His Promised Land (1886)

John P. Parker's slave narrative was never actually published until 1996, but editor and historian Stuart Seely Sprague makes a thorough and painstaking job of it. Parker was a freed slave as of 1845, at the age of 18, who worked out of Ripley, Ohio, "running off" Kentucky slaves by way of the Underground Railroad. Twenty years after the Civil War the reporter Frank M. Gregg tracked him down and interviewed him. Gregg's interest was primarily in verifying the factual basis for the Eliza scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which involves a young woman escaping with her baby across the melting ice of the late-winter Ohio River. Slaveholders and other Southerners took an interest in debunking it as implausible, but Gregg wanted to prove it. Parker died in 1900. His narrative had to go unpublished in his lifetime because of the danger the story represented to himself and family, both legally and personally. It's harder to say why it went unpublished for nearly a century after his death, but the reasons are not hard to guess: lack of interest as African-American liberation was replaced by Jim Crow laws and Confederacy memorials. Still, Parker may be the single most heroic figure in all these slave narratives, smart, brave, and committed to freedom. "Freedom" has become a dangerously inapproximate word these days, but in Parker's case it's pretty clear: "freedom" means freedom from enslavement. As always, the details of the context—notably the high value of slaves—contributes to understanding the difficulty of ending it once it had become an institution. As always, there is the mystery of seeing Americans accept it so readily, often aiding the slaveholders rather than the slaves. Parker's story is fragmented because of the way it made it into print. Some sections are simply missing. But it also contains some of the most exciting scenes in slave literature, with anecdotes of amazing adventures. They are too short and there are not enough of them, but they will do. Parker earns his bona fides and then some here as a genuine American hero. He did not have to stay in Ripley and help runaway slaves. As a shrewd and successful businessman, with several patents to his name for metalworking inventions, he could have stayed in Ripley and let the runaways see to themselves. But he did not. Partly out of hatred for slavery and slaveholders, partly for the thrill of what it involved, he spent his nights for years on exceedingly dangerous work. We still need more like him.

In case it's not at the library.

Squeezing Out Sparks (1979)

I don't have much sense of how this is regarded nowadays, except in my own mind, where I generally find it vaguely denigrated as overrated and/or simple critics' favorite. This is unfortunate because it is actually much better than that, although it is also somehow timebound too in a sense, fastened down there in the past of the late '70s/turn of the '80s, constantly receding. Graham Parker turned out to be remarkably easy to put away. I don't think he wrote anything even close to his early stuff from this point on. It makes me a little sad, remembering my own various obsessive periods with him, and I wonder if that isn't what draws me back to it now, nostalgia. On the level of its weirdness—the wild swings at Japanese culture and UFOs and bad relationships (with and without abortion intimacies), a surprising lyricism alternating with retreats to winning yobby throwaways, e.g., "Saturday Nite [sic] Is Dead"—Squeezing Out Sparks is still remarkably fresh. No horns on this outing, just a rock band—Brinsley Schwarz, Martin Belmont, Bob Andrews, Steve Goulding, Andrew Bodnar—hitting all their marks with precision. And going through the album again recently keeps peeling off surprises: the raw surge of "Discovering Japan," the shocking tenderness of "You Can't Be Too Strong," the plaintive declaration of "Passion Is No Ordinary Word," the poise of the big finish, "Don't Get Excited," and on and on it goes, the hits keep coming, rocking out at will with style, economy, and power. It's a remarkable set. It did win the "Village Voice" Pazz & Jop poll of its year (running away, as I recall) and even made the Billboard album top 40 (barely), and for several months was unavoidable, playing at every house party and get-together and loud. Squeezing Out Sparks is indeed, as I discover every time I get myself to return to it, a hard and brilliant thing, lean and angry and constantly insinuating. In many ways it represents a consolidation, a pulling-together (one last time, in retrospect) of the coequal powers of Graham Parker and the Rumour, in tandem, everything promised on those first three albums herewith delivered on, no denying and sign here. Play loud, as they say. Don't forget.

