Graham Parker with Chris Trapper opening ~ 2006 January 21 ~ The Towne Crier, Pawling, NY
Graham Parker accompanying himself on Fender electric guitar, Gibson acoustic guitar, harmonica, and kazoo
Set List (with guitars noted)
[Gibson acoustic]: Fool's Gold - Cruel Lips - Just Like Hermann Hesse - Force of Nature - Stick to the Plan - Hard Side of the Rain - Saturday Night Is Dead - [Fender electric]: Obsessed with Aretha - First Day of Spring - Just Like Joe Meek's Blues - I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down {Earl Randle} - Don't Ask Me Questions - Stick To Me - [Gibson acoustic]: England's Latest Clown - Evil - Dark Days - Heat Treatment - Local Girls ... encore ... [Gibson acoustic]: 2000 Funerals - The Raid - Back to School Days - Wait Til the Midnight Hour {Wilson Pickett} - [Fender electric]: Protection
Chris Trapper Set List
Paint the Town - Wish I Was Cool - All Time Favorite - Starlight - Away We Go {on ukulele} - Boston Girl - Keg On My Coffin
Review
The Towne Crier is a medium-sized restaurant with an attached lounge. The performance space is in the restaurant. It's basically a folk club aspiring to be a midscale restaurant; the tables have white tablecloths, but with paper covers. The restaurant features an interesting quasi-Native American decor. Concert Going Partner and I got to the venue early and had the chance to chat briefly with Geep after he had finished his soundcheck. He said he had four new songs that he was going to perform, and he seemed very excited about them.
The opening act was Boston-based singer/songwriter Chris Trapper, appearing solo without his band the Push Stars. Chris is a good-looking fella with hair that keeps flopping into his face in an endearing fashion. He played a Fender acoustic except for one song when he played a ukulele; he said his dad had told him to impress women he needed to play either the tuba or the ukelele. He played a thoroughly enjoyable 7-song set. His songs were excellent and he sang with a great deal of power, to the point where on some phrases he had to stand back from the microphone and just let it rip. He was also very funny, especially on the ukulele tune, when he broke into a "solo" and played very familiar riffs from the canon of hard rock ("Stairway to Heaven," "Smoke on the Water"). He said that to open for Graham Parker was an "honor, no, it's a privilege."
After a short break Graham came through the crowd carrying his guitar, bounded up on stage and began the show with "Fool's Gold," which by some trickery of strumming he turned into a waltz. He was wearing a long-sleeved green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, gray trousers, and black Keds. He wore dark glasses that were really dark, not like the lightly tinted glasses he sometimes wears. He played the same two guitars he has brought to other recent solo gigs, a Gibson acoustic with a pretty pickguard and a Fender electric with a well-worn neck.
GP had copies of the 'official bootleg' Yer Cowboy Boot for sale, and when he played "Force of Nature," which is featured on that disk, he made fun of the British "yer": "You can't say 'your', you say 'yer' - remember The Beatles' 'Yer Blues'?". In eight GP shows over the past two years, this is the first time I have heard him play a song from 12 Haunted Episodes. He also played "The First Day of Spring" from that wonderful album.
He told a story about learning to play a musical instrument on stage at a gig last fall. The punch line of the story was that the musical instrument is a kazoo, which he then played on the catchy new "Stick to the Plan," a sarcastic critique of the U.S. government's harmful policies and exploitative religious pretentions. I heard echoes of Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and The Kinks' "Ducks on the Wall." After he played the kazoo solo, he said (of playing the kazoo): "It's not like a harmonica, you don't suck, so you don't get your breath, somebody get me an iron lung." Well, you're confident of your kazoo playing, aren't you Graham -- you don't suck -- quite a straight line, if there had been someone else on stage to use it. "Stick to the Plan" is a great song, with a Parkeresque anger at phoniness, combined with a bouncy melody line. There is a plentitude of lyrics in the song and I wouldn't be surprised if there are fewer verses when GP records this for his next album. He had the audience sing along on the catchy chorus "good things are coming if we stick to the plan." He had a music stand over to his left to help him with the many lyrics to this one. This song is so good it could be a #1 hit if the world were different.
