Aug 222012
From Rolling Stone:
British rocker Graham Parker has reunited with his original band, the Rumour, for their first album together in more than 30 years, Three Chords Good, out November 20th on Primary Wave Records.
The Rolling Stone piece contains a track from their upcoming album, which delivers the chunky guitar crunch many of us grew up loving. An update on the documentary on the band that Rumour guitarist and Friend of the Hall Martin Belmont first discussed with us as well as Parker’s upcoming appearance in an upcoming Judd Apatow movie are also covered. I’m psyched.
While Rolling Stone fails to credit the Hall for its small but not insignificant role in the reunion, we can allow ourselves a pat on the back.
That song’s not bad. But what really got me thinking regarding this reunion was this: We give Bowie and Costello lots of shit for re-re-reissuing their old albums, and generally rightly so, in my opinion. On the other hand, the only GP album I ever bought was Squeezing out Sparks, which I found on cassette for 3 bucks in my college bookstore. I don’t recall any concentrated, well-orchestrated reissue campaign for classic GP, and I think at this point if you want to make a case for yourself as an artist worthy of inclusion in the canon, you have to make your music visibly available and you have to do it again and again. It’s hard for us to conceive, but the audience for music really does reset every 10 years or so, so preparing another release of Ziggy Stardust or This Year’s Model maybe isn’t so crazy after all, but just the way things are now.
Good point, Oats. I wonder if GP’s pockmarked history with record labels will prevent this ever happening. He’s one of those artists like the Animals, who seem incapable of ever having all his best material collected under one 2-album compilation let alone getting the full remaster/remarketing treatment.
You’re probably right, although it seems these days it’s easier for conglomerates to collaborate on reissues than, say, the ’90s. I did some wiki-ing. Parker and the Rumour recorded first for Mercury (now owned by Universal), then for Arista (defunct, copyrights reside with RCA/Sony now). I wonder who owns the masters. If Parker does, or could acquire them, he could license them to whatever label he wanted.