Desert Island Poems - Discovering Japan by Graham Parker and The Rumour
By: Dave Bidini
September 1, 2009 – Toronto, Canada
Technology changes you. It does. It did. Take bands. Rock bands. Before file-sharing and social networks, bands showed up in your town unannounced, unheralded, unphotographed, undigitalized. They transpired out of concert lighting ether, identified only by the way they stood or what instruments they played; maybe by their hair or lack thereof. Their voices helped clear the windshield. Fuck, she's a screamer or guy sounds like Robert Plant or they should let the bassist sing more, he sounds like he really means it. After forty minutes, you knew. There was no reference point, no Japanese robot YouTube clip. Maybe a bad publicity pic in Hit Parader. Maybe a promotional beer matt or lapel pin. Maybe a video. Maybe.
Their names hinted at something: Blackfoot, Norton Buffalo, Trixster, Fingerprintz. Graham Parker and The Rumour hinted at even less. A guy's name and his band. Big deal. I'd read about them in the NME—pub rock minus Nick Lowe, receding hairline Elvis Costello soundalike—but otherwise, they weren't anything more than Cheap Trick's opening band, 1979, Maple Leaf Gardens. After the first half of the first verse of their first song, we'd probably end up in a washroom stall working through a bag of weak Sicilian pot, which Frank's cousin had mailed to him from Italy. As an opening band, they were cannonfodder, more so to a kid who knew no better than Joe Walsh or Triumph's "Rock and Roll Machine," whose album cover I traced and submitted as my year-end art project in Grade 10.
Getting blindsided by rock 'n' roll rarely happens, but when it does, you remember it forever. I was blindsided by Fishbone in 1992. We were hanging out in Parkdale one night when someone produced a handful of tickets to the show, which hadn't sold well. The lights dimmed as we wandered cool and bored into the near-empty club. The band's singer, 5 foot Angelo, limped on stage supported by a cane. The drummer, Fish, whose kit faced the wall, hit his snare drum once. Then a second time. Then 5 foot Angelo threw his cane into the air and leaped after it, scaling invisible heights. As his feet hit the stage, the band played the Fat Albert Theme. Leaving the club two hours later, our legs were weak from the impact. I saw the band play a few times after that. But no time is ever like the first.
I remember sitting in art class, Cheap Trick tickets in my pocket. I brought them to school. I showed them around. Then, a few nights before the concert, I was watching a local cable access program hosted by Kirk Lapointe. I phoned the show and the person said, "Fifth caller? You've won the new Graham Parker and The Rumour album!"
This guy has albums?
We went to the show. The subway was shroud in denim. We got out at Carlton station, fighting our way up the staircase to the street. Outside, trolls played guitar and sang. Neil Young, sure, but James Taylor would have drawn blood. Pirates sold typewriter shirts spilled with Cheap Trick's inky font. We moved past them, handing our tickets to an old dude in a blue Maple Leafs sweater who remembered the time the Queen met Syl Apps. We found our seats: floors. The best. Awesome hadn't been invented yet, but no word for how good we felt had.
Then, darkness. The Little River Band could have walked out on stage and not ruined that delicious moment of suspension. A thin, balding singer in a silvergreen blazer and Converse running shoes made his way to the middle of the stage, where he was surrounded by an obnoxiously normal-looking band, some of them bearded, the late-'70s rock fan's red flag of lamedom. Frank, you got the pot? Let's hit the can, okay?
Graham Parker said nothing. Not How ya doing Toronto? or We'd always heard that Toronto had the best lookin' ladies. Frank couldn't find the pot, so we suffered through the first half of the first verse of the first song. The band stared at us and we stared back. The singer was angry-sounding, but he wasn't young. The music was bouyant, but serious, too. The songs had singalong choruses, but there were lots of strange chords in them. The band didn't move around much, but they possessed a kind of manic energy. And while I understood every word the singer was singing, together they made no sense—My watch says 8:02/but that's midnight to you—even though he hollered at the top of his lungs. Each song was greeted with nothing more than muted applause, but whatever the band played, they played the same way, leaning into their performance as if pointing their shoulders into the darkness of an evening storm.
Their set was the album I'd won—"Squeezing Out Sparks"—played front to back. For their last song, they did a version of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson Five, which, in 1979, was a pretty fucked up musical statement. At the time, nobody was square enough to cover any songs except those by other cool bands, let alone R&B standards (The Slits had done this, too, with "Heard It Through the Grapevine"). Knowing the song as I do now, I know how hard "I Want You Back" is to play well, let alone note-for-note. If The Rumour's show hadn't been triumphant in itself, "I Want You Back" would have been enough. That they'd pulled it off made them seem wierder and more fascinating to me.
Because The Rumour weren't young, they played as if they knew that they were at the fleeting heart of their defining musical moment, and that, soon, that moment would be over. While the headliners—Cheap Trick—would play well into the 21st Century, Graham Parker and The Rumour would disappear, although the singer, himself, would continue to make records. Because the band left only the faint trace of a notable career, and one great year—1979—when they were among the world's best ensembles, I imagine the players these days—beards down to their pant-cuffs, clothes tattered and worn, fingernails curved and yellow—telling whoever will listen what it was like to play so impossibly well for such a brief time. Some maybe believe them, others maybe not. But to a stoner kid from Etobicoke, what they were doing was real. I know this. I saw it happen.
Dave Bidini is an award-winning author and filmmaker and currently fronts Bidiniband. Before that he spent more than 25 years as a songwriter and guitarist for legendary Canadian rock band The Rheostatics. You can find his other columns here.
Video: "Don't Ask Me Questions" by Graham Parker and The Rumour
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