News & Articles

Graham Parker has always had that mysterious something that makes his songs stick with you, songs like “White Honey,” the bouncy ode to cocaine that kicks off his first album, the poppy “Silly Thing” and “Gypsy Blood” from that record, and let’s not forget “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” the anthemic, reggae-tinged rocker that ends the first record.

Now, 48 years after Howlin’ Wind, his remarkable 1976 debut with The Rumour, the 73-year-old Parker continues to make memorable and relevant music. Right now I can’t get “The Music of the Devil” out of my head. It’s the leadoff song of his latest record, Last Chance to Learn the Twist, released last September on beautiful “Coke bottle clear” vinyl (translucent green) on Big Stir Records.

Someone once wrote that Parker’s early albums “are like punk for grown-ups, fist-shaking refusals to go quietly into that good night…”

That’s an apt description, although it plays into “the angry young man” stereotype that early critics pinned on him and ignores Parker’s poetic and soulful R&B sides, which have been on display since his Howlin’ Wind. “The Music of the Devil” is a perfect example of his love for American soul and R&B.

In a recent Zoom conversation from his London flat, just days before he was to begin a tour in America that brings him to Duluth and the West Theatre on April 21, Parker was happy for the interruption.

“Well, I am at the moment spending a lot of my time cleaning my flat here because I’ll be gone all the way till June, and staring at my suitcase open on the bed, hoping that will help to deal with it,” he said. “It’s a lot of moving parts, but that’s the nature of a tour, brutality on a stick, I like to say.”

I dove right into his latest record by thanking him for “Cannabis,” the song that opens the second side of Last Chance to Learn the Twist, which caused him to chuckle.

“Well, yeah, the word just went with a chord, and I said no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. And it was like now I can’t stop it. It’s there,” Parker said. “You know, I only use the word cannabis once, and then it’s drifting off into the experience, as it were.”

It’s obvious the subject strikes a chord. Parker said the longtime prohibition on marijuana and prosecution of its adherents is “a human rights abuse of the highest order,” and England’s take on marijuana remains Draconian. In fact, he wrote a song about the situation called “Nixon’s Rules.”

“It was seven, eight years ago, I can’t remember now,” he said. “There’s a video of it. We’re living under Nixon’s rules in England. It’s very punky, very pissed off and anthemic. It’s worth checking out the video on YouTube. That’s my daughter on bass, or pretending to play bass, and her boyfriend on drums, who is an actual drummer, and Wreckless Eric is playing the lead guitar, although he’s not on the record. I put it out because England is horrifying. You can’t have an adult conversation about the plants. I mean, we’re still fully on Nixon’s war on plants and the people who use them. It’s a massive human rights abuse, probably one of the longest in history and worldwide as well.”

Just for fun I looked up the first American tour schedule Parker and his adept band of pub rockers, The Rumour, made in late 1976. It’s definitely a snapshot of the time – they appeared at various venues with KISS, Tom Waits, Foghat and at one venue in Milwaukee shared billing with the Climax Blues Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd on their Gimme Back My Bullets Tour.

Parker really came out of nowhere and made a place for himself on an international stage. He admits always having an affinity for words.

“I think that in school, I was a victim of class system education. So writing was a prominent thing for me growing up,” he said, adding that he was encouraged by “some nice teachers.”

“The curriculum wasn’t going to take us to university, and I didn’t have any academic flair anyway, really, but in English I was always the best and would win the essay section in my class and all those kinds of things. And melodies were coming to me when I was 12 or 13. So when the Beatles and The Stones arrived,  it made us all realize, wait a minute, maybe we can do this.  Twelve-year-old kids, that gives you better hope because these guys weren’t from America. They weren’t from the Delta. They weren’t, you know, as alien as Elvis Presley or something. They were Mick Jagger from Twickenham, which was just 30 miles from where I was growing up. I was born in London, so so that that really kicked us into it.

“I was always messing around writing little things,” Parker continued, “even though I didn’t knuckle down into playing guitar until I was in my 20s, and started to really take it seriously and write a lot. And eventually, you know, that was my career.”

Like many adventurous young souls who do not follow the “traditional” education path, Parker left London to explore the world when he turned 18.

“That was 1968,” he said. “I lived on the island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Immediately I was meeting Americans, I’m meeting Irish. There’s a different lifestyle. Then I went to France, and stayed in Paris for a couple of months. Then to Morocco because of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and all that stuff. By the time I was there, I was 21. Broadening your horizons just does a lot for you. Does a great deal. I came back to England amd said that’s it. I’m not traveling anymore until I’ve written great songs and I get a record deal.  Three or four years later, boom, it happened.”

As one reviewer remarked about the emergence of Parker with two remarkable records in 1976 – Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment – they “heralded the emergence of a street-tough soul singer with genuine literary chops.”

Parker’s songwriting has always attracted critical praise, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that he tried his hand at fiction. 

“I just found myself writing prose, very, very short fiction that would turn into a novel. I realized these short stories were really appealing to me. They said a lot.”

The result was Carp Fishing on Valium and Other Tales of the Stranger Road Traveled. They are stories about rocker Brian Porker. 

“My literary agent who I used at the time, she’s still out drops me a note ‘Memoirs are popular.’ Well, I don’t know. I’m not Winston Churchill and I felt as though I wrote them with the short stories in Carp Fishing on Valium. What better way to write your memoirs, but fictionalized and lie through your teeth? You take in all your experiences and regurgitate them, expand on them and it seemed much more entertaining to me.”

While Parker toured Great Britain in support of the new record last fall with his new band, The Goldtops, which includes Rumour guitarist Martin Belmont, this American tour is Parker with an acoustic and electric guitar.

“I start with a song from the Stick to Me album, for instance, going back to ’77 and there’s some Howlin’ Wind from the first album. That always comes through as being fresh, playing those songs to this day,” he said.

Parker said last summer he spent time reinventing songs for solo performance.

“To try and play like the record, there’s just too much, so I get some subtle things going, and maybe some stand-up comedy, or not everyone might agree with that. But you know, a few jokes thrown out. I’ll tell a few things about certain songs. It’s that campfire experience, I think, that makes the solo show a good thing, the storytelling thing and there’s nowhere else to go. That’s it. Man, you’re stuck with it. So it’s a mixed up set, bits from different parts of my career and plenty of some new ones, three or four, maybe, from Last Chance to Learn the Twist.”

Parker noted that just three days after his appearance at the West, his good friend Tom Freund will be there on April 24.

“He’s worked with me a great deal,” Parker said. “He played on the Your Country album (2004, Bloodshot Records), did backing vocals, bass, somewhere a bit of organ and stuff. He’s all over that record. And I’ve done duo tours with him many times. A year ago, he did his version of my song “Disney’s America,” which is on my 12 Haunted Episodes album (1995, Razor & Tie Records). He did a lovely version of that. So he might even be there the night I’m playing. You might see Tom lurking around.”