Tony's Picks 2012 - The Albums

I didn't buy very much "new" music in 2012.  Like last year, there wasn't very much that screamed at me and said "buy me."  When I did buy music in 2012, it was mostly to complete collections I had already started [Grateful Dead, old Rush, etc].  I find that the new music I buy is from old folks who I've been listening to for many years.  Some of the usual suspects have already been reviewed in these spaces

 

Soundgarden - King Animal  This is Soundgarden's first album of completely new material since 1996's Down on the Upside.  The good news:  King Animal is better than Down on the Upside.  The bad news:  it isn't as good as Superunknown, but then not many albums are.  The best songs are on the first half of the album.  Favorite songs:  A Thousand Days Before, By Crooked Steps, Non-State Actor.

Dwight Yoakam - 3 Pears  After being apart for 11 years, Dwight Yoakam comes home to Warner Brothers and releases his first album since his 2007 tribute to Buck Owens [Dwight Sings Buck].  3 Pears has lots of LOUD guitars, standard weepers, and a song with goofy-assed lyrics about jellyfish, peanut butter kisses and giraffes.  Favorite songs:  Take Hold of My Hand, It's Never Alright, A Heart Like Mine, Long Way to Go.

Mumford & Sons - Babel  The wait between 2009's Sigh No More and Babel has been worth it. Who knew that I would like a group of English folk revivalists?  These guys are loud, fiery, ballsy, and full of energy.  One thing they are NOT is "boring" [Fleet Foxes, call your office...].

Spectrum Road - Spectrum Road  This is probably as close to jazz that I will get. One hesitates to use the term "supergroup," but this one is close.  Jack Bruce [Cream], Vernon Reid [Living Color], John Medeski [Medeski, Martin & Wood], and Cindy Blackman-Santana come together to pay tribute to end expand on the music of Tony Williams' Lifetime.  The bulk of the material presented here is from Lifetime's catalog, with a couple of originals and one Scottish traditional song thrown in for good measure.  These guys are no mere tribute band.

Ian Anderson - Thick as a Brick 2 Ian Anderson [Jethro Tull's guiding light] answers the musical question that nobody but a hardcore Tull fan would ask - whatever happened to Gerald Bostock?  For those who don't know, "Gerald Bostock" was a 8-year old boy who wrote an epic poem about the trials of growing up that became the lyrics to Jethro Tull's 1972 concept album Thick as a Brick.  Well, not really...Gerald Bostock was really Ian Anderson, and TAAB was a parody of concept albums then en vogue in the early 1970s.  Unlike the 1972 work, TAAB 2 wasn't recorded as a single, 40-minute song.  The arrangements are leaner, less cluttered, but still well-executed.  TAAB 2 shows five different things that could have happened to Gerald Bostock - he could have been a greedy banker, a soldier fighting in Afghanistan, a shopkeeper, a homeless man, or a preacher.

Mark Knopfler - Privateering  After over thirty years in the business, Mark Knopfler released his first double album of studio material.  If you like what you've heard from MK since he gave up Dire Straits, you get more of the same here.  Oddly enough, this album was not released in the US.  I had to get it as an import.

ZZ Top - La Futura It's been a long time since ZZ Top released anything new.  La Futura has been heralded as ZZ Top's return to their roots.  That's a true statement - the synthesizers of the Eliminator years are gone, as are the beat-box, dub experiments that ruined XXX.  La Futura isn't Tres Hombres, but it's the best thing they've done since Rhythmeen.

Bob Dylan – Tempest It wasn't "the best Dylan release since Blood on the Tracks," but Tempest does continue the musical winning streak Dylan started in 1997 with Time Out of Mind.  Favorite songs:  Pay In Blood, Early Roman Kings, Narrow Way.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2012/10/bob-dylan-tempest.html

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Psychedelic Pill He toured three times with Crosby, Stills & Nash [2000, 2002, 2006].  He made a sequel to an album he never released [Chrome Dreams II].  He made an album-long ode to cars [Fork in the Road].  He devoted an entire album to ranting against the Iraq War [Living With War].  Finally, he got around to making a great album [that I didn't think he had in him] with Crazy Horse, and it's about damn time.  Favorite songs:  Walk Like a Giant, Psychedelic Pill, Twisted Road, She's Always Dancing.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2012/11/neil-young-crazy-horse-psychedelic.html