After the song he said he was done with the kazoo and gave it to a fan in the front row. He had already given one of his harmonicas to another fan in the front row, and at this point remarked that he was looking for someone in the audience to give his guitar to. Some wise guy shouted out something about the piano that was standing at the back of the stage, and GP said that since he wasn't going to use the piano, the guy should go ahead and take it away.
Geep played two of the Motown tunes that he loves so much, "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down," the Ann Peebles classic recorded by GP & the Rumour on Stick To Me, and "In the Midnight Hour," in honor of Wilson Pickett, who just passed on a few days ago.
GP said he was playing "Hard Side of the Rain" in front of an audience for the first time. This was a mid-tempo, pretty song with lyrics about the hope that things will get better. GP said he hoped to record an album sometime this year, and said he'd been procrastinating about doing it, but I don't see how he can say that, when he just put out a record last June, and has performed quite a few live shows since then. He apparently has high standards for himself. And he likes to work.
Another new song was "England's Latest Clown," featuring a memorable, somewhat melancholy melody line, which he said was inspired by an English rock star who had been in the tabloids for spending time in jail, doing heroin, and dating supermodel Kate Moss. Graham pretended he didn't remember the name of the star, so Concert Going Partner looked it up on the interwebs and found out his name (you can, too -- just search on "Kate Moss boyfriend"). The song is about the cult of celebrity; the public despises this man for his nastiness and at the same time envies him for his adventures. When GP records it, I hope he changes the lyric about "Kate Moss on his arm" to "a supermodel on his arm" to give the song a wider range. My only fear about these great new songs is that they are so topical that they might be dated in a few months.
The fourth new song was "2000 Funerals," the recording of which is available for download on E-Music or I-Tunes, on which GP plays all the instruments. It is a sad song with a lovely melody mourning the 2000 Americans killed in the Iraq war. He played it as the first encore.
I last saw Geep at the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA in October, and at this show he played an almost entirely different set list. He repeated only two songs from the Iron Horse show. After the show he told me he varies his set list so that fans who come to a lot of shows don't get bored; I also think he likes his own songs so much he enjoys playing as many of them as he can. He played a number of songs I hadn't heard at a GP show before in my two years of attending his shows. One was "Just Like Hermann Hesse," which GP said was a complicated song to play, with its key change in the middle. Another was "Dark Days," which gave me goosebumps, from my favorite GP album, Deepcut to Nowhere. Others were the excellent "Obsessed with Aretha, "Force of Nature," "First Day of Spring," and "Joe Meek's Blues." Geep introduced "Joe Meek's Blues" by telling the story of the British producer Joe Meek ("Telstar"), who recorded #1 hits in his flat in London, showed a preference for young boys, and then one day took a gun and shot to death his landlady and then himself. GP told the facts of the story, ending with the murder/suicide, and he seemed to feel the story lacked a conclusion, so he said: "so I wrote a song about it." "Joe Meek's Blues" was fabulous, with GP playing a complex accompaniment on the Fender electric and singing falsetto on the choruses. After the song, some heckler in the front row complained that they missed the harmonies on the record; GP said "what - I'm not some sort of throat singer and can sing two notes at once."
The only song he played from Songs of No Consequence was "Evil" and the only one from Your Country was "Cruel Lips." It seems he is already moving on to his next set of songs. On "Local Girls," GP let the audience sing the chorus, and he praised our singing after the song with apparent sincerity. He is so kind to the fans!
GP is all about making fun of pretentiousness. Besides the obvious "England's Latest Clown," other targets included hackneyed "homilies" for sale at a country store (wall hangings with cliches like "don't sweat the small stuff"). He also likes to poke fun at himself, with calling "The Raid" the "worst song on Stick To Me." I'd heard GP play this with The Figgs last June and enjoyed it then, but it was even more fun with him singing it solo, because you could really follow the lyrics, which really are silly, if you don't take the song too seriously.
As usual, attending a Graham Parker concert was a feel-good experience and I look forward to the next one. He is a performer who is entertaining, funny, and gracious to the fans, while showcasing a song catalogue that is second to none.
More Chairman
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