Subject: Gram Parsons: The Grievous Angel Flies Again
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 13:23:20 -0700 (PDT)

I found this on All Music Guide's new online magazine, it was an
interesting enough find to push me out of lurkdom to post it, even
though I didn't get much new information from it.



Legendary music journalist Ben Fong-Torres kicks off his Allmusic Zine
column with a recollection of Gram Parsons, who continues to inspire
old friends and new players through a parade of tribute projects
twenty-six years after his death.

Gram Parsons: The Grievous Angel Flies Again

Now I know what they mean when they say the beat goes on. One of the
beats in my life is Gram Parsons, who helped to shape the music that
came to be known as country-rock and now has numerous handles, ranging
from alt-country to y'allternative, with Americana, cowpunk, no
depression, and other tags fluttering in between.

You can learn the basics on the GP story elsewhere in the Allmusic.com
site or by way of my book, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram
Parsons. The most basic of the basics are these: Born into a wealthy
Southern family, he wove twin passions for rock and roll and country
music into one with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and in
harmonic tandem with a young discovery, Emmylou Harris. He died in
September 1973, two months shy of his 27th birthday, after an alcohol
and hard drug binge in one of his favorite retreats: the Joshua Tree
National Monument, in the high desert country of southern California.

But in a real sense, he's never gone away. Because of his influence on
an unending stream of musicians, from the Byrds to the Jayhawks to
Sheryl Crow, Parsons is the subject, every year, of one tribute or
another. Some years -- this happens to be one of them -- the salutes
pile up.
Which brings me here, to serve as a Gram mall of sorts, a catch-all of
the latest doings based on the legend and the legacy of Gram Parsons.

The Hickory Wind Keeps Blowin'

If I do write so myself, one or two of the doings have to do with my
book, first published in 1991 by Pocket Books, under the Simon &
Schuster umbrella. It returned in paperback a couple of years later.
Just last fall, it popped up again, in a revised and expanded edition,
courtesy of St. Martin's Griffin. Now, the folks at Mercury Nashville
Records are working on an audio CD based on the book, mixing music with
an abridged version of the book. Last I heard, they were talking with
Phil Kaufman, Parsons' longtime buddy and "road mangler," the guy who
fast-talked Parsons' corpse out of a Los Angeles area airport, drove it
back to Joshua Tree, and tried to burn it to fulfill a pact he said
he'd made with Gram not long before the singer's demise.

That's not to mention the day, earlier this year, when I got not one
but two inquiries about optioning the film rights for Hickory Wind. As
with various other rumored documentary and feature film projects about
Parsons, these are far from done deals. But the point is, the book
keeps bouncing back, just as Parsons does.

A Magical Musical Tribute

Although his recordings continue to be available in various forms, the
hottest news is the July release of Return of the Grievous Angel: A
Tribute to Gram Parsons, the highly-anticipated compilation of GP songs
performed by various country and rock artists, including Beck, Sheryl
Crow, the Cowboy Junkies, Elvis Costello (with David Crosby, whom
Parsons replaced in the Byrds in 1968), Steve Earle and Chris Hillman
(with whom Gram formed the Flying Burrito Brothers), Gillian Welch, and
two younger bands known to be direct spiritual and musical descendants
of Parsons: Wilco and Whiskeytown.

And, oh, yes, Emmylou Harris. With her instinctive and intricate
harmonies, delivered in a jewel of a voice, she brought Parsons' songs
and Parsons himself to greater heights in their short time together.
Since then, she has carried the country-rock/Cosmic American Music
torch that Parsons first lifted, and carved out a stellar career -- one
that, in its adventurousness and passion for music, wherever its roots,
often draws on lessons she learned from Gram. As Harris has said,
Parsons "always tried to fight against categories." She adds, "I wanted
to carry on with what I thought he would have wanted me to do, bringing
certain elements of folk music, with its emphasis on the lyric, trying
eclectic things, but always coming back to that electric country
blues."

Just before the release of Return of the Grievous Angel, Harris spoke
with Holly George-Warren for No Depression magazine. "Gram would be
horrified by the state of country music today," she said. "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
country radio."

