POP MUSIC REVIEW : Graham Parker Back to His Label-Bashing Tricks

For the first three songs of his solo show Monday at the Palace, Graham Parker played up the sides of his music that he’s emphasized for most of the ‘80s: the playful, trenchant and sentimental.

But then he revived an old GP tradition--attacking his record company. The Englishman, whose 13-year recording career has been marked by unamicable partings from four labels (“Mercury Poisoning,” perhaps the most vicious item in his oeuvre , details his feelings about one) paused to take on his current home, RCA.

Parker, it seems, is miffed that the company changed the title of his new live, solo album from “Live! Alone! A Legend in His Own Mind” to the less sarcastic “Live! Alone in America.” After a brief tirade on corporate wimpiness, the singer wryly hammered home his point with the old James and Bobby Purify hit “I’m Your Puppet.”

Ah! The old Graham Parker--the bitter, bilious bard--is back.

And a bitter Graham Parker is an entertaining Graham Parker. He was just that as he rolled on with new songs taking on the business world (“The 3 Martini Lunch”), the marketing timidity of a former label (“Passive Resistance”) and so-called democracy (“Soul Corruption”), punctuated by sarcastic jibes at former bosses and colleagues.

But a bitter GP can also be tedious, and the wiry singer countered that tendency by drawing on all facets and phases of his canon throughout the 90-minute, 23-song performance. All of it came together magnificently with the final encore of “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” a 1979 song that presents the abortion question as a complicated emotional issue rather than a black-and-white moral/political choice.

Still, the solo format’s promise of up-close-and-personal intimacy was largely unfulfilled, in part because of the bar and dance-hall nature of the Palace, in part because of the caustic nature of the singer and his songs. (How intimate can a performer be if he never takes off his sunglasses?) Consequently, it was the old bile that left the strongest impression, rather than any newly revealed aspect fans might have hoped for. Parker plays Bogart’s in Long Beach on Thursday.

Opening act Pierce Turner, on the other hand, was almost embarrassingly open with his feelings. With his majestic band playing with an offhand force, he showed a vision and style somewhere between Peter Gabriel and the Waterboys--and as unique and remarkable as both.