In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two in the process.
The artist: Singer-songwriter Graham Parker stormed out of the U.K. in the mid-’70s with gritty, R&B-influenced rock ’n’ roll that was unlike anything else happening in the pre-punk British music scene. Parker has remained active over the past 35 years, regularly releasing new albums of tuneful, energetic, acerbic rock. His latest album, Three Chords Good, reunites Parker with The Rumour, the backing band for his first five albums. In addition, Parker has a featured role in Judd Apatow’s upcoming comedy This Is 40, for which Parker says, “I’m ‘acting,’ and I’m putting that in quotation marks.”
“Snake Oil Capital Of The World” (from 2012’s Three Chords Good)
Graham Parker: I wrote the songs way before thinking about reuniting The Rumour. And when I enlisted The Rumour, I didn’t really think, either. If I had, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s basically been my war cry on this: “Stop thinking.” [Laughs.] I found myself with all these songs, and I had enlisted the band, and it started to dawn on me what a hassle this was going to be. Then I started to listen to the songs again, which I had put down on my little MP3 recorder with just me and the guitars, and started to think, “What does this have to do with The Rumour?” But then somebody pointed out to me that when I wrote the first songs that became the album Howlin’ Wind, The Rumour didn’t exist at all. So, I’ve never written for The Rumour. The first four albums I did with them weren’t written for The Rumour, they were just songs. Everything became clear then. They can play these songs, so why not?
“Snake Oil” is right up our street, because there were reggae influences on the first album that came out in ’76, and I’ve used that kind of groove throughout my career. Musically, it was perfect for these guys. Lyrically, if you want to get into that side of the song, I was writing it during the Glenn Beck reign and had the kind of blinding flash that this is all snake oil. It all came from England, back in the day, when the guy would turn up in the town selling Murphy’s Cure-All, an elixir which would relieve menses, gout, and make men vigorous. America did the same thing as it was growing. The snake-oil salesmen would come around—the carnival barkers—and in a blinding flash it occurred to me that this is what Glenn Beck was doing, and many others. “Buy into this scenario, buy into this anger, come onto my side, I’ll cure you. The liberals are taking it all away from us. The blacks and the gays. And, by the way, buy some of this gold.” [Laughs.]
Suddenly I saw the entire world through this prism of snake oil. And America is the prime example. It’s not England anymore. The song just wrote itself. Because everything—exercise machines, diet programs, health food, everything—I just started to see snake oil, snake oil. [Laughs.]
The A.V. Club: Did it always have a reggae rhythm, or did that develop as you were recording with The Rumour?
GP: No. Most of these songs were nailed. My M.O. these days is to get things finished way before I go into the studio. In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn’t really have quite enough nuance. Back then, The Rumour were more experienced than me. They’d been in bands that had actually played professionally, where I was completely naïve and had no professional experience whatsoever. Now, of course, it’s different. I have the arrangements pretty locked. So it was always reggae, this tune; it always had that groove that was totally natural to the lyric. These things work together for me. It’s a bit of lyric and a bit of rhythmic structure, and the song fires out of that, as it were.
I think when we rehearsed, I said, “Okay, second chorus, cut it in half and go to the bridge; it’s too long,” a few bits like that. But with The Rumour, I wasn’t going to overburden them by giving them too many riffs and things. Again, it was a case of “stop thinking.” We did it in about nine days, the entire album. Most songs were the second take or something. I told the guys, “Bring what you got,” and they did. They didn’t need to dismantle the song and take it apart because it was good enough in the first place. Whereas some of my earlier ones, there were a few things I didn’t really have together, and they needed to help me as far as structure goes.