Harris, who shares exec producer credits for Grievous Angel with Paul
Kremen, GM of Almo Sounds, accounts for several of the album's many
high moments. As she did with Parsons, she harmonizes perfectly with
Beck, who does a bang-up job of getting into some twang time on the
Hillman/Parsons classic "Sin City." She joins the Pretenders on "She,"
a beautiful song that has come to be associated with her ("Oh, she sure
could sing . . ."), and hooks up with Crow on another Hillman/Parsons
tune from their Burrito Brothers days, "Juanita."
Hillman, who turned Parsons onto Harris after hearing her singing folk
and country songs in the back room of a Washington, D.C., bar one night
in 1971, also performs on the album, paired with Steve Earle on "High
Fashion Queen." Other memorable moments come from Elvis Costello, who
breaks hearts with his reading of "Sleepless Nights." (Costello, back
in 1982, wrote the liners for a British reissue of Parsons material,
most of it performed with Harris. Their first album together, Costello
wrote, "featured some of the finest duet singing ever put on record.")

Harris and her crew seem to have a similar goal with this album.
Besides those mentioned, there are fine efforts from Evan Dando and
Juliana Hatfield on the sadder-than-sad "$1,000 Wedding," and by
Williams and Crosby, two of my favorite voices, on the title track. I'm
also a great fan of the Mavericks, who deliver a superb "Hot Burrito
#1," and of former Jayhawks singer Mark Olson, a vocal dead-ringer for
Parsons, as he demonstrates on the CD-closing "In My Hour of Darkness,"
as part of a group of GP admirers called the Creekdippers that includes
Victoria Williams and Jim Lauderdale.

For Parsons fans who hunger for the real deal, Grievous Angel is . . .
well, a godsend. P.S.: Proceeds from this CD go to the Vietnam Veterans
of America Foundation's Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. For more
info on the campaign, go to www.vvaf.org; for more on the recording,
check out www.almosounds.com.

The Tidbits Just Keep On Coming

Return of the Grievous Angel is bound to draw more music lovers to
Parsons. They, along with those who've already enlisted in the Cosmic
American Music army, have no shortage of places to go and sites to
visit to hear more from and learn more about this rich and reckless kid
from Waycross, Georgia. Although an annual Gramfest, staged for the
past three years in and around Joshua Tree, seems to be skipping the
last year of the 20th century, there's a weeklong gathering September
12-19 at Gram's Place. That's the bed-and-breakfast operated in Tampa,
Florida, by Mark Holland, a founder of the Gram Parsons Memorial
Foundation. Holland, who says that ex-Burrito bassist Chris Ethridge
and other former GP bandmates have signed on, promises "a week of fun,
partying, resting/relaxing, pickin' and a-grinnin'."

New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Joshua Tree have served as sites
for musical tributes to Parsons. Add San Francisco to the list: In
April, Eric Shea and his band, Mover, staged the first annual Sleepless
Nights, with nine bands, including Beechwood Sparks from L.A., sharing
the stage at Slim's, the city's premier roots club. . . . A more recent
tribute to Parsons took place on KVMR, a small station in Nevada City,
California. The four-hour special was sent out into cyberspace and may
one day be archived at the station's Web site, www.kvmr.com. . . . The
Holly George-Warren cover story on Parsons in the July-August 1999
issue of No Depression is a worthy partner to a lengthy profile by
Barney Hoskyns in Mojo a year ago. . . . The Georgia Music Hall of Fame
has named Parsons a nominee for induction this fall. We should soon
learn whether he's joined Ray Charles, Otis Redding, James Brown,
Little Richard, Gladys Knight, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Chet
Atkins, the Allman Brothers, and other honorees. . . . GP fans are also
waiting for news about a BBC documentary on their hero. Sid Griffin,
musician (the Long Ryders, the Coal Porters) and author of Gram
Parsons, first published in 1985 by Sierra Books, is involved; he says
the film could air by mid-2000. . . . and I just got a call saying that
Nancy Parsons, the mother of Gram's daughter, is interested in
producing a movie. The beat goes on. . . .