Robert Bennett delves into Gram Parsons...!

There is something at once incongruous and oddly fitting that when the Rolling Stones arrived, jaded and spent, at a musical crossroads and it seemed that creative saturation was about to deal them a death-card, it was Gram Parsons’ concoction of “Cosmic American Music” that reinvigorated and offered a means to express the broken spirits and end-of-the-line panic that drips from the staggering “Exile On Main Street”. And it does stagger, not swagger. Gone are the cock-in-my-pocket, “gonna stick my knife right down your throat” battle cries of the young, middle-class misogynists about town, replaced with something shadowy, wounded, and gripped by terrors. “Exile..” is by far the Stones’ heaviest album, the one where it actually pays to listen to the lyrics (sometimes), and they couldn’t have pulled it off without the pioneering ventures of Gram (or the nightmare-Blues of Robert Johnson, but that’s another story). 

It seems strange that the band that moulded the mountain of narcissism, mindless-hedonism, and schoolboy-sexism that all future pretenders would attempt to scale turned for inspiration to a man whose music was ruled by deeply plaintive emotion, a voice that could imbue hell-raising lyrics with a moving fragility and other-worldly sadness. But in other ways it doesn’t seem like such a leap. If you’re a hep young Blues-geek who, short of blacking up, has imitated the greats to the point of parody where are you going to go next except to the nearest style of white-music that approximates and sometimes seems to overreach the gut-wrenching misery, fear, and “drunken spree” desperation of the Delta Blues? Sure, they’d dabbled with rinky-tink, plonker- Country with “Honkey-Tonkey Wuman”, but by 1972, tired, jaded, paranoid and depressed, they had the sentiments to fit the style. Because when Little Richard dubbed Country “the white man’s Blues” he wasn’t just standing around talking bullshit!

As great as your Cash’s, Haggard’s, and Waylon’s were it took a “long-hair”, someone with a finely-tuned pop-sensibility to really return to the lost-highway and connect an increasingly archaic music with a new audience, re-invigorating, testing and challenging as he did so. The man that Merle Haggard refused to produce for being too much of a “hippy” did all this yet remained closely in touch with the purpose and urgent, emotional drives of earlier Country. The voice of so many of Parson’s songs remains that of the defeated, the alone, sometimes itinerant struggler, harried, deceived and mistreated at every turn. If his legacy had consisted only of the glistening gems he contributed to The Byrd’s “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” his contribution to this heritage of lamenting, confessional songs would be undeniable. Brought into the band to replace the acid-rock genius of David Crosby, Gram’s intimacy with the foundations of American music gave the record an emotional depth that no previous Byrd-album possessed. “Hickory Wind”, a despairing hymn to an almost Blakean vision of lost innocence and simplicity sounds like a relative of The Carter Family’s weary denouncement of life, “Can’t Feel at Home” and possesses all that songs sincere disappointment and aching fatigue. When the line: “It’s a hard way to find out that trouble is real, in a far-away country, with a faraway feel ” is softly delivered, Gram’s voice seems to lament so much more than the loss of a childhood home. It stretches into the territory of regret for having been given mortal form at all that so many of the Carter Family’s songs inhabit. To create such a song amidst a market dominated by saccharine, boy-girl lyrics, to reach into the past and bring back such sentiments drawing them into a pop-record is no mean feat at all. “One Hundred Years From Now” is Hank Williams had he been a stoner instead of an alcoholic. Despite the curious line: “Everybody’s so wrong, that I know it’s going to turn out fine.” the song sounds as if it was born of a deep pit of pessimism regarding human behaviour and the future. The implication is that treachery, greed and empty talk is what we’re really made up of and so it’s no wonder “nobody seems to know the kind of trouble we’re in.” “The New Soft Shoe” would further outline this picture of human-being as puppet to base instincts in a cruel world.

Gram Parsons, voice of a fallen angel? Undoubtedly. Idealistic hippy? Unlikely. Brilliantly gifted pop-visionary and musical-alchemist? The proof’s in the pudding.

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