A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 172, Hickory Wind by the Byrds: Part 4, Hour of Darkness

Episode Date: March 1, 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 fourth and final part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock, this time mostly focused on what Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman did after leaving the band. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr. 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 Hickie. Song 172 Hickory Wind by the Birds Part 4 Hour of Darkness Before I start, a brief warning This episode deals with drug addiction

And death both by drug overdose And in car accidents Plus some discussion of misogyny And general bad male behaviour to work women, and what is arguably corpse desecration. Chris Hillman has always had a complicated relationship with Grand Parsons. When Parsons left the birds, as we heard last episode, Hillman said, he was a drag personally, but a good musician. In recent decades, Hillman has had what we might call the Paul McCartney problem. Since Parsons' death at the far too young age of 26, Parsons, like so many musicians

who die too young, has been hailed as a unique genius and as a pioneer in a genre he created more or less single-handed. And there is an element of truth to that. Parsons was a visionary, and he was a truly great songwriter. But Parsons made six albums while he was alive, and his reputation rests more or less on three of those six. And for two of those three, and one of the other three, Chris Hillman was his principal collaborator. Hillman was the more senior musician. In his eyes at least he was Parsons' mentor, and they shared a musical vision. And when Parsons himself became a mentor to Emmy Lou Harris,

at times who in many ways has since outshone either of them, Hillman was the one who had told Parsons about her in the first place. So for decades, Chris Hillman has had the work he is proudest of, the work that he feels contributed a great deal to the world, and which has influenced generations of musicians, talked about not as great collaborative work that he did with his collaborator, but as the work of the great Grand Parsons. But on the other hand, Chris Hillman is still alive,

which is an advantage he definitely has over Parsons. The Flying Burita Brothers started out as a splinter group from the International Submarine Band, but one that was opposed to the turn towards country music that Grand Parsons was pushing for, and one that didn't have Grand Parsons in. As we talked about two episodes ago, the original Flying Burita Brothers consisted of Barry Tashian and Billy Briggs from the Remains and Ian Dunlop and Mickey Govin of the original line-up of the International Submarine Band. Various other people would sit in with the Flying Burrito brothers from time to time,

like the sax player Bobby Keys, who would later become a long-time sideman for the Rolling Stones, the guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who would go on to play with Taj Mahal and Graham Parsons. But after having a lack of success in California, This line-up of the Flying Burrito Brothers moved to the East Coast, and while they continued performing, Graham Parsons seems to have thought that this meant that he could just take the name of their band

and use it for his own new project after leaving the birds. How the West Coast version of the Flying Burrito Brothers formed is something that is told differently by different people. And given the loose way in which everyone in this story seems to come and go from everyone else's bands, it seems likely that all the different stories have some element of truth to them. The way Chris Hillman tells the story, he'd been thinking along the lines of the Flying Burrito Brothers before he even left the birds,

and he had brought in Clarence White and Gene Parsons with the idea that they would join him and Grand Parsons, who had apologised to him for quitting the group, and that foursome had recorded some demos together, but White and Jean Parsons decided to stay with the birds. The way Grand Parsons told the story, after he got back from spending time with the Rolling Stones in the UK, he met up again with Chris Etheridge,

the former guitarist for the International Submarine Band, and the two of them had started performing together, including jamming with Leon Russell, the wrecking crew keyboard player who was just dipping his toe into the waters of performing himself, with his band Asylum Choir. They talked with various other musicians, including Clarence White,

and almost formed a band with Richie Fury of the Buffalo Springfield, before they decided to form separate bands. Fiori's band Poco would become another of the proto-country bands whose membership would intertwine with the other bands we've been talking about in this mini-series of episodes. According to Parsons, when Hillman got back from the tour of South Africa, he came to see Parsons and said,

