Sacrificial Lambs

Since yesterday I haven't been able to stop thinking about Gram Parsons, and trying to figure out who he really was and whether his short life and somewhat obscure work can teach us, the survivors of that era, anything of value.

Parsons' short, intense life and his death in 1973 at age 26 from an overdose of morphine and alcohol are almost period cliches. He joined Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin in creating work of demonstrated longevity, living fast, and dying young. Was it the case that the best among our generation were unable to live in a world gone wrong? Or were Parsons and the rest of them simply spoiled, self-indulgent wastrels, overgrown adolescents who happened to have creative gifts?

Rather than reproduce Wikipedia's biography of Parsons here, I'll simply recommend it to any reader interested in learning more. From that source I found that Parsons is ranked eighty-seventh in Rolling Stone's roster of the 100 greatest rockers of all time, which would seem to indicate that he was and is more a cult figure than a major star. Certainly the main thrust of his work, an attempt to fuse country music and rock 'n' roll, never did catch on as a pop phenomenon, and Parsons was always to some extent a musicians' musician. His approach gained favor with other cult groups with limited appeal such as The Grateful Dead, but none of his stuff ever broke into the AM rotation.

However his best work ranks with the most outstanding examples of creative genius produced in an era that saw a lot of it. In particular, the song "Sin City" (see yesterday's post) displays a subtlety that imparts tremendous power to what would otherwise have been a pompous and hackneyed message. But by embedding his apocalyptic vision in the self-effacing "just folks" diction of a country gospel song and using vaguely Biblical-sounding, "see how the mighty have fallen" imagery, he amplified and authenticated the song's images of a lightning-struck skyscraper and a fouled, polluted earth. "Sin City" is a lesson in the power of understatement.

Parsons left several obscure but lasting monuments, most notably his collaboration with Byrds on the album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" and the towering "The Gilded Palace of Sin," the first and best effort by his band The Flying Burrito Brothers. It was on that album cover that Parsons wore a Nudie suit embroidered with marijuana leaves, an emblem he hoped would help establish his country music authenticity.

For it was authenticity above all else that drew him to country music, and authenticity as well as beauty he sought when he became infatuated with performers like Merle Haggard. And in the end, he did his best work just before he died, in tandem with a bonafide country singer he discovered in Birmingham, Alabama, EmmyLou Harris. Her flawless, penetrating voice and uncanny ability to instinctively and effortlessly produce perfect harmonies was the ideal counterpoint to Gram's soft and pleasing tenor, and those qualities have served her well to the present day.

It fell to Harris, the supposed amateur on that final tour, to act as den mother to Parsons and the other musicians, to make sure they showed up on time, had set lists, and maintained enough relative sobriety while performing so as to avoid vomiting or falling down on stage. But in the end Parsons could only hold things together for a few last songs, and his work with EmmyLou was his encore.

People sometimes ask me about the drugs in the '60's and early '70's, and why we found it necessary to be that wasted. Maybe "wasted" is the wrong word. I always tell them that to understand the drugs you have to take them; to understand the time you had to be there, and that I remain convinced that without the drugs and other excesses of the period, we never would have been able to escape the straitjacket in which we were bound and tied prior to 1965, and would never have had the vision. Because the '60's may be over, but the vision is still alive. It survives wars, depressions, and even monsters like George W. Bush and Dickman.