Graham Parker “Struck by Lightning”
Over time, some men trade their passion for domesticity. Some trade it for vice. Some trade it for sports cars. Some trade it for booze. Some trade it for nostalgia. Some trade it for death. It’s a Sophie’s Choice. For Elvis Costello, the transaction was awkward. But by the mid-80s, he’d traded his youthful venom for the wisdom of a writer and troubadour. Van Morrison eventually traded his for musical predictability, heavy reverb and personal grudges. There are countless permutations among aging musicians. By the early 1990s, Graham Parker had turned forty and was at that crossroads. On his left, he saw his critically admired, but increasingly softer, nerd hero friend. On his right, he saw the man he idolized, now a portly, professional, new age Soul man. In the middle, Parker imagined something a third, previously unthinkable, option.
This other option -- an autumn wherein passion was digested and metabolized as wisdom and innovation -- was not without precedent. In 1991, Richard Thompson landed on critics’ year end lists and garnered a Grammy nomination for his middle-age triumph, “Rumor and Sigh.” Leonard Cohen and Jonathan Richman had found new gears around forty. And even icons like Neil Young and Lou Reed experienced a third or fourth peak around this time. Those men, however, were not impassioned the way Graham Parker was. The phenom who wrote and performed “Passion is no Ordinary Word” is irretrievably tied to that word and that feeling. It is in the title of his documentary. It should be in his eulogy. Graham Parker, the young man who dazzled critics and pub goers in the 1970s, was passion distilled.
There may be no precedent for Graham Parker and The Rumour’s first run. They were assured and electric, well beyond their years. Every player sounded like they were soloing, while also contained within the same mode and structure. They brought to mind early, electric Dylan and The Band. As a singer, Parker was less symbolic and poetic but just as biting as Dylan. And while his songs were half as epic, they were twice as sharp and so they could cut just as deeply. “Howlin’ Wind,” from 1976, was frequently likened to both Elvis Costello and Van Morrison. And it is probably the equal to any Van Morrison album after “Veedon Fleece” and stands right alongside the best Elvis records. Parker’s “Squeezing Out Sparks” from 1979, is somehow superior. Frequently included in lists of the greatest albums in the history of Rock music, it is ferocious like Punk, but precise and clever rather than furious.
Graham Parker was half a decade older than the Punks and a few, but important, years older than his friend Elvis Costello. He spent those years in between working odd, mostly thankless jobs, traveling the world and figuring out what sort of musician he could be. That eventual form was the sum of R&B, Rockabilly and some Ska. It was a sound that The Clash would soon fully realize, but not before Parker fired the first shots. In those years before Punk and before New Wave, there was nothing really like him. He emerged fully formed, musically assured and convinced of his merit. And, from the moment he appeared in pubs, record labels, critics and early adopters violently agreed: Graham Parker and The Rumour were something special. Because, like most every unsigned English band, they played pubs, someone, at some point, devised the least imaginative name possible for their sound -- Pub Rock. They were broadly conflated with Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Ian Dury and several other acts that predated Punk but had a whiff of the forthcoming vitriol.
Of that class, Graham Parker was once considered the surest of sure things. His manager, Dave Robinson, was among England’s musical congenscenti. His label, Mercury Records, was well established and flush. His producer was fellow Pub rocker, Nick Lowe. He had the songs. He had the band. Critics could not get out of the way of their superlatives. Graham Parker was it -- both the next big thing and the connection back through Van Morrison to Bob Dylan. In the back half of the 1970s, if you knew better, you knew Graham Parker.
All of the sweat and smart and songs and right decisions seemed to pay off in 1979 with the aforementioned, “Squeezing Out Sparks.” Recognized as a masterpiece from its moment of release, the album reached the top twenty of the U.K. charts and the top forty in the U.S. Unencumbered of their beloved horn section, the “Sparks” version of The Rumour was lighter and tighter. Bob Dylan asked them to open for him. Bruce Springsteen was a fan. Parker’s new label, Arista, gilded the album with a live LP to help encourage promoters and radio stations. All hands were on deck.
