Graham Parker Aces 'Acid' Test With Attitude

By MIKE BOEHM

Nov. 7, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Graham Parker’s new album, “Acid Bubblegum,” well may stand apart in the annals of pop music:

Call Guinness and ask whether any other record on record has incorporated a lyric with the phrase “chitinous bugs.”

“Chitinous,” the dictionary tells us, denotes a crawly critter with a hard casing. It’s fitting that Parker has trotted it out for an album that finds him getting back to being a hard case himself.

He emerged on the British rock scene in 1976, staking his claim primarily with anger and aggression with a dollop of soul-singer’s romanticism. Grounded in roots rock and R&B;, the albums “Howlin’ Wind” and “Heat Treatment” are tough, lean, pointed works that helped pave the way for the soon-to-come eruption of punk.

Parker’s early catalog also includes “Squeezing Out Sparks,” a third sizzling ‘70s album widely considered a classic. Lately, though, fans who favor that period of Parker may have wondered whatever happened to the angry young man. His ‘90s releases--”Struck by Lightning,” “Burning Questions” and “12 Haunted Episodes”--instead brought out the family man in him.

But this softer, warmer, more meditative, beyond-40 Parker hardly was a drowsy burnout case. If his recent albums weren’t “Howlin’ Wind,” they were evidence of a no-longer-young artist catching a very strong second wind as he turned out work that ranged from good (“Episodes”) to excellent (“Lightning”).

Speaking from a hotel in Seattle last week, Parker said his decision to get back to rebellion started with the need to rebel against himself.

“I definitely said, ‘I’ve got to rock here.’ ” The softer recent records, culminating in the exceedingly gentle and folk-ish “Episodes,” were “all aspects of me, the more romantic, pastoral side,” Parker said. “I did that. Now let’s steer the songwriting somewhere else, so I don’t become repetitive.”

He started to build an album around “Turn It Into Hate,” a brightly rocking song he’d written a few years ago before taking a detour for “Episodes.” The song counsels anger rather than tolerance as the right response to assorted forms of villainy and stupidity. It became the keynote as Parker set down a series of songs in the key of A--for “aggrieved.”

“Next thing I know, I have an album with some fairly aggressive, vituperative stuff, and I thought, ‘This is the right antidote for what I’ve been doing.’ ”

It’s a cranky thinking-person’s album, along the lines of Lou Reed’s ticked-off-guy-on-a-barstool record, “New York.” Parker’s screeds are less focused and more scattershot than Reed’s as he whips out witty rhymes slicing at, among others, the music business, musicians who accommodate themselves to it and journalists and money-changers who feed off it.

Though he slows down for a couple of prime tracks (the romantic-regrets R&B; song “She Never Let Me Down” and the poignant extinction-of-innocence parable “Girl at the End of the Pier”), Parker mainly runs on a blend of bile mixed with humor. In this company, even “Milk Train,” a song inspired by the birth of his son 10 months ago, seems like a cutting commentary on society’s undeserving freeloaders: It is, as Parker puts it, a song about “breast-feeding made angry.”

The chitinous bugs take their bow on “Beancounter,” which pretty much sums up Parker’s soured view of humanity.

Civilization has come a long way

Out of the mud where the chitinous bugs

Eat each other all day.

Now we’re in the clouds

Workin’ overtime for our pay,

Countin’ the numbers and being the bugs

That eat each other all day.

“We’re just not going to get everything together and make everything great,” Parker said, offering his assessment of humankind’s prospects. “The greed element is just so profoundly ingrained. I think we could be heading for some bad stuff down the road, with all kinds of environmental doom. Cockroaches will be left. The chitinous bugs, they’ll survive.”

He shrugged at the suggestion that he might be perceived as trying to jump on a curdled milk train himself, by reverting to anger at a time when rage and pessimism have been known to help sales.

“I read a review in some little freebie rag in Milwaukee where the guy was talking about me singing about stale old things, that I’m just trying to be angry for the sake of it,” he said. “Maybe he’s right, but I don’t agree. People are going to do that. You can’t win.”

The real motivation, Parker said, is that skewering an offensive world with humor “makes me laugh.” Never more than a cult figure commercially, he really doesn’t have many prospects for the milk train at this late date. His notoriously sour relations with the world of major labels are severed at the moment; his two most recent albums are on the independent label Razor & Tie.

To help put across his rekindled ire on stage, he has hired the Figgs, a young punk-pop band from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to be his sidemen and opening act.

Although Parker is a fellow upstate-New Yorker who lives on bucolic acreage in Woodstock with his wife and two children, he met the Figgs on tour in Atlanta. They were booked at the same club, and Figgs member Mike Gent sought him out to ask him the chords to some of his old songs (the Figgs join other Parker admirers, including Frank Black and the Smithereens’ Pat DiNizio, on a newly released tribute album, “Piss and Vinegar: The Songs of Graham Parker”).

“I’m sucking energy from these young lads. It’s a good way to get your kicks. I think vampirism is the correct term,” joked Parker, who was speaking on Halloween (and regretting his being unable to go trick-or-treating with his 11-year-old daughter).

With his 46th birthday coming up on Nov. 15, Parker said he manages to keep up all right with his new associates.

“I’m fitter and more active than I used to be in my 20s. I used to sit around stoned all the time, like everyone else. Now I play soccer two times a week. I’m actually hoping to have hair on my bald spot again, without using Rogaine.”

His taste for anger spiked with humor, and for zoological arcana, has carried over into a hoped-for side career as an author. His novel is finished but unpublished.

“It’s a comedy, and this guy [the narrator] is unrelentingly nasty and vituperative. I’m finding publishers have certain rules for what books are supposed to be like, and mine breaks the rules by having this extremely angry person as the narrator in a comedy.”

If he does get it published, readers will have to pull out a dictionary even before they open the book.

“It’s called ‘The Thylacine’s Nest,’ ” Parker said. “Thylacine is a supposedly extinct marsupial wolf from Tasmania.”

Chitinous bugs and thylacines. Where does he get this stuff?

“I read a lot; I know a lot, and it comes out when you’re writing. That’s the great thing about writing. You become more intelligent than you are.”

* Who: Graham Parker and the Figgs.

* When: Tonight at 8.

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

* Whereabouts: Take Interstate 5 to Camino Capistrano and go left. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza, on the right.

* Wherewithal: $16.50-$18.50.

* Where to call: (714) 496-8930.