A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 172, Hickory Wind by the Byrds: Part 3, The Parsons Tale

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hig. Song 172 Hickory Wind by the Birds Part 3, The Parsons Tale Welcome to part three of our four part look at Hickory Wind Because this is stretched out to four episodes, I'm actually going to try to release the next and final part of this next week, not the week after.

so that I don't spend too long on the birds. And then the first part of the next song, two weeks after that. When we left the birds a couple of weeks ago, they were looking for a jazz piano player, and they thought they had found one in Grand Parsons. Parsons was not, in fact, primarily a keyboard player, but that hadn't stopped him from bluffing his way through the audition. According to Roger McGuin,

in his initial meeting with McGuin and Chris Hillman, Parsons had played some Floyd Cramerish piano. Kramer was a Nashville session player who more or less invented modern country piano with his slip-note playing style, and who long-time listeners to this podcast may remember from his contributions to many of Elvis's hits. McGuin would say later, When I hired Graham Parsons, it was as a jazz pianist. I had no idea that he was a Hank Williams-type character too.

But while McGuin was still at this point wanting to push the group into jazz and electronic music, Hillman had always been a country player at heart. and he was impressed by Parsons' rendition of Buck Owens' under your spell again at the same audition. You've got me saying no Making me believe that you're just mine You've got me dreaming those dreams again Thinking those things again

I've got to take you back just one more time Hillman, unlike McGuin, was also aware of Parsons before the audition Having been introduced to the music of the International Submarine Band Which he described as young hip guys playing country music, I liked it. Actually, it was an old idea of mine, and to think some young upstart had beaten me to the punch. In truth, in at least some ways,

Parsons was at least as sympathetic to McGuin's ideas as he was to Hillman. McGuin had been wanting to make the next bird's album a history of rock and roll music encompassing jazz, electronica, folk, country, and R&B. Parsons similarly had a vision of creating what he called, cosmic American music. In Parsons' conception, this would be music that would draw equally from rock and roll, soul and country music, and from the many connections between them. At this point, the rapidly changing revisionist history of rock and roll was already starting to erase the music's

influence from country music and from contemporary soul, in favour of a false history, in which the music was rooted in a narrow view of the blues that largely consisted of solo male performers from the Mississippi Delta in Chicago. But as with every attempt at historical revisionism, there were also people pushing against that view. And in particular, as we've talked about in several recent episodes, there was a question being asked by many people about what we would now refer to as cultural appropriation, but which many people were phrasing simply as, Can white men sing the blues? Among people who are answering no to that question, many in America decided to turn to music that the new white men could sing, to country music.

Now, there is a way in which this avoidance of cultural appropriation can in itself be a problem, as it can, and later did, lead to resegregation of musical genres. And there can be a sense of, why can't I be proud to be white in some of this reaction? Which in modern mainstream country has curdled to the point that for many people it's a truism, that country music is by definition racist. But at this point, there was a movement in country music that was later renamed the Outlaw Country Movement, but at the time was being termed progressive country. And songwriters like Merle Haggard were getting praised by the new rock magazines like Rolling

Stone. And so, particularly on the West Coast, a lot of white rock artists, not wanting to engage in something akin to musical blackface, started de-emphasising the blues in their music and emphasizing their country routes. and so more or less simultaneously with Parsons' International Submarine Band there had been records that we would now recognise as country rock from Buffalo Springfield The Monkeys

The Everly Brothers and many more myself let my guitar playing friend do my request a song Bob Dylan had started recording with the