“Back To Schooldays” (from 1976’s Howlin’ Wind)
GP: “Back To Schooldays” was one of the first songs I wrote, and it was probably writing that around 1973 that made me realize I was on the right track. Because in England at that time, a lot of people don’t seem to realize, there wasn’t punk rock or new wave. There was progressive rock, which is what people who thought they were intelligent listened to, and there were the pop hits, the gimmick hits, that were all over Top Of The Pops. And the real exciting thing that was going on, I guess, was what was erroneously called “glam.” There were some good writers there. There was David Bowie, who had stopped being a hippie wearing a dress and decided he wanted to be a pop star and write pop songs; and Marc Bolan, who didn’t want to sit around cross-legged anymore singing about people with stars in their hair, and wanted to be a pop star and started writing pop songs. That was the most exciting thing going on in that ’70s period.
Still, what ruled in the provinces was prog rock. You’d be surprised at the amount of people—even my age, when I was 22 or 23—who were just getting into Uriah Heep. But I was digging into something else; I was digging into the influences I had been into when I was a kid, when I was 15 and 16, which was soul music and ska and Eddie Cochran. I was getting away from the prog rock and the psychedelic scene, and I was starting to think I was on a new track, that I would reinvent pop music with three-and-a-half-minute songs with a lot of aggression. I wrote “Back To Schooldays” probably from hearing Eddie Cochran a few times on the radio, those very old hits. And I was like, “This is really something. No one else is doing this right now.” I didn’t hear anything like it. I didn’t hear lyrics like it from new bands, new acts. I didn’t hear music like it. I was combining these rather intense lyrics about education being a farce, because my education was a farce. I was a working-class kid, and we were educated to be mechanics, or to go work in a gas station—which was one of the many jobs I did, as a matter of fact. “I’m going back to schooldays to put them right,” to show them, “I just educated myself, pal, and it’s nothing like your system.”
So it was a very powerful song for me, in that respect, and really made me think I could do this. You have to realize, I had no experience. I wasn’t in bands playing in bars, like people think I was. To a tiny extent perhaps, inasmuch as I left home when I was about 18 and traveled around a bit. And by the time I was 20 or 21, I found myself in Morocco and joined a psychedelic band called Pegasus. [Laughs.] I met them in Gibraltar and we took the band to Morocco, but we didn’t practice, we just jammed on minor chords doing psychedelic stuff. And I played with various other configurations of musicians, but we were never really bands, because bands mean discipline and work, and I never did that. So when I hit upon that song and also “Soul Shoes” that appeared on Howlin’ Wind, I realized I was really onto to something here, you know?
AVC: Did you mind being categorized as “pub rock?”
GP: Yeah, I did. I didn’t understand what that was. I had this backing band put around me by this guy I’d met through serendipity in London. I went to London and somehow imposed myself on a few musicians and they said, “You should meet this guy Dave Robinson, he might like your songs.” And he did, as it happened. And he also managed this band called Brinsley Schwarz that I’d seen in the papers. I didn’t know anything about the London scene. I was living in the country, in the suburbs, back with my parents, deciding that now I’d write songs and be somebody. I met Dave, and he put these musicians around me, and I thought, “I’m meeting people who’ve had their name in Melody Maker. That’s incredible.” I didn’t know who they were, but they could play my music. And then I started reading these words “pub rock” in my early reviews. I thought, “What the fuck is this all about?” And then Dave gave me some Brinsley Schwarz records; Brinsley was in The Rumour, and our guitarist Martin Belmont was in this band called Ducks Deluxe, so he gave me one of their records. Ducks Deluxe was a pretty tough band, but Brinsley Schwarz? I heard that and literally thought, “What’s this lame country music got to do with me?” [Laughs.] “This Nick Lowe sings like a wimp; I don’t get it.” I was guilty by association. [Laughs.] It happens, man.
AVC: At some point did your opinion soften on Brinsley Schwarz and Nick Lowe?
GP: Well, my tastes became much wider. My tastes at that time were very tunnel-visioned, because I thought I was the only person with the secret. That was my idea of things. There was nothing else like me. And I was right, especially in the first year of my career, in 1976. It wasn’t until mid-1977, when the first Sex Pistols records came out, that everything changed. Suddenly there were a lot of people saying, “Well, that’s a lot like GP. Angry, three-and-a-half minute songs.” I love Nick Lowe’s work now. I grew to appreciate it, and to appreciate a lot more things as well. It’s one of those things where you grow up a bit. Back then I didn’t think anyone was any good. I really didn’t. I think that’s what drove me. You need a driving force sometimes, especially in the early days.
