by Chris Price
'Then in '98,' said Dave, jumping in, 'I figured we should do somethin' to celebrate Gram's music. So we started the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull. It started out in my back yard, just friends jammin', and now it's an annual festival.' We pulled out of the motel car park onto Memorial Drive. 'That's the Jacksonville Highway right there. Keep going ten miles and you reach the Okefenokee Swamp.'
'Okefenokee!' I blurted. 'I love that word. Oh-kee-fen-oh-kee. I could say it all day long. OHkee-fen-OHkee...'
'It's Native American,' said Billy Ray. 'Seminole. It means "land of the trembling earth".'
Dave looked up at me in the rear-view mirror. 'You ever listen to the words of "A Song for You"?'
'A Song for You' is a naked, heartfelt ballad on GP about shifting sands, troubled times and uncertain futures. Emmylou sings harmony – as on most of Gram's solo recordings; her voice appears almost to carry Gram, who sings each line as though the emotional effort required to deliver it might desert him at any moment. By any measure it's a bit of a heart-render.
Dave sang the first line: 'Oh, my land...' In his glorious Southern drawl, the word 'land' had three distinct syllables over three separate notes – 'lay-ee-und.'
I quoted the next line: 'Trembles and it shakes, 'til every tree is loose...'
'You got it,' said Dave. 'That's the Okefenokee Swamp.'
'Well I never,' I said. 'I always wondered what that meant.'
The Okefenokee is the largest black-water swamp in North America – half a million acres of cypress and mangrove trees stood in boggy wetland which straddle the Georgia–Florida state line. Plant life grows in peat beds which float on the mirror-black water and undulate with the movement of the wind and wildlife. It literally trembles and shakes.
'I thought maybe the shaking earth thing was tremors in southern California,' I said. 'When he lived in LA.'
'Could be,' said Billy Ray. 'I guess I always read it more as a symbol of his home life – his daddy killin' himself, his mama's drinkin'.'
Waycross or California, it seemed Gram's roots were never set in solid ground. We were barely out of the car park and already a favourite song spoke to me more directly than it had before. This was a good start.
Courtney leaned forward in her seat. 'It's pretty cool, the swamp. There are 'gators all over. We could take a drive out there later.' The Okefenokee also teems with animal life, much of it – alligators, bears, snakes and mosquitoes – of the kind that turns tourists into lunch.
'I can hardly wait,' said Joe. 'Perhaps we should pick up some 'gator repellent on the way though, just to be safe.'
It is a common observation that natives never 'tourist' in their own cities. A Liverpudlian rarely goes anywhere more Beatley than John Lennon Airport, and for most Londoners the only connection to the city's significance-swollen past is a vague awareness that the streets they're shopping on have been there for, like, ages. But visitors come from far and wide to splash about in the rich cultural waters we residents stride through unawares. I couldn't help feeling, as our Waycross tour wound on, that a morning cruising around a town so geographically and culturally irrelevant even its inhabitants weren't sure they lived in it, was rather perverse and perhaps utterly pointless.
Billy Ray turned in his seat. 'So whereabouts are you guys from exactly?'
'London,' I said.
'D'you like it thur'?'
'Yeah, I guess so.'
The chubby Michelins on the B-Team van clicked across rusting rail tracks, and I wondered what I could offer Dave and Billy Ray by way of diversion if they ever came to visit me in Hammersmith. There's the stained-glass West Bromwich Albion crest over the doorway of a house that once belonged to Adrian Chiles, but what else? In Waycross I began regretting the lack of attention I had paid to the bits of the capital that really mean something – the breadcrumbs of modern music and film that lead a trail to the present day. As we criss-crossed the town I ran through my daily journey to work in my head.
