Last Albums: Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel (1974)
Grievous Angel was only Parsons' second solo album after having a very brief but artistically productive stint as a member of The Byrds and later with his own Flying Burrito Brothers.
Over the decades a cult has arisen surrounding the death of the man many
people say gave birth to country-rock.
The album was recorded just a few months before Parsons
overdosed in a Joshua Tree, CA motel at only age twenty-six - just a little
too young to qualify for the infamous 27 Club. Despite outwardly suffering from heroin and alcohol addiction all
through the sessions in the summer of 1973 critics considered the record an
artistic triumph even though it never climbed higher than 195 on
Billboard's album chart.
The sessions prominently featured Emmylou Harris on vocals and Parsons
wanted to treat her almost as an equal by crediting the album to "Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris" because she sang on
eight of its nine songs. The album wasn't released until January 1974 -
several months after Parson's passing - and because his widow resented
Harris's close working relationship with her husband she had the
future country legend's name and picture removed from the LP's front
cover before its release. Harris's name now only appears as a band
member along with the other musicians who played on it.
Parsons' voice is a perfect fit for the kind of music he loved and
Harris is a flawless duet partner. They excel on the album
opener, "The Return of the Grievous Angel" and on their classic cover
of Roy Orbison's "Love Hurts."
Parsons never let his ego get in the way of making good music
regardless of who received the writing credit. In addition to the
Orbison tune he covered Tom T. Hall's "I Can't Dance," The
Louvin Brothers' "Cash on the Barrelhead" and Walter Egan's "Hearts on
Fire." "Barrelhead" is paired with Parson's own "Hickory Wind" and is
actually a studio recording, but it's presented here as a faux barroom performance that
makes listeners believe they're hearing a live show in a seedy, dive bar.
There is plenty of country music pickin' from James Burton on
electric lead guitar, Herb Pederson on rhythm, and Al Perkins on pedal
steel. Bernie Leadon played dobro, and Byron Berline added some fiddle and
mandolin.
Linda Ronstadt contributed gorgeous harmonies to the sad and most beautiful
song on the record, "In My Hour of Darkness" - a co-write with Harris
- that closes the album.
Parsons didn't want a fancy
funeral so he and his road manager, Phil Kaufman, made a pact to cremate
each other's body in the desert if either of them died young. In a post you can read here that is rich with additional details, you'll find that Kaufman and a friend had to steal Parsons' corpse from Los Angeles International Airport in a ramshackle hearse with help from an unsuspecting police officer. They took the purloined musician's remains to Cap Rock
in his beloved Joshua Tree National Park, poured gasoline over his
body, and set it ablaze.
In 2019, my wife and I stopped at Cap Rock specifically to look for any tributes left by fans who
visited the site. The National Park Service regularly removes them, but new
homemade monuments continue to pop up. The only one we saw during our visit there was this
blue cross painted on the rock with the initials, GP, scrawled underneath it. She snapped this picture for posterity because we knew it was eventually going to be removed.
Parsons' outrageous funeral story has become legendary, and because popular music is a very generational thing it's possible this strange but true tale of his passing may outlive his artistic endeavors.
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Last Albums discusses music that was recorded as new material and
intended to be released to the public as a complete album but not
necessarily the last one. Live albums, greatest hits or "best of"
collections and compilations do not count, nor do posthumous
releases of leftover tracks cobbled together to make a final
album.
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