Stick To Me

Rip It Up, Issue 136, 1 November 1988, Page 10

Stick To Me

Graham Parker was a contender. Short, with a reason to live, he kicked the late 70s into life with a passion and fury that was rooted in R&B but a storm-warning for punk. He was an angry young man and a romantic, fighting forthe underdog with intensity and venom.

• Big things were predicted. Parker was mentioned in the same breath as that other future of rock’n’roll. When he visited New Zealand in 1978 and ‘79 with his band the Rumour, they were cooking on all cylinders. Fired up, local bands quickly covered ‘Local Girls’, .' .-. r.' . ‘Protection’ and other gems from the instant classic Squeezing Out Sparks. It seemed world domination was a kiss away. But as the 80s began, Parker lost his way. He dropped the Rumour and his fiery anger - seemed burnt out. Until now, that is. God knows where all this new vitality is coming from, but in this era of comebacks, Parker . has made a surprising return with The Mona Lisa’s Sister. It’s ' : an honest, hook-filled album that puts Sparks in the shade. No-one’s gonna kick sand in -

GRAHAM PARKER LOOKS BACK IN ANGER

Graham Parker’s face anymore. He remembers New Zealand well. I low the Auckland City Council banned dancing at his town hall concerts, afraid that the balcony might collapse. Making the front pages in a -.C . bizarre photo, swinging dukes with that other feisty five-footer who was our Prime Minister at the time. ; ..-1 “It was very funny,” recalls Parker from his home in upstate New York. “We were getting out of the aeroplane and [publicist] Daryl Sambell noticed that Muldoon was up the front. So he got us together for a photo. My dodgy Irish manager was lurking around in the background. It looked like a cocaine deal was going on.” Parker’s a speedy, self-assured talker with a mid-Atlantic accent and a fine sense of irony. Which is just as well considering his experiences with the music business. Why did the . • breakthrough never happen? Maybe his "material was too - biting for the US market; certainly the troubles with his US record company (that inspired ‘Mercury Poisoning’ are still a cause for rancour.;' . £ “I hear what’s selling big and 90 percent of the time I find it’s predictable. It’s not what I have ■ to say. My lyrics are a bit heavier, and more akward for the average person to get a handle of. That’s not to say I think the songs couldn’t be much more popular. I thinkthey could. But still .there’s something missing.

“And Mercury buried me, that’s a fact. I was before any kind of explosion of new music, and I think I suffered from that, and I suffered from Mercury being incredibly cheap. Even now, when I have two records in the Rolling Stone top 100 albums of the last 20 years, Mercury put in a little quarter-page ad with their three artists who were in the Top 100, and they used the same picture of me they always use, which is a photograph of a store cut-out. Every tour I did on Mercury I’d turn up at the pub and that photo would be there. And this person looks like a moron, like something out of Willy De Ville’s band! You wouldn’t want to buy records from this moron! It was a joke. “Mercury didn’t spend in any way. They didn’t say ‘This is it, let’s go, there’s no competition.’ At the time I didn’t really mind, but my managers were tearing

their hair out ‘cause they could see what was going on. And they could see what a waste it was.” , Abandoning Mercury in 1979, Squeezing Out Sparks was a brilliant debut for Arista. That proved to be his career’s peak, however. What happened to the momentum? “It’s hard to get a handle on it, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to figure it out. The general opinion seems to be the last three or four albums I’ve done since Sparks have been lack-lustre, or there’ve been a few good songs. To me, the; ." ’ production was the thing that wasn’t right. That’s my feeling, though some say the songs weren’t as good as the earlier albums. . “But you have to keep going,' you can’t sit there and think, what will impress the critics again. I just come up with the best I’ve got, and if it turns out to

be five steps down from Squeezing Out Sparks, it’s still • damn good, I know that. I think I’ve made some stuff that’s in the top league of rock music. That’s my feeling and I can’t help it if it sounds big-headed. And not many people keep that up for every album they make.” Another factor, says Parker, was that he ditched the ... “aggressive” sound of the Rumour for more slick ” production. “I called them ■- r' around to my place in London and said I think it’s time we split up. 1 fired them in fact! It was mutual, though. They were like, yeah, we’ve had enough as well, we want to be the Rumour and do our own thing, which lasted about five minutes. I’d had enough, I wanted to sound different. I’d been dying to change my band after two albums but I was just weak about it. I’m glad I didn’t, because then Squeezing Out Sparks came out as ‘Graham Parker And The Rumour’. We really hit peak.” Parker drifted to RCA, then Elektra, where he made his last album, Steady Nerves, in 1985. Then he signed with Atlantic, . which proved another awkward relationship. Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun and his A&R people didn’t think Parker’s songs were good enough, and didn’t like his approach. “I thought making something uncommercial, like my demos, anything, would pay off better in the end than me trying this ■' ■, considered kind of record making they have now; Where if you haven’t got a hit on the , album, they stop everything and get a songwriter in. z “Ahmet Ertegun liked about two out of 20 songs, which I thought was totally ridiculous. I thought this guy cannot .' understand a guy on an acoustic guitar anymore.‘Cause he

