Gram Parsons:Classic or dud?

Hot Burrito nr 2 is my favourite song of the moment FUCK. such an awesome song. cant listen to the whole album all the way through as i am not a country girl at heart.

i can't get w/ people who would say 'dud'

so classic it hurts

gram's the king of heartbreak

whatever that means

a grand piano made entirely of smack

this old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house

sin city is the best song i've listened to all year

<3 his cover of "to love somebody" so much...

i can't get w/ people who would say 'dud'

― mark cl, Thursday, May 7, 2009 11:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so classic it hurts

― mark cl, Thursday, May 7, 2009 11:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

word, esp the first part

Dud. I have FBB's'Gilded Palace...' and the one after it on a single CD, and well, I don't know, it's just too *country* for me. The press would have us believe all this stuff about creating a 'New American Music'. These two albums contain some fairly pleasant country-rock, but there is such a high percentage of the worst kind of trad, mawkish old country in there too, that this claim seems absurd.
He ruined the Byrds too - although I guess it's ultimately McGuinn's fault for letting in turds like Skip Battin afterwards.

― Dr. C, Wednesday, March 14, 2001 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

fuck you imo

still feeling blue didn't do shit and we'll sweep out the ashes was too ragged and then BOOM a song for you and i'm rapt and will listen to anything with this man's name on it

i mean i own mad hank williams and conway twitty and patsy cline and david allen coe and shit but the fiddles on still feeling blue are so fuckin trebly i can't even really listen. a song for you on is the best country soul record ever made tho.

still feeling blue is all about the pedal steel

hoos u heard $1000 Wedding?

hell yes i have and it can't be fucked with imo

velko ty for the correction i totally thought those were fiddles all this time and i feel a douche

and now hoos still feel a douche.

xxpost Mekons did an awesome cover of that song btw

the back-to-back jams of still feeling blue & we'll sweep out the ashes do it for me every time

hoos listen to 'sin city'

or 'return of the grevious angel' god this guy is so good

so guys gp or grevious angel? i think i like gp. what i really like tho is the 2-disc sacred hearts anthology that basically has both these albums + all kinds of stuff from ISB/byrds/FBB

^^^OTM
Best present I got last year (thank u gf). Want a Nudie suit (gf protests).

haha me too

I checked out this guy's records from the library and was surprised by how shitty they were. I was led to believe that this guy was some kind of genius.

wife says i play too much gram parsons

do u like country music? xp

anyways so i've also been reading 'twenty thousand roads' by david meyer, prob the most detailed bio of gram that i've come across (tho i know there are others out there). really fascinating book. guy has an irrational hatred for the eagles (then again i suppose most people do) and has a few quirks but all in all it's a really interesting and entertaining read. especially enjoyed the nellcote/stones stuff during the recording of 'exile'

through tons of interviews what meyer conveys so well is the effect gp had on everyone around him - so many people were like 'yea i didn't really think much about country music, thought it was mostly for hicks until gram sat me down and played me a bunch of songs'

*checks amazon*
ooh, might want to get that. i'm not that familiar with gp apart from the musics

like a lot of musician bios i never read them start to finish - i just bounce around and pick up chapters here and there, but it's really good. there's also a big section in that back w/ a suggested discography of country records gram loved, albums by his contemporaries, and later bands that were influenced by him

do u like country music? xp

Yeah, I do actually-- well, the old stuff. Not whatever passes for country these days.

what didn't u like about parsons?

yeah i enjoyed that book a lot, tho my major takeaway was that gram had a totally weird and fucked up life.

this is true

I can't really get into Parsons because what I've heard sounds like some rich kid who stumbled upon country music and wanted to adopt it.

ha u get that from his music or from reading that he came from a rich family?

b/c i don't really know how someone could tell from listening any particular song that he came from wealth

more "steeped in" than "stumbled upon" imo

Something about the guy's music sounds makes me think of posturing-- mimicry and affectation. This is also true of the Rolling Stones, but for reasons I can't really articulate, I can let them slide.

