Graham Parker portrait by Steve Keene.
About The Book
In the Village Voice’s year-end 1976 Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll, Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind placed fourth. In second place was his sophomore album, Heat Treatment. Number one was Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, and in third place was Jackson Browne’s The Pretender. Among that titanic company, it’s fair to say Parker more than held his own.
In his liner notes to Parker’s 2001 album, That’s When You Know, The Acoustic Demos & Live at Marble Arch, writer Nigel Williamson claimed, “Graham Parker and The Rumour had revitalized British music with their debut album Howlin’ Wind. Released in April 1976 to a wave of enthusiastic reviews that had compared Parker to Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen, his raw and energetic vocals combined with his intelligently crafted songwriting had come at just the right moment. Indeed, at the time Parker appeared to be the savior of British music.”
Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind is the captivating story of how the critically acclaimed album came together. The book illuminates Parker’s musical influences and those of the members of his backup band, The Rumour, against a backdrop of the British music scenes of the 1960s and 1970s and details how each song on Howlin’ Wind was written and recorded.
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The “eureka!” songwriting leap for Parker came with “Back to Schooldays.” The rockabilly song comes last on side one of Howlin’ Wind. “Back to Schooldays,” with its jabs at the British class and education systems, was Parker’s breakthrough song, both lyrically and musically.
Don’t seem to be no break in the line
Don’t seem to be no break boys
They ruined my vision
Screwed up my eyes
I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do boys
I’m going back to schooldays (x2)
I’m going back to schooldays to put them right
“It was so exciting,” Parker said. “I didn’t go from the E chord to an A, back to E and then to B. That three-chord thing. I went from the E chord right to the B chord, which we call the three chord, one, two, and three, instead of going one to two and then dropping right back into the E chord. That had a real great syncopation to it, and it felt even though the song itself was recognizable, that’s pretty clever and pretty fresh the way I did it with an old style. And that makes it stand out a great deal.
“I’d sort of taken a bit of the Eddie Cochran kind of feel and I wasn’t, you know, an aficionado of rockabilly at all. But I didn’t need to be to get the hang of something. I only needed a small example, and I could extrapolate on those and find my own version of it. And it sort of had that going for it. And it seemed to be just right for what I was doing, which was in a way reinventing these old styles.
“‘Back to Schooldays’ did not go away. The quality of the tune. I thought, ‘This is really original in its own way.’ And that kind of may have been what spurred me on really to realize I can do this. I can come up with original takes on things that are still at the same time familiar. ‘Schooldays’ was just a centralization of that, very much so, I think. And then when ‘Soul Shoes’ came along, that would have been another thing like, ‘That’s as close to “Brown Sugar” as I’m going to get.’ That’s not bad. That was another one that just was not going to go away.”
