Gram Parsons: Boston, 1973, in His Fatal Year

April, 1973:

Around the time the tour bus carrying Gram Parsons and the band The Fallen Angels on their six-week American tour was fetching up on the Boston streets, your blogger, then 25, was piloting a vehicle known as the hawker van through Boston's  Back Bay.. 

Often I’d be accompanied by a co-worker I’ll call Bixby. He accepted the usual FM radio fare I'd tune us into, although he seemed diametrically unlike Mr. David Bowie whose landmark Ziggy Stardust album had dropped the previous June. Bixby had a vaguely post-military aura. Tthere were rumors he spent some time doing odd stuff for the C.I.A. in Tegucigalpa, On this particular day, as we discussed our life philosophies, he summarized mine as “You’re a fucken nihilist then, you don’t think nobody should do nuthin'!” 

He wasn’t that far off.  I had sophomoric tendencies towards alienation. Bowie’s  “Five Years”  (in odd contrast to a few needle drops of the country-rock Parsons championed might have been playing  to the college crowd: 

A soldier with a broken arm
Fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest
And a queer threw up at the sight of that
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor
Drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don't think you knew you were in this song…

  It’s hard not to hum the tune, no?

 We grappled the papers off a 10-foot box truck and filled the back of a smutzy-white VW  Variant the `Squareback’—with twined-up stacks of papers we sold to the  hawkers for a dime, so they could move them for a quarter to a welcoming public. (Top ticket price for local music club gigs was around $6.) 

This was the year when the paper that had been Boston After Dark, which weekly had grown up and out from a  start as listings rag, was taking over the Phoenix name. (It would gradually subsume the short-lived if hipper, Cambridge-based  Phoenix offshoot, The Real Paper. (But not before Jon Landau wrote up Bruce Springsteen’s May 9,1974 show in the Real Paper as "rock and roll future"). 

The arts section of the new Phoenix was still billed in its own right as Boston After Dark. But I couldn’t see much of the music that filled the city clubs—I was just a nihilist  with a brain that , as Bowie sang, hurt like a warehouse, and `after dark' each day I had to report to my dishwashing job at Bettie's Rolls Royce Restaurant.

That was okay. Living communally five blocks from Harvard Yard , some of us in grad school, we didn’t imagine we would be the last Americans to have gushers of fun. It’s only lately we’ve begun to think …maybe we were the last .  (I didn’t have the clairvoyance to turn to Bixby and say, "The world’s only going to start to suck hard around 1979, and forty years later the dream of commonweal democracy will deflate biliously and a porcine pustule of a man will show that a single individual can wreck our country and our world  in  league with corrupt family, grifters and thugs." But who knew?)

In any event, it was spring, the Sixties still  glowing faintly in the rearview, and even somebody who pretentiously read Schopenhauer (“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness”), mostly  to impress a book store clerk , might still be charged with hope. 

That was me, all hope. I had handed off some college music and film reviews to Phoenix editors Janet Maslin (film) and Ben Gerson (the music coverage). Thus came the day when Ben, once I’d returned from the day’s hawker run, inquired if I might want to expand my ambit from record reviews (Lou Reed, The Who, etc.) to a profile. Was I interested in Gram Parsons’s solo effort, GP? 

Well, based on the Byrds’ 1968 Sweetheart of the Rodeo, for which he wrote “One Hundred Years ", and co-wrote “Hickory Wind. ” He sang both those, plus covers of  Geroge Jones’s “You’re Still On My Mind”(and “Merle Haggard Life in Prison."

Yes. I was interested.

 A few words about Ben. Like his fellow Brandeis alum Landau, he was musical down to his bones. In an impromptu round of singing, say chorusing some pop tune with pals, he might cue the group with such instructive interjections as   “diminished seventh!” A production glitch at the paper might bring from him the Robert Johnson-quoting  complaint, “stones in my pass way.”  Whether I showed my nerves over saying yes, or maybe thanks his own unpretentious  enthusiasm, we mutually manifested the idea to crack this enterprise as a duo. (There had been vague tales of disruption from earlier cities on the tour—Boston was where the rambling hootenanny would splash down after six weeks.)

 What to say about our lengthy if, at the same time  enjoyable, day-into-evening with the troupe? Gram, legendarily a product of too-rich louche  Floridians, at once showed a had a transparency that’s rare (as I would discover over time) among stars of any showbiz medium. 

I had gathered from half-remembered journalism stories that such meet-ups are often fueled by beverages. But the thinking for me was, that all happens …aftre dark and possibly into the wee hours.

Come to find out the  wee hour this day was approximately 10 a.m., and the libation Gram touted to us (we politely demurred, more over hearing the  stated ingredients than out of simple prudence) was what he called “The Gram Parsons Breakfast Cocktail". THIS DRINK,   as he reminded the now-fidgeting young waitress, contained  coffee in some measure plus Metaxa—a Greek brandy liqueur– and a suitable load of dark rum. (There may have been other tasty fillips to it, but  we hadn’t yet set out my clunky tape recorder; writing down the contents  of this the first commodious tankard to arrive seemed prematurely nitpicky. 