Walk to Hammersmith – home of the Apollo, immortalised by Motorhead on the album No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith and one of the few truly great music venues left in London. Then Goldhawk Road and Shepherds Bush Market, where Ray Winstone got bested at fisticuffs for once in Quadrophenia. On to Wood Lane – the home of BBC Television Centre, star of the opening credits to Going Live, several attempts to break the world record for a very large number of tap dancers tap-dancing near each other, and a place where every year you can see newsreaders 'dancing like you've never seen them before!' on Children in Need.
Turning away from the swamp towards the centre of Waycross, we drove along a five-lane highway past a Huddle House, a Cypress Creek Steakhouse and a Wendy's fast food restaurant. Every commercial premises that wasn't an eatery was a gas station or car parts specialist. Arriving in what looked like a downtown area, Dave pulled up and pointed across an intersection towards a large white painted church on the opposite corner. Looking like a cross between a mosque and a university campus building, it bore a sign which read: 'Grace Episcopal Church'.
Dave smiled. 'Mean anything to you?'
It didn't at first. Then a lyric lit up in my brain; an image of a preacher talking to a crowd. It was from '$1000 Wedding', another Parsons ballad from his last record Grievous Angel. It tells the story of a young man left waiting at the altar for a bride that never comes. (We never find out why, only that she 'went away'.) The song vacillates between acrimony and resignation, rising to a swell as drink-fuelled recriminations ensue, then ebbing to sober reflection as the protagonist recognises the 'old lies' on his friends' faces. In the final bridge, a Reverend Dr William Brace is preaching to a congregation; a crescendo of guitar, drums and steel rises once more with his tales of fire and brimstone, before the song finally descends to a sombre, funereal close.
I have listened to '$1,000 Wedding' at least as many times as 'Wichita Lineman', very probably more. One of Gram's most portentous songs, definitely his most accomplished, it is an obliquely narrated tale that manages to avoid the bathos and triteness that so many country storytellers fall foul of. It makes me wonder what Gram could have achieved as a songwriter if he hadn't ballsed it up so magnificently in 1973.
'"$1,000 Wedding"?' I ventured.
'Yip,' said Dave. 'That's where Gram's family went to church in the forties and fifties.'
'His daddy's funeral took place here,' said Billy Ray. 'Reverend Dr William Brace was the priest. Gram remembered what he said and put it into the song.'
Another eerily visceral experience of a favourite song. But unlike the Wichita County line, Grace Episcopal Church looked nothing like the one in my imagination. They were two very separate places in my head, and I found it impossible to overwrite one with the other. The church we now looked at was real but imaginary, a little like when you try to describe the familiar setting of a dream and find yourself saying '... except it didn't look anything like the one in real life.'
I was still in my head too. Continuing my internal commute, at Westbourne Park I could jump out for a pint at a pub that starred as the Mother Black Cap in Withnail and I. Then it's Latimer Road in the heart of Portobello, home of Hugh Grant's famous blue front door in Notting Hill, of Michael Caine's flat in The Italian Job, and the excellent Sarm West Studios where the Band Aid song was recorded.
Then it's Edgware Road (The Blue Lamp, Pete Doherty's regular cell), Paddington (A Hard Day's Night, The Long Good Friday), Baker Street (Holmes, Holmes and more Holmes) and lastly, up to street level near the bottom of Regents Park (everything from Harry Potter to American Werewolf in London to Brief Encounter), a brisk walk along the edge of Park Crescent, where Hitchcock's Hannay left his cart and horse in The 39 Steps, and I'm at my desk.
Dave drove us across town to Cherokee Heights – the affluent, leafy suburb of Waycross where Gram had grown up. Wide, tended lawns swept down onto straight boulevards in front of mostly single-storey brick and weatherboard homes. Eighty-foot pine trees, branchless below house height but with a proliferation
of dense, spiky foliage above, dusted the roofs with needles and shaded the gardens like a gazebo.
Immediately another Parsons song popped into my head – 'Hickory Wind' from the Byrds' album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and re-recorded 'as live' for Grievous Angel. It's another ballad about yearning for home, nostalgia for a place that no longer exists. The opening line describes the 'many tall pines' of Gram's childhood surroundings, the oak tree he climbed and the 'hickory wind' that transports him there from far away, setting them in successive verses against less wholesome images such as the 'riches and pleasures' that later life has brought.
