GRAHAM PARKER SEEKS PROTECTION

GRAHAM PARKER SEEKS PROTECTION

by

Susan Whitall

It was Toronto, a soft late May evening, and the Best Promo Girl in Detroit and I were watching Graham Parker and the Rumour fight a losing battle with the El Mocambo Club's sound system. They were able to blast out a handful of songs in between power blackouts, one of which, "Tear Your Playhouse Down," found Parker stalking a girl in the audience, a most intense erotic moment. He lunged out at her from the stage; she half shrank back, half froze in fascination as he caressed her face and sang, the ferocity of his words belying the tenderness of his hand. Then he drew back, withdrawing his hand so that their fingertips just barely touched...then, as the girl's fingers strained toward his; and you could feel the electricity snap in the air, he resumed the stage, the spell broken.

Hanging around after the show, the girl was no longer the mysterious she Parker was squeezing sparks off of; she was just a girl, chomping gum disconsolately and bleating to her chum, "Let's go home," when it looked like she wasn't going to score a dream date.

The intensity with which Parker sucks the soul of his victim audience into his own skin can't be exaggerated. For all that the Mocambo was a/failure as a gig, it was an honest failure, an intense communion of soul and flesh at the best moments. One such moment was at the end of "When The Moon Comes Down," when the mike§ went out. Geep was still howling, like a singer in a silent movie, so the crowd kind of moaned as if in pain, to signify that they couldn't hear. When he realized he was mute, he threw down the mike in disgust, but kept on yelling the words into the crowd. The crowd picked up the beat, and boomed the words out for him, while he did the mouth play. Eerie. It was as if he'd thrown his voice into the crowd, the bobbing heads screaming out the lyrics like a thousand male and female Geeps. All the while, his wired-up, slender frame seemed on the verge of exploding with sheer animal energy.

Frustration—palpable sexual tension, charged the air, as G.P. & the pumping Rumour played on the crowd's nerve ends until they were frothing, only to be cut off rudely by the cold realities of (un)modern electricity. As Reggie of the Mocambo wailed miserably afterward: "Of all nights, it had to happen for Graham Parker & the Rumour!"

But the hard-core non-elite like Promo Girl and myself, who'd mapped out this trip privately (regardless of the feelings of our respective corporations as to whether our attendance was strictly vital), were relatively calm. It was a different flavor of frustration from what we'd experienced when Graham opened for Journey in Detroit—there the cretinous lethargy of the Journey fans (their hands aflutter in some cryptic thumb-and-forefinger Journey signal) setting off such rage in this spine that I was unable to enjoy the show, which included one of Parker's better versions of "Mercury Poisoning."

"But he's so good when he's mad!" a friend had calmed me with. "He can get his teeth into a crowd like this, and just maul them."

As Graham said, when we talked in Detroit: "The Journey audience—pretty dumb kids who think they're at Woodstock, that's pretty much what they are, that's the kina of fantasy they're living out.

"The thing is, they've got no idea of movement—they think 'rock 'n' roll,' when you're grooving, you go like this [//sf in air], this one-hand thing. I mean, they don't know how to move to the beat—they haven't got it.

"But they're gettin' off a bit...'cause we ram it down their throats. But basically they don't know what the fuck we're doing." \

They're the flipside, emotionally, of the gutsy, sweaty type of crowds who swarm the clubs of these mid-continental cities when someone like G.P. & the R. headline, these sopered-out clone rock devotees. I shudder to say it, but it appears to be the midwestern younger generation in toto.

On the other hand, stalking the tough side streets of Toronto earlier with Promo Girl for food, when we saw an old man leaning against a pole a few yards away from the club, a steady stream of spit fountaining from his mouth to the ground, I had an idea I was back on the right side of things. Monolith is a good bet not to be a best seller in this part of town. Instead, I was reminded of the tough club districts of Detroit, where Geep would have the audience eating out of his hand, where Jackie Wilson used to tread the boards of the club Berry Gordy managed. Promo Girl and I wrap our Detroit attitudes high around oqf necks, and scuttle off to make some trouble, humming "Protection" as we go.

