THE MANY SHADES OF GRAHAM PARKER : Yes, He’s Feisty and Acerbic, He’s Also Romantic and Eloquent; What This Prolific Singer-Songwriter Isn’t Is Well-Known

Imagine Cyrano de Bergerac wielding a guitar instead of a sword, and you’ll have some idea of Graham Parker’s style in cutting a swath through the world of rock ‘n’ roll.

Like the French dramatic hero, Parker is a man inspired by snubs, slights and insults. Parrying and thrusting with words sharpened by a fast-flicking wit, the wiry little Englishman tends to give back as good as he’s gotten. Known for sprinkling his songs and interviews with wryly acidic barbs and jabs, Parker clearly is a fellow who relishes jousting in the role of the abused but feisty underdog.

The offender might be an indifferent girlfriend (a sort that turned up often in Parker’s songs during the 1970s, before he settled into the family life chronicled on recent albums), a perceived malignancy on the sociopolitical scene, or an unappreciative record company (Parker has almost as many ex-labels as Elizabeth Taylor has ex-husbands, and he delights in delineating their shortcomings).

But, like Cyrano, this avid battler is also a committed and eloquent romantic--a saving grace that has kept Parker from ever seeming like a caustic one-note crank. While the “angry young man” tag hung on Parker early in his career wasn’t inaccurate, it was reductive.

On record, the Parker persona that has emerged over the years is one of a rough-edged, crusty spitfire from the wrong side of the tracks who, in his maturity, has come to realize that his best and truest self is the one that reaches for a softening, redeeming love.

Fittingly, Parker began his recording career in opposition, consciously setting out to puncture the stately decorum of the progressive rock movement that had come to dominate the British music scene by the mid-’70s. He arrived in 1976 with two raw, aggressive albums steeped in soul music, reggae and Van Morrison. “Howling Wind” and “Heat Treatment” were full of Parker’s raspy-voiced attitude and the wonderful playing of his band, the Rumour--an assemblage of veterans from the British “pub rock” scene that had sought to keep alive rock’s roots in American rockabilly and rhythm and blues.

Parker’s arrival set the stage for such New Wavers as Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, and for the first wave of British punk. Since then, Parker has continued to make mostly quality records without ever finding a mass audience (“Squeezing Out Sparks,” from 1979, and “The Up Escalator,” from 1980, were his best showings on the Billboard album chart, both reaching No. 40).

“Burning Questions,” the new album that is the 14th of his career, continues Parker’s impressive creative resurgence after what is widely considered a fallow period during the early to mid-’80s. Starting with “The Mona Lisa’s Sister” in 1988, continuing through “Human Soul” (1989), “Struck by Lightning” (1991), and now with “Burning Questions,” Parker has been as consistently strong as any other artist playing rock-for-grown-ups. The albums are marked by warmth, urgency and intelligence and, on occasion, a bit of that old Parker venom.

Having played solo and gone out as part of a package show with Dave Edmunds, Dion and Kim Wilson on his last two American tours, Parker, 41, is about to tour the United States with a band of his own for the first time since 1988 (Graham Maby, Joe Jackson’s longtime bass-playing sidekick, is the new lineup’s best-known name). Having dubbed them the Small Clubs in honor of the venues to be played, Parker will begin his tour Sunday at the Coach House.

Interviewers are probably approaching Parker somewhat gingerly these days. The singer’s new label, Capitol, recently circulated among the rock press a fictitious interview composed by the singer in which a hapless hack named Jay Weinerbaum gets roasted for asking some typical rock-scribe questions.

At one point, Parker imagines his interlocutor asking him to explain whether his 1979 song “You Can’t Be Too Strong” is for or against abortion. And Parker imagines himself answering: “It’s about ramming my fist so far down your throat you’ll need to get a vasectomy to get it out.”

But, speaking over the phone recently from his 10-acre homestead in Woodstock, N.Y., Parker, who also keeps a home in London, came across as a thoroughly pleasant fellow. The interviewer cautioned that he might perceive certain questions as wieners or bombs--but since 3,000 miles is presumably beyond Parker’s vasectomy-infliction range, he would go ahead and ask them anyway.

“I can always find you when I come to Los Angeles,” the singer replied good-naturedly. In fact, Parker was good-natured enough to entertain and answer a question (courageously saved for last) regarding the differences between his take on abortion in “You Can’t Be Too Strong” and in his angriest new number, “Here It Comes Again.”

