Graham Parker - Not quite as old as these other guys.

[LouieB]

I had only caught part of this story of late, but here is an article from today's NY Times on the return of Graham Parker and the Rumour. Since VC seems obsessed with musicians from the 60s of late, here is information about someone from the 70s who is also in his 60s.

 

LouieB

His Perfect Role: Rocker of a Certain Age By BRUCE HEADLAM

 

Tarrytown, N.Y.

LAST Saturday afternoon the Tarrytown Music Hall was shaking as the Rumour, one of Britain’s best-known backup bands, rehearsed its 1979 song “

.” The only thing missing was the singer, Graham Parker, who, together with the band, defined the pointy-shoed, ska-inflected sound of 1970s London with songs like “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” “

” and “Discovering Japan.”

The five members of the band, most now in their 60s, were preparing for their first concert with Mr. Parker since 1980 in support of a new album, “Three Chords Good” (Primary Wave). But just four hours before show time, he was caught in traffic, and the conversation turned to drugs. “Do you have any aspirin?” one band member could be heard muttering from backstage. “Two baby aspirin?”

Before Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols or the Clash there was Graham Parker and the Rumour, who anticipated the energy of punk and set the bar for smart, literate lyrics married to a danceable beat. Critics in the United States compared the band impact to Bruce Springsteen’s, but American record buyers didn’t follow suit, possibly because they couldn’t surrender Mr. Springsteen’s thrill of the open road for Mr. Parker’s desperation in an English cul-de-sac.

After five studio albums and hundreds of incendiary stage performances, the band and singer parted ways. The members of the Rumour gradually settled into lives as session musicians, guitar makers and, in one case, a librarian.

Mr. Parker, though, kept releasing new music and became in his words, a working musician, driving himself from his home in the Hudson Valley to gigs, often playing solo and sometimes with the Figgs, a popular local band. (He rarely, however, visits the local music hub, Woodstock, because “every time I go, I run into a musician who says: ‘We’re doing a benefit, Graham. For the sewers.’ ”)

To everyone’s relief Mr. Parker finally arrived. Wearing black jeans, Nike sneakers and a pullover, he looked, at 62 less like the Last of the Angry Young Men, as he was once called, than a kindly soccer coach late for practice. “Traffic on the 87,” he said by way of an apology.

The reunion with the Rumour began last April with an offhand remark by Steve Goulding, the band’s drummer, whom Mr. Parker wanted for his next album. “Steve made a joke in e-mail that if we got the rest of the guys, it would be a proper band,” Mr. Parker said. “I didn’t think it through, which is a good thing.”

If the band members had any misgivings, they vanished a short time later when, by coincidence, the director Judd Apatow called. He was working on a new movie called “This Is 40,” in which a rock promoter tries to resuscitate the career of a once-famous band. Could Graham Parker and the Rumour play themselves as washed-up rock stars looking for one more shot?

“I was trying to figure out who could perform in the movie and be awesome and also be up for satirizing the state of their own career and the industry,” said Mr. Apatow, who is that rare fan who has bought every Graham Parker album for the past 30 years. “But I was afraid to ask anybody.”

The band agreed, and Mr. Parker set aside his natural English reluctance to consider the possibility that the film, the reunion album and tour would finally give him and the Rumour their proper due.

“Big, big checks would always be good,” he said. “I’ve had some nice ones, but mainly it’s a trickle that has a bump now and again.”

When the Encyclopedia of English Bullheadedness is finally completed, Mr. Parker should get his own entry tucked somewhere between John Osborne and Richard III. He attacked one of his own record labels in a song called “

.” He was dismissive of competitors: Michael Gramaglia, who has spent 10 years making a documentary on Mr. Parker called “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” said Mr. Parker “will freely admit that he was snotty to everybody coming up, a standard English thing to do.”

He was born in London but grew up in a village called Deepcut in nearby Surrey, where his father was a stoker, shoveling coal into the furnace of a hospital. At 15 he announced he wanted to be a naturalist like David Attenborough, having no idea that might require something more than a technical high school degree.

His youth employment officer (what the English would have called a guidance counselor if they had believed in guidance) had other ideas. “He said, ‘I think you’d be good working in a supermarket.’ My heart sank, and I said, ‘I don’t think I’d like that at all.’ He sighed and said, ‘You should think about it.’ ”

Within a few years he had developed another ambition: pop star. “I didn’t see myself playing in pubs. I saw myself in the Hammersmith Odeon,” he said, ignoring that he had never played professionally and was living in his parents’ house with a job pumping gas. “I was on a mission to open everyone’s minds. It was very naïve.”

In London in the mid-’70s Mr. Parker joined a scene of young, gawky and mainly working-class kids like Nick Lowe, Ian Dury, Dave Edmunds and, later, Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, who wanted to create a sound that combined all their influences: Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Carl Perkins, Prince Buster and Levi Stubbs.

He made a demo tape that almost immediately got him a manager who introduced him to the musicians who would become the Rumour: Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont on guitar, Andrew Bodnar on bass, Bob Andrews on keyboards and Mr. Goulding on drums.

