If one suspects that the impetus behind Your Country was media manipulation — that it was more an attention-getting gimmick than a significant change in musical direction — Parker won’t argue. Though the news cycle and the cycle of creativity don’t necessarily spin in tandem, the album served its purposes. It landed Parker on Bloodshot — where the likes of Jon Langford and Alejandro Escovedo strike him as good company — and it made the album an easy sell in the press (it generated more coverage than he’d received in years).
“People who come to see my solo sets know how varied they are, and it changes all the time,” he says. “Anybody who knows that recognizes I’m not going to ‘go’ anything. I’m not going to ‘go’ mellow. Or, ooh, he’s angry again! Sure, there’s a temptation for people to say, ‘He’s gone country,’ and the shock value of that sort of thing is always good….And then I come back and do something like Songs Of No Consequence, and it’s like, wow, what happened?”
What happened is that he’d been writing some uptempo rock songs and buoyant melodies over the past decade that didn’t seem to fit the direction his albums were taking. Much of this material predates Your Country or was written concurrently with the more country-flavored songs on that album, while some of it dates from the demos he’d cut for 2001’s darker Deepcut To Nowhere.
“I knew they were strong songs, but I thought they were too pop-oriented for that album,” he continues. “I wrote ‘She Swallows It’ back then — it’s a real bright pop tune with one of these man’s-inhumanity-to-woman lyrics disguised as something naughty in the title. And I had ‘Suck And Blow’ [which, title aside, is also not about fellatio] as well, which is a real road song from the perspective of someone on his first big tour, the madness of being on the road at twentysomething years of age, getting crazy.
“They didn’t seem to fit Deepcut, and obviously, with Your Country, they wouldn’t have been right at all. You never know if these songs are going to disappear as your writing moves on, but I wanted to do another album with the Figgs, who are a real rock ‘n’ roll band, and I wanted to get the right stuff.”
Working as Parker’s on-again, off-again band has been a thrill for the younger Figgs, whose 33-year-old guitarist Mike Gent explains, “My dad bought those records, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment, when they came out, so I’ve been listening to this music almost my whole life.” (Just the sort of thing a veteran rocker loves to hear.)
Though the Figgs formed in upstate New York, where Parker has maintained a home (in Woodstock) since the late ’80s, it was a chance encounter in an Atlanta club during the mid-’90s that brought them together. The two shared a dressing room on a day when Parker was playing a matinee and the Figgs were booked for the night slot, giving Gent the opportunity to tell Parker what a huge fan he was, extolling not only his ’70s music, but long-forgotten mid-’80s albums such as Steady Nerves. The Figgs subsequently impressed Parker with their performance of “Passion Is No Ordinary Word” on a tribute album (Piss And Vinegar: The Songs Of Graham Parker), and he called when he was looking for a band to back him on a 1996 tour.
The Figgs were signed at the time to Capitol, which didn’t think touring with Parker would be a smart career move for the band. “Isn’t he dead?” asked one label rep, apparently confusing Parker with Gram Parsons. After the Figgs hit the road with Parker, backing him on 1997’s live album The Last Rock ‘N’ Roll Tour, Capitol dropped the band.
Though the Figgs have continued to work with Parker when he isn’t touring solo, Songs Of No Consequence represents their first studio collaboration, giving the band the opportunity to generate arrangements instead of learning to play parts live that other musicians have recorded. The album likely will elicit some comparisons to Parker’s days with the Rumour, but Gent argues, “It’s a totally different thing, two completely different bands. I don’t think we’re as good a band as the Rumour were, though I think that some of the records we’ve made are better than theirs [without Parker].”
Yet Gent admits to one link, be it sonic or spiritual or both. Long after Parker and the Rumour split, Brinsley Schwarz gave Graham the distinctive flying V guitar he’d used in that band. For these sessions, Parker unpacked the flying V for Gent to play, so a bit of that Rumour legacy distinguishes the new album.
Though it’s almost impossible to discuss the Rumour, or even mention the name Brinsley Schwarz, without evoking the term “pub-rock,” Parker has long insisted that an identification with pub-rock is one of the biggest misconceptions of his career. A British musical phenomenon of the early-to-mid-1970s, pub-rock might be characterized as the more mature stepbrother of American garage-band rock, and the more tuneful precursor to punk.
It also carried a kind of dismissive stigma of amateur-hour, not-ready-for-prime-time, bar-band rock. It was rootsy, often country-flavored music for city folks, who found a human pulse within the music played in the pubs of London that had been lost amid the bombast of arenas. The biggest band in pub-rock was Brinsley Schwarz, the guitarist’s namesake group, fronted by bassist Nick Lowe and fellow singer-songwriter Ian Gomm. Pub-rock hit its creative pinnacle with 1974’s The New Favourites Of Brinsley Schwarz, its title inspired by an old George Jones release, its production courtesy of Dave Edmunds, its kickoff track a resplendent rendition of Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love And Understanding”. (If pressed, I will argue that this cut is the most glorious three minutes of music ever committed to vinyl.)