Rush – Clockwork Angels A first in the history of Rush - a concept album.  IMHO, it is far and away the best thing they've done since 1981's Moving Pictures.  Some things do get better with age, like Rush.  Favorite songs:  Clockwork Angels, Seven Cities of Gold, The Wreckers, Headlong Flight.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2012/06/rush-clockwork-angels.html

Ry Cooder – Election Special  This is Ry Cooder's contribution in kind to Barack Obama's re-election campaign.  While I don't agree with the message, I do appreciate the art.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2012/08/ry-cooder-election-special.html

Things to look forward to in 2013 [assuming the Mayans are wrong]:

Black Sabbath - After 33 years, Black Sabbath are finally recording an album of new music with Ozzy Osbourne.   The original four members [Ozzy, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward] announced on 11/11/11 that they would reform, make an album and tour the world.  Things haven't quite turned out that way.  Tony Iommi was diagnosed with lymphoma at this time last year, so plans had to be put on hold for him to recover.  Bill Ward told the world he's having contractual problems with band management and hasn't gotten a contract he could sign.  In 2012, the rest of the band played three shows with Ozzy's drummer, and from what I've heard of the shows Bill Ward hasn't been missed.  Tony Iommi is recovering well and recording continues on the new Sabbath album.  As yet untitled, it'll probably be out in April 2013.

Alice In Chains - These guys took everybody by surprise and released Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009 to rave reviews [including mine].  I wondered why it's been taking awhile for a follow-up, and last week I found my answer.  Guitarist Jerry Cantrell had shoulder surgery and needed to recover.  They started recording in 2011 and just finished not too long ago.  I think it will be out before Spring 2013.

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell - They have a new album, "Old Yellow Moon," due out on Feb 26th.

Tony's 2011 Picks - Eleven from '11

I didn’t buy a lot of “new” music in 2011.  There wasn’t a lot of new music that jumped out and screamed “buy me.”  Some of those that I did buy I’ve already written about at length.  I pretty much stuck to stuff that’s come out in years past that I didn’t get when they were new.  So my list of favorite releases from 2011 is a short one.  Ten of them contain new music, and one of them is a monster of a box set.  As one would expect from me, the list is filled with the usual suspects, but as long as the usual suspects continue to make new music, I’ll continue to buy it and write about it.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me The only surprise about this Tom Waits release is the brevity of the songs.  All thirteen songs (16 if you got the “deluxe” version) run under five minutes.  Sound-wise, there are no surprises.  The “human beatbox” that was prevalent on 2004’s Real Gone is gone, and keyboards that were absent from that release make their return on Bad As Me.  As usual, Tom Waits barks, hollers, croons, and rasps.  Keith Richards makes an appearance on four of the songs, the funniest of which is Satisfied.  Here Tom Waits mocks Mick and Keith by name and tells him that, unlike the singer who “can’t get no satisfaction” he will be satisfied by the time it’s his turn to depart planet Earth.  There’s an anti-war rant called Hell Broke Luce, which features machine-gun fire and snarling guitars.  He’s got poetic ballads like Back in the Crowd and Kiss Me.  Bad As Me has the mix of the old-timey and the surreal one expects of any Tom Waits release.  The songs sound like they were recorded after all the bars closed.  There’s dark humor and sorrow, anger, disgust and heartbreak.  The disgust comes in Talking At The Same Time: “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind…”  The sadness comes in Pay Me where the singer tells of his family who pays him not to come home.  The only way down from the gallows is to swing… To borrow a phrase, Bad As Me is chock full of brawlers, bawlers and bastards.  It is essential for any Tom Waits fan.  Same as it ever was…

Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain  For most of her career, Emmylou Harris has contented herself with being an interpreter of songs written by other people.  She’s always been insecure about her songwriting.  I think she sells herself short in that regard – she wrote From Boulder to Birmingham!  What I didn’t realize [and I probably should have – I have many or her albums] was that she was the primary songwriter for only three of her albums before Hard Bargain.  Emmylou wrote all the songs on Red Dirt Girl [2000] and Stumble Into Grace [2003], but returned to recording other peoples’ songs for All I Intended to Be [2008].  On Hard Bargain, Emmylou returned to songwriting and produced a wonderful collection of songs.  There are three elegies on Hard Bargain.   The Road is for Gram Parsons.  In this song she can still remember every song he played.  My Name is Emmitt Till is told in the first person, telling how a black boy from Chicago was murdered in 1950s Mississippi for talking to a white woman, how he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, stabbed, shot, and thrown in the river “like trash when they were done.”  And she tells of how Emmitt Till’s mother kept the casket open to show her son’s mutilated body “for the whole wide world to see.”  Darlin’ Kate is for her late friend Kate McGarrigle, a frequent collaborator who lost her battle with cancer.