I was tempted to create some trouble when we ran into a figging Nick Gilder backstage at the Mocambo; when I briefly mistook some geezer for Brinsley Schwarz and was"trying to get across how effective the band had been in between utter nothingness, and how painful that had been, Gilder sneered at me: "Oh yeah, it was a goood show," making sure he let me know what brand of female scum he was addressing. Chump. Give me Geep & the R. without any sound at all, and go stick it, hot child.

It made me think of the existential rage of "Passion Is No Ordinary Word" off the new album.,.in the face of rampant Nick Gilder ism in the music biz, the sanest reaction would seem to be to pick up a blunt instrument and mess around with the creature's face. Sorely tempted, I went off to find the real Brinz instead.

It's one thing to have an Elvis raging at everyone and everything from his stage pulpit coast-to-coast—his rage is direct and up-front and clean. But this kind of insidious degradation of half the human race that goes on backstage at every rock concert in the world could tell adoring fans more about their fave rave rock star than his inane lyrics.

Then there's Geep...who writes a song ("Protection"), about being overwhelmed, not only by his own pain, but the pain of others..universal pain, if you like. Who feels personally the rape of a three-yearold girl flashed on the news. It reminded me of the hapless T.S. Garp, hurtling through the pages of The World According To...,chasing speeding cars, sensing mayhem around every corner and getting socked with it, his emotional defenses always inadequate to the horrors of fife. But running after child rapists like a mo'fo'—nobody was going to persist in destroying life without getting a fight out of this bastard.

In Detroit, Parker had hit the stage already brimming with sass the Journey coneheads had no hope of comprehending.

I have to do this.

"QK, why don't you face the 80's?!" he snarled, and the Rumour chugged into gear with "Discovering Japan." Well, hey—when you're waiting breathlessly for "wheel in the sky keeps on turning/I don't know where I'll be tomorrow," a nuclear love song ain't going to be your cup of oolong.

Graham and I had settled down for a heavy talk session earlier that day in his Detroit hotel room, Graham rolling cigarettes, chewing caramels, drinking coffee, and fixing the Parker stare on me as we jawed.

You rather have the impression of seeing his expressive eyes from the other end of a long blue tunnel (Prescription shades? "Nah, rubbish," he said. "Seven pounds from Motorway Services."), alternately genial/amused and snapping when he was making a particularly impassioned point.

Unexpectedly, he was funny, which made for a tape that ranged from Serious Critic/Musician baloney to insane laughter, chuckles, and rash and indiscriminate wisecracking.

Naturally, entertaining these yvillfully laid-back children of the prairie night after night (opening for Journey and Cheap Trick), had prodded Geep's brain to offer some theories:

"The whole middle America...there's a certain look they've got, which is halflength hair, usually a lumberjack sort of shirt—looks as if they work in a car factory or they go to school and wish they were a lumberjack.

"They've got this look about them, and it's no fashion, no style, no cool, no rhythm, nothing! They look as though they came out of a rpold! And when you talk to them, you find maybe one of them is a fan of yours...they're all right, they've .got something in there, but it needs bringing out a bit. They're stupefied. They're definitely stupefied by where they are, you know, the situation.

"In England, if you work in a factory, you're fucking edgy. You're trying to develop a sense of cool, you're trying to look better and keep up with the fashions, because it's a smaller country and things move faster in that way. Sometimes it's channeled to extremes...but they're growing more, whereas these kids out here, as I say, they think they're at Woodstock, they're copying their older brothers. and sisters."

And as if the audience of future parents at Cobo Hall that night wasn't a veritable gene pool of burnt-out lassitude (anyone for mass sterilization via drinking water? Uh, sorry.."), various individuals in Van Halen t-shirts positively ignited the evening by passing joints around._So as not to get too excited?

