An Announcement & Some Thoughts About Gram Parsons

As anyone who has read more than a few posts here can tell you there is one person who is responsible for my love of music; my mother. So I am incredibly excited to announce that she is going to begin to contribute some of her wonderful musical musings to TWIAPC. To kick things off she’s got a little something to say about Gram Parsons – which will give you a pretty good idea of the kind of conversations that happened around our dinner table as a kid. Read on!

The beauty of shuffling through your music library is that wham! right in the middle of washing dishes you are hit with Gram Parsons singing “Won’t you scratch my itch sweet Annie Rich…” The Grievous Angel returns and you are back in 1974 listening to the song for the first time and thinking “what a damn shame the fool offed himself.” Then because you want more you dry your pruney fingers, search Gram Parsons and spend the rest of the night listening to all you have which leaves you wanting more. So you download the tribute album, Google his name and follow all the links in Wikapedia (so extensive is the Gram Parsons entry that it will take up most of the next two hours but you will be an expert on, not only all things Parsons, but most of the origins of the hazy genre ‘country rock’).  At the end of which you will be so convinced of the absolute crime of his not being included in either the Country Music or the Rock and Roll Halls of Fame you will find the GP3 website dedicated to righting this wrong and vote as many times as you can.

Then it is too late to do anything else so you sit in the dark and listen over and over to “A Song for You.” You’ve heard Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams cover this song and they do a fine job.  It is a great song but it can’t help but strike you that it actually makes no sense. “Jesus built a ship to sing a song to.” What the hell does that mean? Was this the product of one of the many drugs that Parsons imbibed and which eventually wiped him out at 26?  Or is this the poetry, written by the kind of smart kid who makes it into Harvard (he attended for a semester), that you have never really understood anyway, not being that kind of smart.

“A Song for You” is on the album, GP,released after Parsons died. And as you listen you have that kind of relationship one has in the dark.  Just you and the song.  His voice is wavey and not strong and you get the feeling that Emmy Lou Harris singing back up is really pulling him through. And you think you understand how raw his life was at that point. “So take me down to your dance floor and I won’t mind people when they stare.” It’s good stuff. Parsons hated “country rock”. He called his music Cosmic American Music.  It’s a perfect term.  Cosmic. You will induct him into the Cosmic American Music Hall of Fame.

 

 

 

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