| Rolling Stone |
BOB ANDREWS looks like a middleaged
minister who's gone off on a bender at a church social. Dressed
in black pants, shirt and suit coat, the balding keyboard player
for Graham Parker and the Rumour darts around the dance floor
at the Agora Ballroom, jumping up and down, clapping and shouting
at the singer up onstage.
It's Wednesday night - "ladies'
night" at the Agora, a showcase-dance club located on a seamy
side street in the desolate downtown area near Cleveland State
University. The previous evening, a packed house turned out to
see Graham Parker and the Rumour, and now Parker and company are
back, doing a special show that was announced over a local radio
station only a few hours earlier. Unfortunately, because of the
short notice, the group finds itself facing not another crowd
of fanatics, as has been the case for much of this first leg of
Parker's three-month U.S. tour, hut a sparse, unattentive audience
of a few hundred cleancut college coupies who no doubt showed
up to hoist a few brews and listen to cover versions of late-Sixties
and early-Seventies hits performed by a local group called Lefty.
And Andrews is trying his best to set an example for the crowd.
"Get that heckler out of here," Parker shouts, pointing toward the
keyboard player. "He's been following me all over the country."
Andrews continues his antics, and Parker bends down to take swigs from
cans of Michelob and Miller offered up to him by the few faithful
at the foot of the stage. "Why do they call Cleveland the
rock & toll capital of the world?" Parker continues,
a sneer crossing his face. "What the fuck do they mean by
rock & roll-buzz-saw guitars or sornething? Well, don't worry, we'll
be doing our Beatles medley in a minute."
Instead, the Rumour rips into
a roaring version of "Soul Shoes." Andrews scurries
back up behind his keyboards as Parker prowls the stage like a
caged Leopard, occasionally stopping at the edge to lift Iris
large, tinted spectacles and peer into the eyes of the crowd.
By the end of the song, Parker and the Rumour have stirred up
enough enthusiasm that they are called back for an encore.
But it is still far from the
victory Parker had hoped to win when he agreed to do the
show for free. Backstage, Andrews begins talking about
the couples who walked out during the performance. "It
was the girls," he says. "Did you see them?
The kind who sit at home and watch the detergent and fabric-softener
adverts. The guys seemed to he getting into it, but their girlfriends
were grabbing them: 'Come on, Henry. We've got to get
home and do the laundry."'
Parker, slumped down on a
love seat in the dressing room, is not in a joking mood. "It's
depressing," he moans. "It's so fucking depressing."
GRAHAM PARKER HAS been waging
such battles against indifference for years. Born in 1950 in
London, Parker grew up in Deepcut, a country village in southeast
England. His mother worked in a cafe and his father was a coal
stoker. Parker left school when he was seventeen and began working
in the Animal Viral Research Institute, breeding mice and guinea
pigs. But he soon found that job, like most other aspects of
working-class life in England, a dead end.
His way of breaking through
that was music. In 1975, after a series of odd jobs and stints
in several bands, Parker, then a gasstation attendant,
sent a tape of some songs he'd written to London's Hope and Anchor
pub. Dave Robinson, who ran a recording studio there, heard the
tape, got in touch with Parker and matched him up with the Rumour,
an allstar band made up of veterans of England's then-waning pub-rock
scene.
The following year, Parker
and the Rumour - guitarists Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont,
keyboardist Andrews, bassist Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding
- released two albums. Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment
contain some of the most intense music of the Seventies, showing
off a variety of influences, from Bob Dylan and R&B to Van
Morrison and reggae. With Parker's growling voice pulling everything
together, it was clear that Graham Parker and the Rumour had risen
above pub-rock to create their own distinct brand of rock &
roll. As critic Greil Marcus put it: "Parker's advent was
a sign that the decade was finally toughening up: in its anger,
its lyricism, its sophistication, its lack of artiness, its humor
and its punch, his music cut a swath through most everything around
it." But despite the critical acclaim, those first two LPs
sold only 30,000 and 60,000 copies respectively.
The group and its management
put much of the blame on Mercury Records, their label at the time.
"Let's use Howlin Wind as an example," Allen
Frey, Parker's U.S. representative, told me over dinner the night
before the first Cleveland show. "We were out there touring
insupport of that album, which had such incredible reviews, and
here Mercury had done an initial pressing of only 8000 copies.
At that rate, youre lucky if there's even one copy in every city
you play."
(A Mercury representative
contends that although the company initially pressed 8000 copies,
"substantially more records" were in the stores by the
time of the tour.)
The third LP, Stick to
Me, released late in 1977, was not as well received by the
rock press, which criticized Nick Lowe's production, as well as
some of Parker's songs. And the two-record live set that followed
last year, The Parkerilla, was at best a flawed attempt
to capture the band's powerful live presence on vinyl.