I'm sorry, look, I didn't want to go to South Africa either. It was the wrong thing to do, and I think I'll quit the birds and join you guys. Either way, Parsons and Hillman moved in together, into a house that got christened Burrito Manor, and they put together a band consisting of themselves, Etheridge on bass, and Sneaky Pete Clino, a pedal steel player who up to that point had mostly worked as a stop-motion animator,

working on films like The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and TV shows like Gumbie. Kleino would continue working in animation and special effects, contributing to such films as Gremlins and The Empire Strikes Back, but would also develop a second career as the pedal steel player who played on basically every country rock session in El, the Red Roads didn't play, playing with Joni Mitchell, Frank Zapper, John Lennon, Joe Cocker, and many more. And on drums was Fast Eddie Ho, who we first encountered as a member of the modern folk quintet,

when they recorded This Could Be the Night. Ho had gone on to be a session drummer, often getting work on records produced by other former MFQ members, like The Monkeys Pleasant Valley Sunday, produced by Chip Douglas, and Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello, produced by Jerry. Yester. He had also played a Mike Bloomfield, Al Cooper and Steve Stills' super session album, and had been the Mama's and the Popper's live drummer, including playing with them at the Monterey Pop Festival. Parsons described the group, just after it formed, as basically a Southern Soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar. But the image they chose was far more country than Seoul.

They all went to New Dees Rodeo-Taylor's to get rhinestone suits made. For those who are unaware, Nudies had a very specific aesthetic that defined the look of a generation of country singers, and that was later taken up by several Californian rock musicians. Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys would often wear nudie suits in the 70s, as would Michael Nesmith, and Parsons insisted on the Barreto brothers all wearing nudie suits. Parsons has featured embroidered cannabis leaves and naked women on his lapels. The core of the band was Parsons and Hillman,

and the two men, who had a love-hate relationship, were at their closest at this point. In particular, the two men had bonded over the fact that they both lost their fathers at an early age to suicide and over their shared sense of humour, though they had little else in common. Hillman says in his autobiography, In some ways it was like the odd couple.

I serious and focused with the disciplined work ethic, while Graham was charismatic and completely disorganised. I wanted to make great music. Graham wanted to be a star. Though that's Hillman's assessment. and others have a very different view of Parsons. Remember the quote from Keith Richards in the episode before or last, in which he said that Parsons was, along with John Lennon, the only pure musician he knew personally other than himself. But importantly, as Hillman also said,

we could practically finish one another's thoughts while writing or singing, and they soon began a songwriting collaboration that provided what would be the core of their first album, the Gilded Palace of Sin. The first song they wrote together is definitely more Hillman's work than Parsons's. As Hillman tells the story, the first verse and chorus of Sin City are about Larry Spector, the Byrd's manager, who Hillman regarded as a thief, and whose office was apparently on the 31st floor of the building it was in and had a gold door. Hillman says he wrote the first verse and chorus while Parsons was asleep, before waking him up to complete the song, though contemporary witnesses remember that Parsons sent a telegram to Keith Richards, with the line, on the 31st floor a

old-plated door won't keep out the Lord's Burning Rain, because he was so proud of having written those lines. But then it wouldn't be out of character for Parsons to take credit for a good line from Hillman, either. According to Hillman, Parsons' main contribution to the song was the second verse, whose lyrics Hillman finds obscure. And then Hillman wrote the final verse, which was about the murder of Robert Kennedy. There were other songs on the album which leave a bad taste in the mouth, though, once one knows the stories behind them. For a start, there's the opening track, Christine's Tune. A lot of listeners may have wondered why that was called Christine's Tune, rather than the more obvious devil in disguise. There are actually two people

who have been identified as the Christine in the title, both by authoritative sources. One was a 19-year-old girl named Christine Frouca, who went by the name Miss Christine, because she and her friends were always referred to by Tiny Tim as Miss and their first names. Miss Christine was the girlfriend of Alice Cooper, and was part of a group of girls known as the GTO's, who did backing vocals on the closing track on the Burritos album. We'll be hearing more about Miss Christine in future episodes, as she intersects with all sorts of people. But the important thing to know about her is that while she was, by all accounts, a talented, thoughtful, creative person who loved spending time with rock musicians, she didn't want to have sex with them particularly, partly because

she didn't have a high sex drive, and partly because the scoliosis from which she suffered meant it was often painful. Obviously, the existence of a 19-year-old girl who didn't want to have sex with them was the ultimate affront to the egos of rock stars. The other possible Christine is Christine Gale Hinton, who was David Crosby's girlfriend at the time. After splitting up with Nancy Ross, Crosby at first dated Johnny Mitchell, then dumped her for Hinton, who he fell in love with. Either way, whichever Christine it was, was clearly hated by both Parsons and Hillman. Both Christine's died tragically young not very long after the release of the album. Miss Christine died of a drug overdose while visiting the house shared by her boyfriend David

