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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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November 18, 2002
Graham Parker pours it all out
Graham Parker was born November 18, 1950. Happy #52! Most commonly he has been grouped as one of three classic original new wave "angry young men" along with Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello. On the one hand, that's damned fine company. On the other hand, it hardly does any of them justice musically, and a lot of the comparison is simply that they are all English and came out within a couple of years of one another.
Stylistically, you would probably do better musically to describe Graham Parker as a pissed off Bruce Springsteen. He writes more directly than most of the new wave crowd. He didn't nearly so much construct a personnae as Joe Jackson or Elvis Costello [as his animated self says on the Simpsons after his ugly glasses get knocked off "Oh, my image!"]. Actually, Graham Parker is in a sense more Springsteen than Springsteen. That is, he comes on more direct in what he does, with less image manipulation or self-mythologizing. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Parker, however, comes across with a very pleasing lack of affectation.
He came with the most straightforward rock attack as he understood things at the time of his first album in 1976. This does not mean that he was any kind of generic, or lacking personality. It's just that he was, per his classic song title, "pourin' it all out."
His most popular and perhaps best album was the 1979 classic Squeezing Out Sparks. His one proper American Top 40 single was the outstanding tough guy love ballad "Wake Up." Really though, his first four studio albums are indispensable:
Howlin' Wind
Heat Treatment
Stick to Me (highly underrated)
Squeezin' Out Sparks
Also, he made a one-man-and-acoustic-guitar album Live Alone in America that may be the best one such album I've heard. The two CD Rhino anthology Passion Is No Ordinary Word would be an outstanding starter record.
If you wanted to start sampling a few songs, you might begin with:
"Don't Ask Me Questions" (an angry reggae powered demand made of G-d Himself)
"Nothing's Gonna Pull Us Apart"
"Lady Doctor"
"Pourin' It All Out"
"Stick to Me"
"I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"
"Wake Up"
"Discovering Japan"
"Local Girls"
"The Three Martini Lunch" (from Live Alone in America)
Any y'all wanting to learn to play some of his songs might GO HERE.
Every last drop will go into this, now I don't want to miss now
I don't know when to stop, I just pump and pump till that's all there is
You better stick to me, just like glue now
You better stick to me, that's what to do now
posted by Al at 11/18/2002 12:45:00 AM
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