Gram Parsons & the Fallen Angels
Byrds
In a 1972 interview with an A&M Records publicist, Gram Parsons was asked what he’d been doing with himself since leaving the Flying Burrito Brothers two years before. The godfather of country rock replied, “I played a lot of sessions, but I played mostly with friends. It’s a hard thing to do, making a living.” This answer was more than a little disingenuous: for the most part, he’d been jamming, drinking, shooting heroin, hanging out with the Rolling Stones at Keith Richards’s villa in the south of France, and drawing on a family trust fund that paid him as much as $100,000 a year.
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Parsons always hated the term “country rock,” coining phrases like “white gospel” and “cosmic American music” to describe the sound he was chasing. But more than any other artist, he helped legitimize traditional country for an audience likely to associate it with cross burnings and pro-war sentiment. In 1968 his work with the International Submarine Band led to a gig with the Byrds, and as documented on the newly expanded Sweetheart of the Rodeo, he briefly seized the reins from Roger McGuinn, convincing the band to cover songs recorded by Haggard, Merle Travis, and the Louvin Brothers. A contractual snafu forced the Byrds to erase Parsons’s vocals on most of the tracks, but the new edition includes two discarded Parsons tracks (previously released on the 1991 Byrds box set) and four rehearsals in which he sings numbers later appropriated by McGuinn and Chris Hillman. In the end their experiment showed how far apart the country and rock audiences remained: the Byrds got a mixed reception when they performed at the Grand Ole Opry, and Sweetheart of the Rodeo stiffed on the pop charts.
But country is the music of heartbreak, and Parsons’s wealth caused him enough to rival that of all his heroes. In Ben Fong-Torres’s Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers describes Parsons’s family as a page out of Tennessee Williams, and indeed, one would have to read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for a more disturbing portrait of greed, betrayal, and self-destruction. Gram’s father, Ingram “Coon Dog” Connor Jr., was a decorated fighter pilot in World War II, but when he married Avis Snively, an heiress to the $28 million Snively Groves in Winter Haven, Florida, he found himself emasculated and ridiculed by his rich in-laws. Gram and his younger sister were raised in Waycross, Georgia, by the Okefenokee Swamp, where the Snivelys had installed Ingram with a token job managing a box factory. Both of Gram’s parents drank, and the marriage was scarred by infidelities. Two days before Christmas in 1958, when Gram was 12, his father shot himself. The Snivelys were so crushed by his death that Gram’s maternal aunt hosted a cocktail party the day before the funeral.
Onstage they usually positioned their microphones so that they could sing to each other: Harris was a steadying influence on Parsons, and by her own account, he was her greatest musical inspiration. “He was never afraid to write from the heart,” she said in a 1975 interview. “It could rip you up. Not many can take music that real.” Nor can many make it. There are some gifts that money can’t buy.