Nashville A team The band were just about to release music from Big Pink and country influence seemed to be everywhere At the same time though The connections between country music and soul were also there for those who were looking looking. Billy Cheryl, who was producing Tammy Winnett and would soon go on to produce Parsons' favourite singer George Jones, was, as we heard in the episode on Arthur Alexander, one of the

founders of fame in Muscle Shoals. And while he'd gone on to Nashville, many of the musicians and songwriters in Muscle Shoals and Memphis, who were making soul hits, were equally versed in country music. When Parsons listened to a record like Dark End of the Street by James Carr, he heard the same thing he heard in Jones. So Parsons had an ambition. He was going to unite these apparently disparate streams of music and bring country soul into rock music. But at first he kept quiet about that,

at least to McGuin. Parsons had mostly been hired simply because he was signed to Larry Spector, the Bird's new manager, and the international submarine band were not as successful as they could be. But this, of course, led to two problems. Firstly, there was the simple problem of Parsons having to let down his bandmates. For Parsons, who was always willing to sacrifice friendship for ambition, this was not actually a problem,

and he quickly dumped the rest of his band, including John Cornille, who he had dragged thousands of miles on the promise of being in a recording group, and then dumped before the group's first record came out, and turning down a lucrative offer for the band to tour as a support act for the turtles. The other problem was that Parsons was, as part of the International Submarine Band, signed to Lee Hazelwood's record label. According to Parsons, he confronted Hazelwood. In Parsons's words, I picked up every single that his label put out, and I listened to every one of them.

Every side of them, I took all the singles and laid him on his desk and said, Listen, man, I've listened to every one of the singles your companies put out and they're all garbage and I want off. By Parsons' account, Hazelwood pointed out that he had a huge, run of hit, and Parsons had never made a hit record in his life, and that he was welcome to quit, but Hazelwood was going to retain ownership of the International Submarine Band name. So Parsons was, as far as he was concerned, free to join the birds. On paper he was a salaried sideman, not a band member at all, but in his mind he was essentially going to take the band over and convert them to the cause of Cosmic American music. But McGuin and Hillman weren't

entirely unwilling to go along with Parsons' ambitions, at least at first. Partly this was because they had to deliver two albums a year to Columbia, and neither of them were particularly prolific songwriters. They had used up all their current material on the notorious Bird Brothers, and had still had to use multiple songs by David Crosby to fill it out. While they had never had a problem with doing cover versions, and indeed had had some of their biggest commercial successes with songs from outside songwriters, it did seem a little better if they had some original material. and Parsons had a few songs that he'd been working on, including one which he'd demoed with Brandon DeWild.

Hickory Wind had been written by Parsons and Bob Buchanan, the guitarist with the International Submarine Band, on a train ride to L.A., and was clearly a masterpiece. Hillman later said of it, It's his signature song, just as I'll feel a whole lot better as Jean-Claq's signature song. If Graham had never written another song, Hickory Wind would have put him on the map.

The song says it all. It's very descriptive with vivid imagery. It's actually quite literary, but Graham was, we know, was a very bright kid. If you know the guy's life story, however he conjured up that scenario, it's right at home. Grandma was shuffled off to a prep school, lots of money.

That's a lonely song. He was a lonely kid. In his first appearances with the group, Parsons stuck to just playing piano, as he'd initially been hired for, but soon he was up front singing Lee on Hickory Wind and another of his songs 100 years from now. And Parsons had plans.

At first he seemed to be going along with McGuin's idea for an album that was a massive history of music, but soon he persuaded Chris Hillman and Gary Usher to go with a different idea. The birds were going to Nashville, and they were going to make a country album. According to Hillman, with Graham on board I had an ally.

I had somebody who knew about and loved country music. He was somebody who understood the music that I understood. And Roger was fine to go along with the idea. So that's how he started to formulate that plan to do a country album. Parsons started playing with the birds in February 1968, and by March they were playing the Grand Ole Opry, and it seems to have been there that Roger McGuin realized that he might have a problem with the group's new member.

