Graham Parker has always been a spiky one. And now, after twenty-five years of service — and with no gold watch or multi-platinum parachute in sight — the old boy is plenty cranky. "I'll Never Play Jacksonville Again" could be a love letter to his booking agent, while the hapless incompetence Parker catalogs in "It Takes a Village Idiot" suggests he needs to find a better social crowd — or stop watching CNN. Only "Tough on Clothes" breaks from the pattern, sounding suspiciously like he's auditioning for the detergent market. The electric guitars still cut with precision, though, and Parker's voice — a cross between a switch-blade and barbed wire — allows him to imbue even the most tender moments ("Depend On Me," "Last Stop is Nowhere") with the threat of apocalypse just beyond the sunset.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.