“My idea was not to do a mechanical thing with interviewers,” Parker said of the cautionary mock-interview he whipped up to go with an announcement that he wouldn’t be talking (well, not much, anyway) to the press about his new album. “It’s very hard for me to try to add anything to the songs without getting a crushing depression. They’re about complex emotions and ideas. That to me is what life is--a series of complications, at least if you’re not 17 or 18. Then it’s all hormones going ‘boom-boom.’ When you’re around 40, the depth and subtleties of life are now apparent, and my lyrics fit that.”

If Parker has little appetite for explaining his songs in print--the genteel, wine-and-cheese style of interview--his verbal juices flow quite readily when some good red meat is placed on the table. The singer worked up a fine dander ripping into his most recent ex in the music business, RCA Records. He also chewed apart MTV for having the gall to refuse his latest video before he had even filmed it. Along the way, Parker cast aspersions on Guns N’ Roses, the Seattle grunge-rock phenomenon and rap music, while acerbically lamenting the lack of a mass audience for intelligent pop song-craft in general.

But let it not be said that Graham Parker is unduly reckless in his opinions. He did go easy on Michael Bolton when asked to render a soul-lover’s expert evaluation of the much-criticized but hot-selling pop balladeer.

“I’ve got to send him some songs and get him to cover them and make a whole (expletive) load of money,” Parker said. “I think he should be doing ‘My Love’s Strong’ from ‘Human Soul.’ Go out there and take a chance, Michael, for my bank balance. It’s a No. 1 smash if done in the correct way, which mine obviously wasn’t. So right now, I don’t have anything to say against him. If he doesn’t do one of my songs in five years, I’ll be screaming at the bastard.”

Actually, Parker did have something not-so-nice to say about Bolton. He said it was “a real cheap shot” for Bolton to have released as singles his remakes of songs by Otis Redding (“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”) and Percy Sledge (“When a Man Loves a Woman”). Asked how Bolton’s move differed from his own remakes of soul hits (including “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5, and Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” and “A Change Is Gonna Come”), Parker said: “I did them as B-sides. There was no cynical intention, no record company machinery behind me. They were done purely in the spirit of it.”

Those looking for a gentler, highly personal, flower-alongside-the-thorns side of Parker can find it in abundance on his three most recent albums. The first side of “Human Soul” was steeped in appreciative songs about a blooming love (just as Side Two was devoted to tirades about the disgusting state of affairs in the outer world). “Struck by Lightning” features two brilliant numbers about parenthood: “Children and Dogs,” a funny complaint about the more taxing side of child-rearing, and “The Kid With the Butterfly Net,” perhaps the most poignant song of Parker’s career, which evokes the wondrous but fleeting sense of rightness and possibility that can overtake even a crusty old cynic as he watches a young life bloom.

On his new album, Parker sings of marriage bonds that have become twisted, as one song title has it, into “Too Many Knots to Untangle.” Then, in songs such as “Mr. Tender,” “Oasis” and “Worthy of Your Love” that set the album’s more hopeful closing tone, he goes on to sing with moving ardor and winning humility about his determination to untangle those knots. When Parker--aware of past and future difficulties, but certain of the vital necessity of his romantic mission--sings, “Be my oasis, and I will try not to be your mirage,” it defines everything a lover’s pledge in a pop song ought to be.

“It’s something I can’t psychoanalyze too much,” Parker said of his use of personal material. “None of the things I write are entirely specific to me. (For example), I borrow off what I see on TV. It’s not always desirable to write in that fashion where it does have that personal emotion invested.”

On the other hand, Parker acknowledged, it’s hard to get anywhere as a songwriter without investing just that quality.

“It would be nice to write “we all live in a yellow submarine,” but if I try to do that, it just becomes a puerile experiment,” said the singer (puerile being a preferred Parker pejorative). “If you’re not writing about your heart and soul, it just becomes an experiment in clever cleverness, doesn’t it?”

At any rate, Parker, as previously stated, didn’t buy into this interview to explain his songs to Weinerbaum surrogates. He bought into it so he could publicly bury MTV.

Take it away, Graham.

“The song is ‘Release Me’ (the darkly driving rocker that leads off the new album). Capitol took it to MTV and said, ‘We’re probably going to make a video, will you play it?’ MTV’s attitude was, ‘Absolutely, definitely not.’ There was no way they would play something with me in it. Their demographics and research clearly point out that in the 63 million homes they’re beamed into, not one would want to hear a Graham Parker song.

“I got extremely irate at the very idea that now a record company has to take the song to the video outlet--not the video; they take the song , and ask, with cap in hand, ‘Please, can we make a video with this song?’ which is a disgusting, sinister development. People who make music have to have access to the media, at least a chance.

