Wheat Treatment
Graham Parker
talks about his not-so-new found love of
country music
By Kevin Wierzbicki

All photos by Jolie Parker courtesy of Bloodshot Records

Kevin Wierzbicki: When I first heard that you were putting out a country album, I thought, “You’re kidding!” But then I revisited a bunch of your records, and you’ve actually been doing this for a long time.

Graham Parker: Yeah, I have, actually. As I point out to people, the B-side of my first single, “I’m Gonna Use It Now,” could’ve easily fit in on this album. A couple of cuts on Deepcut to Nowhere, my last album (Razor and Tie, 2001), would’ve worked here. There’s always been one or two. The country influence kind of came to me when I started writing good songs. That would be somewhere in ’73, ’74, when all of my influences were coming together with a bit of reggae, Stones, Van Morrison and Dylan. All kinds of rootsy things, to use that cliché, were coming together, and country was just one of them. I’ve never been a huge fan of country per se, just a few things here and there. But for this album there was a preponderance of it. It seemed a good idea to stress that aspect, even in the title of the album, and me wearing silly hats…

Kevin: And a bola tie! (A star-shaped number is visible in the cover photo--KW).

Graham: Yeah, and a bola tie! (Laughs)

Kevin: You look like the new sheriff in town…

Graham: (Laughs) That bola tie’s been lying around for years. I went through a bola tie phase sometime in the ’80s. I don’t much like wearing [dress] shirts anymore, so I’m wearing it over a t-shirt in the picture. I’m just looking at it; that’s the star of Texas there or something. So basically, Your Country started because I had enough songs for a couple of albums. That gave me three choices. One was to mix-and-match the songs, which would be fairly typical and would have been like my last album, Deepcut to Nowhere, which had that varied feel to it; to go in the more pop/rock direction or to go in the country direction. I just looked at the songs and thought that I could go in this direction to a large degree. I prefer singing this kind of stuff to hard rock these days anyway. It suits the way my voice has become, which is a much more flexible and deeper instrument than it used to be. It just seemed like an enjoyable situation for me, and a different kind of album, even though as you say this is not new to me. It’s not like I’ve gone Brazilian or something. That would be different.

Kevin: You split your time between the U.S. and Britain?

Graham: Yeah, but right now I’m much more time in America.

Kevin: I notice some of the song titles on Your Country are very American, like “Tornado Alley” and “Almost Thanksgiving Day.”

Graham: It’s very infused in me, the American way of life. I’ve spent much more time over here for many years now really. England is somewhere I know, whereas America is somewhere I’ve been discovering and keep on discovering; there’s so much to it. I think my Englishness comes out more in my fiction writing now. I’ve got a novel out called The Other Life of Brian and I have some short stories out called Carp Fishing on Valium where a lot of old English stuff comes out, working-class English conversations. That’s an interesting thing to see---I don’t write fiction in America in “American,” but I write songs in “American.” Which, to a great extent, we always have. Go back to the Stones and the Beatles---where was the influence coming from? America. And once you live here, of course, you pick up on all these bizarre things like “tornado alley” and “Thanksgiving day,” a strange custom that we don’t have in England, obviously. Or July the 4^th, we don’t have that either.

Kevin: You mentioned The Other Life of Brian. That book’s character, Brian Porker, is based on you, right?

Graham: Obviously I’ve got lots to draw from, and I did with the novel. That’s the fun thing about fiction. You can take the ideas you’ve got, the experiences, and then blow it all out of proportion. In The Life of Brian, he ends up being a helpless kind of victim of his manager’s craziness. He gets sent to Tasmania and the Arctic Circle--places I’ve never been, but I do know that territory pretty well, meaning the territory of the manager and the artist. When you start your career, the manager is that kind of father figure who is always trying to twist your arm into doing things you don’t want to do. Three or four years into your career you start to try and represent yourself a bit more, and of course they’re always beating you down and saying, “Nope, you’ve got to tour Scandinavia.” Well, you know, why? (Laughs) It’s the dead of winter! It’ll be horrid! So Brian is just seething with anger but is helpless to do anything about it. He just gets knocked about with the tide anyway. Which I felt was a fun idea, to get him into all kinds of scrapes and jams and hopefully get some comedy out of it.