The day of the second Agora
show, Parker defended Stick to Me. "I think it's
very hard sounding, very English sounding," he said. "It's
not meant to be played on an expensive hi-fi; I don't think it
works then, perhaps." He added that the album had originally
been recorded with producer Bob Potter, but that version was scrapped
when they found it was impossible to mix ("The hi-hat kept
going over everything, and there was something missing in the
bass frequencies"). The Nick Lowe version had to be recorded
in a week, crammed in between tours of Sweden and the U.K.
Parker did admit that The
Parkerilla was not as good as it should have been. But he
maintained that this was not because he rushed it out just to
fulfill his contract with Mercury - the reason most often cited
in the press. "There wasn't enough care taken on The
Parkerilla. I wasn't experienced enough, so I left it up to
my manager and whoever he got to do the sound. And I think we
botched it."
Despite his lack of commercial
success, Parker had no trouble finding a new label. In fact,
an intense round of bidding reportedly preceded his signing with
Arista Records. His first album for the label, Squeezing Out
Sparks, and the accompanying tour have gone a long way toward
regaining the momentum that was lost after the first two LPs.
The critical response has equaled, if not surpassed, that given
Parker's first two records. And at press time, the LP was in
the Top Forty with a bullet and had sold more than 200,000 copies.
In addition to being the first
album for a new label, Squeezing Out Sparks also marks
the beginning of a new rnusical era for Parker. The horns and
complex musical arrangements that had reached a zenith on Stick
to Me have been dropped in favor of a simpler, guitar-dominated.
sound. And lyrically, the album is his most introspective.
WHEN I ARRIVED in Cleveland,
it was immediately clear that this time around Parker was determined
to achieve the commercial breakthrough that had been predicted
for him for so long. In addition to the two Agora shows, he had
two radio-station visits planned (one to cut a station ID tape,
the other for an interview) plus a record-store autograph session.
The bulk of my interview was to be sandwiched between all of
these activities.
Parker is an intense, wiry
man who stands only five feet five and can't weigh a whole lot
more than a hundred pounds ("Everyone looks tall and fat
next to me," he joked during the photo session for this story).
My first indication of just how intense he can be came
the night after the first Agora show when we were discussing the
band's tour of Japan, which inspired at least two songs on the
album - "Discovering Japan" and "Waiting for the
UFOs" "It's really a weird country," Parker said,
taking a sip of Grolsch beer as we sat at the bar in Swingo's
hotel, just a few blocks from the Agora. "You go into a
bar over there, and they're eating raw whale meat. I mean, can
you believe that?" I offered a slight chuckle, thinking Parker
was going to joke about such odd food, when he added: "I
mean, fucking whales are going extinct, and here are these people
eating them!"
The next day we met in his
road manager's hotel room to talk about the new record. "What
we were trying to get across was the songs, the emotion, the lyrics,
rather than any kind of extravaganza," said Parker, who was
seated on the edge of a bed, busily rolling a cigarette. "In
the past, I occasionally found the music running away with itself,
and I was fighting in the middle of it. This time I wanted it
to be absolutely direct - the whole thing like a heartbeat. All
the riffs, like in 'Passion,' I wrote them with the songs. We
didn't elaborate on them much. I wanted it totally my show, and
that's why it's different. lt sounds like a Graham Parker alburn."
Parker gives much of the credit
for the album's more direct sound to producer Jack Nitzsche.
"The album took eleven days to record," Parker explained.
"It took two days to get the studio [Lansdowne Studios in
London] working because it had only been used by Acker Bilk and
things like that. The third day we rnanaged to play a song, and
Jack said, 'Come and listen to this.' There was just this big
mess corning out. So Jack and I went up to his hotel room and
I told him we wanted to get back to fundamentals but we didn't
know how to. I said, 'Jack, you gotta say what you think.' He
was a bit paranoid about criticizing the band. I said to him,
'Jack, we're English. We sneer, we're cynical, we're miserable.
But we really don't mean it.' So the next day we came in, and
anything he said, I said, 'Yeah, come on. Carry on. Wot? Wot?
Come on, say it. Here, have another beer.' And eventually we
got it out."
Parker nervously rolled another
cigarette ("Its an acquired taste. It's a little easier
on the throat," he said) and began to talk about "You
Can't Be Too Strong," the one song that perhaps best illustrates
the "less-is-more" production approach to Squeezing
Out Sparks. The song - done with just acoustic guitar, bass
and keyboards - is about an abortion that involved an intimate
friend of Parker's. lt has been praised as one of his most passionate
songs, but it has been criticized by those who feel Parker blames
the woman in the song.
