Graham Parker

Graham Parker most recently named himself President and CEO of Up Yours! Records. He's been telling the record industry that much since his career began in 1976, so why not get it in writing? Parker recorded in the states for Mercury, Arista, Elektra, Atlantic, RCA and Capitol. For Atlantic, he didn't even make an album. He pocketed their money all the same. In what Parker calls "one of those clear moments when you realize what your life has been about," he figures "record companies are banks, but the great thing about them is that when you lose them a $150,000 you don't have to pay them back, they just drop you."

As the President and CEO of Up Yours!, Parker isn't throwing money around like a frat boy at a strip club. In fact, he's complaining with a smile about the "fucking freebies" he's got to hand out of his latest project, a collection of demos and outtakes from 1983-1996 called Loose Monkeys, Spare Tracks and Lost Demos that he's making available only through the Internet. You click over to www.razorandtie.com and place your order. Like the George Foreman grill, this thing is initially not to be sold in stores.

Parker's doing it this way because unlike the mathematically challenged execs over at other record companies, Parker has taken notice that "14% of nothing is still nothing." With the Internet, the bulk of all monies go to Parker. If there's a slipshod marketing campaign to coincide with Loose Monkeys it will be Parker's own doings and not some Arista henchman who decides it would be a perfect tie-in to have a "Local Girls" contest in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Arista reps dress up as women and parade on stage.

"That was good, man," says Parker, shaking his head, recalling the Arista promotional push for 1979's critically acclaimed Squeezing Out Sparks. "That was a doozy. That'll break your record."

It wasn't quite the `throw it in the bottom desk drawer and disown it' technique that Capitol used for 1992's Burning Questions, but then when MTV tells you they won't play your video no matter what and you hand your record company a video you made yourself with a hand-held camera with a bill for five grand, well, maybe, they don't like you as much as they thought they did. A small club tour, business cards for Up Yours! and the "fucking freebies" should be Loose Monkeys only promotional tools.

Parker has taken to the Internet. No computer genius, he's taken an active interest in the website devoted to his twenty-three year career (www.punkhart.com/gparker). He answers fans' questions and posts updates about his burgeoning soccer career. "The soccer team I play for has not lost a single game this indoor season!" he wrote last year.

It also allows Graham the chance to correct the inaccuracies that have been repeated ad nauseum in the press.

"What you get with the press -- and I totally understand it -- is that they have a file for every artist and whoever is writing the piece looks it up," explains Parker. Unfortunate for GP, his file's marked `Pub Rock.' "It's a career killer, really."

At 24, after traveling, Parker returned home to live with his parents and work at a gas station. Songs were written on the side while an ad in Sounds attracted a slide guitarist named Noel Brown, who through other folks introduced Parker to David Robinson, the man destined to become his Ian Faith, the manager with the master plan . Robinson provided a pub rock band named Brinsley Schwarz and wasted no time throwing Parker in the studio to cut a demo. Within weeks, Parker was on the radio and Phonogram was eager to sign up this guy who sounded like Van Morrison wearing Mick Jagger's leather jacket. The band became The Rumour.

"I stayed on at the gas station while I rehearsed with the Rumour," says Parker. "I met Nick Lowe, a guy I'd never heard of. Dave said, `This guy is gonna produce your album.' They're playing. They can obviously cop the Stonesy and Dylan stuff, amazing. Finally, I get to hear a Brinsley Schwarz album and it's this limpwristed country rock shit. And I'm reading that I'm a part of all this."

Howling Wind, released in 1976, met with raves, any lingering `limpwristed country rock shit' wiped away by Parker's pinched growl. The media, hungry for a catchphrase, picked the immensely creative "angry young man."

"If you look at my songs, the first album, and you say `Gypsy Blood,' angry young man? I don't think so. `Between You and Me'? It's a very narrow thing," he says. "The angry young man is not something I would disqualify. `Don't Ask Me Questions,' `Back to Schooldays' are angry. Once my guitar strap broke and I was doing `Don't Ask Me Questions' and I think I went `Hey Lord' and my finger came up and people were like `this is it'. And I was doing very theatrical stuff."