“Pourin’ It All Out” (from 1976’s Heat Treatment)
GP: Again, that’s an expression. It’s that youthful thing of, “Nobody really understands me, so sometimes I feel like pouring it all out, how I really feel.” It’s a cliché, really. But I always had the passion and power to pull it off. I was doing that in every song, anyway; it just kind of was embodied in that song.
AVC: It’s surprising that song was never a single, because it’s one of your catchiest early songs.
GP: Mostly I’ve never let record companies become involved with my music, which was a very smart thing that my first manager Dave Robinson did, to keep them out of it. “Let’s take their money, make the record, and turn it in.” But I was always interested in other people’s opinion of what was the catchy song. I always had the same trouble with record companies, in that they couldn’t decide. My first single was “Silly Thing,” from Howlin’ Wind, and it was undeniably catchy, but it wasn’t a hit. None of them were really hits. I just think people were confused as to what would be the right thing to send to radio as a single. I don’t even remember what came out from that album as a single, if anything. I thought of things more in terms of England then. The American labels put different things out as they always did with English bands, even going back to the Beatles. But this was still ’76, so no one really knew how to market me. There wasn’t punk or new wave, so I fit into something that didn’t quite exist yet. I existed on the back pages of music papers. It was obvious we were getting an audience as a live band and as an album band. So I think the singles fell on the back burner a bit.
“Watch The Moon Come Down” (from 1977’s Stick To Me)
GP: That’s just a beautiful, atmospheric song to me. It’s all about atmosphere over substance, which quite a lot of my songs are. I think that I was staying with a girlfriend then, again around ’76, in Finsbury Park. I would often write songs by just sitting and looking out a window. And there I was in London, still getting used to that idea that I was somebody now, not in the suburbs working various dead-end jobs. My name was in the papers, and I’d be on the BBC on some TV special, and I’d already done two tours of America in the first year of my career, so I was very excited about everything that was happening to me. There I was, getting used to all this, and I would sit there and look out the window at London instead of the suburbs in England, and the song kind of has these images of working men walking by, splashing through the gutters and the sand, and children on the playground playing, and suddenly the punchline comes: “Watch the moon come down,” out of nowhere. That’s how these things sometimes happen. There isn’t a great deal of meaning behind it. It’s an atmospheric, dare I say, poetic kind of exercise. Still a favorite of mine, that song.
AVC: Some critics have described it as your first serious or adult song.
GP: Well, I guess you can throw a few clichés at it, like “adult.” Not so ranting and raving, let’s put it that way. Reflective. But look back at Howlin’ Wind, there’s a song called “Between You And Me” on it, and it’s the same deal. It’s atmospheric, it’s personal, it’s got sweetness to it. All these things have been in my songs from the beginning, really. They were just overshadowed by the fact that there wasn’t an “angry young man” around then, and I became it. So that’s what they leaned on, the reviews. They were full of “ferocious punch,” and they forgot the songs sometimes.
AVC: How did you feel once Elvis Costello and more musicians of his ilk came around? Competitive?
GP: No, I think I felt more competitive with The Rolling Stones. [Laughs.] It’s a competitive game, there’s no doubt. There’s a lot of macho posturing, and definitely I felt like I was the kid. I saw other people popping up and getting slightly compared with me for about five minutes, but then suddenly it was like, “No, they’re their own thing,” and people got it in perspective. I still felt very good about my position. Every record was selling a little more, every tour got bigger. We didn’t play a ton of pub gigs, because we didn’t have to. We played a few, and then almost immediately we went on tour opening for Ace, in theaters. Then we did our own tour in theaters. I felt established in a very short time.
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