I’m doing something different this week. Instead of crate-digging through my parents’ collection, I’m passing the keyboard to Jay Nachman. Jay is the author of Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind, and he shares in this book excerpt how the finishing touches were put on the album before Parker and his band, The Rumour, began touring behind it.
Jay is new to Substack, so be sure to give him a warm welcome and a follow.
Now, I’m not a Parker historian, so I’ll let someone who actually knows what they’re talking about take it from here.
Graham Parker’s debut album, Howlin’ Wind, turns 50 in April. 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.
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“We listened on this very small, single speaker because we wanted to pretend that maybe it would sound like this on radio,” Parker said. “Not an original idea, really, for mixing albums in some way, but, you know, it was good to bring it down to earth as opposed to the giant speakers, where it could sound fantastic and you can get misled. It was a great thing. I loved being with [producer Nick Lowe], just him and me, into the wee hours, mixing. That was a really good thing about that album. The whole experience was pretty damn good, really.”
Howlin’ Wind was completed in early January, and the release date was set for the end of April. Parker didn’t put a whole lot of thought into naming the album. Howlin’ Wind struck him as a good, inspirational title, and he liked the distant association with Howlin’ Wolf. But the song “Howlin’ Wind” was very much about himself. “I just thought the song was powerful inasmuch as it’s like reinvention,” he said. “That song is about being lost or something, and a reinvention of a person. That last person was left behind, me, and now I’m on a course. The howlin’ wind is my inspiration. I’ve got this to say. This howling need to get the songs across, as it were.”
After Howlin’ Wind was finished, Parker was proud of the album but wasn’t about to get carried away. He didn’t know how it was going to be received, and he had to prepare for tours—his first—to support the album. Then there were promotion and interviews to get through, also firsts. He was getting onto a music industry run-away train carried along by its own momentum.
“I didn’t think much further than, my first album is made. My foot is in the door,” Parker said. “That’s it. We’ll see what people make of it.” Still, he said, he thought it was a great first album, and “to this day I couldn’t have hoped for better. And it was amazing to have these musicians playing on it. [Manager Dave Robinson’s] instinct was right to get Nick, who did a fantastic job. It was so natural sounding.”
Parker and the other musicians hardly had time to enjoy the accolades the album received. Robinson lined up gigs to promote the album, and the musicians agreed to play with Parker, supporting the band Ace for fourteen dates across England, starting on January 15.
There was no doubt for bass player Andrew Bodnar, drummer Steven Goulding, and guitarist Martin Belmont. They were raring to go. “I would have said, ‘When are we going to go play this stuff live?’ Once I realized how good Graham was, I was keen to go off and work with him,” Belmont said. “He was everything we were looking for. He was a natural front man. A natural crowd pleaser. A great songwriter with a musical direction with the kind of music references and influences that I and most of The Rumour, to one degree or another, related heavily to. As far as I remember, there was nothing official like, ‘Do you want to be the band?’ Of course, we were the band.”
That meant lawyers and paperwork. Bodnar recalled, “It was quite a complicated set-up, and suddenly we were being swept up into a situation which no one had foreseen and was slightly out of our control. Suddenly, it was ‘Sign this and sign that’ and lawyers drawing up contracts.”
Howlin’ Wind was completed in January 1976. By the end of the year, Parker and The Rumour had gotten less than a month off, by [guitarist Brinsley] Schwarz’s calculations. The gigs with Ace were followed by fourteen dates, beginning on February 6, supporting Kokomo. That tour ended on February 29. On March 2, they played again at Newlands, and the next night, they had a gig at the London club Dingwalls. Then, beginning on Friday, March 5, Graham Parker and The Rumour played thirty dates supporting Thin Lizzy on their Jailbreak tour, which ended April 4.
Lowe stayed involved, serving as tour manager for Parker during the band’s tour with Thin Lizzy, a job he admits he was ill-suited for. He was pretty good with getting the band members out of bed and getting them on stage on time, but he was hopeless when it came to managing the accounts and organizing the receipts. However, Lowe said, “I needed the money, really. I was out of work. And I was pleased with how well the record had been received. And it was opening for Thin Lizzy. They were really a fantastic group at that time. It was a sensational tour for them to be on, and they did really well.”
Initially, Lowe wished the album could have been better, but eventually he felt good about it, as is his pattern. “I felt pretty much like I felt like when I produced any of the albums that I produced. I always thought, ‘It’s not quite right,’” Lowe said. “‘I did my best, but we’ve run out of time now.’ None of the records I’ve ever produced have I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, now we’re talking.’ I listen to them in greater and lesser degrees of pleasure, but you can hear it just too well, what’s going on. It’s only after a few years you can listen, when you’ve forgotten all the things you did, you can see it for what it is. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, it could be better, frankly.’ I’m a bit of an old tart, really. As soon as the reviews come out, if they say it’s great, then suddenly I say, ‘Well, fabulous. That worked well.’ The reviews were good. It was received really well, and Graham was on his way.”
Parker was satisfied with the response to the album. “They saw things in my chord progressions and voice and my intensity,” he said. “I meant business. The songs weren’t letting anyone down. Amazingly, I can’t believe how accomplished I was in some ways, to have those songs and to know they were good enough.”
“I personally felt relieved and a little bit proud to have played alright on my very first album session and pulled it off,” Bodnar said. “There was so much stuff going on around the album, and I think we plunged straight into our initial U.K. tour supporting Ace very soon after Howlin’ Wind was completed. The circus had commenced.”
