Word: parker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Parker's own hard-line commitment to rock is evident both in casual conversation ("I'm not about to give people music about rolling down the highway") and, where it properly belongs and truly flourishes, in his songs, which are like sneak attacks on his own psychic defenses. His tunes rock hard and burn bridges-and create the kind of commercial problems that have plagued Parker since his first record three years ago and seem to be easing only...
Ever since the release of Howlin' Wind in 1976, Parker has stalked the big time, collecting delirious reviews but staying an arm's length away from the top of the charts and the kind of record sales that are commemorated with albums cast in semiprecious elements. Just last spring, with a new record company behind him, Parker released one of the year's best albums, Squeezing Out Sparks, and set out on two bruising cross-country concert tours to rally fans and baptize some new converts. His style of total-immersion rock is a salubrious shock...
Squeezing Out Sparks, however, keeps bumping around the lower reaches of the Top 100, and part of the purpose of the Parker barnstorming is to push the record. The future is by no means clear, although Parker holds it in perspective pretty well. "I only want people to hear me, hear my songs and lyrics," he told TIME's William Blaylock. "I'm no prophet or anything...
...first and easiest impression of Parker-both on records and in performance-is of a spoiler, full of challenge and low-slung, bemused carnality. "When the world is dead, I'm gonna make the bed/ With the hotel chambermaid ... Gonna shut the bellboy out tonight" runs one of his earlier odes to one-stop sex. Many of his best tunes, like Fool's Gold, portray quite another character entirely, a knight-errant on a lonely and probably hopeless quest for a shopworn Grail: "I'm a fool, so I'm told/ I get left...
...Parker the quest is at least as important as the goal itself. Like many another British rocker, he comes from a working-class background, sings out of the same wounded idealism and fractured, persistent hope. Now 28, he was raised in the small village of Deepcut, 40 miles south of London. He never made it into the good schools, spent most of his time studying rare reptiles ("probably very Freudian") and playing music. In his early teens he joined a band called the Black Rockers ("We wore black turtlenecks, black pants and black shoes, and we still weren...