probably hears demos by all these jive black people, y’know,

with all this bullshit on. People’s demos these days sound like 24 track records. Any schmuck can sit there and listen to something twice, listen to the radio, realise it doesn’t sound like the radio and say, ‘Well, we can’t sign him.’ So I got off of Atlantic.” t >;*; So Parker returned to RCA, under the proviso that he had artistic control. “I said it would take a minimum amount of money. I didn’t want to make it in New York City for $ 150,000, I’d do it as cheap as possible. Because that’s what I wanted the record to be like, and they wouldn’t be losing anything.” Still, his problems weren’t over. When RCA Europe didn’t show any enthusiasm for the finished result — “they didn’t return calls, didn’t know who I was” — he sought a separate deal. Which is how he ended up at Demon (through Liberation in NZ), where Elvis Costello and John Hiatt revitalised their careers with low budget, low tech albums. “In England my reputation has been zero, it’s been really bad since 1980, and I thought Demon would give it a bit of street cred, ‘cause they don’t sell hit singles, they sell LPs of worthwhile artists.” Not happy with the production on his recent albums, Parker co-produced The Mona Lisa Sister with < ex-Rumour guitarist Brinsley Schwarz. “What happens when you’re thinking about producers is, names come up, and you ? • might meet a few people. But basically the guy that you pick, you meet him for lunch — and the next thing you know, you’ve agreed to it, and you’re in the studio for two months with the guy. Whatever anybody says at lunch, it’s not really enough to get spiritually involved with the thing. What I think about producers is, because it’s their job they get a technique down.

And it doesn’t matter what the artist says, the producer will apply his technique to the record. So you get a certain sound. “And accepting the fact that a record has to cost $ 150,000 is . wrong. That’s what almost every name producer will do. And they seem to have tunnel vision these guys. They get into one thing on the keyboard and it takes four hours. . “So I said, I just can’t work with a producer, I gotta do it myself. I gotta be the guy who says, ‘Okay, we’ve got two hours to get three keyboard tracks down. Let’s go! C’mon, time is money! That track’s great, forget it! No, leave it, I like it. I’m the man, thank you, goodnight!’ “Because I wanted it to be like my demos, which ended up a whole lot more exciting than $ 150,000 worth of production. That was what I went for on this production. But don’t hold me to it, I might want to go Phil Spector on the next one. I don’t think so, ‘cause I can’t stand seeing all this money pouring away, and the people who listen, the fans, just don’t hear that, it gets in the way. If you refine things too much you forget how good they were in the beginning.” Parker’s approach has been vindicated in a powerful return to form comparable to Costello’s King America and Hiatt’s ' Bring The Family. It’s not that he produces his best work when his back’s against the wall — “I’m trying to think when in life I’ve felt totally comfortable” — but the songs did come as a result of the adversity. ’ Looking back on the songs on his acclaimed 1976 debut , -. J Howlin ’ Wind Parker says “I thought I was on to some : mind-blowing reality then. Now I don’t feel like that about songs. You can’t. You know too much. It’s almost like I’m putting these clever lines together, thinking, is this really any good? It’s hard to tell. “The themes are different because I am. I’ve got a three-and-a-half year old little daughter, and I don’t go round. the suburbs and drink beer with my mates, and then watch dreadful English TV and get uptight about it. I’m still uptight

about things, there’s still a lot of aggression and anger in there, but it’s different, I suppose.” For the past few years, Parker has been based in America, , living in Manhattan before - shifting to upstate New York. ‘Blue Highway,’ one of the most affecting songs on Mona Lisa, was inspired by the book of that name, a travelogue across ? America’s secondary roads. Parker’s first trip across the States was in a station-wagon, touring with the Rumour in . 1976. “My impressions were. pretty much the same as most people when they come over here. They think it’s all junk food, Americans are totally / phoney, and all that. That was my concept of America, very , English, cynical things. You tour and all you see is the hotel. All I really wanted to do was get stoned, do the gig, and get . stoned again. That was the way my life was then. “But you meet people who become friends and it’s not all ■ Howard Johnsons and Holiday ’ Inns from then on.” . ‘Back In Time’ though, looks nostalgically at his British childhood, successfully emulating the feel of Hope And Glory or Ray Davies’ ‘Waterloo Sunset.’ “I was in New York when I wrote it, but that was the feeling I wanted. The structure is almost nostalgic, with the . acoustic lead. I wanted to sound like that Dylan song ‘I Threw It All Away.’lt’s just an atmosphere, a feeling you totally recognise.” “I must have been mad,” sang Dylan, “to think of what I had, and I threw it all away.” The risks Graham Parker took with Mona Lisa paid off — what if they hadn’t? “Well, that would be strange,” he says. “After three years of not getting anywhere, then finally getting it done, if it had been dreadful I’d probably be sitting here thinking ‘lt was great! Why didn’t anybody see it? I can’t . understand!’ No, it couldn’t go wrong. I’m going on gut feelings these days, I’m not listening to other people. It’s very bloody minded, but I have to do it myself. And if you do that, it has to pay off in some way.”

CHRIS BOURKE