Howlin' Wind 1976
Recorded in the absolute void
of the '70s, when the progressive hangover still ruled and flares
were nowhere near a retro fashion statement, I knew the world
was waiting. Well, a handful of critics at least. The charming
naivety of me and Nick Lowe making tiny moves on the faders, mixing
through a minuscule radio speaker because, of course, they were
all singles. Most of them were only three minutes long! Big joints
and long nights in Chiswick: the singer from the Equals stopping
by, an addled slide guitarist flying in from Dublin, Edmunds waking
from a five year coma to play guitar on "Schooldays,"
touring with Ace (valium to stay calm, speed to make it to the
stage), yes, the Ace who once had a hit! Let's go!
Heat Treatment 1976
Mutt Lange's idea was to record
every instrument as separately as possible and then try to make
them sound as if they were all recorded together. To me, it sounds
like it was recorded under a blanket under water, but I hear he's
come a long way since then. Rockfield is a residential studio
located in Wales. The musicians stay in chalets next to the studio.
Legend has it that they used to mic up the bedrooms to record
people "wanking" in the night! Pity they didn't have
sampling back then.
The Pink Parker E.P. 1977
Things were already getting
hazy. Somehow we ended up in Holland with Mutt producing and Brian
Robertson on guitar, Brinsley was ill. Bob Andrews was starting
to turn and it wouldn't be long before the Bull's Blood began
arriving by the case load, mostly for the bass player. Somehow
we were desperate for a hit and got one, sort of. We did "Top
of the Pops" twice at any rate. Even today, The Pink Vinyl
People continue to be proud to own one of these dreadful objects.
I've got a few of them stashed away somewhere myself, and some
foul looking grey ones, just in case.
Stick To Me 1977
l'd brought the egg, chips
and beans down from the cafeteria. lt was pitch dark outside the
studio door, and I was wearing cheap black sunglasses. I wasn't
in my right mind. I saw something by the door that looked like
an enormous old freezer, what was it doing there? Everything
went into slow-motion as I put the plate down on what appeared
to be a solid object but was actually a yawning great hole. The
freezer door was open! The plate disappeared into the blackness
as I fumbled open the studio door and a flood of light illuminated
my mistake. I scraped the food up and put it back on the plate
along with some mold and other stuff. What did I know? lt seemed
sensible enough at the time. This was on the first attempt at
making the record, the one that was ruined by some fault in the
tape or the equipment or something. The second attempt probably
sounded even worse, but at least it was nasty.
The Parkerilla 1978
Someone in the audience threw
a toy mouse on the stage. I said, "hmm, pet mouse."
lt's on the record somewhere.
Squeezing Out Sparks 1979
Jack Nitzsche had arrived
in London from L.A. not having a clue as to what he was supposed
to be doing with this 'punk rock' act. He instantly hated the
way The Rumour were butchering my songs but it took him three
days to tell me. I said, "Great Jack, you're right. Now,
tell them what to do! You're the bloody producerl" After
that it was plain sailing. The funny thing was, I was talking
to him in his apartment the night he'd arrived and he looked tired
so I said, 'Okay Jack, l'll be off now, you'd better get some
kip." (For the American readers, 'kip' is English slang for
sleep.) He looked at me a little strange and as I was leaving
I remembered his manager's name was Kip. I still wonder to this
day whether he thought l'd gotten the wrong idea about their relationship.
Another funny thing: one day, Bob Andrews walked into the studio
covered with scratches. He claimed he'd fallen into a bush.
This was in the middle of London.
The Up Escalator 1980
My manager at that time --
who was bilingual -- had the idea that we should go with Jimmy
lovine to get that "Because the Night" drum sound.
Obviously, one Iisten to the record will tell you we didn't get
anything like that at all. In fact, the producer spent most of
the time in the lounge shouting things into the telephone like,
"get me to the coast...any coast" Strange people were
always around by now; predatory women, Nicky Hopkins' impersonators,
a guy who always had a chauffeured limo who seemed to have befriended
the tour manager and appeared to be supplying us with things.
Gallons of Bull's Blood or Thunderbird and bottles of Do-Do's
were stacked up in band members' hotel rooms. There was at least
one suicide attempt with a safety razor and a bottle of aspirins.
Jagger came in and listened to a playback of "Endless Night"
but we ignored him, embarrassed by our attempt to sound like the
Rolling Stones. One of the guitarists actually tried to tell
the producer how to get a good drum sound by citing the Rumour's
own LP as the example! lt was time to move on.
Another Grey Area 1982
An expensive black hole.