But soon, something amazing happened. Graham Parker did not happen. Within a couple of years, he regressed from “next big thing” to “best kept secret.” Beneath that was “critical darling,” which was one step above “College Rock.” By 1982, Parker had parted ways with The Rumour. More startlingly, the press began to turn. “Another Grey Area” was deemed a major step backwards. And by 1989s “Human Soul,” Parker found himself label-hopping and miles from the charts. He tried more. He tried less. He got married. He had a child. He moved to upstate New York. He hadn’t lost much. But he had fully gotten lost. At the end of the decade, he was on the other side of forty, at the end of a major label deal and stuck between passion and something else.
In 1991, during the high, early days of American Indie Rock and in the years right before Alternative, there was reason to believe in the return of Graham Parker. He was adored by College radio, and that platform had proven its worth for artists like R.E.M. and The Replacements. Parker was also increasingly making more stripped down music, with nods to American Folk and Country music. This move towards the heartland had worked recently for artists like The Jayhawks, Freedy Johnston and many others. Most of all, sub-popular artists from Iggy Pop to Tom Waits had enjoyed recent commercial and critical reclamations. While perhaps not as iconoclastic as Iggy or Tom, Graham Parker was equally vital and equally deserving of a great second half.
That year, he released “Struck by Lightning.” Among his ardent but thinning fanbase, you could hear the chant of enthusiasm. It had been long enough. The time was right. There were four star reviews. There was a Letterman performance and an NPR interview. College radio played the songs. The carpet was rolled out. They wanted to love it. I wanted to love it. I was still a teenager at the time, but I sensed the groundswell. I felt the passion. I bought “Struck by Lightning” its week of release. I played the CD. And I played it again. I listened for the wit and for the economy of form. But, between passion and “something else,” Graham Parker had landed on a mostly aimless, long-winded jangle that I charitably graded on a curve in 1991. I presumed that, with age, I would naturally warm to its charms.
It would be another twenty something years before I revisited “Struck by Lightning.” And, sadly, in middle age, the album did not fare much better. Graham Parker is a famous talker. He always has plenty to say. When he was great, however, he was able to harness those mouthfuls into concise verses and stinging choruses. The songs and the band necessarily governed the words. “Struck by Lightning,” however, is an unbridled, kind of frustrated, kind of happy Graham Parker. He is trying to capture the lyricism of fatherhood and pastoral domesticity while still promising us that he has bite. It’s a hard needle to thread and when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
The album opens with “She Wants So Many Things,” a drawn out, monotonous, petty cousin to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall.” The verses are flat and impossibly long-winded but, unlike Dylan’s classic, the chorus offers no relief. In the place of Brinsley Schwarz’s honed lead we get a middling strum. In place of Bob Andrews’ Hammond, we get a grating Wurlitzer. On “Howlin’ Wind,” Parker genuinely howled. When “Struck by Lightning” opens, he sounds almost out of breath.
Like many “prestige artist” albums from the time, “Struck by Lightning” is excessively long -- fifteen tracks and nearly an hour. Part of this girth was a record la bel strategy to justify the increasing costs of compact discs. And part of it was just poor editing. There is probably a very good half album scattered inside Parker’s 1991 release, but it works very hard early on to dissuade listeners. Following “She Wants So Many Things,” we get “They Murdered the Clown,” an organ-drenched ditty that buries its nostalgia in sarcasm. And while it’s not as boring as the opener, it is equally strident. Ten minutes into the album, it is hard to imagine new or casual fans surviving the openers.
Graciously, things do get better. “Strong Winds” is a wistful ballad with a yearning melody. It’s not a bullseye but it offers the patience and maturity that one expects with age. Whereas young Graham Parker and The Rumour would frequently succeed by complicating simple R&B or Rockabilly forms, middle-aged Parker requires simplicity. When the guitar, the melody and Parker’s voice are the focus, he lands on the rights side of Roots Rock. However, when the organ or the fiddle come to the fore, as they do on "The Kid With The Butterfly Net,” he ends up on the Mellencamp side of Roots. Frequently, he lands somewhere in between, but a notch too close to “Key West Intermezzo.”
