Parker, WELL DONE!

GP HERE, the voice on the other end of the trans-Atlantic phone-line announces. General Patton? Gram Parsons? Gordan Petric? Well, no actually, it s Graham Parker, veteran songwriter, old new-waver, retired Angry Young Man and novelist to boot. Right now, Parker is fielding journalists calls and rehearsing for his upcoming tour, trying to get the brain cells fluent in time for his first Irish date in seven years at Whelan s on March 20th. However, busy as he may be, he can t help marvelling at the longevity of Ireland s premier rock comic.
I can t believe Hot Press has been going longer than I have! he says incredulously. Fucking amazing!
Since that last Irish gig with Bob Dylan at The Point, Parker s had a slew of old and new material released. In fact, a total of seven albums bearing his name found their way into the marketplace during 1996 alone. However, Acid Bubblegum ( a fucking great record ), his last collection of new songs, is sadly all but unavailable here, much to the singer s chagrin. He even admits to having all but given up on his current record label Castle, ruing the fact that I signed a deal with a record label that suddenly restructured, and then I m calling people up who have all left, and everyone else is going, Graham who?
And as for the re-releases?
Most of them I had nothing to do with. They re not my idea. Record companies call me up these days and ask me for liner notes, cos they seem to think they re funny, I guess.
True enough, if the singer s last press release is anything to go by, he s a funny guy. Prophesying the effect of all these re-issues on the planet, he writes: Huge debts will be run up around the world; record buyers will be remortgaging their homes in order to afford this plethora of Parker; prosthetic limbs will be hocked to foot the bill; glass eyeballs will be plucked from their sockets by their owners and slammed down on the counters of pawn shops from Kerry and Katmandu in order to pay for each and every CD; England will become a sub-district of Morocco in a last-ditch effort to save the pound by coalescing it with the now-strong dirham; Dow Jones will be Parker Jones because that s what everyone will have . . .
It goes on like that for several paragraphs. If such skewed prose suggests a budding man of letters, it ll come as no surprise that Parker now has a literary agent.
I m working on these short stories that I m trying to edit and make presentable, he informs me. You ve gotta be pretty sharp these days. The short story has a much longer arc to it than a song on a page. I started writing stuff around the early 90s, short pieces that were more like TV sketches, humorous things, and I wrote a novel after that, and then continued writing about a dozen short stories. I pushed the novel around half-heartedly to a few people and got a mixed reaction; some people really loved it but said, We can t publish anything this unusual. I got a lot of opinions about it. I write very quickly, but the process of getting it right is very tough.
Graham Parker is hardly the only ageing rocker moonlighting as a novelist. Recent years have seen the likes of Richard Hell, Ray Davies and Ian Hunter take up their quills in anger, but Graham is eager to put some distance between himself and the pack. In fact, he had a head start on them all.
I had a comedy/science/fantasy novel called The Great Trouser Mystery out in 1980, he points out. I wrote it when I was 22 and just shelved it until I got well-known. By about 1978 I decided I should see if anyone wanted to publish it, and I was well known enough for the first publisher to say Yes . It was a kind of coffee-table sized book with full-colour illustrations. There were a lot of faults in it, but people still tell me it was a funny book.
So, I d done it before on the back of being a celebrity, but it just fell into my lap that time, and that doesn t happen anymore. This time I had to work a bit and find out about literary agents and publishers. Basically, the first literary agent I showed the short stories to wanted a look because one of her clients was a fan. But she immediately grabbed it, which was gratifying because the novel was kind of iffy.
If such frankness suggests that Parker is under no illusions about his own strengths and weaknesses, then he s not shy about highlighting those of his contemporaries either.
I ve read other pop singers writings and I think I m a million miles above all of them, he claims. I hate to blow my own trumpet, but it s true in this case! This book is not going to be a pop star writing about being on the road. I read a bit of the Ian Hunter book Woke up. Had some egg and chips. My haemorrhoids are playing up. Cor, miserable hotel. What I m doing is fiction, it s literary. I m influenced by your own Flann O Brien, Mark Twain, Steinbeck and Kafka.
