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The Holy Grail of Cosmic American Music - Gram Parsons Journal

Around the corner from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of Country Music, a bunch of lucky Americanafest goers found ourselves in the presence of the holy grail of Cosmic American Music, which, on September 14, transformed the Hard Rock Café on Broadway into our own little church. A long-forgotten journal filled with handwritten notes, lyrics, drawings, and set lists had once been held in the hands of Gram Parsons. Turning the pages (while wearing white “archivist” gloves) became a near-spiritual experience for Shilah Morrow, Queen Bee of Sin City Social Club, and me, a longtime fan and chronicler of Gram’s music.

This opportunity arose, due to a bit of cosmic intervention: In Seattle, No Depression’s Kyla Fairchild recently heard about the notebook from Floridian Jeff Nolan, Hard Rock Café’s historian of music and memorabilia, via a mutual friend of the two who’d connected them. In his job as the company’s archivist, Jeff had stumbled upon the beat-up bound book stashed away in the Hard Rock’s massive warehouse of music artifacts in Orlando. When he opened the unlabeled journal’s metal hinged fastener, Jeff’s heart beat faster as he flipped through its pages. As soon as he saw the handwritten lyrics to “$1000 Wedding,” he knew it had belonged to Parsons. The Hard Rock had purchased the journal at a Christie’s auction in the 1990s; it had previously belonged to Rick Grech, a former member of Blind Faith. Gram had visited Grech in England in mid-1971 and the two collaborated on songwriting for a possible Grech recording. (Two years later, Grech would co-produce Parsons’ first solo album.)

Though there are no dates anywhere on the chockful pages, clues suggest that Gram wrote in the book from late 1969 through his visit with Grech in ’71. Several of the lyrics in the journal are of songs featured on the Burritos’ second album, Burrito Deluxe, recorded in late ’69, among them “Cody, Cody,” “Man in the Fog,” and “Older Guys.” Also there: “Wild Horses”—with the chords written in above the words. Keith Richards had sent a tape of the song to Parsons just after the Stones recorded it in Muscle Shoals in November ‘69, and gave him permission for the Burritos to cover it on Burrito Deluxe (their version would be released before the Stones’ on 1971’s Sticky Fingers). Also for Deluxe, the Burritos played a nine-minute version of “$1000 Wedding” for the album’s producer, Jim Dickson, but he rejected it. Gram had written the song not long after his break-up with Nancy Ross, mother of his daughter, Polly. He finally recorded a heartbreaking version of “$1000 Wedding” for his second solo album, Return of the Grievous Angel, released posthumously in 1974.

Set lists include one notated as for the Troubadour; others may have been songs for shows that fall at the Whisky a-Go-Go, the Palomino, the Corral in Topanga Canyon, the Golden Bear at Huntington Beach, and on December 6 the ill-fated Altamont festival. Along with songs from the two Burritos albums, the set lists include such C&W classics as “Together Again” and “Six Days on the Road.” The Burritos returned to the studio in 1970 to record such nuggets as Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” also name-checked in the notebook.

Intriguingly, the journal includes lyrics for never-recorded songs, including one entitled “Lookin’ for a New Mama.” Which begs the question: Could this journal eventually provide raw material for new Parsons “collaborations,” like those included on The Last Whippoorwill12 years ago? That album was inspired by an earlier Parsons notebook in possession of guitarist John Nuese, who’d played with Gram in the International Submarine Band in the mid-1960s. Nuese rounded up such artists as Jim Lauderdale to write music to go with lyrics in that book.

What’s also exciting is reading Gram’s ideas for his never-heard first solo album, recorded in 1970 with Terry Melcher. The tapes were checked out from A&M in October ‘70 and vanished. A&M recording logs include some of the songs listed in this notebook: the Parsons original “Brass Buttons,” Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby,” and Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Also jotted down are studio ideas like “Keith’s slide guitar,” “ask Clarence 4 Nash guitar,” “Jr. Parker–sax,” and “4 harmonies of voices.”

At the convivial event organized by Kyla, Shilah, and Jeff, guests got to view all the journal’s pages scanned onto iPads, which were passed around the room, and projected onto large screens. The original journal sat under glass, its pages open to “$1000 Wedding.” Also sponsoring the event was the Gram Parsons Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by Polly Parsons, to assist artists with addiction and recovery issues and to offer prevention and education via programs for teenagers (www.gramparsonsfoundation.org). Jim Lauderdale, Tim Easton, Brendan Benson, Honeyhoney and other artists performed Parsons songs, including some of the ones in the notebook. Lauderdale also played “Blessing for Being,” his contribution to The Last Whippoorwill.