Playing the opera was an unusual move for a rock and roll band. While the were definitely country musicians who were sympathetic with the new counterculture, people like Johnny Cash, and there was more back and forth between the two genres than many would think, given how they were portrayed in the media then and now, the Opry itself was the embodiment of conservatism in the genre, and was taking a risk on having the group play there. The group had cut their hair short for the event, making their own compromise just as the Opry was,

and they were taking their country turn seriously. They were augmented on stage that day by the Nashville session player Lloyd Green on pedal steel guitar, and they'd agreed that for the event they would perform not their own material but two Merle Haggard songs, Sing Me Back Home, which we heard the Everly Brothers singing earlier, and life in prison. Prison for the wrongs I've done, but I pray for death to come every day. If I could die, my pain might go away. They were recording that one for their new album, but after the MC made the announcement of the song they were going to do,

Bram Parsons, whose grandmother was in the audience, decided to change their plans. He said, instead of doing that song, I'm going to do a song I wrote for my grandmother. It's called Hickory Wind. He started up the song, which the group had just recorded in the studio a few days earlier. Now, to most people, that would seem the most straightforward of things. a band deciding to do one country song rather than another. No big deal. But the Opry was so tightly regimented at this point,

with everyone sticking exactly to the songs that had been agreed in advance, that there are websites about the Opry to this day that list this as one of the most shocking events in the history of the show. You just didn't perform a song other than the one that was announced, and especially not if you were already up there on sufferance. The Birds would never be invited to play the Opry again, though not everyone was annoyed at them. The singer Skeeter Davis apparently came up and hugged them afterwards,

delighted that someone had stood up to the Opry's rigidity. Sessions for the album had started a few days earlier, and Lloyd Green had joined the group for that initial session as well. While there were plenty of claims that the album was mostly played by session players, in fact the basic tracks are largely the work of the new birds line up. But the group were augmented by other players, and in particular a country record needs pedal steel and fiddle, so Green was brought in for that initial session.

The later sessions would largely feature Parsons' friend J.D. Maness on pedal steel. Green said later that it was the first time he'd smold a recording studio full of pot. Though this is likely exaggeration on Green's part, as pot smoking among country musicians is not exactly unknown. To start with, the group decided to record a song from Bob Dylan's basement tapes, which had still not been released, but which had been passed over to them for the purpose of recording covers. The song was McGuins' idea, and he would be the lead vocalist on it.

Unusually for this album, which at this stage was going to be dominated by Parsons' vocals. The group played the song to Green and he said, Great, great, how do you want me to approach it on steel? Where do you want me to play? Their answer, in unison, was everywhere. And so he did. The other track cut at that initial session was Parsons' Hickory Wind. Over the next few days, while they were in Nashville,

they recorded a mixture of originals by Parsons, like lazy days, and old folk songs like, I Am a Pilgrim. They then went on tour halfway through recording the album. On this tour they brought along J.D. Manis on pedal steel, and Parsons spent the entire tour trying to persuade his bandmates to bring Maness into the band as a full member. And two things happened that seemed to change things with the group. The first was that You Ain't Go In Nowhere was released as a single

and flopped miserably, and the second was that the International Submarine Band's album was finally released. This combination seems to have caused Roger McGuin to do some hard thinking about who was actually in charge of the band and whether they really should be going in this country direction. He started saying things like, Graham is caught between the International Submarine Band and Us.

It depends on how their record does. Graham worked with us on this last tour and he was great. The audience loved him. He likes to work with us and we like to tour with him. The International Submarine Band album sank without trace, apparently Lee Hazelwood only released it at all because of the new prominence parsons had got thanks to joining the birds.

And McGuim was given a stark reminder of what it was like when other people were in charge of the group when, at a party for Derek Taylor, who was leaving L.A. to go back to London to work for his old employers the Beatles and their new label, Apple. Jean Clark tried to get up on stage with his old bandmate and fell backwards into the amplifiers.

