Parsons at his beloved Joshua Tree. What a ham!
If you’ve never gotten into Gram Parsons, here’s how to go about doing it. First listen to Return of the Grievous Angel, A Tribute to Gram Parsons, and look at the lead vocalists on each of song. You won’t need to look anybody up. Then watch the documentary Fallen Angel. You’ll be introduced to GP by the likes of Keith Richards, Chris Hillman (The Byrds), Emmylou Harris, Peter Buck (R.E.M.), and Bernie Leadon (Eagles; banjo player on “Take it Easy”)
The little vignettes about Gram Parsons are the ones that really kill you. His hair was always a mess and he lived off a trust fund. Both of his parents were dead before he turned 20, and Keith Richards described him as a brother. He was so deadly serious in his music and songwriting that sobriety was probably not an option. An earlier version of Fallen Angel contained extensive commentary on Parson’s poor musicianship.
Parsons worked on his custom Nudie suit for months. It’s covered in drugs.
Emmy Lou Harris however points out that Gram Parsons was likely a vocal genius. “What he gave me, was learning how to sing and phrase. […] Singing with him, I learned that one of the universal things about it is the restraint in the phrasing…. I am not possessed of a voice that can do a lot of acrobatics, so country music was one of the best places to go for me as a singer, and I didn’t even know that”. I had never heard the restraint in Emmy Lou’s voice before, but yes, there it is.
Gram Parsons, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg didn’t need to go to burning man to trip in the desert.
Parsons was one of the good folks back in the 70’s who never forgot the sound of real country music, and yet had a solid lock on what Emmy Lou calls “his own personal, and generational poetry”. Some describe him as the first artist to smelt the emotion of country with rock’s timbre. He was responsible for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, taught Keith Richard everything he knew about country, and discovered Emmylou Harris. Harris writes in the liner notes of her Anthology that Parsons gave her tapes of the Louvin Brothers, and Carl and Pearl Butler to demonstrate what he was going for. It is my guess that “Boulder to Birmingham” is about Parsons, as are perhaps other songs written by Harris.
The first thing you think when you hear a Gram Parson’s song, is how good, and simple and beautiful this sounds. The first thing you think when you look at a chart of a Gram Parsons song is, Jesus Christ?! What is he Mozart or something? He seems to have been influenced by older incarnations of country that used jazz chordal organization. Parsons was a melody man, but unlike the young bucks of today, his melodies had a beginning middle and an end, and he had something to say.
The greatest country duo since Tammy Wynnette and George Jones
He made critical covers of hard hitting country songs like “Sleepless Nights”, “The Dark End of the Street” and “Love Hurts”. He also wrote “Hot Burrito #1”, “She” and “New Soft Shoes”, classic works that make it hard to tell the songs he wrote from those that he did not.