Graham scoffed:

"There're all these kids, 14-year-old kids, and they're out there smokin' grass, the security cops are ignoring them. It's all pass# I mean, they all read High Times and think they're taking part in a revolution. And they're not! It ain't gonna cause any revolutions, it ain't gonna make anybody think better. And these kids are following that, you know?

"It's a trap! There's no forward movement in Amerfca at all, there's no...'Let's kick all these fucking bearded longhairs out and get something going!'...it's not happening. And it's a bit unhealthy.

"What , I wanted to do was mix airy-fairy and rock 'n'roll."

"I mean," he hastened to ad^, "I think people should get along with each other, but when it comes to rock 'n' roll you've got to have a bit of aggression, a bit of channeling aggression into some kind of dynamic experience!" He laughed. "I'm getting fucking scientific here, but I'm trying to say something that's important, it's not goin' on at all over it. I mean, are there any bands that are 18-20 years of age, that are coming up with a fresh look at music? There aren't, at least I can't see them!"

I murmured that they seemed to be copying bands like Styx, who tour the Midwest as inevitably as Mother Nature.

"That's what I mean!" he exclaimed. "That stuff, to kids in England, is a joke! To the kids over here, it's serious, it's our, music, our rock 'n' roll, against our parents...it's not! Their parents fucking listen to it!

"I don't care what people look like, I don't care if they've got hair down to their feet, I've seen them diggin' us, and when they do I )now that they've got shorthaired brains. It's just that that whole thing is still there, that hangover...

"They're going to do Woodstock again, now! All the fucking nutters and freaks are going to climb out of the woodwork and be there. And all the 15-year-old kids are going to be there, and God! it might even happen again, with a little bit of bad luck." (I'm struck with a brainstorm: what if it caused all former hippies to acid flashback simultaneously, and come out of their nests like zombies, to converge on Woodstock...sort of like Night Of The Living Dead! Somebody tie Brinsley down, quick!)

I described a recent John Cale concert in Detroit as being an incongruous mix of long hair and razor do's. Graham noddfed.

_ "That's what I mean—music should be crossin' over all the time, I think that's great, I love to see punks or people who think they're punks and long-hairs with beards groovin' on our music...I really want everyone to mix up, and just...get into it for the'music, not for the comfort— do you know what I mean? Not to feel comfortable—This is my kind of music, I feel comfortable with this.' "

"It's weird to think that they've only been together since 1975," mused Promo Girl as we tried to simulate breakfast (we get a thrill out of tampering with reality) the morning after our Mocambo adventure, "that this guy, Dave Robinson, comes along and says, 'OK you guys are going to play together and make records.' And so. they do! It was so perfectly arranged, like a computer date."

Exactly. When Graham tells me that he didn't like Howlin' Wind for a long time "because I didn't like my singing on it—I was just kind of learning to sing, and I didn't like it," I'm dumbstruck, because the album had long been a favorite sOulstirrer for the old late nights, with its range of emotion, and—especially—the sharp,1 intimate tones of the Parker vocal chords, going full tilt on "Back To Schooldays", knifing your heart oh "Don't Ask Me Questions", a sexy growl on "Lady Doctor." Good stuff, no?

"Now, listening to it, Hike it more than the others [except for Squeezing Out Sparks, of course], because it's more... simple, you know, more rhythm-y."

Undoubtedly, Geep can trace the evolution of his voice better than rank amateurs, but you have to wonder how such a voice lay dormant, professionally, for so long. By his own account,'Parker was a late starter in rock 'n' roll—24. "Laziness," he grinned. Raised in a tiny village in Surrey, Graham described his adolescence:

"I used to go to discos and stuff. There was a lot happenin' then—I was a Mod and all that stuff—that was all going on around there."

An early soul fan, weren't you, I posit...

"Yeah! Oh, yeah...Otis Blue...I used to, when I was 16 or 17,1 just used to sit and listen to it and fucking cr$ck up, crying, listening to this guy singing. And I'd try to copy his voice. You know, 17! And then it became popular, and it was great—I was a Mod and we used to go out and dance to Otis Redding. It was fucking amazing.