The group made a quick tour of Europe, only a few days long, and for that they couldn't bring Maness over. Parsons pushed instead for another pedal steel player, Sneaky Pete Klino, and McGuin later said of this. Graham and Chris took over at that stage of the game. They actually wanted to fire me and get Sneaky Pete in my place. McGwin pushed back at the idea of getting Kleino in,

but he did agree that they needed to do something to make their new country material work, so they ended up getting the bluegrass banjo player Doug Dillard in for the tour, leading to some truly strange results when they played older material. On that tour, Grand Parsons, who was always interested in hanging out with rock stars, became very friendly with the members of the Rolling Stones, especially Keith Richards. But also, McGuin started to realise that while they needed Parsons in the studio for the moment,

maybe they didn't need him quite as much as Parsons thought they did. The notorious Bird Brothers had only just been released in Europe, and journalists kept wanting to talk to McGuin and Hillman about the new sound on that album, not to Graham Parsons, whose contributions to the birds' releases so far had been backing vocals and rhythm guitar on one side of one flop single. And in interviews, McGuin started to talk more about things like how he had been the only bird to play on Mr. Tambourine Man, something that hadn't been revealed up to that point.

And the audiences were far more interested in the hits McGuin was singing than in the new stuff Parsons was singing. But still, when the game, got back, they continued making the album, and the album was, just like the International Submarine Band album before it. To all intents and purposes, a Grand Parsons solo album. Parsons was in total control of the recording sessions and was pushing his idea of Cosmic American Music, the intersection of soul and country, with the emphasis on country. Getting back after the mini tour, for example, Parsons brought in two cover versions. The first was a Stax soul song, You Don't Miss Your Water by William

Bell, which Parsons rearranged into a country style, and the second was a Louis Brothers country song, The Christian Life. Which again Parsons took lead vocals on. As Gary Usher said, it was while we were in Nashville that Parsons really came into his own. He had great charisma and was a very strong person, not strong in the way Crosby was strong, but strong in the sense of what he was doing as a person and what he believed in. He was naturally a great influence during the Nashville sessions. A lot of the times it was just Graham and I working one-on-one with each other.

I always considered the control that he did exert was for the good, because his joining the band at that time was a perfect marriage. it was his laid-back simplistic approach that really helped pull the album off. But then, everything changed. Columbia Records got notified that Parsons' departure from Lee Hazelwood had not actually been legal. He was not legally allowed to be in the birds, because he was still signed to another label.

The problem was sorted out relatively quickly. But what followed has been the subject of much dispute over the years, and people have seemed to say different things, mostly depending on how the critical reputation of Graham Parsons has changed and how they wanted themselves to be seen. The story that Parsons always told at the time was that his vocals had to be wiped and replaced with McGuyn's vocals for legal reasons and that the legal problems were sorted right before they were about to wipe his vocals on Hickory Wind,

but after the damage had been done on the other tracks. That's also the story that gets told now by McGuin, though Parsons' vocals do still exist on the multi-tracks and have been released on archival records in the last few decades. And we just heard a couple of those vocals. The other version of the story, which Gary Usher used to tell, is that partway through the recording, McGuin, Hillman and Usher, simply decided that there were too many Graham Parsons lead vocals on the record,

and that, to quote him, we took a number of Graham's leads off, not because of any contractual reasons, but because McGuin was reluctant to have Graham sing an entire Bird's album when he was the newest member of the group. Really, the birds sound at that stage was McGuin and Crosby. And with Crosby gone, McGwin thought there might be an identity crisis. Whoever sang lead on the album was there because that's how he wanted it to sound.

You just don't take a hit group and inject a new singer for no reason. The album had just the exact amount of Grand Parsons on it that McGuin, Hillman and myself wanted. Whatever the reasoning, and it seems plausible to me that both applied, the McGwin leaped on the excuse given by the legal problems to regain control of the band in the studio. Two songs with Parsons lead vocals, Parsons' own Lazy Days and a cover of Tim Hardin's reputation, were dropped. Three other songs, The Christian Life, You Don't Miss Your Water, and Parsons' original, 100 years from now, had Parsons' vocals replaced by McGuin, singing with an affected southern accent and doing his best to copy Parsons' phrasing.

