Graham Parker ~ 2009 March 26 ~ Iron Horse, Northampton, MA
Setlist (with guitars indicated)
Review
Concert Going Partner and I went home to Cape Cod after the Sculler's show, and we had the longish drive to Northampton on Day #2. I've seen Graham at the Iron Horse at least three times before and it's a good venue for him. Tonight the upstairs balcony was closed off (as it usually is, actually) but the downstairs was full to capacity. It was another good crowd but maybe not quite as into it as the crowd at Sculler's the night before. We were joined by our friend Mary "Capgirl," who came in from "All-Bunny" for the show. We ordered from their refreshingly normal pub food menu. Graham asked if anyone was from Northampton or if we'd all driven in, and there was a response of "drove in" from the crowd.
Again there was no opening act. GP came on at the humanely early hour of 7:00, wearing the same fab '80s shirt as last night. He called himself a "fashionista," saying the shirt was from the '80s, the grey trousers from the '90s, and the plastic sunglasses were actually the ones he wore on the cover of Steady Nerves, also from the '80s. At one point he commented about the early hour for the show, and said he liked to be home by 10:00 tucked up in bed with a hot cocoa, and then he decided he'd rather have an Ovaltine.
Again he opened with "If It Ever Stops Rainin'," but tonight followed it with "High Horse," also from my favorite GP record, Deepcut to Nowhere, and at the end of the song changed a few lyrics from "high horse" to "iron horse."
The point of this mini-tour is to promote Carp Fishing on Valium: the Songs. GP explained that in 2000 he put out a book of short stories, Carp Fishing on Valium. (This title got a laugh from the audience.) After the book had been published it was suggested to him that he write some songs to illustrate the stories. He laughed off the idea at first, but then went home and "immediately started writing songs" and decided to do a short tour to promote the book. The format would be reading a segment from a story and singing the song that accompanied the story. He made a cassette of himself singing the songs into a walkman (in the bathroom) which he sent to Tom Freund so he could learn the songs since he was going to accompany Geep on this tour.
I missed the Carp Fishing on Valium: the Stories tour -- it was before I started following Graham. If anyone was there and would like to tell about it, I'd like to hear about it.
GP claimed that the original CFOV tour was "challenging -- not for me, for the audience." He said he'd read a long segment from a story ("20 minutes" -- I suspect he was exaggerating) followed by a 3 minute song. In other words, the format didn't work particularly well. That tour was 12 shows so GP didn't really give himself a chance to figure out pacing that would work.
So, the book sells pretty well, goes from a hardcover to a paperback edition, sells out and is now out of print. The end of Carp Fishing on Valium, right? Wrong. Graham Parker's intrepid webmaster, John Howells, had a copy of the original cassette of the demos for Tom Freund, sent to him as a curiosity by Graham. He dug it out one day, made it into a CD, cleaned up some of the tape hiss, and sent it to Graham with the suggestion that it become an official bootleg. That is where the CD Carp Fishing on Valium: the Songs came into existence, and the effort Graham is making to promote it during the current flurry of shows.
The first CFOV song he performed was "Chloroform," one of a handful of songs that wound up on a "real" album, in this case Songs of No Consequence, recorded with The Figgs (The Figgs got a good round of applause whenever they were mentioned).
One of the stories in CFOV was "Me and the Stones," in which the scenario is that Mick Jagger has been killed in a traffic accident and Keith Richard is auditioning for a replacement, and the main character in CFOV, Brian Porker, gets to audition. GP imitated Keith brilliantly, complete with gruffness of voice, rubbing of hand over head, excessive swearing, and hysterical opinions on some of the potential replacements. Brian doesn't get the job with the Stones, but he does get to perform a Stones song (an imaginary one, one that GP wrote) called "Custom Fanny." Very funny and at the end when GP said "that's better than any song the Stones have done for 20 years" the audience agreed.
I think Graham summarizing the story, as he did tonight, was probably much funnier and undoubtedly worked better than actually reading from the story, as he did in the original CFOV tour. Telling the story instead of reading it allows him to embellish or to leave things out, and it enabled him to use his very strong ability as an impersonator, this time of Keith Richard.
Graham introduced "Soul Corruption" by saying he had been on the Arsenio Hall show and wanted to play it, but the network wouldn't let him because of the use of the "n-word." He said that at least he thinks he was on the Arsenio Hall show, because no one has ever said they saw him on it, and he's beginning to wonder if he imagined it. Anyway, this was the lead-in to "Soul Corruption," in which Graham actually said "they won't let any n-word in." I still find it offensive. A white man from England has no standing to say that word or to imply that word. Graham's comments made it clear that he's very glad that the line is obsolete, and I think he was paying the American people a very convoluted compliment for the result of last year's election. He could come right out and say it if he's glad we elected Mr. Obama. The song is interesting, musically, and his singing on it is fantastic (the falsetto on one or two instances of "soul corruption" is breathtaking) but in general I think there are better choices from his political catalog.
During "Tough on Clothes," he added a longish guitar solo toward the end of the song that I had never heard before. This time before the encore he hid his face behind a curtain at the back of the stage.
Spotted in the audience was Ray Mason, who has been playing stellar rock 'n' roll music on his Silvertone guitar in western Massachusetts for about as long as Graham Parker's been doing the same kind of thing all over the world.
More Chairman
Here is a page with a handy list of links to all pages on this website with content relating to Graham Parker.
Click for 2009 Concert Page with links to all 2009 concerts ... Click for Main Concert Page with links to all years