GRAHAM PARKER and THE RUMOUR

In the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh described Graham Parker at the end of the 70's perfectly:

Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment, both released in 1976, are extraordinary works of neoclassic rock & roll that draw their anger and emotional intensity from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones, and at the same time anticipate the unsullied, scabrous explosion of punk. These are tough, passionate and hungry albums in which Parker refuses to accept anybody's vision of himself except his own. What his first two albums share with punk is the frightening implication that the culture around him is collapsing, that there is nothing to hold on to. If Parker's abnegation isn't as extreme as the punks', his best songs bray with danger and defeat, and even his most romantic songs have a fierce edge.  

Where Parker differs from the   punks, and what he shares with Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and Mink DeVille - the new guardians of rock & roll past - is his relation to rock history. This is more than a matter of choosing heroes (Van Morrison versus Iggy, say) or forms (R&B versus minimalism or primitivism, or whatever you want to call it). Parker sees rock & roll as a way out-in his case, as a way of of being a gas-station attendant - and rock tradition as a way of establishing order in culture that has lost much of its meaning. The Rumour, Parker's five-piece band, turn almost every song into an epic stand of R&B belligerence and operatic intensity By placing so much emphasis on tradition al rock values, Parker avoids the pessimism of punk and the passivity of pop. The sound is steel-eyed and gritted-teeth.

Sadly, after Howlin' Wind, Parker lost his way.  Greil Marcus, another early booster, nailed that one too:


Graham Parker's first two albums remain among the very finest of the decade: lyrical, intense, emotionally specific; a rough and untrained voice somehow merging perfectly with the Anglicized Blonde on Blonde/Stax-Volt classicism of the band. It was a signal debut, Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment both arriving in 1976 along with a string of Let's-Conquer-the-USA club dates. Then Parker and the Rumour ahd to deal with commercial success, or rather the lack of it: to find themselves an audience or else face a foreclosed future of second-on-the-bill, short-term contracts and premature breakup, their best music perhaps ahead of them and out of reach.

Things did not work out. English punk--which Parker had anticipated with his working-class fury, if not his style--appeared, and made him seem irrelevant, or, worse, tame. Elvis Costello (who, when I first heard him, sounded to me like a hoax that Parker and his sometime producer Nick Lowe had thought up in an inspired moment) emerged with music and an image that could at once take off from punk and escape its enemies. More obsessed, savvy and marketable than Parker, Costello absorbed the few fans Parker had won, and leaped right over him. And on its own terms, Parker's career stopped cold. Stick to Me, out in late 1977, featured a narrow, grating sound that made it impossible to listen to; determined to get out of the US contract with Mercury, Parker followed with a bad live LP. The strategy worked, but whether Parker would be able to pull himself out of the hole he'd felt forced to dig was another question.

Parker found his muse again the following year, with Squeezing Out Sparks - a spotty but damn impressive album.  Marcus nailed that one, too:


Squeezing Out Sparks, produced by former Phil Spector arranger Jack "Lonely Surfer" Nitzsche, lets you hear what Parker was after on Stick to Me, for it's made in the same vein, though this time the music is full of presence: turn the record up and it gets more exciting, not more shrill. In 1977, Graham Parker and the Rumour were reaching for the harshest edge in their music, and that's what they offer here. They've put aside the grandeur and the richness — horns, keyboards and the romantic pessimism — of the first two albums in favor of fuzz tone, fast tempos, hard drumming and desperate, even paranoid singing. The proof of the band's depth is that this approach is most successful at its most extreme.

The authority in Parker's voice — the way he commands your attention — and the momentum in Brinsley Schwarz' guitar playing can take your breath away. You can't tell if the song was written around Schwarz' riff — a searing, muscular attack that carries Parker past himself again and again — or if Schwarz pulled the riff out of something Parker showed him, be it melody or Parker's attack, but that riff is so strong and distinctive the band finally steps back and simply lets Schwarz take the song. Parker mutters in the corners as the track turns into an affirmation of emotion itself. 

...Parker's vision is worth questioning; that of most performers is not. "Discovering Japan," the first cut on Squeezing Out Sparks and the number that best speaks for the album, rams home Parker's music-as-way-of-life by reducing it to a demand for meaning, for the fleeting revelations through which one makes sense of the world. This is a lyrically confusing and musically undeniable account of flight, of an adventure that seems more like an escape. It's as explosive a piece of rock & roll as we are likely to hear this year.

Parker takes off on a jet for the land of cherry blossoms and Hiroshima, and when he confronts the time change — "My watch says 8:02 /But that's midnight to you" — he somehow makes that tiny fact seem as threatening and dangerous as the sudden memory of a murder he committed in his sleep. Images of American occupation and Tokyo street life clash and seem to go nowhere. You have only the pace of the song to carry you along, but with guitar from Schwarz on the order of the budda-budda-buddas that used to punctuate Sgt. Fury comic books, you don't stop to think. The sense of final adversity, of the need for emotional release and for some kind of clarity, hits with more power than anywhere else on the record. This song is struggle. When Parker leaps out of the chaos he's created, with a glimmer of displaced, fragmented insight:

But lovers turn to posers
Show up in film exposures
Just like in travel brochures
Discovering Japan!

you may not be able to figure out why those words end the song so perfectly, why they suddenly make emotional, not rational sense out of the fantasized quest the track now seems to have been all along, but you will be caught up in Parker's refusal of whatever it is life has in store for him.

Squeezing Out Sparks is no landmark.  The album, rather, is one chapter in the story Graham Parker and the Rumour are telling — a tale sometimes subverted by weaknesses of nerve, imagination or craft, a tale of true fear and drama. It's often been said that the work of those artists we most care about becomes part of our own autobiographies. Such work allows us to understand our own successes and failures. This has been true of the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin — all people who have, at considerable risk, exposed themselves and allowed others to understand how little they were holding back, and thus allowed others to respond in kind. Whatever the flaws of Squeezing Out Sparks, this remains true of Graham Parker.

Unfortunately, Sparks was Parker's last indisputably great moment.  The follow-up was weaker.  He parted ways with The Rumour. I remember seeing his videos for "Protection" and "Local Girls" extensively on Videowest.  But then he vanished into thin air.  Parker has made many more albums since then, and none of them have been wretched - but none of them have even come close to the level of his early ones.  Hey - I don't want to be unfair - I don't believe anymore that an artist is only as good as his last album - and Parker is still a good artist.  He just isn't the great one I once thought he'd be.

Graham Parker Wiki
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Struck By Lightning

Essential Listening

Howlin' Wind
Heat Treatment
Squeezing Out Sparks