An album that had at one point looked like it was going to have seven Grand Parsons' leads ended up with just two, though some people think you can hear Parsons' erased vocals leaking on the finished tracks. Parsons' friend, Emmylou Harris, said of the Christian life, if you listen real close in the headset, you can hear him because his phrasing is so different from Roger McGuins. It's like hearing a ghost because his phrasing is the real traditional Lovindfuthr's phrasing.

And Roger McGuin sang it like, you know, Roger McGuin. And there's such an overlapping that you can hear him in the spaces where Roger doesn't sing, because Grammy elongates his phrasing. Whatever the reasoning behind these last minute, the album, titled Sweet Art of the Rodeo, is still considered one of the greatest albums of all time and one of the most influential. It wasn't the first country rock album,

as we say in this podcast there's no first anything. but if there was a first country rock album, the International Submarine band one would have a better claim just for a start. And enough other rock stars were flirting with country at that point that someone else would have got there soon enough. But it showed that Merle Haggard and Lovine Brothers songs could mix with Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Stax covers, and it's had an immense influence on the genres of country rock,

Alt country, Americana, and many more over the years. It's hard to imagine the careers of bands as different as the Eagles and Riem without it. but by the time it came out its main creator had already left the band and by the end of the year the entire creative team behind it would be down to just one man after Sweetheart of the rodeo was finished but before it was released the birds returned to the UK for the start of what was planned to be a massive tour going to Europe and Africa they played the Albert Hall in London supporting the move who were birds fans who had themselves often cover birds songs

apparently through much of the move set the crowd was shouting Bring Back the Birds But that would be the last gig that Grand Parsons would play as a bird Parsons had befriended the Rolling Stones Especially Keith Richards And he decided that he would rather hang around

With his new rock star friends than keep touring But there was another motive And how sincere he was in it Depends very much on who is doing the telling As we heard in the last couple of episodes McGuin was very friendly with the South African musicians, Miriam McCabea and Hugh Massacela. And they had suggested that the group should tour South Africa

and the country that was then called Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. Both countries at the time had utterly evil regimes that tortured and oppressed black people in the service of white supremacy. Massacela and Maccabre were both black, and vociferously opposed to the South African regime. But they also believed that cultural contact with musicians from other cultures was necessary for South African people. We'll pick up on how they justified that

and how those justifications differed from other people's opinions on the subject, some time around Song 370 or thereabouts. So the birds were going to play South Africa and had good political motives for doing so, but musicians in the UK saw this very differently. South Africa had, until very recently, been part of the British Commonwealth,

and there were many strong cultural links between the two countries, which meant that many British performers had toured the country, but such relatively innocuous performers as Dusty Springfield and Adam Faith had come back from the country telling horror stories of evil repressive government actions and of being threatened with deportation or imprisonment for insisting on unsegregated audiences. The mood among Britain's young musicians was clear, you just didn't go to South Africa.

Now, as Keith Richards tells a story in his autobiography, I'm going to cut one swear word from this for clean rating purposes, We started to talk about South Africa, and Graham asked me, What's this drift I'm getting since I got to England? When I say I'm going to South Africa, I get this cold stare. He was not aware of apartheid or anything. He'd never been out of the United States. So when I explained it to him,

about apartheid and sanctions and nobody goes there, they're not being kind to the brothers, he said, Oh, just like Mississippi? And immediately, well, that. He quit that night. He was supposed to leave the next. stay for South Africa. So I said, you can stay here. And we lived with Graham for months and months,

certainly the rest of that summer of 1968. Chris Hillman had a rather different view of what was going on. At the time, he told the press, he was a drag personally, but a good musician. He knew we were going to South Africa long before England, why the sudden announcement? And decades later, he would say, people to this day go on the premise that Graham did not want to go to South Africa because of racial reasons. That's not true. Graham wanted to stay in England and hang out with Mick and Keith and he did not want to fly. He was a very sensitive guy and very socially aware of the situation he grew up with in the South, but the closest he came to black people was the servants he had in his home. The other birds went on to

