Gram Parsons and year zero for alt-country

Return to the New West (Part 2)

It has been a while since I have turned to my planned series of posts on Uncut's Sounds of the New West CD, but here I am again finally, on to track 2, The Flying Burrito Brothers and 'Sin city'.

Of course there had to be a Gram Parsons song on here somewhere, as he is widely accepted as patient zero, the founding father of the whole alt-country movement. Parsons, who was born into a very wealthy family and hance could afford never to have to worry about real work, became the original cliche; he lived fast, died young, and left a good looking corpse, albeit briefly, before it was turned into a pile of ash under a soon-to-be-famous desert tree.

Parsons expired on 17 September 1973 in a seedy motel after a cocktail of drugs (morphine) and alcohol (tequila), with ice cubes shoved where one doesn't normally shove ice cubes, as his friend tried desperately to revive him. In a great twist to the tale which you could hardly make up, his corpse was later stolen by his manager (as agreed with Parsons - what were they on when they came up with that plan?) and burned shortly after under a soon to be famous Joshua tree in the desert(Wikipedia article on Parsons is here while a homepage about him is here). Yes, that is a Joshua tree behind U2 there on the left; perhaps the reason they look so serious is that they can't find the actual spot where Parsons was burned but are sure they can smell something.

Having heard a lot about Parsons and his influence (mainly from Uncut, of course) I was somewhat bemused to hear, on finally buying a budget-priced set of his two albums, what sounded a lot more traditional old-style country than I had anticipated; I was not sure what to expect, but somehow John Lydon in a cowboy hat was in my mind. Several of the songs, like 'The new soft shoe' and 'Kiss the children' were almost, to my ears, stereotypical soft weepy country stuff. His first solo album 'GP' remains definetely a bit too soft for me, but his second, 'Grevous angel', has grown on me a lot more, including as it does far more contemporary-sounding songs like the title track, 'Love hurts', and 'In my hour of darkness'. Before these solo albums, Parsons recorded with the aforementioned Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds and others, which I have yet to explore in any real way.

Of course, perhaps one of his greatest gifts was the discovery of a young singer called Emmylou Harris, and the discovery that she was a hell of a lady to share a duet with (for example on 'Love hurts' and 'Hearts on fire'), but we will get to her very shortly (at least that's the idea) in this series. Some incredibly old footage, possibly taken by John Logie Baird himself, of Parsons and Harris together can be seen below:

Overall, I have concluded that his music just takes some time to work its way into your head but, when it does, his influence and originality become all to apparent. In fact, perhaps what really made him click for me was hearing others (including people like Wilco and Whiskeytown, who were always going to be able to draw me in and make the appropriate polite introuctions, like old friends urging me to give the kid another chance) cover his work in more contemporary style (as on the covers compilation, Return of the Grevious Angel, seen below), helping to bring his songs to life in a more familiar way, but respectfully showcasing the excellence of his lyrics and songwriting. A great duet of Emylou Harris and Ryan Adams on 'Return of the grevious angel' can be found here.

Songs like '$1000 wedding' now seem like the story of a great movie waiting to be made

There was a $1000 wedding,
Supposed to be held the other day
But with all the invitations sent
The young bride went away
The groom saw people passing notes
Not unusual, you might say
But where are the flowers for my baby
I'd even like to see her mean old mama
And why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way
I hate to tell you how he acted
When the news arrived
He took some friends out drinking
And it's lucky they survived.....

This is high-grade gritty drama, far from old style country music. As a final clip, the footage below shows Evan Dando (who always strikes me as a fitting seeming heir to Parsons) playing this song:



I have not given up on Gram yet, even if he may have given up on me, and I have no doubt that his swaggering ghost haunts much music that I love, for which his debt to my musical wellbeing cannot be overstated, and might never be adequately repaid.

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See these CDs? Reason to return to the record store

In the last three years, like many others, I estimate that my CD buying activity has reduced by 90%, in terms of number of albums purchased, or even more in terms of money spent. I download the vast majority of my music from iTunes, or as part of a subscription for eMusic, which happens to have much of my type of music. So far this year, I have purchased U2's 'No line on the Horizon' (because of a sort of tradition, because it looked nice, and because they threw in a poster I am around 25 years too old to put on my wall, plus access to a film I am unlikely to ever watch - yes, marketing guys, I am that stupid), Leonard Cohen's 'Live in London' (also looked kind of cool and was an impulse purchase in hard copy, as it were) and Grant Lee Buffalo's compilation 'Storm Hymnal' (simply because I couldn't find it to download anywhere, and because one evening I took a sudden hankering after a few songs - especially 'Mockingbird' and 'Happiness' - from 'Mighty Joe Moon' which I hadn't even thought of, let alone listened to, for 15 years.



