He kept himself busy with music, but Gram’s family life was a shambles. His mother, Avis, was pregnant and drinking heavily. Bob was cheating on her and the entire town knew about it. Gram started rummaging through Avis’s copious prescription-drug stash, looking for some relief. He failed his junior year at Winter Haven High and Avis got Gram reinstated at Bolles, where he would have to repeat eleventh grade.
Gram and Patti were thwarted in a slapdash attempt to elope by Patti’s outraged parents, who stopped the couple as they perused their getaway map. They were kept apart until Gram went back to Bolles. People remember Gram carrying his guitar into every class, entertaining schoolmates at the fountain, enjoying all the female attention. He asked an artist friend to make him up some business cards that said “It’s okay, I’m a musician.” Gram competed in the Debate Club, became a member of the Centurions fraternity, and on the weekends played with his newest group, the folky Shilos. The band made enough money to get themselves new instruments, traveling as far as South Carolina and Chicago for gigs, getting paid a few hundred dollars a night. The Shilos almost got a booking at the Bitter End in Manhattan, but didn’t get the job when it was discovered they were all underage and still in high school. But having experienced the hipness of Greenwich Village—playing with people like Richie Furay, who would later form the band Poco—Gram would never be the same.
In late March the Shilos booked time in a local recording studio, cutting nine songs in one hour. To friend Paul Surratt, Gram wrote, “I’m sure my music is going to be as big as dylans [sic], and after my album we will have the advantage of owning my music.” But nothing happened with the tape and the Shilos broke up.
Trouble in Parsons’s paradise caused Gram to decide to leave for Harvard after graduation. “I wanted to find out what Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were up to,” he later said, but the truth was closer to home. Bob’s continuing infidelity led to a horrible, gossipy mess that caused Avis to turn more and more to the companionship of booze—against her doctor’s warnings.
As he was rehearsing for Bolles graduation ceremonies, Gram was told by his English teacher that his mother had died, but he decided to participate in the ceremonies anyway, keeping his feelings safely stuffed and under wraps.
For Gram, Harvard turned out to be a place to hone his varied and eclectic musical influences and form another band, the Like, with Ian Dunlop, John Nuese, Tom Snow, and drummer Mickey Gauvin. The Like merged R&B with Gram’s country influences and were often joined by actor Brandon de Wilde (Shane, Hud), who sang beautiful harmony duets with Gram. A lot of experimenting with drugs occurred. After a long weekend on LSD, Gram confided to a friend that he was desperately concerned about his little sister Avis, who was now trapped with Bob Parsons and his new wife, Bonnie, and forced to watch them tossing around her dead mother’s money. Gram wrote letters of encouragement but felt powerless to help.
Gram had a good excuse to leave Harvard when Brandon de Wilde asked the Like to play on some demos he was cutting in New York. The band rented a huge furnished house in the Bronx and started rehearsing, determined to get a record deal. Trading in “the Like” for the “International Submarine Band” (taken from a “Little Rascals” episode), they struggled to find their musical direction. Inspired by Ray Charles’s Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues, the ISB had the unusual opportunity of being able to rehearse constantly without the hassle of bill paying, blessed by Gram’s ever-flowing Snively nest egg. They took their odd mixture of country, rock, and soul to the clubs, where reactions were always mixed. Gram’s first shot at fame was shot down. The ISB cut a promo single for the movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, but the diverse Southern stew, as Gram later said in an interview, was misunderstood. Next came a single deal with Columbia Records, which never panned out, and Gram was getting restless. Visiting Brandon, who was making a movie in California, Gram fell madly in love for the first time, insisting that the band relocate to Los Angeles. They were game.
I drove up the coast to Santa Barbara, where Nancy Parsons lives in a lovely old white wooden house, so we could reminisce about her “old boy,” Gram. Nancy was happily living with David Crosby when Gram came into her life. “I was secure and happy and fulfilled with David,” she says warmly. “When I saw this guy who looked like a coon dog/drowned water puppy come up the driveway, it was not in my mind to be unfaithful.” But bells and destiny chimes sounded in Nancy’s head when Gram said, “I’ve been looking for you for a long time and I’m going to take you with me.” They were both nineteen. “It was written, it had to happen,” she insists. “I was making up the big bed, fluffing a sheet into the air, and David said, ‘Nancy, where are you? You’re a million miles away.’ I looked at him: ‘Don’t you understand? I’ve met Gram Parsons and I have to leave with him.’” Nancy says that for an entire year her life with Gram was “a vision of love and harmony and heaven on earth.”
