Graham Parker & Brinsley Schwarz at City Winery on Wednesday night April 27, 2016
The first time I saw Graham Parker, and got to appreciate his cool delivery of wicked, street-smart lyrics, was when I was just short of my sixteenth birthday in June of 1985 at the Worcester Centrum. A little too young to appreciate some of the subtleties but savvy enough to seek out his work since. His backing band that night was called The Shot, his new album was Steady Nerves and he was on a bill with Eric Clapton.
On stage that night as a member of The Shot was one Brinsley Schwarz. The two already had a decade of history together. 1975 was the last year of existence for the band named Brinsley Schwarz who featured Nick Lowe as its primary songwriter and released half a dozen albums between 1970 and 74. 1975 was the first year of existence for Graham Parker and The Rumour. The groups shared a manager and two members: Bob Andrews on keyboards as well as Brinsley Schwarz on guitar. The five albums the new group did from 75-80 remain highly regarded. Parker’s ambitious, crafty compositions were just the thing to run a band like a racehorse and The Rumour proved on records like Squeezing Out Sparks in 1979, to be a tough, seasoned thoroughbred. Danny Federici of the E Street Band contributed keyboards to the follow up: 1980’s The Up Escalator (and Springsteen lent his voice to a track) but that was the last one for over three decades. However, it wasn’t over for the Parker-Schwarz association that kept asserting itself intermittently and in myriad forms since.
After a triumphant comeback of Graham Parker and The Rumour that began in 2010 and included a handful of tours and a pair of stellar albums: Three Chords Good and Mystery Glue, the time was right for Graham and Brinsley to do duo shows in the states. The tour began at City Winery early last month and ended back at the same joint. In a powwow shortly before his set time, Graham pointed out that despite being his most frequent collaborator throughout his career and despite the fact that he had done duo shows with a number of other artists; the pair had never done a duo show until now. He mentioned he had just been in Minneapolis where he had dusted off an old thing that he had recorded years before with The Figgs.
