Barnstorming For Fool's Gold

By JAY COCKS

Britain's Graham Parker brings basic rock back home

Close your books, it's a pop quiz. Only one question, but tricky. Multiple choice. Graham Parker's music is 1) new wave, 2) old wave, 3) no wave, 4) punk rock, 5) pub rock, 6) none of these, 7) all of these.

Having trouble? You should be. The last is probably the closest to the right answer, although none suits--a situation of which the test subject is well aware. "My image is very vague," Parker admits. "That makes it difficult for audiences to fully latch onto me and critics to know where to put me. But if you're still struggling, I've got a hook for you: call me 'atomic R & B or plutonium pop.' "

Good enough. The fast, fierce, sensual rock that Graham Parker has been setting down for the past three years is raw enough and haunted enough to make most contemporary rock pale out like an extinguished picture tube.

High-powered, always on the prowl for trouble, Parker's tunes range from the slyly salacious (Black Honey, Back Door Love) to the wittily defiant (Back to School Days) and the nakedly personal (You Can't Be Too Strong, which concerns an abortion). In all, not suitable for an easy listen or a fast dance. "I know my music makes people nervous, that it's not what the average person likes to hear," Parker muses. "It's got blues, soul, a lot of different things in it." What gives the songs much of their spirit and a good deal of their body English is frequent adrenal shocks of anger. These dosages may be taken as a tonic at regular intervals, or they may be administered locally, as when Parker took in a recent concert by Ron Wood and the New Barbarians. He went for a lark but discovered the enemy: "A lot of guys with long hair singing about floating in the sunlight and 'Hey, baby, get down.' Ridiculous. Some people may call that rock. I don't."

Parker's own hard-line commitment to rock is evident both in casual conversation ("I'm not about to give people music about rolling down the highway") and, where it properly belongs and truly flourishes, in his songs, which are like sneak attacks on his own psychic defenses. His tunes rock hard and burn bridges--and create the kind of commercial problems that have plagued Parker since his first record three years ago and seem to be easing only now.

Ever since the release of Howlin' Wind in 1976, Parker has stalked the big time, collecting delirious reviews but staying an arm's length away from the top of the charts and the kind of record sales that are commemorated with albums cast in semiprecious elements. Just last spring, with a new record company behind him, Parker released one of the year's best albums, Squeezing Out Sparks, and set out on two bruising cross-country concert tours to rally fans and baptize some new converts. His style of total-immersion rock is a salubrious shock to the central nervous system, and it is easy enough to appreciate, after one of his typically hot-wired concerts, just why he has attracted such a devout following.

Squeezing Out Sparks, however, keeps bumping around the lower reaches of the Top 100, and part of the purpose of the Parker barnstorming is to push the record. The future is by no means clear, although Parker holds it in perspective pretty well. "I only want people to hear me, hear my songs and lyrics," he told TIME's William Blaylock. "I'm no prophet or anything."

The first and easiest impression of Parker--both on records and in performance--is of a spoiler, full of challenge and low-slung, bemused carnality. "When the world is dead, I'm gonna make the bed/ With the hotel chambermaid ... Gonna shut the bellboy out tonight" runs one of his earlier odes to one-stop sex. Many of his best tunes, like Fool's Gold, portray quite another character entirely, a knight-errant on a lonely and probably hopeless quest for a shopworn Grail: "I'm a fool, so I'm told/ I get left in the cold/ 'Cause I would search the world/ For that fool's gold."

For Parker the quest is at least as important as the goal itself. Like many another British rocker, he comes from a working-class background, sings out of the same wounded idealism and fractured, persistent hope. Now 28, he was raised in the small village of Deepcut, 40 miles south of London. He never made it into the good schools, spent most of his time studying rare reptiles ("probably very Freudian") and playing music. In his early teens he joined a band called the Black Rockers ("We wore black turtlenecks, black pants and black shoes, and we still weren't very good"), subsequently left school remembering the advice of a youth employment officer: "Have you ever thought about working in a supermarket?"

Parker tried almost everything else, from rat breeding to gas pumping to tomato picking, finally scraped together enough money for a London grubstake. He got to town just in time to get caught up in the first seismic shudders of punk and to join forces with the Rumour, a band that sounds like a five-man scorched-earth policy. Parker and the Rumour recorded their first album in 1976, got tagged both as punk's precursor and then, just months later, as the movement's first sellout. Soon after that Parker's career stalled over a hasty and ill-received live album and a subsequent wrangle with the Mercury record company. Recovering nicely, he recorded Squeezing Out Sparks in eleven days, and penned a lively little remembrance of his old label, whose title, Mercury Poisoning, tells the story snugly and settles a few scores too: "The company is cripplin' me/ The worst trying to ruin the best . . . I've got Mercury poisoning/ The best-kept secret in the West."

Whether administering lumps, re-examining old romances or launching new crusades, Parker's music has rediscovered its spirit and vigor. "Even if the subject of the song is depressing," Parker reflects, "I want to turn it into a celebration, in the sense that whatever it is, you can at least sing about it. That's what rock 'n' roll is anyway--a celebration." A large part of what it is, anyhow. And as a celebrator, as a seeker after fool's gold and as a straight-ahead rocker, Graham Parker makes the kind of music that keeps everybody honest.

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