this prob gets way into issues of authenticity that go over my head but imo musicians we often think of as 'authentic' wrt to any type of music (and perhaps ESPECIALLY country music in this case) there are all kinds of mimicry and affectation.

even hank williams who people might take as the prime example of a'pure' authentic classic country music was a PERFORMER, who's borrowing from a tradition and emulating aspects of that tradition, mimicking it, using affectation

authenticity is a messy business imo and i don't necessarily have the theoretical savvy to unpack it, but i do know it's messy. stones affected and mimicked and borrowed like crazy but i would never say they're not an authentic rock n roll band

I don't care that he actually was rich kid who stumbled upon country, but sounding like one is a dealbreaker. If he'd made it past 30, who knows.

like i said i don't know how u can glean from his actual songs that he's a rich kid?

He sounds like a wuss so I blame the money.

well yea i guess. gp wasn't a hardman country singer, nor was that what he was trying to be obv

obv

He sounds like he's going through puberty all the time. With a backing singer he's often forgivable but anything he's flying solo on sounds like a fourteen-year-old's demo recordings. Oh, oh, he sure couldn't sing. Now his writing, on the other hand... "$1000 Wedding" and "Sin City" alone would place him in the history books, and there's any number of good songs that in other mouths are devastating. But as a performer, overrated: essential for those who think Costello's "Almost Blue" is an essential album. For all the genre-hopper mythology it all sounds just so straight, so suburban. Maybe if he didn't have some "cosmic vision" to play out and he'd just let himself bring it instead of approaching it like a religious convert who needs to convert the rest of us heathens. And to play him out as the sole father of country-rock? Just wrong. Buck Owens, for example, both rocked harder and was more authentically country than at least three Gram Parsonses put together. But Buck didn't party with the Stones and overdose himself while he still had his baby fat, so he doesn't get the posthumous girl.

Whatever all that's supposed to mean.

staggerlee = chris hillman sock

it’s stunning to realize emmylou had only recorded her first album just a few years prior, she’s still so new and young but so incredible already… her harmonies with gram are lightyears above what he’d done w hillman

i mean, apples and oranges really but still

His death was an absolute classic.

A friend got me the Exile on Main Street 33-1/3 for Christmas. Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz wrote it...It's pretty good; very much a musician's book, so some of that doesn't interest me as much, but some nice personal detours and a good feel for the record. Loved this Gram Parsons bit, a conversation with Stanley Booth:

"Look at it, man," he said, as if he had read my thoughts. "They call it America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they believe it and they salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still believeing in it, and--I don't know," he said, taking another drag, "then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."

I'd say that's a pretty great all-purpose line for not completely giving up on anything: "then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."

i stumbled on the international submarine band record online and yeesh it's good.

jon corneal was an amazing drummer

it has such a nice heft to it compared to the other parsons-related stuff i've heard. just steady driving jangle with the pedal steel skating over it for miles. and jon corneal keeping time like a shift supervisor.

Grievous Angel was my gateway and still fave, but the live follow-up, first Burritos and this 'un are all very hefty in the right way, yeah. He jumped from ISB to the Byrds, and label boss Lee Hazlewood was furious, wanted to sue Parsons, Byrds, Columbia. ISB album producer Suzi Jane Hokum tried to convince him that they should work out a licensing deal w Columbia, which could be a foot in the door to the big time (Lee Hazlewood Industries attracted and did right in the studio by a wylde array of talent, but tended to drop the ball re releases, distribution etc.) That didn't happen either. What the hell, still a good album.

For a second there I read ISB as "Incredible String Band" and thought "WHUT?!" haha

ahhh now it makes sense lol

Imagining him and Robin Williamson swapping roles.

Love Gram but somehow have never heard ISB... gonna correct that now! I knew Emmylou's great version of "Luxury Liner".