If Gram Parsons knew when he scribbled those words in a 1972 letter that 21 years later country music’s biggest stars would record a best-selling tribute album to the Eagles, he probably would have been aghast. Though his oft-stated desire was to introduce pure, unadulterated country to rock audiences, Parsons inadvertently helped bring California rock to mainstream country.
Most likely, Parsons would have agreed with Elvis Costello’s assessment in the notes to a 1982 Parsons compilation: “In the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons helped create a Frankenstein’s Monster.” Costello is among a remarkable collection of artists who have contributed to Return Of The Grievous Angel: A Tribute To Gram Parsons, due out July 13 on Almo Sounds. (It’s the second Parsons tribute disc to be released this decade, following Rhino Records’ Conmemorativo project of 1993.)
Overseen by Parsons’ greatest protégé and acolyte, Emmylou Harris, Return of the Grievous Angel features renditions of his songs by ’90s acts including Beck, Gillian Welch, Wilco and Whiskeytown, as well as artists from the generation right behind Parsons including Costello, Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams — all of whom, like Parsons, have tenaciously followed their artistic muses, damn the commercial consequences. These are the people for whom Parsons’ message and music have been the most profound.
“Gram would be horrified by the state of country music today,” says Harris, co-executive producer of the album along with Almo general manager Paul Kremen. “But he’d have a big ol’ smile on his face to hear Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle and a lot of the great stuff out there that you won’t hear on mainstream country radio.”
In the last seven years of his way-too-short life, Gram Parsons (who died of a drug overdose at 26 on August 19, 1973) broke all the rules to make music his way. As a member of the International Submarine Band, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and subsequently as a solo artist, he wasn’t afraid to pull out the stops to put across a song — letting his voice break and sublimating his sorrows with drink and drugs, but unleashing his emotional highs and lows in his music.
Though classic country was decidedly uncool among rock audiences in the late ’60s, Parsons became its biggest proselytizer. Into the twangy mix he added a soulful R&B feel and Dylan-influenced lyrics, creating what he called “Cosmic American music.” As he also wrote in the aforementioned 1972 letter, “My feeling is there is no boundary between ‘types of music’…I see two types of sounds — good ones & bad ones.”
When Parsons began forging his musical vision in the mid-’60s, country, R&B and rock audiences were about as stratified as you could get. Each looked suspiciously at the other; Merle Haggard, one of country’s great songwriters, had scored the topical crossover hit “Okie From Muskogee”. Most country and rock fans didn’t get the irony in the song but saw it as an anti-longhair ode. The 1970 film Five Easy Pieces also played up the hipster vs.hick angle, via Karen Black’s Tammy Wynette-loving dum-dum waitress.
Parsons, raised in Georgia and Florida, was weaned on C&W and R&B. A pivotal moment for him as a kid, then known as Gram Connor (before his world changed on Christmas Eve 1958 when his daddy Coon Dog Connor took his own life), was seeing Elvis Presley at the Waycross, Ga., City Auditorium in 1956. An impressionable nine-year-old, the boy soaked up the gospel/C&W/R&B brew that was nascent rock & roll and carried it through all his adolescent combos — the Ventures-esque Pacers, the rockabilly Legends and the Kingston-Trio-styled Shilos — and later as a Greenwich Village folkie.
Parsons didn’t start playing country music until 1965, in the Ivy-covered confines of Cambridge, Mass., where he was briefly enrolled at Harvard. By age 18, he’d already suffered just about as much tragedy as the protagonists of the most maudlin C&W weepers: After his father’s death, his mother married Robert Ellis Parsons, a fast-talking, sharp-dressing smoothie who adopted Gram and his sister Avis and changed their last name to Parsons — even replacing Connor Sr.’s name with his on their birth certificates. Gram’s mother drank herself to death over the next few years; she died the day Gram was graduated from high school. His freshman year at college, he got the news his sister had been shuttled off to boarding school after his stepdad married the babysitter who was hired to look after the daughter he had with Gram’s mother. (Soon after, sister Avis fled home when threatened with institutionalization in a mental hospital for getting herself pregnant.)
No wonder country — and the deep soul of Stax/Volt R&B — struck a chord with Parsons. Inspired by his beautiful late mother, he wrote the bittersweet 1965 ballad “Brass Buttons” (which, surprisingly, he didn’t record until several years later; it appeared on the posthumously released Grievous Angel). At Harvard, Parsons found an audience for his long-buried repertoire of old gospel songs and Hank Williams classics in a student advisor named Jet Thomas. Years later, Thomas told writer Ben Fong-Torres for his 1991 Parsons biography Hickory Wind that Gram “was a cultural outlaw doing country music and talking about it as a form of white spiritual music.”
Meeting like-minded musicians on the scene, Parsons credited Boston as being where “I passed my identity crisis and came back to country music.…[The musicians there] had their ears open and they actually reintroduced me to country music after I had forgotten about it for ten years. And the country singers like George Jones, Ray Price and Merle Haggard — they’re great performers, but I had to learn to dig them. And that taught me a lot.”