“I was deeply insulted. I got hopping mad and went and bought a camera for 1,400 bucks and pressed my wife into service as the camera person. (That’s nothing all that new for Jolie Parker, who, her husband said, has long acted as still photographer for his album covers and publicity shots because of Parker’s distaste for professional photo sessions). I did it in my own barn, and it cost under $4,000. Most of the shots, I’m tied up in chains in a cage.”

In other shots, Parker is seen setting loose various small animals found on his lot, including a porcupine, to illustrate the “Release Me” theme.

“The porcupine was luckily at a tree,” Parker said, explaining how he managed first to find a wild porcupine at hand, and then to use it in a video session without being turned into a pin cushion. “This was a young one. The mother was off in the bushes. The young one I gently persuaded into a garbage can.

“The snakes were all non-venomous,” Parker continued, ticking off his video menagerie. “There are some frogs. A very large crayfish is involved. These animals were fairly well treated. They survived it none the worse.”

And yes: “At one point I wear a button that says, ‘Ignore MTV.’ ”

“The beauty of it,” he added ironically, “is that you’ll never see it. You’ll only read about it.”

If MTV really wanted to be adventurous, it would start a brickbat-tossing panel show for argumentative rockers, a la “Crossfire” and “McLaughlin and Company,” and install Parker as a regular. But Parker hasn’t much faith in the video channel’s improvement: MTV-ready videos, he said, are “fatuous, puerile, simplistic ideas to keep a stupid audience and to keep them stupid.”

Clearly, as in the old Monty Python skit, this article has entered the door marked “Abuse,” with Parker seated behind the desk and doing the dishing. RCA Records, take your medicine (and take your place in line with Mercury, Arista, Elektra and Atlantic, the other labels Parker has left with less than fond regards).

Parker said his manager brought the mostly gentle, mainly acoustic “Struck by Lightning” to RCA executives and said: “ ‘Are you sure you want this? If not, we can take it somewhere else.’ They said, ‘We love it; it’s great.’ ” According to Parker, though, RCA’s chief of radio promotion had already made up his mind not to expend any effort on another Graham Parker album. “They completely stifled what I think is my best record ever. One can only hope that ZZ Top (which recently signed a megabucks deal with RCA) fail miserably. Nothing personal, guys, but I would like to see RCA make serious mistakes. Hopefully the tide will turn against old-fart mega-groups when they fall flat on their face.”

Joe Galante, president of RCA Records, laughed with amusement at first when told of Parker’s hex on his company. Then he said that the label had made it clear to Parker from the start that, while it liked “Struck by Lightning,” the album’s acoustic-based sound made it “a tough record” to pitch to mainstream rock radio. “It wasn’t the promotion person saying, ‘I hope this stiffs.’ It was a reality of the marketplace.”

Hale Milgrim, head of Parker’s new label, Capitol, said he isn’t worried about one day becoming a target of the singer’s famous vitriol. But Milgrim added that it doesn’t do Parker much good to be venting his spleen at MTV when the very nature of the video-network beast is to play only hits and hit acts.

“Sometimes Graham gets stuck in his own history of being the angry young man,” Milgrim said. “My opinion is Graham should just get off that. He’s keying in on MTV when they wouldn’t have touched him anyway. It’s a moot point. Why do you want to waste your energy on something that has no effect? They don’t care. If ‘Release Me’ becomes a huge hit (on radio), they’ll play it.”

But, Milgrim added, “I don’t want Graham Parker to change and become some cheerful (personality) if that’s not how he really feels.” The Capitol executive said he signed Parker because “I’ve been a major fan of his all along. When I see a phenomenal artist out there, I want to get involved.” Lots of touring, television (such as a scheduled appearance on “The Tonight Show” on Wednesday and other non-video exposure will be the key to expanding Parker’s record-buying audience beyond its current U.S. level of about 50,000 to 100,000, Milgrim said.

Parker says he’s satisfied with Capitol’s efforts so far (working with Richard Thompson has no doubt given the label a clear idea what’s involved in trying to push records by veteran intelli-rockers with only a cult-and-critics following).

“Their idea of working a record is a long-term thing,” the singer said, approvingly. “They’ve listened to marketing ideas I’ve had, like putting stickers over the breasts on the cover painting on the (CD) box (it’s a tasteful, wistful, post-Impressionist nude), saying, ‘Caution: contains worthwhile lyrics.’ ”

Breaking up with record companies may tickle Parker’s recriminative instincts, but he says it’s something he’d prefer not to have to go through, charmed as he might seem in always landing another deal.

“I always feel like, ‘Uh-oh, this is it, get ready to start pressing out those cassettes yourself, Graham.’ ”

Among the surprising answers to be found on “Burning Questions” is one about what Parker used to do to pass the time before he became a rocker.

As a line from the anti-war song “Short Memories” puts it, “I broke and entered and stole.”