The album includes Six White Cadillacs.  Here, death is a welcome respite from the road that “we won’t have to wander anymore.”  The Ship on His Arm is about a wartime marriage that was inspired by her own parents, who married during World War II.  There’s New Orleans, where “the whole world stood to watch us drown,” but “to cut and run ain’t in our blood.”  It’s interesting how Emmylou chose to make “hurricane” and “Pontchartrain” rhyme in a song.  There are songs of lonely women – Lonely Girl and Nobody.  Given her long-time advocacy for animal rights, she even wrote a song about a Big Black Dog.  There’s a lot of melancholy on Hard Bargain, but it’s a good album nonetheless.  Her voice is still as angelic as ever.  I read in Billboard not too long ago that her next project will be a duets album with Rodney Crowell.  It’ll be good, that much is certain.

U2 – Achtung Baby Box Set Carol got me this for my birthday.  When author Bill Flanagan wrote his book U2 At the End of the World, he wrote about U2 in their Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  Manager Paul McGuinness described this time as a three-year campaign.  This box set is the product of that period.  Included in this set are six CDs and four DVDs.  The six CDs include the original Achtung Baby remastered, the original Zooropa remastered, B-sides and Rarities, 2 CDs of remixes [the Über and Ünter remixes], and the “alternate” Achtung Baby.  The hardest core U2 fans have heard all of these before, but not me.  The remastered Achtung Baby and Zooropa sound as good as one would expect.  The B-sides and Rarities are interesting.  I could do without the remixes.  The “alternate” album [‘Kindergaten’] is for U2 what Let It Be…Naked is for the Beatles.  Take away the studio tricks and underneath you still get a pretty good album.  The DVDs include the documentary U2: From the Sky Down.  One DVD contains each of the videos made from the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  A third DVD is the Zoo TV – Live From Sydney concert.  This show was quite a bit of sensory overload, but it was good to see Bono not take himself so seriously for once.  The fourth and last DVD has lots of goodies – a Zoo TV special,  an MTV documentary, MTV’s show Most Wanted where a fan got to see a U2 show via satellite from his house, a video short about Trabants [‘Trabantland’], U2 on Naked City, U2 on TV-AM.  There’s CD-ROM content as well, complete with links to websites.  This is how to do a box set the right way.

Glen Campbell – Ghost On The Canvas  The country icon makes his final album and says goodbye to his fans.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Glen%20Campbell

 

Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues  Gregg’s first solo studio album in fourteen years has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Blues Album category.  In fact, of the five albums nominated, three were made by members of the Allman Brothers Band.  Perhaps for this year they should rename the category “Best Blues Album by a member of the Allman Brothers Band.”  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/gregg-allman-low-country-blues.html

Warren Haynes – Man in Motion  Also nominated for Best Blues Album [the third being the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator].  The hardest working man in the music business, Warren took a year off from Gov’t Mule to release and tour behind this soulful gem.  To these ears, Man in Motion is more of a soul album than blues, but I tend to nitpick.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/05/warren-haynes-tale-of-two-albums.html

Neil Young – A Treasure  Neil Young changed musical directions with every album he made for Geffen during the 1980s.  This CD captures Neil and some legendary Nashville studio pros in his “country phase.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/neil-young-treasure.html

Levon Helm – Ramble at the Ryman  Recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2008, Levon Helm and friends keep the spirit of The Band alive.  Levon doesn’t do all the singing, but with Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams and daughter Amy Helm along for the ride, he doesn’t have to.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/levon-helm-ramble-at-ryman.html

        

