{"id":21880,"date":"2021-11-03T05:30:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T09:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=21880"},"modified":"2021-10-27T10:05:49","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T14:05:49","slug":"graham-parker-those-soul-shoes-still-fit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/11\/03\/graham-parker-those-soul-shoes-still-fit\/","title":{"rendered":"Graham Parker: Those \u2018Soul Shoes\u2019 Still Fit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

By Robman94 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=23274100<\/p><\/div>\n

Guitarist, singer and songwriter Graham Parker first came to the attention of American audiences during the punk and new wave era of the late 1970s and early \u201880s. As a result, he was sometimes mentioned in the same breath as acts like the Sex Pistols, but musically he had relatively little in common with the punk bands. Drawing inspiration from a wide variety of sources \u2013 including American soul and r&b \u2013 Parker had more in common with thoughtful, incisive artists like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. But he didn\u2019t sound like them, either; Graham Parker always has a sound and sensibility all his own.<\/p>\n

While Parker good-naturedly dismisses his early infatuation with soul music as \u201cjust another youthful phase that came and went like all the rest did,\u201d it\u2019s clear that many of those musical values stuck to him. It helped that he was exposed to some of those records before others his age in Britain.<\/p>\n

Born in 1950, Parker grew up near Surrey, south of London; his mother sometimes waitressed at the nearby army camp to earn a bit of extra money. Army officers would be transferred in and out, and oftentimes when they left, they would decide that taking their records along was too much trouble. So Parker\u2019s mom brought the orphaned LPs and singles home. \u201cThe connection was almost immediate,\u201d Parker recalls. \u201cI’m 13 years old, and this soul music starts creeping into my awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon thereafter, Parker acquired a copy of the landmark LP Otis Blue \/ Otis Redding Sings Soul<\/i>, given to him by a cousin. \u201cI had this record and would sit and listen to it and cry, a 14-year-old kid absolutely moved to tears by this guy,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

By age 15 Parker was frequenting dance clubs that opened in the afternoon. \u201cYou’d just dance to soul music,\u201d he says. Parker\u2019s tastes broadened from there; he was further inspired when he saw Jamaican ska\/reggae legends The Skatalites at a club. \u201cThen psychedelia raised its head,\u201d he recalls with a chuckle. \u201cSo then, it was tripping out listening to Hendrix and Pink Floyd, things that were incomprehensible to me before I got into what you have to do to fully understand them.\u201d Next, he became infatuated with British blues, attending concerts by the original Fleetwood Mac (featuring guitarist Peter Green) and Chicken Shack.<\/p>\n

But his love for soul music never left him. \u201cI guess I was in my early 20s when I suddenly heard \u2018You Can’t Hurry Love\u2019 on the radio again,\u201d Parker says. By that time he was a budding songwriter. \u201cI was trying to make something of it after a lot of traveling around doing the hippie thing to Morocco, working in Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.\u201d He found himself once again obsessed with the rhythmic structures and distinctive vocals of soul. \u201cAnd,\u201d he says, \u201csomething clung to my head that, \u2018That is the way to go.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Parker says that mainstream rock of the \u201870s in England was of a particular type. \u201cIf a band formed in Surrey, they were likely to have long hair, wear denim suits and play extremely plodding blues-based prog rock,\u201d a style he laughingly describes as \u201cthe worst type of music, ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the middle to late 1970s in England, punk \u2013 and a style of music retroactively dubbed \u201cpub rock\u201d \u2013 offered an alternative to all that. And Parker\u2019s original music folded soul, r&b and reggae into something that was at once rooted in established musical traditions yet fresh, new and exciting. Of the five albums he made with his band The Rumour between 1976 and 1980, four charted in the UK. And six out of seven consecutive Parker LPs hit the charts in the United States. Scattered singles like \u201cTemporary Beauty,\u201d \u201cWake Up (Next to You)\u201d and \u201cGet Started, Start a Fire\u201d have raised his profile, but it\u2019s in concert \u2013 both with bands and as a solo artist \u2013 that Parker is best experienced.<\/p>\n

Today at age 70, Parker remains every bit the compelling songwriter, singer and performer. With nearly two dozen studio LPs (and as many live albums) to his credit, he continues to do things his way, building on the foundation established decades ago in a suburb south of London. <\/p>\n

An edited version of this featured appeared previously in <\/em>Metro Silicon Valley. Come back to Musoscribe soon for more from my third interview with Graham Parker.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guitarist, singer and songwriter Graham Parker first came to the attention of American audiences during the punk and new wave era of the late 1970s and early \u201880s. As a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62,69],"tags":[931],"class_list":["post-21880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","category-soul","tag-graham-parker","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","cat-69-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21884,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21880\/revisions\/21884"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}