The Real Macaw 1983
The diminutive David Kershenbaum
stuffed himself with boiled potatoes and talked endlessly of "cooking
the sausage" as he tunneled his way through this one. The
drummer was convinced he wasn't up to the material and brought
in the video "Faces of Death," perhaps to inspire himself
with scenes of people eating live monkey brains. The bass player
sometimes didn't turn up at all, having spent his evenings attempting
to womanize in the obscure London club "Champagne Nights"
and finding himself still drinking alone at dawn. A guy came
in with an alleged revolutionary Farlight sampler. lt was as big
as the Titanic and sounded like one of those-cheesy multi-sound
organs named the "Holiday" or the "Variety"
that would-be keyboard players keep in suburban living rooms.
Listening to the rough mix I was convinced "Life Gets Better"
was a hit, but when it came to the final mix I knew in my gut
it was gone.
Steady Nerves 1985
An annoying giantess named
Friedman from the Elektra art department did everything possible
to sabotage the album cover. I flew to London to do a video for
"Wake Up" with Godley and Creme only to find that some
incompetent amateur who had won a competition, was in fact the
director. He spent most of his time trying to chat up some lady
with a clipboard and the resultant video looks like ninety-seven
thousand dollars worth of solid stiffness. Krasnow, the label
president, threw a fit when I told him I wanted to produce the
album with an unknown engineer named Wittman. He threw an even
bigger fit when the beans didn't turn up with the franks that
he'd ordered for lunch at his pretentious men's club in Manhattan.
The Mona Lisa's Sister 1988
I called myself the producer
which basically means sponging off the engineer's talent and getting
the credit for it. lt's hard to find anything interesting to say
about recording now, everyone's so straight, boring and professional;
it's closer to office work than rock and roll. James, the keyboard
player, was pretty funny though. He acts like he's on camera
even in the studio, posing around like a lunatic wearing an assortment
of silly hats at rakish angles.
Live! Alone In America 1989
A Rolling Stone critic
cailed this a "strange career move," which I took to
be a compliment. He criticized the fact that I didn't change
the arrangements of the songs -- they were too similar to the
studio versions, he reckoned. Critics, of course, are mad for
that kind of nonsense: e.g. "REM started their set with an
all-bongo version of 'Brown Sugar' completely shifting the emphasis
from male domination of black women to a feminist vegetatian war
cry for equal ... etc., etc., blah blah blah" or "Dylan
stood on his head and performed a breathtaking version of 'New
Morning' through a Moroccan nose flute blurring the barriers between
idiocy and genius forever .... " The punters, of course,
are completely confused by all this and wish they could hear the
song the way they like it, the way it was meant to be played.
Human Soul 1989
Because l'd run out of ideas
and desperately wanted to be quirky, I decided to take all my
silliest songs, cut them down to one or two minutes, and join
them together for side two, ala "Abbey Road." I pretentiously
called this the "Surreal Side." The studio we used had
the atmosphere of a clinic but luckily we had a totally incompetent
assistant engineer from Spain who offered some shreds of amusement.
The fact that he had to drive four hours to get home after every
session, sometimes at three in the morning, and knowing that the
poor English girl he'd suckered into being his wife was about
to give birth at any moment, was no reason for me to allow anyone
an early night. Often we would find him under the console fast
asleep, or playing his maudlin composition on the studio piano,
hoping, I imagined, to become some sort of Spanish singing star.
Struck By Lightning 1991
I was the roadie, driver,
the guy who nailed the carpet to the floor for ihe drum kit to
stand on and the accountant, tearing off checks as if I knew what
I was doing. I even cooked tuna fish steaks for Garth Hudson,
and later, after his session, he haggled his fee down by $800!
Things got strange when he did his Hammond organ overdub on "Strong
Winds." Suddenly, halfway through a take, the most extraordinary
sound came out of the speakers and I began to think that perhaps
my choice of keyboard players was more emotional than sensible.
"Has the ah ... has the song changed key? " he growled
at me through the talkback. "Ah ... no, no I don't think
so Garth," I said nervously. lt transpired that some weird
electrical fault had occurred and the Hammond itself had suddenly
jumped up a tone, so that whilst Garth was playing in G, what
actually came out was in A, causing a sound that could almost
make a man's bowels move involuntarily. After we had sorted that
problem out, we had a great night swapping accordion jokes like,
"What do you get when you drop an accordion down a mine shaft?
A flat minor," and Garth did a brilliant demonstration of
"stride" piano.
Burning Questions 1992
Made in London in the shadow
of the decaying Battersea Power Station, and surrounded by the
Beethoven Estate full of dangerous Jamaican posses getting busy
on re-mixes and drug feuds, add an assistant engineer who spent
his childhood locked in a room and denied all audio and visual
stimulus, a brain damaged night watchman named Tom, and a receptionist
who practiced difficult circus tricks in the kitchen, and you
have the perfect atmosphere in which to record something a long
way from butterfly nets and kids with dogs. Keith Moon's tom
tom and The Ghost came in pretty handy, too. Odd sounds appeared
at the end of rough mixes, totally unexplainable in origin even
to the technically brilliant Jon Jacobs. Some of them are still
there -- check the end of "Too Many Knots" in a walkman
with the volume turned up. The drum kit would mysteriously collapse
halfway through a take and Pete would bravely soldier on with
only one stick and a snare. The bass amp would talk to us in
an alien tongue and Mick would dance on the Hammond like a whirling
dervish even during the ballads. Lots of serious lndians were
consumed which might explain a few things, and at one point, we
seriously considered having melt-down heat phall sauce tapped
right into the control room. The record was made in just 22 days.