Next year will mark 40 years that Gram Parsons died in the desert near Joshua Tree. His legacy remains, as proven so often during the rich musical performances over five days of the 2012 Americana Music Festival. But nowhere was his presence felt more deeply than at this gathering, where we could personally experience the pages where his ideas once flowed.

(PHOTOS COURTESY OF HARD ROCK INTERNATIONAL)

Tags: Gram, Parsons, journal, notebook

Comment by johnny Besant on September 25, 2012 at 6:55am: been into Gram since '75 but the tag cosmic american music isn't a good one. He was just competing with McGuinn's Space Age Music tag. McGuinn having a minimoog and singing about space doesn't make it space age music any more than Gram dropping acid, copping jagger moves and singing like george jones makes something Cosmic American Music. At this point cosmic and american in the same sentence is a contradiction... space knows no place.

Comment by Holly George-Warren on September 25, 2012 at 7:30am: Hmmmm...I think he also chose that tag as an alternate to "country rock," which he told at least one radio DJ he despised. I wonder how he would have liked the name Americana and if he would have identified with that one....

Comment by greasepaint on September 25, 2012 at 8:48am: Is there more "Gimmee Shelter"-connected footage of the FBB from Altamont (over and above the smokin' snippet of Six Days on the Road)? If there is and the rights could be cleared, release it with a facsimile of the notebook (cf. Bruce Sprinsteen's "Darkness" megabox).

Comment by Colin Cannon on September 25, 2012 at 9:02am: Always dug Gram with the Burritos and personally favored the first solo album over "Return of the Grievous Angel" ... but thats irrelevant. Wonderful post, well written with reliable info and GREAT photos that some of us may never have seen in a lifetime. Thank you so much for sharing.

Comment by Tim M. Otto on September 25, 2012 at 10:37am: Holly, This is the first well written and enticing article/blog I've read about Gram's book. Thanks for the photos too. Gram is an old hero of mine and I also like the documentary on him "Fallen Angel." I'm gonna watch it again today now that I've read this article. Thanks again!

Comment by Easy Ed on September 25, 2012 at 11:54am: I hate their overpriced hamburgers and t-shirts, and how they have absconded with the label of hard rock. And on the flip side, I'm glad that they have invested so much money in buying up all this memorabilia that they now have so much of it they don't even know what's sitting in what warehouse. But better them then some rich guy in Silicone Valley who would buy it to put next to his Jimmy Page Les Paul, and hats off to Jeff for his sharp eye and realizing what he had in his hands. And to Kyla and Shilah and Holly and Polly. Four rhymes in a row can't be wrong.

Comment by Garry Knapp on September 25, 2012 at 5:00pm: When I was in California last year, I took a long drive from L.A. to San Francisco and out over the mountains and back South to Bakersfield and into the Mojave Desert. I was thinking these were the same roads Gram and his bands would've travelled when performing. Just down from the road that leads to the entrance of Joshua Tree Nat'l Park is the Joshua Tree Inn. I stopped in and was told that many pilgrims come to see the room Gram died in and that people reserve that room from here and abroad. I saw the make shift shrine in front of Room 8. Sat there and thought of all the wonderful music we missed from this enormously talented young man who died too young. And then I thought how selfish of me. But is it? Is it selfish to feel deprived of a man's talent when he was deprived of his very life? What do others think? Glad to see his notebook resurface, too bad "lost tapes" do not.

Comment by Paul Wilner on September 25, 2012 at 8:00pm: Great piece; thanks Holly (and Kyla).

By coincidence, a GP piece I did for the now-moribund website Obit-mag.com resurfaced today, as they put out an e-blast with some oldies (and hopefully) goodies...The peg at the time was David Meyer's book...now I'm looking forward to reading Bob Kealing's contribution to the lore. Calling me home, indeed...(For what it's worth, I'm okay with "cosmic American music,'' in the Leon Russell tradition, although I agree with the author about the International Submarine Band moniker.)

In any case, it follows below, in case it adds anything to the conversation:

A Grievous Angel

NOVEMBER 6, 2007

By Paul Wilner

He was country when country wasn't cool.

The high life and hard times of Gram Parsons, the feckless Southern boy who arguably changed the course of rock ’n’ roll history, are recounted in an ambitious biography, Twenty Thousand Roads - The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music, by David N. Meyers, a New School professor of cinema studies and a fanatical fan.

A poor little rich boy whose father married into a wealthy Florida family, Parsons emerged from Waycross, Georgia, where he was born and partly raised, in the late '60s, and quickly cut a unique swath, first with the International Submarine Band, which Meyers accurately calls "a pseudo-psychedelic, unbearably twee handle.'' Nomenclature aside, the group was unique, as bandmate Ian Dunlop points out: "We sang a lot of country ballads and songs that were so weird they were funny - ultra obscura Americana.''