Moving in with his lady love, Gram rented a Laurel Canyon house for the rest of the band and plotted his grand future in the City of Angels. Through Brandon’s connections, the International Submarine Band performed at a party scene in a Roger Corman movie, The Trip; then the movie’s star, Peter Fonda, recorded one of Gram’s songs, “November Nights,” for the small Chisa label. Gram was rubbing elbows with the near-greats but had to enter the Palomino club’s weekly talent contest to get up on a stage. It took him two years to win, after losing out to corny comedy acts and whistling cowboys. A few years later, in a tragic attempt to get good enough to sing with the Burrito Brothers myself, I entered the Pal contest and lost to a piano-playing duck.
Nancy was pregnant and Gram panicked. “I was actively fighting for this little soul in my belly because Gram’s manager wanted me to have an abortion on my very own bed. Gram didn’t know what to do. He was so young, so scared, and so confused. A baby wasn’t part of his vision for us.” But Nancy refused the idea of an abortion. “We couldn’t make a go of it. He couldn’t give up his kismet, his contract to come to earth and do his mission with his music. He had to choose and that’s where the pain started. That tore him up, it tore me up. For me it was Gram and his happiness or Polly and her life. His choice was to get the music here. He said, ‘Now I know what I have to do,’ and I said, ‘Don’t leave me here.’ I knew he was going to split apart from me and what we represented, and make his music happen and leave in a blaze.”
Just after the ISB broke up, Gram was offered an album deal with Lee Hazlewood’s new label, LHI. John Nuese stayed with Gram while the others played the circuit, calling themselves the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram corraled his friends Bob Buchanan and John Corneal, and the International Submarine Band album, Safe at Home, featuring four G.P originals, was recorded in two sessions. Released in the spring of 1968, the album—and Gram specifically—received an excellent review in the L.A. Times: “His voice and pen seem meant for the medium, neither sounding artificial in the homey feel of good country music.” Gram went to Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor, and decked himself out in country flash, but the initial buzz on the International Submarine Band was soon over, and Gram was ready for a move.
After meeting Byrds bassist Chris Hillman in a bank, Gram was brought in to audition for the group, and Roger McGuinn asked him to join that very day. Roger later recalled the meeting for Fusion magazine: “We hired a piano player and he turned out to be Parsons, a monster in sheep’s clothing. And he exploded out of this sheep’s clothing. God! It’s George Jones! In a sequin suit!” The Byrds had dabbled in country and, along with Chris Hillman, Gram devotedly pushed the group in that direction, which culminated in Sweetheart of the Rodeo, considered the breakthrough album that led to what would come to be called “country-rock”—long-haired weirdo rockers daring to tamper with the C&W mainstream. Having decided to record in Nashville for authenticity the Byrds were booked to play the hallowed halls of the Grand Ole Opry. At twenty-one years old, Gram Parsons had reached Mecca and decided to run with it. After a decent recept
ion from the wary audience for the Merle Haggard song “Sing Me Back Home,” Tompall Glaser announced another Haggard song by the Byrds, but Gram had his own agenda. “We’re not going to do that one tonight,” he said cheekily. “We’re going to do a song for my grandmother, who used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry with me when I was little. It’s a song I wrote called ‘Hickory Wind.’” This was a surprise to the Byrds, who were flying high on the pot they had smoked backstage, but they followed Gram’s lead and managed to piss off the entire Opry hierarchy.