Joe Bonamassa – Dust Blow  This is the first of three releases Joe Bonamassa put out in 2011 [the others being Black Country Communion 2 and Don’t Explain (with singer Beth Hart)].  With three releases in 2011 Joe is trying to take Warren Haynes’ title as the hardest working man in the music business.  Unwilling to be put in a blues-rock straight jacket, Joe goes in a more eclectic direction as he did with his previous two releases, Black Rock [2010] and The Ballad of John Henry [2009].  I love to hear this guy play.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Black Country Communion – 2  After a not-so-stellar first album,  Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa and company fulfill their potential on their sophomore release.  At times Black Country Communion sounds like the second coming of Deep Purple.  Everything is better – Kevin Shirley’s production is better, Glenn is singing better, Joe is playing like a hard-rock guitarist, and Derek Sherinian can finally be heard in the mix.  Jason Bonham didn’t need to improve his drumming it’s still rock-solid as it was on the first album.  Father John would be proud.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Good-Looking Corpse…

If anybody in music personifies this phrase, it would be Gram Parsons. Not many people know who Gram Parsons was, his work, or his impact on music. He’s credited by many as having invented “country rock.” He always hated that phrase. He preferred to use the term “Cosmic American Music.” He was very adept at taking musical forms like country, soul, and rock, throwing them all in a musical blender, and come up with a synthesis of all three. But I don’t think that was his biggest contribution to music. In my feeble mind, his big thing was introducing the world to Emmylou Harris. After his time with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, he finally decided he wanted to do his own thing, but his own thing included having a female singing partner like George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Chris Hillman [the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers] discovered Emmylou Harris while on tour and told Gram Parsons about her. The rest, as they say, is history.

If anybody knows about Gram Parsons, it’s because of his death and the way he went out of this world. His passing is the stuff of legend. The legend even generated a movie called “Grand Theft Parsons.” While at the funeral of Byrds guitarist Clarence White, he made a pact with his road manager [Phil Kaufman]. He didn’t want a normal funeral – he just wanted to be taken out to Joshua Tree, California and cremated. Why Joshua Tree? Whenever he wanted to get away from all the hassles of the music business, Gram Parsons always liked to go to his favorite place, which was Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree was a spiritual place for him. He’d go there, commune with nature, take trips on LSD or magic mushrooms, and look for UFOs, usually all at the same time.

Gram Parsons did lots of drugs – you name it, he probably did them. His drug use caught up with him in September 1973. He had just finished recording his Grievous Angel album and was going to go on tour to support it. Before the tour he and several friends went to Joshua Tree for a vacation. They consumed lots of drugs and lots of alcohol. Gram Parsons died on this trip, having ingested too much morphine and alcohol. But before his step-father could claim his remains to fly them to New Orleans for burial, his road manager honored the pact they made at Clarence White’s funeral. He stole Gram Parsons’ body, drove out to Joshua Tree, poured gasoline on it, and set it on fire.

Bernie Leadon: “He was very alive – a lovely guy. He just had this dark side and really sort of a death wish.”

Keith Richards: “He could touch a core in people. We call it ‘high lonesome,’ and it’s a certain melancholy, and it’s sort of ‘beautiful pain.’ But he had that to the max.”

Pamela Des Barres: “Gram was rock and country. He bridged those two worlds. To see him standing in the middle of these two worlds, you know, bringing them together, uniting them, and that was his purpose.”

Chris Hillman: “We’re talking about a very classic Tennessee Williams play here. Southern money and alcoholism, just a tragedy.”

Gram’s mom [Avis Snively] came from a wealthy family in Florida. They got all their money from citrus. Gram’s father was a World War II veteran. Both had drinking problems. His father was affected greatly by the war. If he was alive today, he would be diagnosed as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. This condition was recognized as a kind of disability until after the Vietnam War, so when Gram’s father went through it, the only way he coped was to drink a lot. When Gram was twelve his father committed suicide right before Christmas. He became the “man of the family” until his mother married Bob Parsons.

He went to prep school in Jacksonville. While he was in prep school, Gram’s mother had to be hospitalized for her alcoholism. Coincidentally [or maybe not], right after Bob Parsons paid here a visit in the hospital she died. Her death happened the same day Gram graduated from prep school. Avis Snively’s family didn’t like Bob Parsons – they thought he married her for her money, so when she died right after he visited her in the hospital, that just added to the suspicion that he was after her money. Shortly after Avis’ death, Bob married the family’s teenage baby sitter.