'Gives a whole new meaning to "pining for home",' said Joe.
Courtney laughed. 'Although the lyrics say the pines are in South Carolina.'
'Poetic licence,' I replied. 'Georgia doesn't scan.'
We pulled up on Suwannee Drive, where Gram lived for the first twelve years of his life.
'And right here is where Gram's house was originally built,' said Billy Ray. 'So in a manner of speaking it's where he grew up.'
Courtney went quiet for a moment, and then sprang bolt upright in her seat, grabbing the arm rests with both hands. 'Oh my God!'
'What?' I said.
'Really?!' squeaked Courtney.
'What?' yelped Joe.
Courtney's eyes widened. 'Gram grew up… here?'
'Sure,' said Billy Ray. 'Right there on the corner.'
'On this plot, anyway,' added Dave. 'A developer moved the original building in the sixties. To another plot out of town.'
Courtney looked confused. 'But I've driven up and down Suwannee Drive a hundred times looking for Gram's old address, and it doesn't exist. There isn't a 1600 Suwannee Drive.'
'That's because they moved the old house across town,' said Billy Ray.
'And when they built the new one,' Dave went on, 'the front door faced the other way. So this house' – he gestured to the one we were parked in front of – 'is on Seminole Trail, not Suwannee Drive.'
Courtney's jaw dropped. 'I used to live in that house.'
Joe and I gasped simultaneously. 'Really?'
'Yeah. My mom and I moved back here from Charleston after she divorced my dad. I lived in that house for three years.'
Even Joe had to admit that things just got interesting. Courtney was about as big a fan of Gram Parsons as it was possible to be. And she had just found out that in addition to sharing his home town and given surname, she had grown up on the very same patch of earth as him. The Gram trail had led straight to her own front door.
I shook my head in disbelief. 'Wow Courtney, that's incredible!'
'I know!' said Courtney.
'Darn,' said Dave.
'Crikey,' said Joe.
'Well I'll be,' said Billy Ray.
We took in several more hot spots on the Gram trail – the house where he was conceived, the factory his dad managed and the railway station where Gram last saw him alive – then thanked our Waycross tour guides and bid our farewells.
It was hard saying goodbye to Courtney. Our Southern belle had gone out of her way to give us a taste of Southern hospitality, and we – me especially – had grown fond of her in the short time we'd been together. Which is a roundabout way of saying I had developed something of a schoolboy crush and was going to miss her. Not least because she knew all the Emmylou Harris harmony parts on GP and Grievous Angel and Joe didn't.
But we had a road trip to finish. Today was 4 November. Tomorrow would be Gram's birthday – his sixtieth – and we planned to be celebrating it 224 miles to the south in his birthplace of Winter Haven, Florida. Then we would return the Grievous Angel to Dollar Car Rental at Orlando airport and fly home, job done.
So where else to spend our final night than Gram's Place, a music-themed hostel in Tampa run by Parsons fanatic and self-confessed oddball Mark Holland. We had arranged on the phone for Mark to give us a guided tour of the hostel for our video tapes. It would be a rare pleasure, he said, to celebrate Gram's birthday with people who had actually heard of him, as most of his guests hadn't and frankly weren't interested. He was sorry we wouldn't be able to stay in the Gilded Palace of Tin, a converted tool shed taking its name from the Burrito Brothers album, on account of its being occupied by a guest of long-standing from New Zealand, but he could offer us the Country Room instead. We drove south from Waycross, skirting the Okefenokee Swamp and crossing into Florida at Folkston.
We barely noticed Tampa as we approached it in the late afternoon; its unremarkable skyline might have been any major metropolis in North America. Carried by a criss-cross of flyovers, underpasses and feeder roads into a homogenous beige townscape, we regretted, for the first time in over 4,000 miles, not relenting to Dollar Car Rental's sustained sales pitch for satellite navigation. In short, we got spectacularly lost.