Parsons dumped the Submarine band after a trip to Los Angeles, where he hooked up with The Byrds, having as always an instinct for the main chance (except when it came to his own survival). Nonetheless, it was his dedication to roots music that formed his contribution to the era.

Hired first to play piano and then guitar, Parsons turned The Byrds around, flipping them from folk-rock to the seminal "Sweetheart of the Rodeo.'' Roger McGuinn, the group’s frontman, was ambivalent about Parsons' growing role, but went along for the ride in a down-home hurricane. "Gram's selling point was that country sold worldwide, in massive numbers,'' he said. "And because he was a rich kid, Gram had this confidence that he could do anything he wanted and people would go along ….”

Parsons burned The Byrds, too, refusing to go on a tour to South Africa. He said he was opposed to apartheid, but his rejection was more likely because he'd found a new best friend, Keith Richards, and was inducting him, to the chagrin of Mick Jagger, into "the mechanics of country music.''

The new friends shared other interests as well. "He had better coke than the Mafia,'' observed Richards, who speaks with authority on the subject. On a visit to the south of France, which ended in a strung-out Parsons being exiled from the Main Street of the Stones' inner circle, Jagger and Richards wove Parsons' country obsessions into tunes like "Tumbling Dice'' and, most famously, "Wild Horses.''

Meyers points out the difference between Parsons' passive-aggressive style and that of his British mates. "Jagger and Richards, who were as wanton, pleasure-seeking, and distractible as Gram, never let their distractions distract them from their ruthless ambition. The recording of a song - the final step for Gram - was only the beginning for the Stones. Gram fled those details ... thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great, and great work immortal.''

The rest of the story, of course, is what made Parsons famous, for all the wrong reasons. After playing an early set with the Flying Burrito Brothers at the Stones' infamous Altamont concert, Parsons lived out the myth he was born to play. The son of an alcoholic father who committed suicide, an alcoholic mother and an alcoholic step-father, whom his mother's family always suspected of being a con man, Parsons brought a Faulknerian excess to substance abuse that proved remarkable, even by the standards of the times.

Like Elvis, whom Parsons at 9 heard perform in 1956, he grew fat and popped pills. Although flashes of the old brilliance surfaced in his collaborations with Emmylou Harris, Parsons topped Presley by shooting scag, drinking to distraction, dumping lovers, checking out of rehearsals and disappearing into Joshua Tree, near Palm Springs, where with great gobs of controlled substances he pursued visions of UFOs.

It was there that he died, on Sept. 19, 1973, of an overdose of morphine and alcohol, at 26. But in a ghoulish postmortem, his road manager, Phil Kaufman, claimed that Gram had made a pact with him, after the funeral of a fellow musician, "whereby the survivor would take the other guy's body out to Joshua Tree, have a few drinks, and burn it.'' Kaufman lived up to the agreement, kidnapping Parsons' coffin from the Los Angeles airport, pouring gasoline on the body, and doing the deed.

It was a sad, disrespectful ending, although one that Parsons, looking to clinch Byronic immortality, may have approved.

Meanwhile, his music, as they say, lives on.

A new 25-track release, Gram Parsons Archives Vol 1: The Flying Burrito Brothers Live at the Avalon 1969 (Amoeba Records), compiled by LSD proselytizer and Grateful Dead archivist Owsley Stanley from the Dead's vault, debuts Nov. 6. It features a sometimes shaky-sounding but always soulful Parsons and the band on such classics as "Close Up The Honkey-Tonks,'' "Sin City,'' and the Everly Brothers' "When Will I Be Loved.''

Meyers refuses to sentimentalize his subject. "Gram's death offers not the slightest trace of romance,'' he writes. "It was sordid. Gram liked drugs a lot, did more than he should, and drugs ate him up.''

Yet with a commitment he could not make to his own gifts, Parsons in his short life brought country sounds and "cosmic American music'' together. It took a while for the times to catch up with him, but these days we are, in the words of the gospel standard Parsons famously covered, farther along.

Paul Wilner is a Bay Area writer who specializes in the arts and popular culture.

Comment by Holly George-Warren on September 25, 2012 at 9:40pm: Thanks for posting your article--I enjoyed it! I recommend Bob Kealing's new book, Calling Me Home.

Comment by Paul Wilner on September 25, 2012 at 9:52pm: Thanks so much, Holly - it means a lot to me that you liked it. Loved yours as well, of course, and think it's great that you mentioned the important work being done by the gram parsons foundation. I definitely want to check out Bob's book, which I've heard nothing but good things about...Thanks again.

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