Gram Parsons/Fallen Angel DVD/The Complete Reprise Sessions (Rhino/WEA)

Gram Parsons: He could have gone to Woodstock, but he decided to take the train. 'Papa' J. Lowe takes a sideways look at the truth, the life and the myth of alt-country legend, Gram Parsons in light of two new releases: ‘Fallen Angel: A Film by Gandulf Hennig’ and Gram Parsons: The Complete Reprise Sessions. Out now on Rhino!

25/07/2006

In with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels. You’ll have to excuse any licence I take with these words lifted from Gram Parson’s Return Of The Grievous Angel, because it seems, to my mind at least, that there’s at least two personalities to deal with here. Perhaps that’s why Gram effectively ended up with two tombstones: one, the faux-tombstone inscribed Gram: Safe At Home over at Room 8, the Joshua Tree Inn and the other slipping namelessly into history, squeezed between thousands of others like it at the decidedly chintzy Garden of Memories cemetery near Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans that sits close to the city's airport. At one site lies the legendary Gram Parsons – nudie-wearing, mescaline smoking founder of Country-Rock and one-time member of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, responsible not only for introducing acid into country music and for a stream of broken hearts, but for influencing, amongst many things, the Stone’s Exile On Main Street, the career of Emmylou Harris and for posthumously empowering a school of similar minded mavericks that include Elvis Costello, Dinosaur Jr, Cowboy Junkies, Belly, Yo La Tengo, The Lemonheads, Ryan Adams, Teenage Fanclub, Starsailor, The Charlatans, Grant-Lee Phillips, Wilco, Tom Petty and even The Eagles – the summation of a rock n’ roll lifestyle procured by bad company and brought to a sad, ignominious close through a terminal brew of tequila and morphine on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park in South Eastern California and from years spent drifting across the sands and dunes of a deep, recursive melancholy. At another other site lies Ingram Cecil Connor, III, grandson of citrus fruit baron John Snively, and heir to a fiercely dysfunctional family and fortune; born in 1946 in Winter Haven, Florida, to a father who committed suicide and a mother who died from cirrhosis of the liver in less than transparent circumstances, the summation of a life beset by tragedy and brought to a sad, ignominious close by almost criminal abandonment and neglect.

If Gandulf Hennig’s Fallen Angel (Rhino) is anything to go by, the legend of Gram Parsons doesn’t start with his death in 1973 when tour manager and friend Phil Kaufman steels Parson’s body from the Los Angeles International Airport and makes a botched attempt to cremate it ritually in the Joshua Tree desert (as it does for most Parsons converts) it begins with the ritual and chronic dysfunction of a family and the wilful intent of one impressionable young man to escape it by any means he can find: Elvis, California, drink, drugs and the rootsy salvation of country-music – the same objective – just different channels, different routes. It’s a rock n’ roll cliché with a difference. This time, it’s not the reckless young man from the wrong side of the tracks trying to escape his impoverished upbringing, it’s the polite, Harvard-educated young man with impeccable manners and the sensitive eyes wishing to escape the grip of a terminal prosperity and the culture of apathy and neglect that beleaguers it like a cancer. And like most legends – rock n roll or otherwise – it’s a story that has more than its fair share of bewildering fortune and irony. Ingram Cecil Connor, III gets buried in New Orleans, a deeply rich and fertile belt well suited for stock raising and cultivation. Gram Parsons is cremated in the desert, the abject opposite of Florida, an arid, intractable region notorious for its failure to support very little in the way of life. And yet it’s here that the legend thrives.

Joshua trees can grow from seed or from an underground rhizome of another Joshua tree. They are slow growers with new seedlings perhaps only reaching a height of 10-20 cm in their first few years. This tree is not very sturdy because of its shallow root area and top-heavy branch system. But, if it survives the rigors of the desert, it can live a couple hundred years.

And the same could be said of Parsons. A victim of chronic family dysfunction, Parsons overcomes the rigors of a shallow, inhospitable environment and against all odds, the boy with the impossibly poignant voice and the beautiful big doe-eyes actually flourishes, not in his own lifetime, perhaps, but for a 100 or so years at least.

But why choose country music? Why not rock n roll? In July 2001, the alt-country magazine No Depression published a handful of letters posted in response to a veto on Parsons based, to some extent, on his wealthy background. "Finding yourself rootless is a very painful experience," wrote someone called Shilough Hopwood, "By deliberately and self-consciously choosing the idiom of country music, Parsons was trying to throw down roots again, to bridge the past and the future, the cosmic and the colloquial." But herein lies the rub. Parsons’ musical statement was as much a public one as a private one, complicated by drugs, marred by inconsistency and thwarted by delusions of celebrity. Gram may have had the drive and the talent to succeed but he had neither the constitution nor the application to meet the demands of the status he sort. If the certainty of success failed to revive him then sticking ice-cubes up his butt was unlikely to move him at all. His spangly, patterned nudie-suits festooned with all manner of rock n roll imagery, from pharmaceutical items and marijuana to crucifixes and flames wasn’t a fashion-statement, it was a mission-statement: if he couldn’t earn the right to be a rock star, he could buy into it, the drugs, the suits, the hanging out with the Stones, even the untimely death – all paid-for using his $55,000 annual trust-fund allowance. Happy with the 10-20 cm he was to accrue creatively off the back of inspired moments like The Byrd’s Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, the Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin (the bench-mark for alt-country) and his two solo albums GP and Grievous Angel, Gram simply didn’t have the compulsion or the need to drive his roots still deeper into the mainstream. Gram seemed happy on the peripheries, a casual invite, an interested guest, fiercely suspicious of laying down any kind of roots and moving on in instant. High. And lonesome.

For me, Gram is best summed-up not by the hauntingly beautiful records he created – the Burrito #1’s, the Song For You’s, the ‘She’s, the Brass Button’s – but by the few touching memories shared by his peers; the image we have of him lugging his gear off stage in his ridiculous, spangly nudie suit. At once silly, at once poignant. Or the story of Gram shedding a tear during one of his songs, water rolling his cheeks, with not one person in the audience noticing; a gesture, that should by rights have been an iconic, defining moment in the trajectory of rock n roll history somewhat criminally overlooked. Or the awkward, ‘if-only’ myths that surround him; how Gram didn’t in fact write Wild Horses, that Gram didn’t in fact discover Emmylou Harris, that Gram didn’t write The Ballad Of Easy Rider or that the fact that he wasn’t cremated in the desert at all – only partially burned.

It seems everyone wanted Gram to be famous. Everybody but Gram. His future, just like his body, was destined to never truly ignite.

Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels.

Out with the light. In with the legend.

Gram Parsons - Fallen Angel (2006)
Studio: Rhino / Wea DVD
Release Date: June 20, 2006



The Complete Reprise Sessions [BOX SET] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]
Original Release Date: June 20, 2006
Box set, Original recording remastered

Relevant sites:
http://www.gramparsons.com



Papa J. Lowe for Crud Magazine 2006©

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