After an unplanned detour of nearly an hour through an area of Tampa apparently full to brimming with opportunities for gift purchases of guns and crack for our loved ones back home, we finally pulled up outside Gram's Place. Situated in Tampa Heights, an older residential neighbourhood with faded stately charm, it slouched behind a tall wooden fence on the corner of a shaded intersection facing a large, open cemetery.
Entering the compound through a rickety gate, we found hostel owner Mark sat behind an outdoor bar overlooking a decked jacuzzi area. Built to resemble a Hawaiian tiki bar, it had a slatted wooden counter and high stools under a porch hung with beads, flags, wind chimes and salvaged street signs. Beach music blared from
speakers propped up on shelves behind the bar.
'Hey guys! Glad you could make it. I thought you weren't coming!'
'We had a little trouble finding you,' said Joe through gritted teeth.
'Seen a little of sunny Tampa, huh?' He smiled. Podgy cheeks swelled under his sports sunglasses. 'Well I'm sure glad you found me. I've been looking forward to hanging out with you.'
As we shook hands, Mark gripped my elbow enthusiastically with his free hand. The childlike grin, bright shirt and hearty welcome felt less like a hello than a Care Bear Holiday Hug. The staff at the Four Seasons in LA were trained to make us feel like they had been waiting all their lives for us to check in. Mark seemed almost as though he had. 'Hey – I'll give you the guided tour!'
Gram's Place is an exceptional guest house even by the occasionally wacky standards of the international hostelling circuit. It is a conjoining of two neighbouring properties – a forties cottage with private rooms and a larger bungalow next door with dorms and shared living spaces. Mark had transformed it into a kind of roots music theme park, each dorm decked out according to a different genre – the Jazz Room, the Blues Room – and every wall covered with instruments, photographs, album sleeves and other assorted memorabilia.
Joe rolled camera while I stepped into the role of interviewer and prospective guest, Mark playing the part of gregarious host with gusto. 'This is the Parsons Pub,' he began, with a wide sweep of his arm. 'It's BYOB. That means "bring your own bottle". We have satellite XM radio and a jukebox with over 400 CDs. The music plays 24/7 at Gram's Place. I consider it a major disaster if the power goes down for even five minutes.'
'What happens then?'
'I get the guitar out. And you don't want that! Let's go inside.'
He led us across the decking and into the main house. Turning right and up some steps, he unlocked the door to our room.
'This is the Country Room, where you guys are staying.' Metal bunk beds faced each other across a small dorm decorated with photographs, album sleeves and 45s tacked to the walls. A banjo was propped up one corner next to a hand basin. 'You'll be sharing with Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Patsy Cline.' A stubby finger pointed out each of their pictures. 'I put these here to educate people. I want them to know that Barf Brooks and Billy Ray Virus are not country music.'
'Very nice.' I applauded.
'Well, I just think it's horrible that people know who Billy Ray Virus is but they don't know who Jimmie Rog
ers is. It's an atrocity.'
'And what about Gram?' I said. 'I guess if people don't know about him when they arrive, they will when they leave, right?'
'Not true. Most people don't know who he is when they come, don't know when they leave. Most don't care. And that's fine. People just like Gram's Place because it's got this funky, bohemian thing, whatever you call all this. Some people call it Markitechture.' He winked behind the sunglasses, still clamped tightly to his face even indoors. 'This place is the childhood fort you always wanted to build as a kid but your parents would never let you. Follow me.'
We passed through a darkened living area cluttered with sagging furniture and musical instruments. A piano stood in one corner surrounded by several acoustic guitars, making Joe's camerawork visibly shake at the thought of an evening jamming Gram numbers. Then Mark led us through a fifties-style communal kitchen before finally taking us back outside to Parsons' Pub.
'This side of the hostel is named Little Montreal,' Mark went on. 'That's why you see a lot of French stuff here.'