Kevin: Did you ever feel like hanging it up in your early days? You had some problems with your first record label.

Graham: You know, to me it wasn’t as bad as it seemed to everybody else. I came from a working class background. One day I was like every other person I knew, which was no money to speak of, with a beaten-up, second hand car, working in a gas station and doing cleaning jobs in the afternoon. A no-hoper, you know? Nobody around me knew, really, that I had this kind of talent. I was kind of working on it in secret. Then I met a few key people--Dave Robinson, my first manager, being one of them. After I’d done a demo or two, one gets on the radio and that same day I’ve got a record deal. I’ve got this big check in my hand, and I’ve been successful ever since. So even when Mercury were showing their true colors---which was a label peopled by very old folks, it seemed to me, who weren’t interested---I was still feeling like I was living somewhere near being a pop star. Suddenly my name was in the papers and the first year of my career I had two albums out and was on “Top of the Pops” in England. I don’t care whether you’re the Sex Pistols or the Clash or whatever--being on that crappy show “Top of the Pops” is the greatest achievement in your career! You grow up watching this crappy show and hating most of it, then you’re on it and it’s, “Hey, I’m a star!” But the Mercury thing was really irritating. It was irritating to hear my manager come back from meetings or get off the phone seething--to see him so pissed off. They weren’t going to do anything for us in America. I still felt an optimism; I’m making great records and I’ll just keep on and people will figure it out. Stuff gets overblown and sometimes you get drawn into this thing of talking about record companies, which is not really what you should be talking about. I guess it’s interesting to people because it’s tension and aggravation. Its hard just talking about music because music speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

Kevin: It spoke pretty loudly in a song you wrote about the situation.

Graham: What, “Mercury Poisoning” (from the 1982 Arista album Another Grey Area)? Yeah, well that again was my manager saying, “Let’s write an entire album of Mercury hate songs.” And that appealed to me immensely! But I did one song and I said, “Dave, I can’t do any more.” It was just fun. It’s not my best song by any means, but it’s one of my more notorious ones I suppose. It’s not a great song by my standards because it’s too literal. It’s literally about something as opposed to about more universal things that are hard to grasp. I prefer things that are much more elusive than yelling at a record company, even though I did it in a fairly poetic manner. There were some good lines in the song, but hardly a watershed moment for me.

Kevin: When Squeezing Out Sparks (Arista, 1979) hit, you were part of a huge developing scene that would push you to legendary status. It sounds like you’ve kept a level head through all of your success. 

Graham: There were times in the ’80s whenever I did interviews that I could talk for two hours with somebody, and they’d ask me about not being a big commercial success for five minutes, and that would be the entire interview. That was what they’d write about. It was very frustrating and annoying. I’ve been a success since I signed my first record deal. It’s been a very privileged life I’ve led. As you get older, of course, you realize that. It’s something you don’t see when everyone’s telling you something else. You know what I mean? When you’re younger and everyone’s saying, “Well, you’re a failure!” (Laughs) You look back and say, “What? Where did all this money come from?”

Kevin: That reminds me of a fairly unique situation you have with your bootleg record with the Figgs (Live Cuts From Somewhere, a collection of concert recordings made mostly by fans and released on Up Yours Records). How did that come about? Obviously you’re not too concerned with being ripped off. You’re sort of condoning audience tapings of your shows.

Graham: There was some stuff floating around, you see, that people had recorded surreptitiously. John Howells, the guy who runs grahamparker.net, the official Web site, suggested this crazy idea--- wouldn’t it be great if we put this stuff out, because it’s going to float around anyway? Why not put it in a nice package instead of just some kind of blank CD? So I called up the tour manager to see what he had from the board and had it engineered and then I sent it to John. I didn’t want to have a huge amount of input or a lot of headaches. I came up with the idea for the cover. I called up these people who press records and got a deal. Selling it for ten bucks on the Internet seems like a pretty good deal for something that’s been edited and made to sound pretty decent for what is obviously bootleg material. As far as I can see, everybody’s doing it. People are selling things on their Web sites left, right and center. So I thought it would be really good to get into this as a peripheral thing for those fans that need to have this stuff. I’d like to do some more in the future. I’d like to put out some more peripheral ideas, things that aren’t what I would call my major records. Those it’s good to put on record companies where you get all that help and assistance promoting and circulating the things. But have smaller things, interesting things, on the Web site. That’s quite a good idea.