There are some music tales in there, but really, I m writing about the England of my childhood. My agent s a slavedriver making me do all these little bullshit corrections, and that s very tedious, but it focuses the work. But it s almost impossible to make a living out of writing fiction. All these novelists are University professors, they ve got a dayjob for Christ s sake.
GP is in the enviable position of still having rock n roll for a dayjob after 22 years. Mind you, he s less than rosy-eyed about the future of the industry.
Album sales are going down the tubes, he proclaims. The generation that buys albums in this country (America) are not into to use a corny expression growing with an artist from album to album. They want an instant hit and they want it now, and then they want to press a computer button and get the next one up. It s all about soundbites. The album has lost its power, live music has eviscerated, it s gone, it s over. Young people are at a different head-space than we were.
It s very hard to get people my age out to gigs or buying records, he continues. I don t go to gigs, I mean, God forbid I might rub shoulders with somebody I don t know! There might be an altercation at the bar! It might be a very nerve-wracking experience: I d rather stay at home, watch Seinfeld re-runs, read something and go to sleep.
So, Graham, you re saying that all this stuff about The Internet being the new rock n roll might be, er, true?
It s really happening, right now, he insists. The Internet is there, you do not want to lay around listening to what some pompous pop star has to say for a whole fucking album. It s over. It s quite exciting really. I m cutting my own throat saying this, but there you go.
So, did he greet the video revolution with the same trepidation 20 years ago?
Oh no, when videos were a very rudimentary form, I was a real champion, he admits. For some reason I thought there wasn t enough rock n roll on TV, and when there was, it always sounded crummy. I thought it was great acting out a song. I was doing it in 79 on Squeezing Out Sparks, I did Local Girls and Protection with this guy who did the early Devo stuff. He came to England with a guy who walked around with a lightbulb and a bit of silver foil and we made two videos and it took days and days, not like the production set-ups you have now.
I thought it was a great idea at the time, but goddammit it was terrible. It s part of the reason why the younger generation want instant gratification, and if it comes in the form of a visual, so much the better. MTV did terrible things in this country. In the 80s they actually promulgated this idea that Def Leppard and Warrant and Foreigner were rock n roll. It was unbelievable, and the young people bought into it, y know, Poison and Cinderella and Mvtley Cr|e.
There was so-called alternative music going on then, all kinds of interesting acts making records, but the public didn t want to know about it. It wasn t until Nirvana that MTV gave the alternative people a shot, and then alternative wasn t alternative anymore. So the video thing did a lot of harm, but was also inevitable in a way. At the time it was fun, but now my maxim is there s no such thing as a great video. I don t think the form is great, I don t think pop singers leering into the camera are actors.
Bearing in mind that there are some 19 Graham Parker albums (including Stick To Me, Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment, releases that established him alongside Elvis Costello as the critics darling in the late 70s) on the market, can he now afford to live off his back catalogue?
Well, what I need now is a new format! he jokes. For a lot of artists, when everything was re-released on CD, it was like, Woooo! All this money! This is nice! It was really good for a while. Now that format has worn thin, we need something like a computer chip that you stick in your ear, something to revitalise the format.
I m pretty much like everyone else in the world in that I work four times as hard for a quarter of the money. Think back to the 60s, when they used to sit around saying, God, it ll be a big problem in the future, being bored with all the leisure time when everything will be automated. It s not like that at all. We re all doing much more for much less. It s like some kind of conspiracy that was brewing all the time.
I ve been lucky that I ve ripped off a few record companies in the past, really, he reflects. I ve done the right things with the money. But on the other hand, a soap opera guy did a cover of one of my recent songs and it sold like, a million in Scandinavia. It s those kind of things that pop up in a quiet way that give me a living. Sometimes I think, I d better learn a fucking trade, I m in shit here! Especially if I go to Boulder, Colorado and play to 50 people in a place that holds 500 and outside the streets are full of young people who have no idea what s going on. Then I think, Shit, man, this is it, it s over. But now and again something will pop up and I ll think, Maybe I can continue. The important thing is I haven t had to get a dayjob for 22 years, that was like the number one reason I got into pop music, apart from getting laid a lot. Now, it s about getting through the next 22 years.