I think the first thing I bought of Gram Parsons’ music was the anthology Sacred Hearts & Fallen Angels. It is the place to be introduced to his music as it has the best from his solo work, his first band [the International Submarine Band], his work with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. His body of recorded work wasn’t large so it’s easy to summarize in a couple of CDs what he left behind. That anthology collection was the hook, so I just had to get the sources. The first source I decided to get was Sweetheart of the Rodeo from The Byrds. I read awhile ago that many of Gram Parsons’ vocals were wiped from the final release due to a contract dispute with another record label, but I also read those mixes still existed. So being the compulsive music buyer that I am, naturally I had to get the “special edition.” Having heard the Byrds come up with the likes of Eight Miles High, So You Want to Be a Rock N Roll Star, and other rock classics, it was quite a shock to hear them do an all-country album [or as close to country as the Byrds could play it]. Such were Gram Parsons’ powers of persuasion. According to Roger McGuinn, they “hired a keyboard player and instead got George Jones in a Nudie suit.” Most of the songs on the album were country covers. There were songs from Bob Dylan, the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard, there were traditional songs. Gram Parsons had the only original songs – Hickory Wind and One Hundred Years From Now, both of which Chris Hillman said were two of the best songs Gram had ever written. But the sleeper track [for me, anyway] was You Don't Miss Your Water, a soul/R&B song from Stax Records recorded written and recorded by William Bell. This was the embodiment of Gram’s “Cosmic American Music,” a blend of a soul song with a country feel.

Gram Parsons lasted only one album with the Byrds before he moved on to other musical things. The Byrds toured England in support of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and they met the Rolling Stones. Gram became great friends with Keith Richards immediately. They talked about South Africa, which was then in the throes of apartheid. The Byrds were going to play some shows in South Africa. Once Keith told Gram what South Africa was like, and the segregation that persisted there [which made Gram think “oh, like in Mississippi” – he was a son of the South after all…], Gram told the rest of the Byrds he wouldn’t go with them to South Africa. So Gram was no longer with the Byrds. To this day Chris Hillman thinks the real reason Gram didn’t want to go to South Africa was because he wanted to hang out with Keith Richards, not because of any sensitivity to racial matters.

Almost immediately Gram hooked up with Chris Etheridge, a bass player with whom he had worked before. They decided to form a band. Shortly thereafter, Chris Hillman came back from South Africa, patched things up with Gram, and told him it was a mistake for the Byrds to go to South Africa. He also told Gram he was going to leave the Byrds, and could he join Gram’s new band? Thus was born the Flying Burrito Brothers. At first they didn’t have a permanent drummer [they eventually got Michael Clarke, another ex-Byrd]. They had a steel guitar player named Sneaky Pete Kleinow who had a very distorted, fuzzy sound. The Burrito Brothers didn’t have a proper lead guitar player. Their first album was Gilded Palace of Sin. It’s very good. It didn’t sell a lot. In fact it still hasn’t been certified gold, and it’s been out for forty years. But I’ve read that most of the people who bought the record started bands themselves. If that isn’t influence I don’t know what is.

The very first song from the record was called Christine’s Tune, the story of a girl who caused trouble for everyone in the Byrds. As it turns out, she was Christine Hinton, David Crosby’s girlfriend. They later changed the name of the song to Devil in Disguise because Christine was killed in a car wreck and they wanted to keep her identity secret – they didn’t want to explicitly speak ill of the dead. It’s a very catchy song with Gram and Chris Hillman sharing lead vocals, as they did with the next song, Sin City. Chris Hillman was going through a horrible divorce at the time, the Byrds manager was ripping them off, so he thought Los Angeles was a whole town “filled with sin.” Another song that really grabbed me was The Dark End of the Street. Like the song You Don’t Miss Your Water, The Dark End of the Street was a soul standard that Gram Parsons turned into a country song. I thought that was Gram Parsons’ finest vocal performance. Chris Hillman said he thought Hot Burrito #1 was best song he had ever written, the best vocal on record, on any recording. Both it and Hot Burrito #2 were songs about love gone sad [I like #2 better].

