Songs With Which to View the Solar Eclipse

"Live in Shadows" /
Graham Parker & the Rumour

Well, darlings, I'm on the road, chasing the eclipse, and I don't have time -- or reliable enough Wi-Fi -- to write a proper blog post. But I for one am looking forward to the moment after the eclipse, when sunlight begins to reappear and we're all reassured that the world isn't ending after all.

So while there are many Graham Park tunes on my personal eclipse road trip playlist, I thought this one would be the most fitting for the end of our journey together.

It's from the delicious 2012 album Three Chords Good, whereupon Graham Parker reunites with his original backing band The Rumour after thirty-plus solo years. (Here's my earlier post about why this album is so amazing.)  Listen to how this song swings, a little jazzy, a little swampy road-house rock, but always coming back to that insistent guitar lick. Like the philosopher king he is, GP dispenses worldly advice: "You don't have to / Live in shadows / You don't have to / Lock yourself up in the dark."

Whomever he's talking to, it's someone who's let the world get the worst of him/her. I don't know about you, but these days I feel like the whole world is tending that way. Belligerence, suspicion, anger, and hate are boiling over.

And honestly, there's no point in living that way.  Give yourself a break. Take this opportunity to make a new start. Snap your fingers and let the beat lift your spirits. It's your choice to make.

P Is For . . .

An A to Z series of artists I love. And who else could be P but:

Graham Parker / 
"Suspension Bridge"

Throw a dart at a pile of all of Graham Parker's albums, and the odds are overwhelming that you'll hit a great song.  Now, I'm not saying you should really do this -- because, you know, scratches -- but you get my drift.  The man simply does not write bad songs; or if he does, he has the good taste (unlike some major artists I know) not to record them, or to put them on his albums.

In fact, Graham Parker has so many great songs that his new career-spanning box set, These Dreams Will Never Sleep, dropping today (order here or here) -- which is packed with 6 CDs of studio and live tracks -- doesn't have room for all my favorites. Like this one . . .

It's from 2007's Don't Tell Columbus, which some Parker fans -- including me -- consider one of his greatest solo albums. (If I have any beef at all with this new box set, it's that it gorges on GP's work with the Rumour and doesn't have enough of his seriously brilliant solo stuff, which is the material that made me a lifelong Parker fan). My fellow Parkerista Jerry Leibowitz did a pretty wonderful job of dissecting the album's greatness here on his blog, I Discovered America, which is named after Track 1 of this album.

"Suspension Bridge" is a sort of dark slinky samba, all chromatic melody and diminished and minor chords, with a sinuous syncopated guitar riff lacing it all together with a hint of menace. I consider this song Graham Parker's dark-star equivalent to William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" and "Tintern Abbey" -- it's haunted by the past, telescoping childhood and adult perceptions, suffused with a sense of loss.

We're in nostalgia territory, yet it's not feel-good nostalgia, despite the first verse's vignette of a loving dad and son: "My daddy took me to see it / When I was no more than 10 / They'd just finished painting the metal / Then they had to start all over again." That's just the kind of information a kid would latch onto -- Dad's trying to impress him with the size of the bridge, while the boy fixates on the futility of human effort.

In verse 2 he seems to be in the present, but in a landscape worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: "And the daredevil pilots fly over me / And the suicide lovers swim under the sea / And the murderers submit an innocent plea / And the prisoners dream of the free." Welcome to adult life, son.

In the third verse, he time travels back to that afternoon with his father: "And the stories that my daddy told me / About the place on the other side." Heaven and hell? We-ellll...for the time being, let's say it's just crossing the river, and GP recalls the info he committed to heart: "About the dip of the chains and the height of the piers / And the men who worked there and died." Stories calculated to awe and overwhelm. Remember when you were a kid, how your parents seemed to know everything? How reassuring that felt -- and how lost we sometimes feel as adults, without that illusion.

The chorus resolves into major key, and an almost anthemic grandeur: "I'm still standing here / On that suspension bridge / With the wind blowing through my hair." But don't take anything for granted. Graham Parker is a master of metaphor, and when we think about what a suspension bridge is -- linking two shores, but hanging perilously in mid-air -- well, it's a balancing act. Industrial Revolution technology gave man the power to span wider and deeper channels, but only by being willing to sway in the wind.

Sources suggest that the suspension bridge Parker's referring to is the Clifton Suspension Bridge in North Somerset, a classic 19th-century bridge by the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It's a fair way from GP's childhood home in Deepcut, Surrey (hence the title of his great 2001 album Deepcut to Nowhere), but not too far for a father-and-son bonding field trip.