In 1976 the band released its influential first album, “Howlin’ Wind,” produced by Mr. Lowe. Looking back now through the prism of punk and new wave, it’s difficult to see how radical their sound seemed.

“People were still discovering Uriah Heep and Pink Floyd,” Mr. Parker said. “I remember reading about these alleged punk bands in CBGB, while out in reality I was playing to people who thought we were aliens.”

When punk exploded in England, the band responded by stripping down its sound for its best-loved album, “Squeezing Out Sparks” (1979).

The music was sharper, less derivative, and as a lyricist Mr. Parker let go of some of the familiar pleasures and predicaments of young men (hotel chambermaids, female doctors) for songs like “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” a gripping retelling of an abortion from the boy’s point of view that begins with the line, “Did they tear it out with talons of steel?”

But after one more album, “The Up Escalator” (1980), Mr. Parker split with his band. “It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I went to the band and said: ‘Look, I think we’ve done enough. What are we going to do — keep touring, keep doing albums? At the moment we’re preaching to the converted.’ ”

Mr. Lowe, who produced two albums for the band, said he had always held the theory that Mr. Parker enjoyed an initial boost from being thrown into what was already a professional band. “But as things went on, it was a disadvantage because his thing was subsumed by the politics that all bands carry with them,” he said. “That got in the way of him really being able to stamp his authority.”

(As difficult as the breakup was, the reunion on the set of “This Is 40” was joyful, according to Mr. Apatow. “It was a very emotional experience watching them play live together for the first time. Many of them brought their kids, who had never seen them play together,” he said. “I kept wondering why they broke up.”)

Mr. Parker spent the next few years making Rumour-esque records albeit with the synthesized horns and guitar reverb characteristic of the 1980s. As the decade wound down, he began to experiment with sparser, more acoustic arrangements on albums like “The Mona Lisa’s Sister,” “Struck by Lightning” and “12 Haunted Episodes,” which many fans regard as his best work.

He began making what he calls “a modest living,” mainly on solo tours. Lyrically he turned his attention again to domestic life — he was married with a young family — in sentimental but unsparing songs like “Strong Winds,” in which he looked at his infant daughter and imagined the inevitable disappointments of growing up. (“In the darkest night, she takes a telescope/Looks through the wrong end and loses hope/Pointing at the nearest thing.”)

“We’re like lurching maniacs,” he said about his writing. “We live through our emotions. At the same time I’m very cold and observant, and I feel a little detached from life. I step out and observe. I can feel it, but I’m thinking it’s good fodder for a song.”

He continued to write songs and produce albums on smaller independent labels. After releasing some Web-only songs a few years ago, he began joking in concerts that his new album would be “a double cassette only available in health food stores.”

Mr. Gramaglia, the documentary filmmaker, remembered the first time he saw Mr. Parker in a bar “in this new form as a folky guy with a guitar.”

“He was getting changed in a trailer,” he continued. “I expected him to be bitter, but he wasn’t.”

If bullheadedness isn’t always in the financial interest of the artist, it can certainly help the art. His song “

” began as a protest song over the company’s proposed theme park in Haymarket, Va., but he quickly decided “writing a song about that is for Pete Seeger, not for me.” Instead he turned it into a song about a woman named Virginia whose love “drifted apart like runoff into the Chesapeake Bay.”

For Christmas 2005 he released a single called “2000 Funerals,” about the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with mordant lines like “Back on the old corral, back in the land of the free/Just in time to push up the Christmas tree.”

The first song on his new record, a rant about the United States called “

,” is driven by a reggae beat that could have been lifted straight from his early records. He revisits the theme of abortion this time in a guitar-driven song called “Coathangers,” and “A Lie Gets Half Way ’Round the World” provides the kind of speed that recalls the band’s early live shows.

It’s a collection almost guaranteed to appeal to his fans, even if it doesn’t bring in the kind of big checks that would allow him finally to stop touring and give up the painful process of writing songs.

“I’d like to think I could stop writing because I’m such a lazy bastard,” he said, taking a last drink of water before heading to the stage for a final run-through. “But then I look back on my body of work and think, ‘I’m not that lazy, am I?’ ”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 2, 2012

 

An article on Page 22 this weekend about the British rockers Graham Parker and the Rumour, who have reunited, misstates part of the name of their new album. It is “Three Chords Good,” not “Three Wheels Good.”

   

 

 

 

 

[dagwave]

nice post, lou - i was a fan through Another Grey Area, and then drifted. I bought Squeezing Out Sparks on cassette, and later had to replace on CD. Still great today.

 

I need to catch up on his stuff since- not sure where to start.

 

Howlin Wind is hugely under-rated as well, in my opinion.

[linclink]

nice post, lou - i was a fan through Another Grey Area, and then drifted. I bought Squeezing Out Sparks on cassette, and later had to replace on CD. Still great today.

 

I need to catch up on his stuff since- not sure where to start.

 

Howlin Wind is hugely under-rated as well, in my opinion.

