A crimson autograph is
all we leave behind / Everywhere man set foot
Thus today’s birthday boy Graham Parker in his early song “Don’t Ask Me Questions.” Parker, 64 today, came up in Britain, after a workingman’s
knocking about in the late Sixties to places like Morocco and Spain, just before
punk and New Wave hit. His irascible lyrics and somewhat nerdy look would seem
to anticipate Elvis Costello—both did some early recording for Stiff Records—but
Parker was more R&B than Costello or Nick Lowe, who produced them both,
would be. There’s rockabilly in Parker too, as with Lowe, but Parker started
out as a leaner, meaner Van Morrison—like maybe if Van had stuck with Them. In
the time when rock bands had stopped playing driving R&B-inflected rock’n’roll,
Parker’s first two albums, Howlin’ Wind
(1976) and Heat Treatment (1976)
brought it back, via pub rock.
Which was fine for the times. The big ticket version of rock
was all coked up and stoned out. Parker & his crew were for the mates at
the pub, fed up with the stupidity of the times and glad to step out to some
white soul now and then. “White Honey” and “Soul Shoes” definitely make one
want to put on non-disco moves, and today’s song’s white reggae strut is prime
Parker.
The song was the first thing I ever heard by Parker, who
didn’t get a lot of airplay in the States, but some Philly DJ put this on one
night when I was having trouble sleeping off a tab of acid taken at a Jerry
Garcia Band show at the Tower Theater. In my addled state, the voice on the
radio seemed to have something to say about our general existential condition.
Addressed to God, “Hey Lord, don’t ask me questions” struck me as the very
thing our man in Eden, Adam, should’ve said to his inquisitive Maker when he came
around asking him about that there fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil. It’s at that point our first forefather should’ve stated for all time our
species’s lack of any foundational truths: “Ain’t no answer in me.”
Parker’s ire against an omniscient being that would bother
to ask a question is funny but it also makes its prickly point, especially when
he notes that Our Father is apt to “raise his mighty hand and break the
precious rules” (you know, that part about “thou shalt not kill”—well, why not
make that apply to the Lord of All Things as well). So, the next time you’re
contemplating something like our topic yesterday, such as a ship going down and
drowning 29 good men, you might say “the same one”—who art in heaven—“must
understand who wasted all these fools.”
And yeah it’s infantile, perhaps, to call out God for his
cruelty to his creations, but, still, it can make you feel a little better—“Who does this treachery?” I shout with bleeding
hands / Is it you or is it me, well, I never will understand.” Sure,
volition, free will, all that good stuff, and yet, the cards seemed stacked against
us. Parker’s no friend of the “if it be thy will” type, humble before it all.
He’s trying to get at just how much of this carnage and chaos is willed. We don’t
even have to be talking about deliberate death—though the song does start with
a glance at “war mongers”—but can concern those nice “natural disasters,” like the
lemmings into the sea that Parker references. Mass death, mass destruction,
enough for everyone.
“Well I stand up for liberty but can’t liberate” Parker says
and there’s the rub. What can a poor boy do but sing for a rock’n’roll band?
The breakthrough album for Parker, that made me acquire all his stuff up till
then, was Squeezing Out Sparks
(1979), and at that point his barbs at all manner of nonsense—“Protection,” “Nobody
Hurts You,” “Local Girls,” “Saturday Nite is Dead”—were hitting their marks,
fully empowered by a rocking band and the attitude that tilting at windmills
was a noble thing to do.
I caught Parker on his 1980 tour, the last with the Rumour,
and kept up with him into the Eighties but it’s one of those things—the more he
sought a kind of mainstream acceptance (a guy’s gotta make a living)—the less
interested I became. After 1980, the Rumour’s drummer, Steve Goulding, had
peeled off and joined an even more lethal punk pub band, the Mekons, and that’s
where my ears went. Still, two songs on Howlin’
Wind—which is one of the best albums of 1976—still stand up to be counted
whenever I think of songs from my early romantic days with Mary: “Gyspy Blood”
and “Nothing’s Gonna Pull It Apart.” And “Black Honey” on Heat Treatment is a passionate outburst I remember well from that
those hazy, crazy days of 1979.
Pent-up agony, I see
it take first place
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