There was a time when Graham Parker was hotly tipped to become a household name. This was the mid-’70s, after Bruce Springsteen had released Born to Run and every record executive under the sun was on the lookout for the next charismatic, revved-up folkie possessing a sizable vocabulary and the true spirit of rock‘n’roll. Parker fit this bill, sort of. He was spindly with a thinning hairline, archetypically British, and never took off his shades, which made him appear more nearsighted than cool. But he was also great. His dual 1976 releases, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment, heralded the emergence of a street-tough soul singer with genuine literary chops. Here was a gas station attendant from the miraculously named working-class London exurb Deepcut, channeling the mystic-reverie of early Van Morrison and the comically embittered broadsides of Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan. Graham Parker was a force of nature.
Alongside his extraordinary backing band the Rumour, Parker was embedded in England’s pub rock scene, which set the template for British punk by stripping down and souping up the garage and folk rock of the ’60s—a functional bridge between the Faces and the Sex Pistols. He was endlessly compared to his ascendant contemporary Elvis Costello, with whom he shared an acidic wit and a simmering rage. If you had asked a knowledgeable fan or clued-in critic in 1979 whether Parker or Costello would have the more notable career over the long term, the wagering would have been 50-50 in either direction.
With the enthusiastic backing of a new label Arista and featuring the production of industry legend Jack Nitzsche, Parker’s fourth album, Squeezing Out Sparks, was a conscious attempt to consolidate his lofty critical reputation into a commensurate audience. Featuring a harder sound calculated to emphasize his connection to punk, the finished product seemingly succeeded by any conceivable metric. It was 10 lean and sardonic songs performed with razor’s-edge menace over 35 minutes, which back-burnered Parker’s reputation as a traditionalist and situated him at the head of rock’s Angry Young Man club.
It’s difficult to talk about Squeezing Out Sparks without first discussing the elephant in the room. “You Can’t Be Too Strong” is the kind of song you hear once and know you’ll never forget, and you definitely don’t know how to feel about that. This might be because you find the song deeply moving, or strange and mysterious, or strongly compelling or vaguely reprehensible; it might very well be any two or three of those options operating in tandem. Following the fireworks of the album's opening salvo, it’s stripped down and noir-blue: four verses of sliding doors and strange imagery landing on the achingly beautiful and frustratingly non-committal title refrain. It’s a song about abortion—or at least an abortion—an issue area where the cultural needle skips off the disc and the room fills with white noise. It looms over the album’s legacy like a Rorschach test.
There is a lot happening in “You Can’t Be Too Strong.” There is bracing language, some of which verges on Cronenberg-esque body horror: “The doctor gets nervous/Completing the service/He’s all rubber gloves and no head.” There is palpable, almost ecstatic relief: “I ain’t gonna to cry/I’m gonna rejoice!” And there is pained contemplation of what might have been: “Don’t give it a name/Don’t give it a place/Don’t give it a chance/It’s lucky, in a way.” What is not conveyed over the song's runtime is any clear conception of Parker’s own views on the matter. Like the fragmented story songs of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” seems to regard the termination of an unwanted pregnancy through a prism of evolving temperaments and perspectives, none given any particular weight over the other.
The chorus furthers this slippery game: Does Parker mean to say that life is a bitter furnace and no amount of armor is too much to endure it? Or does he mean: Yes, life is hard and you must be tough but not so tough that you might harm something innocent in your zeal for self-preservation? I’ve been listening to the song for two decades and I still can’t decide. I suspect he wasn’t sure himself. With the debate over reproductive rights reaching its polarizing zenith with the Supreme Court’s draconian ruling this summer, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” feels more resonant and disturbing than ever. For better or worse, few songs jangle the nerves quite so forcefully.