"And bluebeat—you know, Desmond Dekker, and the Skatalites, and ska, skank...all that kind of music...it was really hip to be into that kind of music, it was really underground.

"This was in '66, '67; when flower power was Starting; I was down in the discos, under the ultra-violet lights, doin' all these new dances that came from Jamaica!

"I used to play '007' when I was 16," Graham laughed, "used to sing those Jamaican words, and I didn't even know what I was Singing^ I was copying the sounds! [Breaks into song]: Amalutta lutta shanty town... Sort of...kids, you know? It was good fun..."

Then, later...

"Uh, I've traveled around the world, you know." (This provoked laughter, for some reason...I dunno, the tape has a life of its own.)

"Gibraltar and Guernsey...France, Spain. You know,traveled around with an acoustic^ rippin' off James Taylor and Donovan, and doin' that kind of stuff." Disbelieving laughter.

"Oh, yeah! I used to finger-pick...that was like '72, '73, I was doin' all that solo singer/songwriter stuff—just completely amateur. People who heard me used to like it—I used to write loads of songs, hundreds and hundreds, but they were all kind of—you know, post-LSD experience songs."

Ah, the Crosby, Stills & Nash years...(I flashed on my Brinsley Schwarz compilation).

"I was in that, but I knew that wasn't what I wanted, you know what I mean? Everyone else kind of accepted that totally and when I joined bands they were into Crosby Stills & Nash/Santana—-that kind of mixture—and I found I'd start playing 'Brown Sugar' or 'Midnight Hour'...and these people had never heard of all that stuff, and I started turnin' people onto that thing, and I started gettin' into it myself, kind of rhythm and beat and soul, as opposed ,to airy-fairy.

"What I wanted to do was mix airy-fairy with rock 'n' roll."

As I'd heard a few airy-fairy romantic fables spun about how the original Parker demo got into interested and influential hands/one had Brinsley Schwarz finding it on th4 doorstep of the Hope & Anchor pub), l,prodded the man for the truth.

"Oh yeah—you've heard a few versions? Well the truth is...if I can remember it... let me see if I'm recitin' someone else's version—I was making a tape of a few new songs with some kids who live around my way, like where I live in Camberley, Surrey, and I had a tape with about four tracks on it; . I took it to a few record companies who thought it was OK but didn't want to do anything.

"I put an advert in Melody Maker, and I met this guy Noel Brown—he plays slide guitar—he actually played on 'Back To Schooldays,' he plays the lead break which runs, out of Dave Edmunds' guitar.

"He introduced me to Paul Riley, the bass player for Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, who said 'Well I know, this guy, Dave Robinson, who might be interested, and he's tryin' to do a few one-off singles at the momenta—he used to manage Brinsley Schwarz.' So I said, 'Well OK, I'll go along and see him.' So—this guy sent me along to see Dave Robinson, who just listened to the songs and said 'Well, what else have you got?' So I just sat in his studio, which was above the H^pe & Anchor pub, and I played my songs on acoustic. And I said 'I want to get a band— I don't know what to do-^I can't meet anyone who can play this kind of stuff— you know, they're all playing diddley, diddley diddley Bad Company mixed with Yes.' Pretty much, that was what was happenin' in England at the time

"...They're gettin9 off a bit... 'cause we ram it down their throats."

"And so Dave—the Brinsleys had just split up, and Ducks Deluxe had split up, and Dave knew all of those people, \and they were in the studio, lookin' for things to do.

."And Dave took the tape to Charlie Gillett, who had the radio show, and it was 'Between You and Me,' the demo tape version that's on Howlin' Wind, that's what was played on the radio, which the guy from Phcjnogram heard, and that's how I got the deal with Phonogram. But that wasn't with the Rumour! That was with Noel Brown, Paul Riley, an unknown drummer, and I was playin' lead on acoustic and rhythm as well. Then Dave kind of said 'Look I've got Brinsley Schwarz and a few other people here, why don't you try to get together with them?'