Kevin: Your record label is called Up Yours?

Graham: (Laughs) That’s a fictitious label with a great name. It’s just a name. The way Your Country came about, I went and recorded it in L.A., almost on a whim. Tom Freund, who plays a lot of the instruments, is a great singer/songwriter in his own right (he has performed with and written for Ben Harper, The Silos and maintains his own label, Surf Records--pg), and he told me he was recording at this great 16-track studio in L.A. where they’d give me a sweet deal. I’d never done an album in L.A., and I thought, “This is going to work with these rootsy, country-flavored things; 16-track tape machine, keep it away from Pro Tools and all that stuff. Let’s really do it properly, in the old style, live vocals and everything.” So then it was a case of, “Where do I send this now?” I didn’t think [previous label] Razor & Tie was the right label. They were still there for me, which was very nice of them, but I thought it might be a bit cooler to go with a different label. One that specializes in stuff that’s a bit hip, as it were. Bloodshot seemed to be a label where people actually buy their records just because they’re on Bloodshot.

Kevin: And one of your buddies from the Rumour is hooked up with Bloodshot.

Graham: Steve, yeah. Steve Goulding, who played drums on Deepcut to Nowhere. He plays with…I can’t keep up with him with which band he’s in!

Kevin: Who are you taking on tour with you?

Graham: Tom Freund is into it; he’s a multi-instrumentalist. He’s got a bass player/lap steel player, and that will give us a bit of flexibility. I’m hoping to get the drummer that Tom works with as well. Tom is real good at picking musicians for my material. He chose [drummer] Don Heffington to do this album. We’re going out under the name Graham Parker and the Twang Three. It should be interesting. The Figgs are a good old nasty pop/rock band, but I need something a little different for this. Also I’ll be choosing material from my past that will slot right in.

Kevin: How did you like working with Lucinda Williams?

Graham: Lucinda’s great! She opened for me on a tour in the ’90s as a matter of fact. Around ’92, I think it was, I had this record called Burning Questions. I think it was that record, if I’m not wrong. Am I confused on this?

www.grahamparker.net / www.bloodshotrecords.com

Kevin: No, I’ve got Burning Questions right in front of me. It was ’92.

Graham: She was just kind of making a name for herself and breaking through a bit. She did like a six-week tour opening for me and I liked her music a hell of a lot. She’s unbelievably brilliant, a great singer/songwriter. When I wrote “Cruel Lips,” as soon as I was writing it I could hear her voice on it. It was like magic; I could hear her singing the chorus. When I got to L.A. and was recording the record I happened to be talking to Don, the drummer, and he mentioned Lucinda, and that he was just out on tour with her on the Essence tour. She was in Burbank, how fortuitous! I called her up and she came along and sang. All I kind of heard her doing as I was writing the song was, (Sings) “Cruel, cruel lips…” Of course when she got in the studio she started singing all over the place. It was so great that I just left it to her and the engineer. She turned my knees to jelly, she sang so good. So she sang about six takes and we recorded them all and picked some stuff out. She put a lot of work in.

Kevin: You have such a vast back catalog, what made you dust off “Crawling From the Wreckage” for Your Country?

Graham: Right, well, I’ve never recorded it in a studio before. I’ve done it live. In fact me and the Rumour did it live for a very brief period. There was a tape floating around, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon, it may have even come out at some point on something. I can’t remember. Maybe one of those BBC things. Of course, knowing me and the Rumour, we made it extremely complicated. We had to complicate it much more than was necessary. I also did it with a group I dubbed the Episodes when I was promoting 12 Haunted Episodes (Razor and Tie, 1995) but I did it in an open tuning as a blues shuffle. For some reason when I was writing these songs, I was playing a few solo gigs, and I suddenly worked up this hillbilly version. Then I played it a few times and audiences were completely baffled. (Laughs)

Kevin: It definitely works, though. It’s been stuck in my head for a couple days now.

Graham: I didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do or not, but I said to hell with it, it’s going to fit on this record. It’s still a catchy tune.