The second time he sings the chorus, he adds a couple of telling lines: "Not in one world or the other / Losing my father like I lost my mother" -- which suggests to me that this was inspired by his father's death. It's an elegy, and I'm grieving because -- do I know Graham Parker's father? No, but my dad died too, and I've never gotten over it.

I can't listen to this song without pondering all the bridges in my life: between youth and adulthood, between life and death, between one homeland and another, between being a child and being a parent oneself.  Suspension bridges may be miracles of engineering, defying nature -- but they still sway in the wind, and halfway over I always look down at the water far below and freak out.  You cross them at your peril.

And Graham Parker is just too much of an artist to let you rest easy with the bridges in your life.

E Is For...

Songs A to Z

My 26-day challenge to myself -- write about a different band every day, working from A to Z. So while we're in Stiff Records mode...this could go under E, G, or W, but what the hell, I needed an E for today. And I love this record.

Wreckless Eric / 
"Whole Wide World"

One of the most lovable tracks that Stiff Records ever released (right up there with Elvis Costello's "Alison" and Ian Dury's "Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll,") this 1977 single was Eric Goulden's debut, and it was auspicious indeed. Oddly enough, it never made the charts, but it's since been covered by everybody from the Monkees to Paul Westerberg to Will Ferrell. It's one of those songs that, even if you don't know it, you know it.

Despite Stiff's reputation for outrageous stunts and proto-punk agression, this song is wonderfully tender, even in the loud and growly parts. What it does share with the Stiff aesthetic is that stripped-down punk simplicity -- only two chords, strummed over and over, in dogged 4/4 time -- and the deliberately raw production quality. Apparently Stiff's house producer, Nick Lowe, played not only the bass but most other instruments on this track, while Steve Goulding of the Rumour sits in on the drums. (The same sort of wistful melancholy runs through Graham Parker & the Rumour's "Watch the Moon Come Down" from their Stick to Me album, also from 1977, also produced by Nick Lowe, also with Steve Goulding on the drums. But that's another story.)

This is an undying-love song, but with a twist -- undying love for a girl he hasn't met yet (think Paul McCartney's "I Will" from The White Album, which BTW he wrote specifically for me). That accounts for the undertow of loneliness; no wonder he's sounding desperate and frantic by the last verse. "When I was a young boy / My mama said to me," he begins, a classic folk-music opener -- but then it goes south: "'There's only one girl in the world for you / And she probably lives in Tahiti." That flash of deprecating Cockney humor -- that's another Stiff hallmark, but it's also authentically Wreckless Eric, as he's gone on to prove in song after song.

But you've gotta admire the kid's determination: "I'd go the whole wide world / I'd go the whole wide world / Just to find her." Now there's a romantic soul. The woebegone quality of Eric's voice is just perfect; the lad's got a pure heart, even if he is a bit thick. (I love how Wreckless Eric stops just this side of making this character the butt of his humor.)

On Eric's website, he jokes that he's never checked out the geography for fear he got it wrong all those years ago. Don't worry, Eric, you're close enough. "Or maybe she's in the Bahamas / Where the Caribbean sea is blue / Weeping in a tropical moonlit night / Because nobody's told her 'bout you." There's a nice touch, the idea that the girl's lonely and longing too.

And as the buzzy guitars and smackdown drums kick in, Eric's getting a leetle paranoid; he changes up the refrain, "I'd go the whole wide world / Find out where they hide her."

Verse three and four are particularly fun -- he portrays himself "hanging around in the rain out here / Trying to pick up a girl" compared to his Ms. Right "lying on a tropical beach somewhere / Underneath the tropical sun / Pining away in a heatwave there." That juxtaposition is a stroke of something very near genius -- shades of the Beatles' "Sitting in an English garden / Waiting for the sun / If the sun you don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain."

He caps it off in verse five, imagining himself "lying on that sun-soaked beach with her / Caressing her warm brown skin / And then in a year or maybe not quite / We'll be sharing the same next of kin." He manages to deliver a happy ending without getting sappy, without breaking character (and I do love that "skin/kin" rhyme"). By the time he gets here, I'm yearning too for him to get what he wants.

It was a great start to what's turned out to be an interesting career. Eric's still performing, still recording, but he's also painting and writing and doing radio shows and . . . well, check it out here.