Learning to point your finger angrily at a crowd may not seem like much of an innovation, but in mid-70s pop music terms, it's actually a bit like parting the red sea. Those looking forward to seeing the luminous Ace (who gave late-nite TV ads "How Long") during a university theater tour were surely harshly shook by GP and the Rumour's stage-jabbing nubs.

Manager Robinson pressed Parker and he quickly wrote and recorded Heat Treatment and the Hold Back the Night EP.

1977 eventually showed up, and with it, the tenor of the times shifted both in Parker's favor and against him. Declan MacManus changed his name to Elvis Costello. Early reviews said he was ripping off Graham Parker. But once the debut album My Aim is True was released, it was obvious that Costello had what it takes as well.

"I thought My Aim is True was staggeringly good," says Parker. "And he was using these really wimpy country rock people. The Rumour were big fans of Clover (Costello's backing group) and I didn't get it. And Elvis Costello uses these guys because he's into this shit. He's into pub rock. He's into Brinsley Schwarz. He's a real student of it, and he never gets the words `pub rock' next to his name." Ah, irony.

The errors were soon to outweigh the hits. Dave Robinson picked a guy named Bob Potter to record Parker's next album, 1977's Stick to Me. "You have to know Dave Robinson," says Parker. "He'd say `Yeah, I got this guy he's fucking great who'll do your next album.' And you have to know me at the time. I'm stoned all the time and I'm just like `Alright, yeah man, alright.' That was all I contributed. I'd wake up in the morning and roll a joint. That's how I got through the first five years of my career."

Potter recorded the basic tracks and the crew went over to Island studios to mix it. But everytime a fader was brought up, the hi-hat would get louder, bleeding through everything. Robinson had the tapes examined and found that "black stuff" was falling off the tapes. Apparently, albums recorded with tapes where "black stuff" falls off them are not releasable. Robinson put Parker back in the studio with Nick Lowe, the one guy capable of getting the album done in a week and, therefore, in time for the band to tour Scandinavia.

Phonogram were haphazardly breaking GP and the Rumour, but Mercury in the U.S. were useless. The Parkerilla, a three sides live album was released. The album received poor reviews and the press construed that Parker had put it out to fulfill his contractual obligation to Mercury. No such luck.

"I didn't put it out to break a contract. We were known as a hot live act and after three albums, every band puts out a live album, real simple," Parker says. Robinson, forever chiming in with ideas, decided Graham should write an entire album of hate songs about Mercury. Parker wrote the single "Mercury Poisoning." "And then I wrote `Squeezing Out Sparks' and said `I don't think we need a whole album of hate songs about Mercury.'" Parker's wisdom prevailed and for eleven days he holed up with producer Jack Nietzche, and came out with Squeezing Out Sparks, his finest album.

Parker's wisdom did not, however, extend to his business dealings. Free from Mercury, Parker let Robinson find the next deal. And find it he did: Arista Records. The Boston Red Sox of mainstream rock promotion.

"They just gave me a king's ransom to sign and my manager's eyes lit up,' says Parker. "Turns out I had a Billboard and I looked at the charts and I'm like `There's CBS, there's Warner Brothers.' This is what the charts are made of. I don't see any Arista and (Dave) is like `they never call me back, those people.' The thing was the Warner Brothers people were following me around when I was on tour. Jerry Wexler took me and Dave to his house and he just sweet talked us and it was too late. I'd done this deal with Arista. You make mistakes."

Sparks sold the best to date in the U.S. For the follow-up, Parker enlisted the help of producer Jimmy Iovine, who had just succeeded with Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes.

"It wasn't the expansive American sound we thought we were going to get so we could break through to those dimwits," explains Parker of 1980's The Up Escalator. Songwriting still carried him -- though the album received mixed reviews. The `dimwits' continued to smoke up to Pink Floyd's The Wall instead.

Jack Douglas produced John Lennon's final album Double Fantasy. "Very slick, very seamless, no rough edges, clear, clean playing. That's what I need next," thought Parker. "You always imagine the day when you'll do another kind of music. Like Spinal Tap. They want to get together with the London Philharmonic and do the acoustic thing."

Songs such as "Temporary Beauty," "It's All Worth Nothing Alone" and "Crying for Attention" were worthy additions to Parker's catalog, but the spirit of 1982's Another Grey Area was all wrong. Parker split with the Rumour and by his next album would split with manager Dave Robinson as well.