At the end of their European tour, the Byrds played London’s Middle Earth, spending that rainy night at Stonehenge with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Roger spoke about the Byrds’ upcoming trip to South Africa, and Keith made sure to tell Gram his feelings about apartheid, the policy of blacks being separated from whites. He told Gram it was like growing up down South and being “the wrong color,” and that the Stones wouldn’t even think of playing there. So when it came time for the Byrds to leave for South Africa, Gram refused to go. Though Chris Hillman went into a rage, he later admitted Gram had been right. “I was ready to murder him, but then we did make up and become friends again. The South Africa tour was a stupid farce and he was right. We shouldn’t have gone, but he shouldn’t have let us down by copping out at the end … .”
Gram had been a Byrd for a little over four months. The landmark Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the lowest-selling Byrds album to date, only reaching number seventy-seven on the Billboard charts. However, not too long ago Rolling Stone named Sweetheart one of the top two hundred albums of the last twenty-five years.
While the Byrds suffered in South Africa, Gram and Keith Richards found some kind of common ground and started hanging out. To England’s Melody Maker, Gram announced he had already started another group, “a Southern soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar.”
Back in L.A., Gram found that Chris Hillman had quit the Byrds and, after apologies, convinced him they should start a band. Along with “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow on pedal steel, Chris Ethridge on bass, and eventually ex-Byrd Mike Clarke on drums, Chris and Gram stole the name “Flying Burrito Brothers” and took off, the former Byrds easily getting a record deal with A&M Records, a label that was trying to branch out and get hip. With the advance, Gram took the Burritos directly to Nudie’s and outfitted them in festive country-trash garb. Instead of the usual roses on his short white jacket, Gram insisted on naked ladies, cubes of acid, Tuinal capsules, marijuana leaves, and a blazing red cross shooting rhinestones across the back.
Gram and best pal, Keith Richards (left), jamming and flying high at the Stones’ villa in Nellcote, France. (COURTESY OF JOHN DEL GATTO/PHOTO BY DOMINIQUE TARLE)
It was about this time that we became friends. A fiendish Byrds fan, I saw one of Gram’s only L.A. Byrds performances at the trippy-hippie Kaleidoscope on Sunset Boulevard. Chris Hillman, my first love, introduced me to the slinky bedroom-eyed stranger, and his Southern manners just slayed me. I was around for the early Burrito days, spending time with Chris, getting to know Gram, baby-sitting his baby daughter, Polly, drinking up the magic at Burrito Manor. Gram and Nancy had never really broken up, and she often brought Polly to town from their sweet little pad in Santa Barbara to visit Daddy.
Miss Mercy, my partner-in-crime in the GTOs, wrote a piece on Gram for L.A. Weekly, describing her first glimpse of G.P at the Yellow Submarine premiere: “[T]he lights dimmed and a tall, lean cat in a sparkling Nudie drifted by. He was true glitter, true glamour rock. The rhinestone suit sparkled like diamonds, it had submarines all over it and the color was scarlet red. It sparkled so bright it made Gram sparkle through the movie show … . His Nudie belt hung on his hips like a gunslinger, and that was his ammunition, his exaggerated entrance into my life … .”
Chris, in the middle of a hellish divorce, and Gram, who was going through grief with Nancy, both moved into a cowboy ranch pad in the San Fernando Valley and started work on The Gilded Palace of Sin. Chris says it was one of the most productive times of his life. “It’s being familiar with your partner, knowing and anticipating what Gram was thinking about, because we were sharing a common thing then,” he remembers. “We were sitting in the middle of L.A … . Our old ladies had left us. That’s what caused the creative working condition.”
Mercy and I visited Chris and Gram during this fertile period, and they greeted us with a grocery bag full of pot and played us a bunch of country forty-fives on a portable record player. “This is George Jones,” Gram said in his weepy drawl, “the King of Broken Hearts,” then broke into plaintive sobs while George crooned. “Imagine,” said Mercy later, “crying over a hillbilly with a crewcut.” I felt like I was being let in on a very important secret—Chris and Gram turned me on to country that night, and I’ve never gotten over it. The Burritos invited Mercy and me to sing in the chorus of “Little Hippie Boy,” and in turn we invited them to the GTOs sessions with Frank Zappa. In between ditties, Gram took my roommate, Miss Andee, and me into a little room where he played us a bleeding ballad for Nancy called “Hot Burrito #1.” As he looked at his exquisite hands on the piano keys, Gram said, “Sometimes I wonder where these hands came from. I keep expecting to see stitches around my wrists.”