Near the middle of this long album, we hear signs of life. “And it Shook Me,” is a sweet, 60s throwback with a hip shake and some earnest romance. And “Wrapping Paper,” while short on melody, is an unusually subtle and sincere take on the delicate work and contrition required to sustain love. It may not sound like the Graham Parker I remembered, but it sounds like the one I expected in 1991. A couple of songs later, we get our first payoff. “A Brand New Book” sounds like the man we met in 1976, just a little lighter. It’s pert. The organ is spare. It has a singalong chorus. And it’s self-aware without being self-indulgent. It’s a near perfect three minutes and a great tonic.
From there, Parker and his band mostly steady their nerves. “Over the Border to America” flirts with John Cougar Mellencamp again, but stays on the Cougar side (the good side) of Roots Rock. And he saves some of his best for the two closers -- “Ten Girls Ago” and "The Sun Is Gonna Shine Again.” The former sounds vintage and effortless. The lead guitar is sharp in a Schwarz-esque sort of way, and it has all of the cleverness and dynamism we had come to expect from Parker. "The Sun Is Gonna Shine Again" wraps up the album with a lovely, but atypical, burst of optimism. It makes the case that “middle-aged Soul” can be a complement. For one of the very few times on the record, the organ resembles a Hammond rather than a Wurlitzer. And the singer no longer sounds trapped between passion and professionalism. He’s found a rare glimmer of light in between.
The next twenty years for Graham Parker were more of the same, but with diminishing returns. He had a few friends in high places, which meant that he could occasionally be found playing on late night TV or featured in a high profile, long form interview. Albums came every two years or so, but increasingly on lesser known labels. In the mid-90s, he teamed up with The Figgs, a younger, infectious, slightly Alternative band from upstate New York. And while that partnership injected a burst of energy, it was relatively short lived. By the end of the millennium, Parker was back on the road as a troubadour, cobbling bands together as opportunities required.
By the 2000s, Parker had begun to remind me a bit of the author, David Foster Wallace. Both men were wordy prodigies who people name-dropped to signify literacy and sophistication. Many people knew their names. Some were genuine fans. Fewer owned a couple of titles. But, even among that lass class, it was hard to find many who had actually consumed the material. Unlike Wallace, Parker thankfully did not trade his passion for pain relief relief. Instead, around that time, constrained by opportunity, he settled into the space that many reliable, aging songwriters arrive at. Van Morrison is perhaps the most bankable version of this archetype while Richard Thompson is a more restless but less famous one. Parker is on the far left of that dial, well past Thompson. Though he burst from the gates furiously and capably, by the early 2000s, he had mastered a more comfortable trot.
A decade ago, it was fair to wonder what had happened and whether it amounted to a tragedy, a small victory or something entirely predictable. Had Elvis Costello “market corrected” Graham Parker? Had Parker emptied the chamber as a young man? Did his listeners just grow up and leave the nest? Was he truly great with The Rumour but only very good otherwise? We knew it was not a matter of talent. We hoped it wasn’t a matter of passion. We knew how the story began but we began to wonder how it might end.
It would not take long to get some answers. In 2012, Parker played himself in Judd Apatow’s “This is 40.” In the film, Paul Rudd stars as husband and father wrestling with middle age. He’s an indie label owner whose passions have been consumed by compromise and frustration. To him, Graham Parker represents the path forward -- both as an example of an impassioned second half and as a possible means to financial prosperity for his label. It’s a heartfelt sentiment, the kind Apatow is famous for. But it is also only a half truth.
In both the movie and in real life, Parker was slightly less a middle aged reclamation and slightly more a lifetime achievement award recipient who traded in excess passion for pragmatism. He was the man who should have been playing arenas if things were fair, but who ended up playing big clubs and gutting out albums for indie labels. He did this for myriad reasons that we could guess and just as many that we could never understand. Many years before, he had sworn that he wouldn’t be doing this at 70. He had also sworn that he’d never reunite The Rumour. But he did both of those things. And, in truth, those betrayals never felt like betrayals at all. They felt like wisdom and truth. They felt hard fought. They felt deserved. They felt like passion.