“I was a good thief,” Parker said. “I got away with a lot of things. But I got caught. I don’t want to go into that in print, but I did suffer for my ill-gotten gains. I wasn’t a perfect chappy, I must say. My mother always thought others were leading me astray, but I was the ringleader.”

Inspired first by the Beatles and the Stones, then by soul music, Parker managed to graduate from B&Es; to B-flats and E-minors.

“Soul music was the intelligent person’s music--the Mods,” Parker recalled. “The Mods thought of themselves as being smart,” in comparison to the rival British youth faction of the ‘60s, the Rockers. “I was a Mod, absolutely. That’s where you got all the best girls. The (Rockers), their girls looked like Cher before the nose job. The Mods were the really pretty ones. Soul music was the fuel for all the activities.”

When Graham Parker and the Rumour emerged, they instantly commanded attention because of the challenge their rootsy, aggressive music made to the prevailing mid-’70s musical order.

“That was one of the reasons I was thrust into some kind of strong position quickly,” Parker said. “I expected what I was doing would wipe out forever the idea of Genesis and whatever progressive bands there were. I expected that to happen. In a way, I was partly right, because in a year’s time, everybody had short hair and played three-minute songs.”

At first, Parker didn’t welcome the onslaught of punks that followed his back-to-basics lead. Parker’s band offered attitude but also keen musicianship, unlike the irate but sloppy beginners on the punk scene.

“I had the Damned open for me, one of their first gigs, judging by the way they played. I wasn’t impressed at all with them, but like everybody else, (I felt) it was a bit scary. They’d all been sitting home, festering with anger that Genesis and Pink Floyd were selling millions of records. Our attitude was, ‘Wait a minute, Graham Parker and the Rumour, we think we’re pretty hot,’ and suddenly there were these people who couldn’t play and were going to sell more records than us. I remember (Rumour guitarist) Martin Belmont saying, ‘I hope the Sex Pistols open for us, we can beat the (expletive) out of them.’ But then the (early punk) records came out, and it was clearly right. It had to be this obscene and this much opposite” to revolutionize rock music. Parker concedes his own music, raw as it was, wasn’t sufficiently extreme to accomplish that.

“I was so aggressive that people would walk to the back of the hall and look at me in fear,” he said. “But the next thing I knew, we had a hall full of (punks) wearing safety pins and spitting at me.”

It wasn’t as a fashion-conscious Mod that Parker came by his signature sartorial statement: an ever-present pair of dark glasses. That happened by accident, he said, after he showed up with sunglasses for one of his early recording sessions with Dave Robinson, head of the then-nascent Stiff Records.

“He said, ‘You look good with those on,’ and I listened to him, much to my regret. I don’t go on stage without them. The shades I wear now are . . . very light. With them, I don’t walk into objects so much. There are bits of metal and cables around stages, and you can damage your shins.”

Better that, Parker said, than dealing with the glare of unusually intense scrutiny he’s felt when he turns up in public with eyes naked to the curious.

“At least (with sunglasses) I’ve got a front up, at least I’m an image. Without them, I’m this person, and they know who I am. It would be awful to be famous. I see Elton John, baring his heart to get the front cover. I don’t think he’s doing that cynically, but I can’t see myself doing that.”

On the other hand, Parker isn’t ready to join the list of vanished, unsung heroes just yet. He has released five albums in five years, an astonishing pace by today’s standards, and evidence that he still has plenty of creative energy pulsing inside him.

“Maybe it’s just pure panic,” he said of his creative gusher, which since 1988 has resulted in four studio albums of new material, plus a solo-acoustic concert album, “Live! Alone in America,” that included a couple of new songs as well. “I feel I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to get another one out. I have this driven feeling. I write the songs, and I can’t stand the thought of them sitting around. It’s almost as if there isn’t that much time left.”

“The reviews are really mixed” for “Burning Questions,” Parker added. “Usually, it’s 90% great. I get the feeling that they’re sort of fed up with me continually putting records out, like I should only be around every three years.”

A gloomy thought, but Parker says being the perpetual underdog hasn’t soured his outlook.

“I get up in the morning and feel really good. It’s a nice world, and I’m lucky to live in a nice part of it. I’m looking out the window and seeing a praying mantis. Lovely. That’s more like it. I can relate to it.”

One supposes he meant he could relate to the loveliness of the nature displayed in his window. But praying mantises, after all, are hungry, combative survivalists known for taking bites out of their own kind. Come to think of it, Graham Parker probably can relate to that too.

Who: Graham Parker and the Small Clubs.

When: Sunday, Sept. 27, at 8 p.m. With Lucinda Williams.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $18.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.