Gram must have been thrilled when he read Robert Hilburn’s L.A. Times review for The Gilded Palace of Sin, praising his vocals as “straight from the sentimental George Jones heart of country music.” He kept his feelings bottled up inside, but Gram’s blues came out in his music.
One afternoon Nancy gaily announced that Gram had proposed to her, but the gaiety was short-lived. Unbeknownst to Nancy, Gram had devised a publicity scheme, reminiscent of Hank Williams marrying one of his wives onstage in between concerts. Gram would invite all his showbiz pals, play a set, and maybe even be able to get the wedding on television! He told Nancy that the invitations were being made up and to create her wedding dress with good ol’ Nudie, and leave the rest of the plans up to him. She did as she was told, had a dress made from the same fabric as Gram’s naughty Nudie suit, and waited. And waited. “Gram played a lot of games. I went to Nudie’s and found that Gram hadn’t been forthcoming with the money. [The thousand-dollar wedding dress was never paid for.] ’I never saw an invitation. It got real crazy after I saw Nudie and found out that Gram was using me as another stage prop.” Nancy felt humiliated and retaliated in the only way she could. She spent the night with his old friend Mickey Gauvin. Some friend. “There’s no honor among men,” Nancy insists. “I didn’t have to sink to that level, but remember the sacred sexuality, the ancient temples? I wasn’t getting back at Gram, I was fulfilling myself with a temple boy!” Nancy must have known she was ending her relationship with Gram once and for all. “I knew already that it was a big, awful, horrible joke. The fact that he would set up this elaborate ruse—this is the man I loved with my immortal soul—one hand beckoned me forward, the other pushed me away.” It’s such a sad story. “It was in Gram’s cellular memory to be sad,” Nancy sighs. “The Southern way breeds sadness. I wish I would have known to say to him, ‘Even if your father knocked himself off, just because your mother knocked herself off, doesn’t mean that you have to follow the script too.’ But he thought he did, and that’s very Southern, Tennessee Williams, dark and willow-hung.” It’s expected, isn’t it? I ask. “There, you’ve hit it on the head,” Nancy agrees. “Who was he to go against that? When he saw that his vision wasn’t gonna happen, then he went back to the only thing he knew and fulfilled it. He thought I was the Madonna? Yeah? Well, I’ll show you!”
In their spare time, the Burritos played serious poker. I remember one night cooking my first fried chicken for “the boys” while they threw money around and cursed one another out. They may have been stoned-out hippie freaks, but their women were not allowed to play cards. I was dancing at the Whiskey one night when Mike Clarke walked in wearing the hand-beaded cowboy shirt I had made for Chris. When I asked how he got it, Mike sheepishly confessed
he had just won it in a poker game. The all-important coked-out poker games continued on the road.
Gram had a drastic fear of flying. So in February 1969 Brandon de Wilde and I were at the train station to send the Burritos off on their cross-country tour, so high we were almost blind. Gram had been tottering through the well-wishers, shoving globs of cocaine into already stuffed noses, reeling, almost delirious. Even though I had indulged myself, I was concerned about Gram, who seemed to have no idea how to stop. The drug-addled tour was part poker, part fun, but mostly a fiasco. Sometimes Gram sang like an outlaw angel, other times he fell apart. One late night Gram called me from somewhere in Middle America, telling me that he made the band wear jeweled turbans onstage, then he sang to me on the phone. It was some kind of grievous heaven.
Back in L.A. the rowdiness escalated. Gram moved into the infamous Chateau Marmont, for a time sharing a bungalow with director Tony Foutz, who was making a movie about UFOs called Saturation 7. Gram was soon spending his days in the Joshua Tree desert looking for flying saucers while the cameras rolled. The project collapsed when the money man pulled out because he thought the film was going to be “too political.”
When the Rolling Stones came to town, they all crammed into the tiny Corral club in Topanga Canyon to see the Burritos. Upon noticing that Mick Jagger was taking an interest in me, from the stage Gram said, “Watch out for Miss Pamela, she’s a beauty but she’s tenderhearted.” He knew my weepy heart well.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 34