It's a bellwether for an LP that bristles with personal and political anxiety. The bracing and poignant opener “Discovering Japan” is all guilt-sick colonial-exploitation set to a killer riff, anticipating the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” by three years. “Local Girls'' is a poisoned confection anchored by a nagging hook landing someplace between “Under the Boardwalk” and “Under My Thumb.” Third track “Nobody Hurts You” ups the ante further still, with its escalating series of gag lines, half-issued threats, and general self-negation suggesting something like the Buzzcocks following a few more sessions of Freudian analysis than were absolutely necessary. Taken together it’s some of the most swaggering, riveting, catchy, and complex rock‘n’roll music ever issued.
As if punchdrunk from its own exertions, side one ends with “Passion Is No Ordinary Word,” a chugging bad-romance fantasia wed to a spiraling snakebite riff which warily backtracks from the every-aperture-open vulnerability of “You Can’t Be Too Strong” by claiming he was only kidding: “This is nothing else if not unreal/When I pretend to touch you/You pretend to feel.” It’s a great tune, but Parker as nihilist is totally unpersuasive; if anything, he cares too much. He's the bruised fallout from the collapse of hippie utopianism, a humanist confronted by an increasingly inhumane context. He won't get fooled again.
The second side is uniformly excellent, but it’s one of those LPs like Marquee Moon or Music From Big Pink where the level of bone-deep investment required of the first half almost inevitably renders everything that follows as an exhalation. “Saturday Nite Is Dead” is a deliriously funny bare-knuckle brawler that affectionately updates Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” with bad news. “Love Gets You Twisted” sounds like the Yardbirds and screws itself into a million different lyrical iterations on the titular conceit. But the closer “Don’t Get Excited” is ultimately perhaps the album’s most revealing moment with respect to Parker’s overarching temperament. An Irish goodbye to his own banquet, typified by if-you-don’t-love-me-then-I-don’t-care sentiments like “You try to reach a vital part of me/My attention span is dropping rapidly.” It’s one part J.D. Salinger and one part Johnny Paycheck, a strangely preemptive hedge on the brink of his own star turn. You can’t fire him—he quits.
Squeezing Out Sparks was so good that critics tripped over themselves with superlatives. It won 1979’s influential Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, prevailing over heavy hitters such as Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and Costello’s Armed Forces. They were a great band making the right record at the right time—and then, nothing happened. Despite critical rhapsody and heavy promotion Sparks reached only No. 18 on the UK album charts and topped out at No. 40 on the U.S. Top 40.
Since then, Parker’s career has been a series of fits and stops. He’s made many records for many labels, some brilliant, some lackadaisical, but none of them less than interesting. Always a treasured favorite of influential fans, Parker has turned up in strange places, such as the time when Judd Apatow made him the MacGuffin for his 2012 mid-life crisis opus This Is 40. Apatow’s summation of Parker’s casting is both telling and poignant: “I knew I needed somebody who would be comfortable being in a movie playing someone who was having a lot of problems selling records.” Parker lives in upstate New York and still plays a killer live show. The enigma of his stalled trajectory lingers somewhat bitterly amongst his diehard fans, but in retrospect, it’s easy to understand.
As popular music, politics, and advertising began to blur in the artificial product-placement glow of the 1980s, Parker was going the other way, producing ever knottier and more nuanced story-songs which seemed to question the veracity of everything surrounding him. To say he was out of step with the onset age of pumped-up Cold War jingoism and runaway consumerism is to wildly understate the point. Whereas Springsteen would use gated drums and keening synths to smuggle his working-class ethos into a mainstream culture that frequently misunderstood him, and Costello adapted enough to produce chart-worthy confections in the spirit of the times like “Everyday I Write the Book,” Parker was never willing to tailor his sound to the moment. His well-known truculence when dealing with labels did not help in keeping his commercial prospects afloat, either. Squeezing Out Sparks quietly remains one of the great records you’ll never see on a consensus-driven best-of-the-decade list. If Elvis Costello wanted to bite the hand that feeds, Graham Parker chewed the whole arm off.
Fame is a weird destiny and so is obscurity. Both seem to recognize and claim their own. Given its low profile, a final irony of Squeezing Out Sparks is that its bleak landscape of back-stabbing political operators, avaricious grifters, and dead-eyed consumption is a prescient vision of the corporate-tech nightmare of today. Parker always knew the truth.