There s a yarn about Graham getting a royalty statement from Arista Records informing him that he was in debt to the tune of $800,000. I ask him if that s true, or yet another one of his colourful press-release embellishments.
It s true, he laughs. Actually the last one I saw was $700,900. Oh yeah, I got a shitload of money from them, it was ridiculous really. It means I can t earn royalties from Squeezing Out Sparks of course, but luckily they cannot touch my publishing. But it s all peanuts to them, I mean they ve had Whitney Houston or Celine Dion or someone since then.
Speaking of such sacred cows, there s a track on Acid Bubblegum entitled Obsessed With Aretha ( But now when you hear Aretha/Singing on some advertisement/Or with a big fussy band/On some rock n roll museum concert/She s still got the lungs and the dress and the stole/You might even say the girl s got soul/But not that much. ).
So, Graham, out of all the cans of prime gobshite you could ve used for target practice, why pick on Aretha Franklin?
I just bounce off something really, and unfortunately poor Aretha happened to be it this time, he confesses. Everybody gets a bit of a kick in the teeth in this song, not just her. I see Mariah Carey on TV, and I m like, Man, vocal cords to die for, and there she is doing what sounds like vocal exercises. Obsessed With Aretha is basically about the decay of soul in humanity in general. I just happen to use her as the linchpin for it all because I d seen her on TV a few times, and she s not trying that hard. What people take as soul now is middle of the road stuff.
While we re on the subject of women s issues, Parker s classic You Can t Be Too Strong was one of the first rock songs to deal with the subject of abortion, particularly from a male point of view. Is he still proud of it?
It s one of my most popular tunes, he concedes. There was a tribute album done of my stuff, Piss And Vinegar, and a band called 27 Brides did You Can t Be Too Strong and there s a girl singing it, and it s an awesome version. That album was flattering the sort of thing that you might expect when you re dead or something. The label sweated bullets to do it, and they didn t try to get any stars on there to beef it up, which they could ve well tried to do.
As you may have gathered by now, there s a fair amount of bile still sloshing about inside Graham. But isn t he tired of still being labelled an angry young man in 1998?
I often read things about myself, and it s basically like the reporter has the GP file angry, Mercury Poisoning, got it, okay. There s your article, so why call me up even? You cannot escape it. The media has a way of putting that picture across to people who don t know me, so that s what I m gonna be labelled as. Just rehearsing some of this stuff, I can see points of illustration which make that look ridiculous, like Between You And Me from Howling Wind, that s almost maudlin and sentimental. And Gypsy Blood as well, that is the closest I ve come to being sappy. But people don t wanna see that: perception is perception and reality is something else.
But anger is the most positive emotion. The first song on Acid Bubblegum is called Turn It Into Hate , literally about the idea that hatred will get things done. Some people hate racial inequality so much they actually do something about it. Some people hate the fact that the Hudson River is polluted from General Electric from 40 years ago so much that they get fucking angry and they do something.
As an American resident, what s Graham s take on the Yank pre-occupation with therapy, analysis, visualisation and all that happy-clappy crapola?
Well, America is full of new-age crazes, he concedes, but also, I come from an English background where you re told not to explore anything, where your conditioning is like, You re rising above your station or You re being pretentious! I have friends who think I m a snob because I know about wine and food, and when I order something, I know what I m doing. And it s like, Well, I m sorry, you just stayed in the suburbs and I travelled the world . It s called knowledge.
On one hand in America, the profit motive is behind everything, but on the other, I m 47 and I m doing stuff to improve myself, which is not something you re supposed to do if you re English. I m a skier now, I started playing soccer again after 30 years, I m in an indoor league. I m doing all these things, and my parents would be like: You can t do that! Be careful! An American s attitude is Go for it! Therapy! Yeah! I wanna do some heat massage! So, anger through therapy, if people want to explore it, is great. But you have to keep a slightly cynical British attitude: somebody is probably getting sex out of it! n

Graham Parker plays Whelan s, Wexford Street on Friday, March 20th.