The second side is uniformly excellent, but it’s one of those LPs like Marquee Moon or Music From Big Pink where the level of bone-deep investment required of the first half almost inevitably renders everything that follows as an exhalation. “Saturday Nite Is Dead” is a deliriously funny bare-knuckle brawler that affectionately updates Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” with bad news. “Love Gets You Twisted” sounds like the Yardbirds and screws itself into a million different lyrical iterations on the titular conceit. But the closer “Don’t Get Excited” is ultimately perhaps the album’s most revealing moment with respect to Parker’s overarching temperament. An Irish goodbye to his own banquet, typified by if-you-don’t-love-me-then-I-don’t-care sentiments like “You try to reach a vital part of me/My attention span is dropping rapidly.” It’s one part J.D. Salinger and one part Johnny Paycheck, a strangely preemptive hedge on the brink of his own star turn. You can’t fire him—he quits.
Squeezing Out Sparks was so good that critics tripped over themselves with superlatives. It won 1979’s influential Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, prevailing over heavy hitters such as Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and Costello’s Armed Forces. They were a great band making the right record at the right time—and then, nothing happened. Despite critical rhapsody and heavy promotion Sparks reached only No. 18 on the UK album charts and topped out at No. 40 on the U.S. Top 40.
Since then, Parker’s career has been a series of fits and stops. He’s made many records for many labels, some brilliant, some lackadaisical, but none of them less than interesting. Always a treasured favorite of influential fans, Parker has turned up in strange places, such as the time when Judd Apatow made him the MacGuffin for his 2012 mid-life crisis opus This Is 40. Apatow’s summation of Parker’s casting is both telling and poignant: “I knew I needed somebody who would be comfortable being in a movie playing someone who was having a lot of problems selling records.” Parker lives in upstate New York and still plays a killer live show. The enigma of his stalled trajectory lingers somewhat bitterly amongst his diehard fans, but in retrospect, it’s easy to understand.
As popular music, politics, and advertising began to blur in the artificial product-placement glow of the 1980s, Parker was going the other way, producing ever knottier and more nuanced story-songs which seemed to question the veracity of everything surrounding him. To say he was out of step with the onset age of pumped-up Cold War jingoism and runaway consumerism is to wildly understate the point. Whereas Springsteen would use gated drums and keening synths to smuggle his working-class ethos into a mainstream culture that frequently misunderstood him, and Costello adapted enough to produce chart-worthy confections in the spirit of the times like “Everyday I Write the Book,” Parker was never willing to tailor his sound to the moment. His well-known truculence when dealing with labels did not help in keeping his commercial prospects afloat, either. Squeezing Out Sparks quietly remains one of the great records you’ll never see on a consensus-driven best-of-the-decade list. If Elvis Costello wanted to bite the hand that feeds, Graham Parker chewed the whole arm off.
Fame is a weird destiny and so is obscurity. Both seem to recognize and claim their own. Given its low profile, a final irony of Squeezing Out Sparks is that its bleak landscape of back-stabbing political operators, avaricious grifters, and dead-eyed consumption is a prescient vision of the corporate-tech nightmare of today. Parker always knew the truth.