POP MUSIC REVIEW : Graham Parker: Mildly Angry These Days

The ‘90s have given us a much-mellowed Graham Parker, never more mellow than on his new album, “12 Haunted Episodes,” with its gentle, autumnal glow.

And yet, at 45, Parker remains ever the contrarian. The angry young bolt-thrower heard on his three acclaimed albums of the late ‘70s (“Howlin’ Wind,” “Heat Treatment” and “Squeezing Out Sparks”) may have given way to a more ruminative artist at middle age, but Parker still likes to put up a crusty front.

Facing about 400 of his partisans Saturday night at the Coach House, the veteran English rocker facetiously explained how “Episodes” turned out so mellow: While trying to deploy grunge-guitarists’ open-tuning methods to “ingratiate myself to the youth of the nation and get in on this droning thing,” he had taken a wrong turn and wound up with “this Donovan album” instead.

Parker also made many a barbed allusion to his long series of disappointments in the pop marketplace (his new tour T-shirts feature the crossed-out names of all the big labels he’s worked for, leaving only Razor & Tie, the small independent company that issued “12 Haunted Episodes,” at the bottom of a long list).

But Parker always has been more complex than the labels he has been saddled with (and sometimes cultivated). Ultimately, his concert rose from a too-temperate beginning to a memorable conclusion because he was able to get beyond such handy tags as “angry young man” and “mellowed at midlife,” by lending a soul singer’s conviction and a tasteful eclectic’s wide array of musical approaches to new songs as well as old.

Through the first half of his nearly two-hour set, Parker walked mainly on the mild side, to pleasant, but seldom grabbing, effect.

It quickly became clear that his three-man backup band, dubbed the Episodes, had skills to burn: Denny McDermott was an industrious drummer who gave easygoing numbers a bit of backbone without intruding on the mood, while Mitch Margold was a master of rock keyboards classicism, able to recall by turns Garth Hudson’s multihued organ playing and Richard Manuel’s stately piano. His churchy playing supported Parker’s ardor-filled delivery on “Cruel Stage,” a contrite lover’s hymn that was one of the nine “Episodes” numbers scattered through a generous 22-song program.

Also cropping up in the first half of the show were well-wrought versions of such fine songs as the elegiac “Blue Highways” and “Force of Nature.” The latter was Parker’s character study of a fiery, charismatic woman who commands attention with a combination of vulnerability and outrageous disdain; it could be the finest, most on-target tribute Chrissie Hynde or Courtney Love will ever have, although Parker probably had neither in mind when he wrote it:

Being invisible, being obscene,

Being the person you wish you’d been.

But inside her heart there’s a kid locked away in a room,

Who throws a grenade at your feet

That explodes with such force that it bursts your balloon,

Like a force of nature.

Some songs that hit with the force of nature would have come in handy during the measured early going.

“Fool’s Gold,” Parker’s grand anthem from 1976, might have done the trick, but not in the retooled form he gave it: a waltzing, seafaring version that may have fit the lyric’s questing motif but hardly served up the shot of shining rock ‘n’ roll glory that the show could have used at that point to offset its pervasive warm-and-burnished tone.

Brilliance arrived with the soaring, soul transports of “Fly,” a song of mourning that was like a New Orleans jazz funeral in miniature: sorrowing at the outset, set-free and life-affirming in the end--the affirmation in this case including an extended Parker vamp on Van Morrison’s “way up in the heavens” epiphany from “Astral Weeks.”

A couple of interesting rhythmic detours followed.

A floating, swirling blend of organ, lap steel guitar (courtesy of bassist Kenny Aaronson) and Indian raga percussion lent allure to Parker’s critically self-assessing “See Yourself,” and a stuttering, Little Feat-style R&B; shuffle on “Over the Border (to America)” provided a playful punch.

Now the band, and Parker’s fabled passionate force, were unleashed, and it paid off in the exceptional soul music of “Wake Up (Next to You),” an extended workout in which the star contributed a nice, spiny guitar lead along with a fine vocal display of romantic yearning. The intensity grew through “Get Started (Start a Fire),” which rode a tough, Memphis R&B; groove and climaxed with the churning, hard-edged reggae-beat of “Protection.” Not so mellow, after all.

Parker’s encores spotlighted one of his best old numbers, “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” with its complex, conflicted array of harrowing emotions surrounding an abortion (not the issue of abortion, but the specific, lived experience of it, as it unfolds for an anguished father-not-to-be).

He also rightly gave special encore treatment to “Disney’s America,” the best of his latest batch. The song is a critique of soulless commercialism--the sort of thing Parker would have railed against 15 or 20 years ago, but which he now treats not with rage, but with quiet sorrow.

Perhaps something has been lost when a rocker gets older and no longer lets loose with angry flares from the gut. But for the sadder, gentler, wiser Parker of “Disney’s America,” artistry hasn’t diminished; it has only changed.