"And he put us together. He kind of forced us together and said 'Try it, we'll do an LP, we've got a contract, everyone gets paid, we'll see how it goes.' And that's it— that's how we kind of stuck together."

The singing is what fascinated me, though...had he been singing like that while touring Gibraltar ripping off old Nuke Eyes, or toiling at his various jobs (picking tomatoes, loading frozen food at docks, a Devo-esque stint in a rubber glove factory,. pumping gas...)?

Said Geep:

"When I met this guy Noel Brown I was playing in a cafe in Finsbury Park—he got me this gig, which is right .near the Rainbow—in a hamburger cafe, and he'd play slide guitar with me, and people'd be eating and they'd listen—and that's what I was doin'. I was learnin' to sing, then. Before that I used to play at parties around my home area, I mean, I'd been in loads of groups! But nothing professional—when I was fifteen, youth clubs and just stuff like that...no name, nothing. But I only really learned to sing when I went through this thing singing in this cafe, and sittin' up in Dave Robinson's studio 'til two in the morning, singing everything I'd written to him, and taping it. I started to learn to sing, and get better. So I was pretty much an amateur...

"When I first' went onstage with a band, it was a big deal—I was really scared, it was the first real thing I'd done where I knew my name would end up in the Melody Makerl

"You know, the first gig, I thought, my whole life was here, at the Nag's Head in High Wycombe, and the place is half full and they're nearly all frieYids of mine."

V Always, whatever we were talking about, the "Protection" riff would pound its way through my tormented skull. It could have been seeing the Parker videotape numerous times (the dogs...the dogs!), it could have been the rhythm (Bob Andrews said that all the songs were structured around a hleavy guitar/drum sound, to pare things down to the skeleton of Graham's composition. Heavy thump factor, in other words), it could have been Andrews' plaintive "No-o's" sticking to Graham's voice like Crazy Glue, it could have been—as Graham pointed out—that "Protection" is a good song to travel around Detroit with. I think it's a bit of everything, and although I knew the single hadn't done so well in England (Graham: "I had a bit more faith in the kids who go out and buy Siouxsie & The Banshees and the Clash—I thought, if they like that, then they've gotta like this, this is the real thing, this is really tough. I thought those kids would get it but they didn't, they let me down—fuck 'em, you know?"), it .seemed to me to get under the skin so completely, that its effect, coming from the radios of a Sleeping nation, would be heavily narcotic. I mean, "Protection" is played here at CREEM to psych people up for heavy emotional trench work—defensive rudeness to telephone operators, casual brutality to deadline-slackers, those tough publicity calls...

Couldn't convince Graham, though— I'd slip the topic in here or there; he'd explain patiently and at length why it was too perverse, too offensive to be a radio hit. Finally, when I'd brought it up for the eleventh and last time, a verbal tussle ensued.

GP: But "Protection" could never be a hit over here, you see—I mean, it wouldn't get played—

SW: I wonder...

GP: No, it wouldn't—

SW: I think it would.

GP: No way!

SW: It would!

GP: No!

SWr Uh huh...

(Outyelling three brothers at the dinner table for year's comes in_ handy.) But really, I envision "Protection" blasting out of the radio with the same obnoxious charm "Satisfaction" had in '64, nestled among that year's crop of Burt Bacharach/Herb Alpert/Petula Clark lullabies like a rattler in a nursery. OK, shut up.

TURN TO PAGE 62

GRAHAM PARKER

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39

On the subject of radio, Graham disclaimed much knowledge of it Stateside ("I prefer TV—it's more soporific. I prefer to be stupefied. I'm just like the rest of'em out there."), but British radio was something he could bite into:

"I listen to radio more in England— commercial Radio One, because it makes me so angry. At least I can get angry about these pathetic personalities trying to control the nation's housewives—I can get into that. I can get into their power, and think about it...it makes me think.