Anyway, my point in this post is that record companies have an easy way to make me buy more CDs, and that is to combine good recession-proof value with extra qualities that simply can't be downloaded. The best case of this I have probably ever seen is the new edition of Radiohead's 'The bends'. This comes in a small CD-sized card box, which contains

- the Bends CD (original, not remastered I think)
- the original CD booklet
- a CD with 21 B-sides and acoustic and BBC session versions of some of the songs on the CD
- a 90-minute DVD with several live performances (including Top of the Pops - bet they didn't get invited back after 'Kid A'!) plus original videos for the singles
- 5 postcards with the single covers, which look really nice, although I have no idea what to do with them (maybe keep them for my wall along with my U2 poster if I suddenly start living backwards, like Brad Pitt in 'Benjamin Button')

And it was €16.99! That is savage value, and enough for me to buy the whole package despite not being that big a Radiohead fan, although I always had a soft spot for 'The Bends' (especialy the title track, 'Black star' and 'Sulk'). There is a great video for 'Sulk' here:



and a nice live version of 'Black star' at:



They lost me a bit with with 'OK Computer' (except the wonderful 'No surprises') and then evaded me forever more when they disappeared up their own backsides with subsequent albums, which I really don't think anyone could possibly describe themselves as having a soft spot for (except perhaps Cylons? - just catching up with the fuss about Battlestar Galactica!).

Bacically, I was impressed by this package and this value, and if there were more like it out there, I would certainly buy them.

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Music and melancholy

A while ago, I started to draft a post on the importance of melancholy music in my life. I have always been a fan of music that others would describe as unacceptably sad or morose, and make no apologies for the fact. Music has helped me through some hard times of real (or often imagined) existential melodramatic self-pity and angst.

Since then, I have had cause to return to music for comfort due to personal loss, and have gone through something which I am not going to write about here, but which made me think even more about how important music with a certain mood was in the darker moments of my life. While the music I turned to first in recent days revolved around a core of 'The songs of Leonard Cohen', 'The Boatman's Call', and (predictably) 'Boxer', for now I am going to stick to my original idea, which was to talk about the music which I listened to in times of adolescent micro-dispair over long-forgotten girls or crises, so trivial in grown-up retrospect, and come back later to talk about more recent emotional comfort blankets like the above, as well as American Music Club, Tindersticks and others.



So, back in time for now. Coming of age socially and musically in the early 1980s and being of a certain taste and midset predictably turned my head towards Joy Division, of course, and songs like the magnificent 'Shadowplay', probably my favourite of their songs:


It is simply impossible to know whether we would still hear the same agony and dispair in Ian Curtis' voice and see it etched on his face if he had lived to grow old like his bandmates. As it is, to me it sounds like a moan from a pit of hell, like a man clinging on to everything with his fingernails, like it seems he really was. There is no doubt in my mind that every second of every Joy Division song is the real thing, not just put-on angst by intense young men of more recent years who can make the sound but never match the mood, who will never convince you that their demons are crawling behind their skin, looking through their eyeballs, and playing their larynx like their own guitar. However, despite the dispair, Joy Division for me would not necessarily conjure the word 'sad', more 'angry' or 'dispairing', and would not quite hit the tone I needed in the dark blue moments of which I speak.

For that, I really think you need The Cure. Not the happy, bouncy, poppy Cure of late 80s/early 90s, and definitely not the loud grungy Cure of the last decade, or even the scarily psychotic Cure of 'Pornography', but the young early 1980s Cure, when they had just discovered drugs and alcohol and synthesisers. This is when they made the sepulchral mausoleum of sound that is 'Faith', which contains songs like 'The Funeral party', to me one of the saddest pieces of music I have ever heard, with the drums and huge synths building a rhythm that can only honestly be described as 'funereal'; this is exactly what Emily Dickinson would have sounded like if she had grown big hair, worn over-sized black clothes and white runners, and picked up a guitar:


Of course, growing up musically with a melancholy bent in the 198os made the Smiths an inevitable accessory. While probably too simple and obvious, I am sure I was not the only person/loser who though that the following lines in 'How soon is now?' had been robbed from the diary they never wrote.

'There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loved you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die'


I could go on about this kind of music forever, and am sure I will come back again to this topic, but will end this post with just one more song of the era. By comparison with those which are listed above, Japan's 'Ghosts' is light and ehereal, like a whisper or David Sylvain's fringe, or perhaps a ghost, but the short lyrics always struck a simple chord with me, so I will end this post with a live performance (not as good as the one on the live album 'Oil on Canvas', but good nonetheless).


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