Robinson and his band The Modern Lovers in 1972, age 22. Though I should point out here that the modern lovers were all very opposed to drug use and didn't even know she had anything on her at the time. Christine Hinton died in a car crash age 21 in 1969. Crosby, who considered her the love of his life, later recorded the wordless accapella tribute to her. I'd swear there was somebody here. Out of respect to whichever dead young woman they'd slandered, the song's co-authors renamed the song Devil in Disguise in later performances. Another song which leads to similar conflicted feelings is the song that Chris Etheridge started and which Chris Hillman later described as one of the two best lead vocals ever recorded by Graham, Hot Burrito No. 1. That and its companion, the faster

Hot Burrito No. 2 were thrown together at the last minute because when the band started recording their first album, they didn't have enough songs. Ethridge ended up bringing in two partial melodies he'd come up with as a child, which he used to play on the piano over and over again to annoy his parents so they wouldn't make him practice, and Parsons turned those melodies into the full songs, Hot Barrito No. 1 and Hot Barreto No. 2. The lyrics to Hot Barreto number one were written about Parsons' girlfriend Nancy Ross, the mother of his daughter, an ex-girlfriend of David Crosby. But around this time, Parsons was in the process of dumping her,

though she didn't realise this at first. Indeed, he even asked her to marry him and told her to get herself a wedding dress made by nudie to match the band's nudie suits. It turned out he was only doing it as a publicity stunt for the band, and had no intention of actually getting married. Nancy told Pamela DeBar, it was a big, awful, horrible joke.

This is the man I loved with my immortal soul. The two soon split up. As well as the six songs that Hillman and Parsons wrote together, and the two songs by Parsons and Etheridge, the album was rounded out with a remake of a song Parsons and Barry Goldberg had written for the International Submarine Band, Do You Know How It Feels, and two covers of soul songs written by Dan Penn and Chip's Momin.

Do Right Woman, do Right Man, originally recorded by Aretha Franklin, and Dark End of the Street, originally recorded by James Carr. David Crosby, added high harmonies to that track, making the album feature more original birds than the birds' records that were being released at the same time. And soon the band would have two original birds as permanent members. While the covers the highlights of the album, there were also a sign of

how rushed the album was. The group had barely played together and were essentially rehearsing in the studio, and the group was similarly trying to sort their line-up out while they were recording. When they started out, Fast Eddie Ho was the drummer, as I've said. But Ho was in the band just long enough to get his share of the advance and play on two songs. Do You Know How It Feels? And Sin City. He was starting to suffer from substance abuse problems and was literally falling asleep on the drumstool according to Hillman. He left the band after those two songs. He would go on to play on just one more album, Games guitars play by Harvey Mandel, the blues guitarist best known for playing in Camp Heat. After that, Ho left the music industry and the public eye.

to the extent that for decades most of the people who'd been associated with were convinced he was dead, though he eventually died in 2015, outliving many of them. Several other drummers were used for the rest of the album, but the one who came closest to being a full member was John Cornel, Parsons and Etheridge's former colleague in the International Submarine Band. Cornel was with the band long enough to get a nudie suit, but didn't stay past the recording sessions. According to Hillman, Cornel and Parsons didn't get on

because Parsons thought that Cornel, who he'd known since they both lived in Florida, was lower class, and Parsons didn't like working with someone who he essentially thought of as the help. Cornell, though, always strongly disputed that characterization, pointing out that he was from a fairly wealthy family himself.

His father had been mayor of the town. What Hillman perceived as a difference in their class just came from the fact that Cornel had spent some time playing with country musicians in Nashville and had picked up some of their accent and mannerisms to fit in, and was portraying himself as a little more of a hillbilly than he really was. Eventually, the group arranged a drummer swap. Gene Clark, the bird's former lead singer,

had formed a bluegrass rock group, Dillard and Clark, with Doug Dillard and guitarist Bernie Ledden. Chris Hillman had also guessed it on a couple of tracks in their first album. Listen to me, sinner, don't you want to go? For some days coming back again, you know, If the wrong and right and be lost in sin Get it on, brother, he will take you in. Now get it on, brother, if you want to go home,