-- Graham Parker, June 1992
Some people won't take no for an answer. Never known as a passive, complacent kinda guy, Graham Parker heard that certain bigwig video programmers weren't waiting with bated breath to air his next video clip, so he's taken the camera into his own hands. Parker - who also revolted at his new record company by refusing to do interviews, and insisting he compose his own official bio - recently tried a seat in the director's chair after he heard rumblings that MTV felt that his new single, "Release Me," from his debut Capitol album, Burning Questions, didn't fit into their programming, and that a video would not be appropriate for them.
Parker's solution was to release a "Release Me" video himself. The singer/songwriter-turned-filmmaker directed his own homevideo, in his own neighborhood, shot on his own video camera by his own cameraperson/wife. Echoing the song's sentiments (and packing a typical Parker punch at programming powers-that-be), the video depicts the reberious musician performing in a locked cage wearing a button that reads: "Ignore MTV."
"If the MTV SOBs don't know what's good for them, sod 'em," says Parker. "Anyway, I've already had an offer from a more intellectual, less morally-bankrupt program: 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'"
CONTACT
Judi Kerr, Capitol Records - (213) 871-5208
Capitol recording artist Graham Parker will commence his first U.S. concert tour in support of the new album Burning Questions on September 27. The coast-to-coast U.S. tour will give an opportunity for fans to catch the wry and passionate singer/songwriter in both small and medium-sized venues. For a sneak preview of his concert repertoire -- including the new single "Release Me" -- tune in to Parker's guest spot on NBC's "The Tonight Show," September 30.
Believing that the record speaks for itself, Parker will be turning down all on-the-road interviews. Instead, Parker -- who insisted upon writing his own official biography, and even directed his latest home video -- has written for publication a self-parodying interview with fictitious journalist Jay Weinerbaum of Camper's Monthly magazine. A sample entry:
[Footnote: Graham Parker did, however,
show considerable restraint recently; he did not write
this press release.] Parker's U.S. itinerary follows, with dates
subject to change:
| 9/27 | Coach House | San Juan Capistrano, CA |
| 9/28 | Henry Fonda Theatre | Los Angeles, CA |
| 10/1 | Ventum Theatre | Ventum, CA |
| 10/2 | Warfield | San Francisco, CA |
| 10/4 | Roseland | Portland, OR |
| 10/5 | Parkers | Seattle, WA |
| 10/8 | lst Ave. | Minneapolis, MN |
| 10/9 | Park West | Chicago, IL |
| 10/10 | Majestic Theatre | Detroit, MI |
| 10/12 | Avalon Ballroom | Boston, MA |
| 10/13 | Trocadero | Philadelphia, PA |
| 10/14 | Town Hall | New York, NY |
| 10/15-16 | 9:30 Club | Washington, D.C. |
G.P. Thanks.
J.W. What do you think are the main differences between Burning Trousers and Struck by Lightning?
G.P. Lightning was more acoustic, this one's more electric.
J.W. Why is that?
G.P. Why? Are you kidding me?
J.P. You mean they're just different?
G.P. I guess so.
J.P. On both records you've played all the lead guitar yourself, you're not using Brimsley Shortz. What's the reason for this and will you be working with Brimsley again?
G.P. (yawning) Sorry, I didn't hear that. What?
J.W. Where is good old Brimsley these days? What's he doing?
G.P. ZZZZZZ (snoring loudly). Look, this is the third time I've been asked this today. You just have a file that says "Graham Parker": ask about pub-rock, Brimsley Shortz, poor commercial success, record label problems (mention "Mercury Poisoning" at least three times in piece), comparisons to Erris Comparo, what is "Can't Be Too Strong" really about, when are you touring, will you be using Brimsley on the road.... etc, etc. Am I right or what?
J.W. So...what is dear, sweet comfortable Brimsley up to anyway? Is he playing these days?
G.P. Ha ha ha (laughs). That's a good question, Jerry. Last I heard, he was doing some kind of cloning experiments with sea mammals, Alaska, I think. Or was it clowning experiments with camels in Nebraska? l'm certainly going to be working with him again soon though. I really want to make you and at least 10 other people happy. I want to give you that cozy warm pub-rock sort of feeling.
J.W. Great...really great. Let's move on now.
G.P. Can I guess?