Stick to Me (1977)

It's probably going too far to say this represents a shadow of a lost album but it's still an interesting story. With some buzz at their backs from the first two albums of the year before, Graham Parker and the Rumour toured a bunch and then retreated to the studio to lay down the third album before embarking on more touring. A lot of work went into it, it sounds like—string sections, a high concept for a long psychedelic soul song, and all the usual angsty blood, sweat, and tears, which I suspect is more than most people (me included) generally know to get an album in the can. Then, all finished, something turned out to be wrong with the master tape, and suddenly it was all lost. They had literally one week before they were set to travel. They went back to the studio. Nick Lowe presided over the board and the band pounded through the set, treating it necessarily more like live performance than whatever it was they had worked out before. For me, only dimly aware of the story, it was the first Graham Parker album I heard and it just lit me up. It was easily my favorite until I checked out the first two and discovered Heat Treatment. Once I knew the Stick to Me story I could hear the rushed quality of it, from which "The Heat in Harlem," the stab at psychedelic soul, clearly suffers most. I don't know that it ever had enough in it to compete seriously with "Time Has Come Today" (long version) but I do wish I could hear the original to judge. Otherwise I think the circumstances may have actually served the session well, contributing to what makes it so good, however unpleasant it must have been for the players at the time. The music is irresistible, spry and quick to make its points, but with an impatient edge, restless, constantly prowling and moving and hitting sweet spots on practically every track. I like the way it retreats to the Muscle Shoals soul moves they have so fully absorbed. I like the way it entertains romantic American migratory history ("Soul on Ice," "The New York Shuffle," "The Heat in Harlem," "The Raid")—the fascination for some heroic American vision is so ingenuous it's adorable, and perfectly winning. And I will say this about "The Heat in Harlem"—it fails for me, as too long though not altogether wearing out its welcome, only when I start to think about it too much. Otherwise it's all of a piece from when I was first infatuated with the album. It had me at the needle drop and the roaring title song, which takes off like a jet and drags everything else behind it, supersonic style. Both sides good.

Heat Treatment (1976)

I'm not always sure about Graham Parker but I am always sure about this one, which I really, really like. Sometimes, often, I forget how good it is, and then I happen to play it again. The songs sound like pure stuff of life experience, unadorned and unpretentious, unbowed above all. Taking chances and constantly pulling it off. Example: "Black Honey," which is about as awkwardly unself-consciously racially odd as the title immediately suggests. It's not exactly PC, but it's not exactly not either. The ache in Parker's voice obviates everything except the unbelievable grace he applies. It's in my soul. That's what he sings—"Oh, black honey's in my soul"—and that's what the experience of hearing it feels like. It's remarkable what he does, covering great plains of emotional territory (and then following it with a song called "Hotel Chambermaid," another good one, they're all good ones). I am frankly surprised that Heat Treatment is generally considered comparable to its companion piece from the same year, Howlin' Wind, which admittedly is a pretty good first album, with Parker's destiny already half written: blowing up with punk-rock (but linked more directly to its immediate predecessor, pub-rock), angry, defiant, and got its chin out, tender/bruised style, and all wrapped up in a blaze of horn-driven Memphis soul stew straight outta the UK. Howlin' Wind is good but Heat Treatment is amazing, really. I have returned to it many times, surprised to find the same kick always there waiting for me. What is it? Something about the scrappy working-class manner, I guess—literally, I guess. Something about his singing. Something about the way he locks in with the band. I don't know why I love this, I just do. Parker would ultimately find his place in the New Wave angry-young-Brit rotation also occupied by Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and others (even, a little, that saint of pure good nature, Nick Lowe). Parker's best stuff to me always has a certain edge of desperation that is not particularly fashionable and certainly not pretty. He sounds truly denied, and fighting back, and I respect that and take it as a model for living too. It just somehow gets me where I live. At least before the '80s, Parker seemed to have a genuine knack for how to use a whole rock band as an instrument, or maybe the Rumour just happened to play it that way because he and they could. This is a great meeting of artist and band, one of the best. You can go right down the line here, song by song. The whole thing barely lasts half an hour, with 10 songs. But they just really tear up the joint.