(It was about five years later I was somehow moved—pwersuaded—to engage Outlaw country singer Johnny Paycheck in a bit of a brandy-drinking show of mettle at the Palm Restaurant in Manhattan.  It ended more or less in a draw—I remember thinking, Is the sidewalk vibrating or am I?”. As a sign  that mentorship takes many forms, by the time fellow guest, the most excellent Chet Flippo, judiciously escorted me back to the Rolling Stone offices where he thenceforth kindly counseled me and utilized my writing services. I had gotten lucky in my friendships once again.)

The first hours we spent with Gram—not keeping pace with the cocktails, epononymous or otherwise--moved into the bedroom at some stage. There his companion Gretchen seemed more than a little flibbertigibbety as he cooed and cajoled her into a simulated  docility. But with the temporary mystery of her misplaced sewing needle on the rumpled bed of the room where Gram posted up to answer questions brought new—discombobulation, as Trump might term  it. 

Ever so sadly, he would be dead on September 19 of that year, at 26, morphine and booze taking the blame after he fatally fell asleep. And then you wonder,,,

And yet. The interview Gram gave us that day, occurring between interruptions. —He was balancing two radio appearances during this day of promotion—was remarkable for its candor and sprawl. The article at around 2,000 words, mostly quotes, ran with a picture taken by Phoenix staff photographer Michael Dobo that captures the (literally) winking charm and magnetism of the man. That will run in its bulk later this week, but to whet and to some degree slake the interest of my loyal readers,  let me post just a few excerpts from our article.

In context, that day:

 Gram brought his new group to Oliver's last week, near the close of a draining bus tour to promote a new solo album GP. We interviewed Gram at some length. A remarkable candor born of fatigue and self-sufficiency resulted in a series of pithy characterizations of his peers and former partners. He was just as offhand summing up Jagger as he was remembering his Daddy, Coon-Dog Conner. Our talk was sandwiched between two live spots on WNTN and WBCN, and a set at Oliver’s. 

Anyone who caught those performances saw something quite like an old country clan, shedding the ravages of travel to do some really lilting and powerful C&W. A reviewer for the Village Voice went so far as to call Gram a potentially "pivotal figure in American music” after his New York visit earlier this month. Flanked as he is by Emmylou Harris, an Alabaman of pure and able voice who uses her space in classic country harmony and tremolo masterfully… Gram could be the one to put sincere C&W on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Meeting the tatoo’ed, muscular, and generally intense Phil Kaufman was, in the parlance of the time and the milieu, a trip. AfterI shared a polite hello and handshake with his girlfriend who was part of the rambling road entourage, he leaned in close enough to make his brushy facial hair felt. “That’s my girl and I love her a lot—you understand me?"

In the WNTN studio, with their berserkly funny manager Phil Kaufman holding the mike, they sang a Roy Orbison-Boudleaux Bryant composition, “Love Hurts,” and made it a lovely example of that art. Emmylou is the Carter family with bedroom eyes. She talks about the high lonesome sound and then puts it right on the money.

She doesn’t look  like an Everly Brother,” says Gram, “but she can sure sing like  one.” 

Having hoisted the Byrds into a deepened country sensibility—though their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album undersold other key entrants in their catalog in terms of popularity—left he reflecting on partying company with them afterwards: 

’ Roger McGuinn Gram found at least as provocative as Chris: ‘‘He’s the weirdest guy in the world, man. . . He’s very conscious of image. Say a guy like you comes in with a tape recorder — he'll bring out his tape recorder. . . and he’ll play with your head. Because that’s what he’s expected to do, being Byrdmaniac Roger McGuinn. He'll have a tape with all the questions you’re gonna ask him about, where did he come from, then he’ll play his tape recorder into your tape recorder--that’s his idea of a good time!

 Gram had kinder words for the Stones, whom he befriended in L.A. in 1969 at the outset of their American tour, and whose  “Wild Horses” he was given to record with the Burritos months before the Stones’ own version appeared on Sticky Fingers.

 Jagger, Gram found to be considerably more circumspect than the press would have us believe. He was, he said, essentially a straight, possessive dude who might swallow an Excedrin once a week to fall asleep, who enjoyed owning an entire English village and a castle in Ireland. ‘His fetish is collecting houses.” 

“What’s Keith’s fetish?” 

“I’m not talking.” 

Most hair-raising of all were Gram’s asides regarding sometime Stones confrere and lover Marianne Faithfull, as were his takes on the mysterious circumstances surrounding discarded Stone Brian Jones’s marginally mysterious death. In sum:

Gram threw these comments off, a fortune teller drawing back from the pit of rock-stardom,one  just trying to front a country band, and play the music he knew before he ever went to the city; Sin City. 

“Everywhere we play ‘Sin City,’ people think it’s about their town,” said Gram to the audience one night last week,  “So I guess it is.”            

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