J.W. Now, you're living in martial bliss in Woodcock, NY....
G.P. ARRGH! (screaming) I'd forgotten about that one.
J.W. So, heh heh...um...is "Can't Be Too Strong" pro- or anti-abortion?
G.P. (brandishing some sort of weapon) It's about ramming my fist so far down your throat you'll need a vasectomy to get it out.
J.W. Oh, dear (head in hands). This doesn't really fit with my preconceived idea of this piece. I...I thought you'd love to generate a really gooey sort of warm gushy feeling. A sort of revel in the past-beery-pub-rock-minority feeling. After all, you are a press act.
G.P. No, I'm not. I've been on "Letterman" five times. I'm doing "The Tonight Show." I've done "Top Of The Pops" and "Arsenio Hall." I'm a Pop Star goddamn it!!
J.W. (Things seem to be slipping out of control, but I'm determined to get a cliched piece out of this, somehow. I have to fulfill the objectives of this assignment. Ah...I know, this is bound to interest him.) Graham, you've been been described as an angry old man. How do you feel about that? Are you angry?
G.P. (Seventeen second pause) Well, Jim, I'm certainly looking forward to being an angry old man. Anger is the only feeling I really relate to. I want to be that doddering old sod on the bus who suddenly pulls out a stick and whacks the poor bastard sitting in front of him on the head. I don't think that's unreasonable, do you?
J.W. It seems fair enough. How many angry singer-songwriters are there right now, making a living out of it?
G.P. (Forty-two second pause) There are 15 that I know of. There may be more. I know there are a lot of guys who really aren't that angry, they just wear loud shirts.
J.W. I'm with you on that one.
G.P. Right.
J.W. Tell me about the Hope & Anchor Pub. I want the reader to really get that gooey, rootsy, warm, oozy sort of feeling. That street urchin real musician type thing, in fact, tell me how you met The Gloomer. How did it actually feel when you reached up on tippy-toe to shake Martin Behemoth's (formerly of the sadly departed Deluxe Ducks) enormous, craggy, roots rock sort of hand?
G.P. Excuse me?
J.W. How did it smell in that place?
G.P. Well, Perry, I really wish I had more time to get into this, but l'm on a pretty tight schedule. (Looks at watch) I have to go and lie down in the back of the tour bus.
J.W. That's cool. I won't keep you much longer. I just have about 17 other mechanical questions to ask you.
G.P. Hey, l'm with you all the way, Tim. Camper's Monthly is the kind of publication my fans read -- this is what the modern record buyer is looking for, y'know?
J.W. Great, Talking of your fan ... what kind of person is he or she?
G.P. I think they need me on the bus now, Bill.
J.W. O.K. Just to wrap things up, what is "Release Me" about?
G.P. Would you ask Mick Jagger what "Start Me Up" is about?
J.W. If I had the chance.
G.P. I thought so.
J.W. Does your mother know you wear your hair like that?
G.P. I always walk backwards when l'm with her. That way she doesn't notice a thing.
J.W. Got it. Graham, it's often said that you are one of the great singer/songwriters of all time, but real commercial success has somehow eluded you. Why is that, and how does it feel?
G.P. Oh, come on, Ray, don't be a spineless jellyfish, come right out and say it. You're being too tactful.
J.W. No, really. America wants to hear the answers to these and other burning questions.
G.P. (Two second pause) Twit.
J.W. What do you think of Al Roker, the NBC weatherman?
G.P. Personally, I love him. I think the way they attach him to a long piece of string and float him up into the sky like a human weather balloon is fabulous. He's real accurate.
J.W. You're right. He's not just a fat idiot.
G.P. No way.
J.W. O.K.
G.P. Yeah.
J.W. Um...
G.P. Don't ask that. Don't spoil it all now.
J.W. Heh heh heh (laughs).
G.P. Come on then, good buddy, spit out!
J.W. O.K. great! When you're on an airplane and the person sitting next to you asks you what line of business you're in, and you, like a fool, say you write songs and make records, and they ask you your name suddenly getting that "Whoa, a celebrity" light in their eye, and you say "Graham Parker," and they say "Brian Porker?" and then they ask you what group you're with, and you say you used to be with Graham Parker and The Rumour, and they say "Brian Porker and the Rum Hour?" and you say, "No, The Rumour," and they say that they've heard the record Rumours, you're on that? Tell me Graham, how does that feel?
G.P. (Snoring loudly, showing signs of rapid eye movement).
J.W. Well, that just about wraps it up for me. There are exactly 11 other questions I had for Graham but I know they can wait for another time. In a gooey cult-figure, armpit sniffing, critically acclaimed, cozy for a home cooked meal, sort of way, I really feel that one day I'll get to the very essence of the man himself. Until then, this is Jay Weinerbaum for Camper's Monthly, signing off.
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