85. Graham Parker & the Rumour, "You Can't Be Too Strong" (1979)

(listen)

There's a word for how this sturdy little leftover from yet another all-but-forgotten rock 'n' roll's last hope ended up on this list, and that word is "shuffle." It's badly dated in at least two ways, first that it even attempts the topic of abortion at all—does anyone, anywhere, write anything like it nowadays? It's just too loaded, politically if nothing else; if someone has (and someone must have), it's probably been even more marginalized than Graham Parker was in his time, and he was never marginalized for this. The second point where it's dated is in the vaguely sexist direction of the story it tells, taking a calculated position at some distance from the (objectified, if uneasily respectful) center of its attention, and too quickly diving for cover in a kind of good old boys denial of the powerful emotional gravity of the situation ("Well I ain't gonna cry, I'm gonna rejoice / And shout myself dry and go see the boys / They'll laugh when I say I left it overseas"). It's not so much that the singer doesn't understand what's at stake, the stark and poignant tone of the song makes that clear enough, but that that kind of position is still even available to be taken. I'm not sure it's the case any longer that anyone could so openly and cavalierly celebrate dodging the bullet of parental responsibility, which means perhaps some progress has been made here, perhaps without our even noticing. Anyway, the reason I like it now is more because of the associations with the times. Hard to believe now, in retrospect, but there was a brief period when Parker and the album this comes from, Squeezing out Sparks, seemed to point the way to our future. That's all so buried now that only shuffle could bring it back.

That's My Bush! (2001)

USA, TV series (Comedy Central)
Creators: Trey Parker, Matt Stone
Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Carrie Quinn Dolin, Kurt Fuller, Marcia Wallace, Kristen Miller, John D'Aquino

Some things you should know if you're going to take my word that this is worth tracking down. First, while I have some appreciation for animated sitcoms—I love "The Simpsons," for example (as who doesn't?)—my preference is for real people and blocking and the three-camera setup and all that, which this basically is. I even appreciate the sound of laughter, canned or otherwise. Second, I have never developed a taste for "South Park," whose creators are behind this (and I'm afraid my excuse is that "the voices are too scratchy," but I do understand that's lame and fully intend one day to give it the fair chance I keep hearing it deserves). As for "That's My Bush!"—there are only eight episodes total to this brilliant Comedy Central sitcom parody. Each and every one is pure gold, spot-on and very funny, ripping off the likes of Jackie Gleason, "Father Knows Best," "Andy Griffith," "Dennis the Menace," "Mr. Ed," "Bewitched," and many more, all at once and repeatedly and in any number of refreshing, surprising ways. (There are even more or less animated characters showing up too, such as an antiabortion leader, with and without scratchy voices.) The thing to remember, this far out from those early days of the Bush administration, is that this is and always was intended more as a hopelessly loving parody of the classic sitcom form itself than derision aimed at the Bush administration, for the sake of which it was discontinued without looking back approximately one minute following Bush's public reading of My Pet Goat to a classroom of children in Sarasota, Florida. In that way it is also a fascinating document of the brief sliver of time when the ineptitude and unwarranted arrogance of Bush, Cheney & crew were still things that could be coped with by laughing (if one could overlook or momentarily forget December 12, 2000).

(For those following along, this concludes my list of my favorite movies of 2009, some of which were not movies and most of which were not released in 2009, though seen by me for the first time then. We now return to something that I'd like to think of as normal programming, with a stepped-up schedule of music along with "the usual" book club Sundays and "the new" "movie" Fridays, according to the limits of my stamina.)