Chris Etheridge described Gram’s voice as a “soulful, almost a ‘help me’ voice, like he had a voice that when he would sing it was almost like he was asking for help or something – it’s kinda hard to explain. I don’t know what it was, but it seemed like everyone almost felt sorry for him. But the women really loved him, loved the way he sang.” Keith Richards – “Gram Parsons is the only guy I know that could make every chick in the audience weep, which is a rare quality. I remember being in the Palomino Club in California and hardened old peroxide waitresses who have been there for yonks [sic], tears streaming down their eyes while they were listening to Gram play.” Yes, he was that good of a singer. He was very convincing.

The next album, Burrito Deluxe, was ok, but it wasn’t so tightly focused as Gilded Palace of Sin. Some of the songs were good, many of them felt like they were rushed. They lost the magic they had on Gilded Palace of Sin. Burrito Deluxe is notable in that the Burrito Brothers cut and released the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses [from Sticky Fingers]. This was a big deal because the Rolling Stones didn’t give songs to anybody. In listening to Burrito Deluxe it appeared Gram Parsons had lost interest, like all he wanted to do was be a star, get high, be high, and stay high. He started to miss rehearsals, and he was spending more time with the Stones than he would with his own band. One time Chris Hillman tracked him down at a Rolling Stones studio session for Let It Bleed and dragged him out to do a show. Chris Hillman had enough of Gram’s shit and fired him.

Free of his Burrito Brothers commitments, Gram went to France to hang out with the Stones while they made Exile on Main Street. Gram wasn’t on Exile on Main Street, but Keith Richards claims Gram was still very involved in the making of the album. There’s a lot of country-ish music on Exile, so perhaps Keith was right. But one side effect of this association with the Stones was drug abuse. Gram Parsons discovered heroin. In Chris Hillman’s words, he had gone from this thin good-looking kid with nice brown eyes into this overweight, loud stupid person. Gram’s dissipation kept him out of the game until 1973. He finally recorded his first solo album, GP, with Elvis Presley’s TCB Band. Unlike his work with the Burrito Brothers, GP was [to these ears anyway] a straight-up country record, complete with banjos, dobros, fiddles, steel guitars, and female harmonies. There was nothing rock and roll on this album, but this wasn’t a bad thing. Unlike Burrito Deluxe, there isn’t a bad song on the album. There are some Gram Parsons originals mixed in with songs written by others, like Harlan Howard’s Streets of Baltimore. The whole album is a joy to listen to.

Gram Parson’s final album was recorded in the summer of 1973. Grievous Angel is a continuation of what was on GP, only the songs are mostly Gram Parsons originals. Of all the originals, the very last song on the album, In My Hour of Darkness, caught my ear. It sounds like a spiritual [“O Lord grant me vision, O Lord grant me speed”] There were three main verses to the song, each telling a story of someone who Gram Parsons knew. The first verse was about a young man who died in a car accident. Upon further review I found the young man in question was the actor Brandon De Wilde. He was a friend of Gram’s who was killed in Colorado – “who’d have ever thought there’d be such a deadly Denver bend” as the song goes. I had to think long and hard who Brandon De Wilde was and then it hit one night as I was watching the John Wayne movie “In Harm’s Way.” Brandon De Wilde played the part of the young ensign who happened to be the son of John Wayne’s character. I couldn’t think of anything else he’d been in, but I was finally able to put a face with thee name. The second verse dealt with a country singer whom Gram Parsons had known. In this case it was Clarence White. As the song goes: “Another young man safely sung his silver-string guitar/and he played to people everywhere some say he was a star/But he was just a country boy his simple songs confessed/ And the music he had in him so very few possessed.” “Then there was an old man, kind and wise with age/And he read me just like a book and he never missed a page/And I loved him like my father, and I loved him like my friend/And I knew his time would shortly come, but I did not know just when.” The song is the last a very good album. The album has other very good songs, including $1000 Wedding, Ooh Las Vegas, and Love Hurts just to name a few. Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris harmonized perfectly together. The work she did with Gram Parsons is what got me interested in Emmylou Harris’ work.

Gram Parsons did not leave a large recorded legacy. He never had a hit record. He’s one of those legendary cult-like figures that you really don’t know much about. What would have happened if Gram Parsons could control his demons and overcome his addictions? He’s been lauded by many as this great singer and songwriter. I agree with half that assessment. He was a great singer, but I think he was a good songwriter, not a great one. Be that as it may, that doesn’t keep me from listening to and enjoying his music. It’s just a shame there isn’t more of it to enjoy.