The English charts, I offered, always seem to have Siouxsie & The Banshees neck and neck with...Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits?

"Oh, yeah, those LPs still sell the most... Don Williams' Country Hour, Cliff Richards' Golden Death, Winston Churchill Plays The Blues Classics— that's the stuff that goes number one every time, in amongst all the other stuff...which is pretty healthy as long as new groups are getting up there as well."

He rolled up another cigarette flawlessly, without looking. "The most depressing thing is, \the kids who read Sounds and NME and have all this revolution, up against the wall, motherfuckers bullshit rammed down their throats by these papers...'Hey kids, here's a new punk band—they're not commercial!' " He lit up. "All the kids read that! Those same kids get their judgement, they buy their records, more than anything, when they've seen the band on Top of the Pops with a hit single.

"The music papers do have a lot of effect at the moment—new groups are hyped very quickly and go on the front page of those papers and sell records, whereas two years ago they wouldn't have done.

"They're pushed too far too soon...or they make it at the expense of people who are really building." He laughed. "It's like, the Police have been ignored in England— and they've actually made a record that works!"

I put forth that success in America . means Yankee bucks, Ronstadt cover versions—rin short, selling out...

"Ah, garbage, innit?"

To put the Joe Jackson stories to rest, for this month anyway: GP likes him, but thinks he sounds "like Steve Miller", not Elvis or himself, and is just waiting for a kid to come up to him at a concert and ask if he's been influenced by J.J.

"Next year they will, for sure!

"People who hear Elvis and stuff who never heard me before hear me now, and there's more chance that they'll like it, you know—they'll be ready for it."

We veered off briefly into a discussion of our fathers and their respective musical taste. I'd mentioned a specific review my father'd proffered on parts of Howlin' Wind. (Thumbs up.) Graham revealed:

"My old man,,, my dad, he loves the Rolling Stones, he thinks they're the best!"

No...

"Yeah. He went to see them, he said 'God, look at them! They make everyone else look like amateurs!' That's my dad. Sixty or something—he's fucking great!"

No story on Graham Parker is complete without a chapter on the Rumour...whose cheery depths I scarcely plumbed. Martin Belmont—this shaggy loose-limbed guitarist hurtling exquisite, sharp chunks of music out into the audience, writhing in behemoth ecstasy with each chop. I expected his voice to be along the lines of two mastodons roaring across a primeval forest. Garbage of course—he sings very melodically and is a gentle soul (responsible for the one love song on the current Rumour solo album). Bob Andrews: the classic English loon—the difference being, in America nuts go around acting strange so somebody will see them; the English variety seem to feel that their very existence says it all...When Bob did a manic dance after singing "Surrender" onstage with Cheap Trick in St. Louis, virtually nobody saw him. He didn't care.

Another story, another day...

The last question I had for GP was the most amorphous. I asked if the new album was harder to sing, being composed of some rather deep slices of his psyche.

"No...it's more enlivening, more fun, really.

"You're bound to get some nights where you're trying to find the emotion...you're trying to find out what you're doing it for, and you can't get to it.

"There are very few nights like that, really, because I don't think of it as a burden anymore, the way I used to, I think of it as fun.

"You know,, somebody reminded me the other day that I'm doing it because it's bigger than me—I have to do this. You know what I mean? I can't just stop doing what I'm doing because I'm not doing it for myself, I'm doing it for an experience, you know? I mean, it sounds pretty glib, sounds like bullshit," he laughed. "OK you wanna just write that it's bullshit. But...I'm doing it for fun, the feel of something...you can't do it as a job, it's too fucking hard."

Things may well be getting out of hand these days; as Garp would say, the swampy breath of the Under Toad breathes down our necks, and he's gaining on us, but to have GP's primal scream is to have something to cling to.

As Dave Robinson told Promo Girl and I, as we made our noisy way down the hotel hallway past GP's room, in Toronto: "Ssssh! I've got a baby sleeping in there!"

No sweat...