(2 of 2)
Squeezing Out Sparks, however, keeps bumping around the lower reaches of the Top 100, and part of the purpose of the Parker barnstorming is to push the record. The future is by no means clear, although Parker holds it in perspective pretty well. "I only want people to hear me, hear my songs and lyrics," he told TIME's William Blaylock. "I'm no prophet or anything."
The first and easiest impression of Parker—both on records and in performance—is of a spoiler, full of challenge and low-slung, bemused carnality. "When the world is dead, I'm gonna make the bed/ With the hotel chambermaid ... Gonna shut the bellboy out tonight" runs one of his earlier odes to one-stop sex. Many of his best tunes, like Fool's Gold, portray quite another character entirely, a knight-errant on a lonely and probably hopeless quest for a shopworn Grail: "I'm a fool, so I'm told/ I get left in the cold/ 'Cause I would search the world/ For that fool's gold."
For Parker the quest is at least as important as the goal itself. Like many another British rocker, he comes from a working-class background, sings out of the same wounded idealism and fractured, persistent hope. Now 28, he was raised in the small village of Deepcut, 40 miles south of London. He never made it into the good schools, spent most of his time studying rare reptiles ("probably very Freudian") and playing music. In his early teens he joined a band called the Black Rockers ("We wore black turtlenecks, black pants and black shoes, and we still weren't very good"), subsequently left school remembering the advice of a youth employment officer: "Have you ever thought about working in a supermarket?"
Parker tried almost everything else, from rat breeding to gas pumping to tomato picking, finally scraped together enough money for a London grubstake. He got to town just in time to get caught up in the first seismic shudders of punk and to join forces with the Rumour, a band that sounds like a five-man scorched-earth policy. Parker and the Rumour recorded their first album in 1976, got tagged both as punk's precursor and then, just months later, as the movement's first sellout. Soon after that Parker's career stalled over a hasty and ill-received live album and a subsequent wrangle with the Mercury record company. Recovering nicely, he recorded Squeezing Out Sparks in eleven days, and penned a lively little remembrance of his old label, whose title, Mercury Poisoning, tells the story snugly and settles a few scores too: "The company is cripplin' me/ The worst trying to ruin the best . . . I've got Mercury poisoning/ The best-kept secret in the West."
Whether administering lumps, re-examining old romances or launching new crusades, Parker's music has rediscovered its spirit and vigor. "Even if the subject of the song is depressing," Parker reflects, "I want to turn it into a celebration, in the sense that whatever it is, you can at least sing about it. That's what rock 'n' roll is anyway—a celebration." A large part of what it is, anyhow. And as a celebrator, as a seeker after fool's gold and as a straight-ahead rocker, Graham Parker makes the kind of music that keeps everybody honest.