Going to see Graham Parker & The Rumour on the reunion tour this Friday in Newton, N.J. actually. I saw him with a full electric band in Cleveland once, with two members of The Rumour in the band (think it was the most since the break up- Brinsley Schwarz on guitar & Andrew Bodnar on bass) & I've seen him once solo acoustic- both just great shows...

As far as the albums go...my two faves, & highest recommends are "Heat Treatment" & "Squeezing Out Sparks", & they are followed very closely by "Howlin' Wind" & "Stick To Me"...Any of the four live albums with The Rumour are great as well (Live at Marble Arch; At The Palladium, New York, NY; The Parkerilla; Live Sparks) & there's a load of various comps to look at too...heard there are most likely re-releases coming next year with bonus track due to this reunion & his visibility in the new Judd Aptow film "This Is 40".

...

And the last album with The Rumour (though jsut credited to Graham Parker), "The Up Escalator" is a fine effort as well. I don't know if he's ever made anything less than a good album (usually with great moments on them), but, for me, while they were good, even very good & then some, but there was some diminishing returns & predictability about the releases after a certain point...and at some point I owned everything up through 1991's "Struck By Lightning"...I've heard lots from the ones after that & they are all fine albums, as our his later live releases (I owned the first live solo one)...

 

[The Inside of Outside]

Saw him open a couple of times for Clapton in 85 - the Shot was his backing band then I think. I remember a pretty high energy show (though that was a long time ago and my memories are hazy....).

[LouieB]

Much of his solo stuff on Bloodshot is worth checking out, but partially because I like Bloodshot in general and they gave him a shot when he had nowhere else to go. Not sure why the new one is not on Bloodshot, but whatever.  I have seen him several times post Rumour, but never with the Rumour and would try and see him in Chicago, but it is an XRT concert for the kids and just not up for that madhouse at Park West (the site of my first show with him just post Rumour back in the 80s.)

 

LouieB 

[GtrPlyr]

Much of his solo stuff on Bloodshot is worth checking out,

 

Agreed. He really had a career resurrgence with those Bloodshot releases in my mind, especially the first two which got me back into Parker's music. Before those I pretty much only listened to his '70s/early '80s records, which admittedly I still go to quite a bit. I'm going to search for that new one next time I'm in the record store.

[Albert Tatlock]

BBC4 Graham Parker doc this Friday evening. Maybe on a YouTube near you soon.

 

 

http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/vq2xp/graham-parker-dont-ask-me-questions

 

This ongoing series is so watchable I even enjoy the ones where the music is not actually really my thing e.g. The Allman Brothers and Lynard Skynard-heavy Southern Rock Saga a few weeks ago.

[Analogman]

They seem to come and go.

 

I usually watch most of them myself. I don't really know anything about Graham Parker, but I'd watch it.

 

I just watched the Blondie BBC documentary (from 2006) - it's been on YouTube since 2011.

[Albert Tatlock]

That was a good one too - the ongoing bad feeling with the bass player (if I remember correctly) as their Grammy appearance came round, and I was quite sad to see how after all DH had done when nursing him, CS went off and married someone else.

[Analogman]

That was a good one too - the ongoing bad feeling with the bass player (if I remember correctly) as their Grammy appearance came round, and I was quite sad to see how after all DH had done when nursing him, CS went off and married someone else.

 

That was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fiasco. I wish they would show the BBC documentaries on the BBC America Channel. That would be great.

[linclink]

That was a good one too - the ongoing bad feeling with the bass player (if I remember correctly) as their Grammy appearance came round, and I was quite sad to see how after all DH had done when nursing him, CS went off and married someone else.

Actually CS & DH have remained really close friends for all of these years...they just stopped being romantically involved many, many years ago...and CS married a terrific ex-girlfriend of mine, & fine actress in her own right, Barbara Sicuranza. They are very happy with 2 terrific daughters & DH gets on great with CS, his wife of over ten years & their 2 kids. CS & I share a mutual fascination with all things mystical & magical & he's a really great guy, so we've always gotten on really well (she married Chris shortly after we broke up)...glad to have kept in touch with them over the years.

And IIRC it was an old guitar player who caused the rift at the grammy awards (but I could be wrong)

[Albert Tatlock]

Actually CS & DH have remained really close friends for all of these years...

 

To be fair the doc did show all three of them all together and getting on fine - with DH in a godmother or acting godmother role for the children.

And yes, the rift around the Hall of Fame was depicted with the ex-guitar player not amongst them.

[Albert Tatlock]

BBC4 Graham Parker doc this Friday evening. Maybe on a YouTube near you soon.

Finally caught up with it on iPlayer last week and enjoyed hearing all those tracks again. Amazing how they felt so familiar after not having heard most of them for 30 years.

At the time I did not actually buy much music. Things were moving so fast that there was always the next new band and the next new single, with constant plays on radio satisfying all my listening needs. Was that the reason they got imprinted in my brain or is it an age you are at the time thing? It was like I was hearing them again from only the previous day.

Anyway, I always thought of him as being quite a highly strung angry guy, but he's actually a real nice bloke.