South Africa without Parsons, and given that they had no notice of Parsons quitting, they persuaded their roadie to pretend to be Grand Parsons on stage, rehearsing the set with him on the plane over. He was apparently not an adequate substitute for Parsons, sometimes playing the songs in a different key to everyone else on stage, and the group gave what were reportedly the worst performances of their career, though those performances were probably not helped by the group getting death threats for their leftish politics, or by McGuing getting serious ill with a viral infection, or by the government insisting that their payment get frozen because they were supposedly drug addict, or by being forced to play to segregated audiences, even though, like the British artists

who had the same experience, they had contracts that said they'd only play integrated venues. They came back from the tour wishing they'd never gone, and short a guitarist. But they had one waiting in the wings. We've heard about Clarence White in recent episodes. He was a country guitarist who had played on a lot of bird sessions, including on the last few albums, and he had also played with Chris Hillman on the first solo album by former Bird Gene Clark. It was Hillman who brought him into the group,

and indeed Hillman had some other plans, which McGuim was unaware of. There were other changes of foot as well. Gary Usher had been fired from Columbia Usher had been the executive in charge of an album by the Millennium a group put together by his friend and protege Kurt Becher and that album had gone $50,000 over budget and was a commercial flop despite sounding decades ahead of its time

in parts. On top of that Usher had admitted he was using psychedelic drugs and that was too much for the people in charge of the label. It was okay of the artists used drugs but not the producers. He and Betcher went off to form their own record label, but had no further success. And the group were getting annoyed at Kevin Kelly's drumming as well. He was a good drummer, but he wouldn't play a song the same way twice.

He had a jazz background and liked to improvise. This annoyed Clarence White, who kept pushing for his old bandmate, Gene Parsons, who was no relation to Graham. And I have to say that after the band had already got rid of Gene Clark, Michael Clark, and Graham Parsons, getting in a drummer called Gene Parsons just seems like a deliberate attempt to annoy anyone trying to write about the group's history. Eventually, Hillman went along with this, partly because, as Kelly was his cousin,

any time McGuin or White had a problem with him, they'd come to Hillman rather than go to Kelly directly. But the new line-up of the group only played one gig, before Hillman got into a row with the group's manager Larry Spector about the group's drop in income, threw his base to the floor, and stormed off ranting about how he'd been stuck playing an instrument he didn't want to play for years.

The group had gigs booked, so McGuin quickly got in a new bass player, John York, a session player who had played in Gene Clark's backing band with Clarence White. This new version of the group, with only McGuin left from the line-up from four months earlier,

went into the studio with Bob Johnston, who produced Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen. Oddly, despite McGuin having been the band member least interested in Grand Parsons' idea of turning the band, country, he decided to keep going in the same direction with this new birds.

Not only that, when this lineup released their first single, The B-side was a song that Parsons had co-written with McGuin in London, right before he'd quit, attacking a country DJ who had insulted the birds on air. But he wasn't the only one that Parsons was still influencing, because Chris Hillman had an ulterior motive in getting Clarence White into the birds. While he had been furious at Grand Parsons' quitting, He'd realised he was more musically sympathetic with Parsons than with McGuin, and had got back in touch with him.

The two of them had made some demos with Clarence White and Jean Parsons, before either of the latter two had joined the birds, and Hillman's plan had been for Hillman, White and the two Parsons to form a new band. As it turned out, White and Jean Parsons had decided to stick with the better-known band, the birds, rather than join this new one. But Parsons and Hillman pressed ahead. They were going to form a new band that was going to play the country, Cosmic American music that they've been talking about, and they were going to take the name

that Grand Parsons' old bandmates were already using for their band. They were going to be the West Coast version of the Flying Burrito Brothers. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon Backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on. by the crazy world of Arthur Brown. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com.

That's 5000-0-the-numbersongs.com. To read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth. reviewing. Please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.