I suppose rock and roll makes you
aware of how transient it all is. You start to realise that time
doesn't care about what you do; that in the end you don't have
much going for yourself apart from what you have between
people."
- DAVID HEPWORTH
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