"When you're sixteen,
or eighteen or something, you haven't got any money or anything,
and the only thing you can think about is, 'God, I only hope she
gets rid of it.'" Parker paused for a second and stared down
at the bed. "But I'm not eighteen now, and it just makes
you think .... But when I say, 'You decide what's wrong,' I'm
not putting any blame on a woman. I'm saying the fact is that
a man doesn't have to decide. A woman does. If it's saying anyone
is weak, it's the men, because they don't feel it."
The album's title also comes
from a line in "You Can't Be Too Strong." "That
title's the best one we've had," Parker said. "It means
death, for one thing. I mean, 'Saturday Nite Is Dead' - there
you go, you're squeezing out a spark. Then there's the abortion,
there's that level. Plus it's very sexual. And it's about writing
songs. You write a song, and you're squeezing out a spark. A
few people didn't like the title, including my manager [Dave Robinson].
He thought, 'What the hell is that? I mean, how can we market
it?' I said, 'l don't care. It makes people think.' l'm still
thinking about what it means. But you know what it's like in the
record business. 'Hit me, hit me, hit me. Give me something
I can market. - Stick to Me, something like that.' And
it's not quite that easy with this title."
As Graham was heating up to
the subiect of record companies, a representative from Arista
knocked on the door and told us it was time to leave for Record
Revolution, where the record-signing session was to take place.
"I mean, I just want
to make records," Parker concluded. "I want a record
cornpany to sell them - I want to be baked beans - a product.
You know, because I don't care. The record speaks for itself.
They ain't gonna change that. I think everyone should hear my
records and buy them. I don't think that's unreasonable. I mean,
I really don't think it is."
TWO WEEKS LATER, Graham Parker
and the Rumour arrive in New York for a show at the 3000-seat
Palladium. As we ride in the tour bus frorn yet another record-store
autograph session to a fire station where some photos are to be
taken, everybody's spirits seem to be rnuch better than they had
been in Cleveland. Squeezing Out Sparks is still climbing
the charts, "Local Girls" has just been released as
a single, and the tour has steadily been picking up steam since
the Agora shows. At one of three sold-out shows at Chicago's
Park West nightclub, the audience had refused to leave, dernanding
a third encore after the houselights had gone up. In Philadelphia,
Parker and the Rumour received a warm reception from some 12,000
Cheap Trick fans at the Spectrum, despite the fact that they had
not been advertised and that, because they got no sound check,
the sound was awful. And the band was ecstatic about the four
shows it had just played at Boston's Paradise Theater. "You
shoulda been there," Martin Belmont tells me. "I mean,
they were really incredible."
But everyone is still a little
nervous about the New York show, which had been sold out for weeks.
"We just don't want to jinx it," Bob Andrews says.
lt turns out they have little
to worry about. After getting off to a rough start, the band
begins to heat up around the time of "Don't Get Excited,"
the fourth song of the set. "Protection" follows, and
a good portion of the crowd is up on its feet. The next song,
"Mercury Poisoning," Parker's diatribe against his former
label ("The cornpany is cripplin' me/The worst trying to
ruin the best/....I've got Mercury poisoning/I'rn the bestkept
secret in the West"), is dedicated to Clive Davis, Parker's
new boss at Arista. The group then plays the title songs to its
first three albums, as if to let some more people in on the secret.
Onstage, the band forms a
visual hodgepodge. At the far left, Brinsley Schwarz, with his
neatly styled hairdo and white suit coat, looks like one of those
well-heeled college kids who turned up for the second Agora show.
He belies that image, however, with his occasional Pete Townshend-like
leaps and sudden bursts on his Gibson Flying V. On the opposite
side of the stage, Bob Andrews, the manic "minister,"
has a difficult time staying put behind his keyboards. He continually
runs to the edge of the stage to encourage the audience, then
dashes back to his station just in the nick of time. Martin Belmont,
standing to Andrews' left, brings to mind a young Keith Richards,
not only in his scraggly appearance, but also in his soulful riffing.
Inevitably, his lead break on "Don't Ask Me Questions"
draws one of the biggest cheers of the night.
But the focus of attention
is almost always Parker, whether he's slamming his fist into
his palm to bring home a point on "Mercury Poisoning"
or wrenching his face into a twisted sneer during "I'm Gonna
Tear Your Playhouse Down." As I watch him this night at the
Palladium, I can't help but think of something he had said to
the Cheap Trick audience in Philadelphia the week before, something
that just about sums up everything he and the Rumour stand for:
"This isn't a show," he said. "This is for real.
Don't you understand that?"
From Rolling Stone #294, 6/28/1979, p. 9, 23, 25 & 26
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