"What I hate about (Grey Area) is it cost $300,000," says Parker. "It's just stupid what we were doing with records. We were trying to find this snare drum sound."

Parker didn't help matters by following it with The Real Macaw, an album Parker recalls reading was the "nadir" of his career.

"I think it has to do with abundant cocaine use that was going around," he says, his nose sitting firmly on his face, unaffected by such talk. "I think that's a drug that flattens your brain. Your accountant would come backstage with cocaine, the girl who swept the stage, the record company. You'd spend weeks and weeks under the influence of this shit, having a great time. But I think the songwriting suffers. Eventually you start to phase it out."

Not before he made his one album for Elektra, 1985's Steady Nerves which featured a giant promotional push, a tour with Eric Clapton, and a song "Wake Up Next to You" that almost made a dent into public consciousness.

"I listen to my stuff and think `well, this isn't going to crack it.' But I don't tell the record company that," he says.

What he did tell his next label, Atlantic, was that drums were the least important thing to a hit record and that the next wave was going to be stripped down production. Maybe so, but they had no intention of letting Parker out there ahead of his time. Pissed off, Parker wrote what would become The Mona Lisa's Sister. Instead of a record, Atlantic released Parker, who took his ideas to RCA who were excited by what they heard.

The Mona Lisa's Sister is the sure-fire return of GP. It's bedrock production matched with songs no longer muted by cocaine's rosy glow showed that the mid-80s hibernation was over and that GP the songwriter was paying strict attention to his frontal lobes.

The U.S. responded favorably. Reviews were up. Shows were packed. But England had written off Parker with Another Grey Area and they stubbornly refused to accept him back. "I think the string of albums (Beauty, Macaw, Nerves) was so heavily lambasted by the press that it was impossible to get back from that," he admits.

Parker's greatest sin, though, has perhaps been his professional distance. He refuses to put his private life in the media eye. "I remember in '77 the Clash had been busted for a small amount of amphetamine. The front page of Sounds and Joe Strummer was on the phone telling them about it. I wouldn't have wanted anyone to know. I could've enhanced my reputation being busted."

"In 1980, I did Up Escalator. I said I'm not going to tour. I was going to get away from it. I was bombarded and everybody wants a piece of you and I didn't fucking want it. So I rejected the fame thing based on my own personality which probably cut my own throat. It makes everything harder now because when it comes down that's what they want. They want hits and they want the cult of personality. I tried to destroy that. It makes it really hard for me, so I have to make really good records and try to sell 'em."

Make them, he has done. 1990's Human Soul explored his soul side while interlocking all the tracks on side two as an extended suite, while 1991's Struck By Lightning was an acoustic juggernaut.

"It's not even gonna reach the people who bought Squeezing Out Sparks. They've moved on. They're probably like me. They don't buy many records anyway and you just have to look at this stuff and say `fuck it.'"

"The last few years have been pretty scary. I've gone out and like `whoa, this place is fucking empty.' There's a huge malaise that's hit live music. You have to realize it's not just you. I mean, I don't buy records often. Why should somebody who bought Howlin' Wind bother to follow what I'm doing now? Then you realize, they probably still buy a Springsteen album. Because they respond to success on a big scale. They don't want to buy into a loser."

The question then remains, why not reform the Rumour and up the personal profile? Doesn't the President of Up Yours records see the advantages to that? "I don't want to give the people what they think they want. I'm real stubborn," says Parker, speaking like a musician and not the CEO he is today. "If I had a seven year plan that would be part of it because it would be a big boost. But I think 12 Haunted Episodes (his 1995 Razor and Tie release) is my greatest recorded work. It's the one I've been waiting for. So I'm going to a record with the Rumour so more people will buy it than 12 Haunted Episodes ? Fuck 'em. 12 Haunted Episodes is better."

Perhaps what Parker needs is something like VH-1's Storytellers, something to reintroduce him to the audience who now stay home. He's agrees but is doubtful. "I need `Storytellers' very badly. But everything is a soundscan decision. They must have a book somewhere that says you must have sold this much in order to do this."

Rob O'Connor

This article was featured in the April 21-27 issue of NYPress.