get on your knees to write and that wrong, soon you'll be singing that old time song. Get it on, brother, if you want to go. Michael Clark, the birds' original drummer, had joined Dulloden Clark for live shows, but shortly before they made their same, second album, Dillard and Clark and the Burritos swapped drummers. Michael Clark ended up in the Flying Burrito Brothers, meaning with Hillman they now had two original birds in the band,

while the birds only had one. Both Hillman and Sneaky Pete Kleino guested on the second Dillard and Clark album as well. I ain't gonna work on the railroad, ain't gonna work on the farm. So, lay round the shack till the mail train comes back and rolling my sweet babies on. Rolling my sweet babies on. Rolling my sweet babies on. Play around the shack till the mail train from back and rolling must be babies on. So as the Flying Burita Brothers' first album, the Guild of Palace of Sin, was released.

They finally had a stable lineup. Graham Parsons and Chris Hillman on guitar and vocals, sneaky Pete Kleiner on pedal steel, Chris Etheridge on bass, and Michael Clark on drums. The Gilded Palace of Sin was an instant classic, though it never sold very well, it was hugely influential on other musicians.

Bob Dylan said, The Flying Barita Brothers, boy I love them, their record instantly knocked me out, and as we'll hear in future episodes on the Rolling Stones, the album had a huge influence on them as well. They followed the album with a non-album single, The Train Song. Several sources on the band say that the single was released to promote a tour, the Transcontinental Pop Festival tour we heard about in the episode on The Grateful Dead,

on which the group travelled by train with the dead, Janice Joplin, the band and others across Canada. But the single came out almost a year before that tour and seems unconnected. The track was produced by two musicians one would not expect to be producing a country rock band, but both of whom had been very influential on the California, rock scene in which the Barito brothers came up. Larry Williams, whose Little Richard Sanderlight Records for Specialty Records, had been huge with the British Invasion bands, and Williams' musical partner Johnny Guitar Watson, who had recorded tracks like Space Guitar back in 1954, more than a decade before people like Jimmy Hendricks had started doing

similar guitar experiments. Everyone seems to have thought that the reason Parsons brought them in was just to party with his heroes, though, and the resulting single is not considered a the group's best work. That single is the only studio work by the first touring line-up of the Flying Barita Brothers. Soon after recording it, Chris Etheridge was gone from the band. He decided to become a session player rather than continuing to perform with them. Grand Parsons would later talk about this as having been the beginning of the end of the Flying Burrito Brothers, though at the same time he would also talk about Etheridge not having been the right bass player for the group. There's probably an element of truth in both. Etheridge was not a country player, and Arborated,

R&B was his first love. That made his bass playing distinctive and brought the R&B element to what would otherwise be fairly straightforward country arrangements. And after his departure, the Flying Beretob brothers were a less interesting band as a result. Dillard and Clark were also falling apart at the time, and so Bernie Ledon, their guitarist, joined the Flying Barreto brothers, with Hillman switching back from guitar to bass. Hillman and Parsons were starting to drift apart, partly because the two of them were no longer living together and so they weren't collaborating every day as they had been. And the Rolling Stones had once again reared their heads.

The Stones were in America doing a tour and recording an album and they invited the Flying Barita Brothers to perform on the same bill as them on a free festival they were doing. We'll hear more about the Altamont Festival in a future episode. But Parsons and Keith Richards were once again hanging out and the two of them went on a trip to the Joshua Tree National Park and took mescaline together. Parsons was hoping that Richards would produce the next Barito's album,

but Richards was too busy working on the next Stones album, Let It Bleed, an album on which Parsons' country influence is very present. Indeed, some have claimed that the initial version of honky-tonk women was actually co-written by Parsons, a claim I don't believe, but which sounds more plausible when you hear the version titled Country Honk released on the album. But Parsons was spending so much time with the Stones that he started missing gigs with his own band,

eventually leading to a confrontation when Hillman found him in the studio with the Stones when he should have been on stage and make Jagger lectured Parsons about professionalism and his obligations to his bandmates. The connection with the Stones did have one positive for the Flying Berita Brothers though in that Jagger and Richards gave the group a song they'd recorded but not yet released and so the second Berita Brothers album, Burrito Deluxe, featured the first released version of Wild Horses. Slide through my... Barito Deluxe is an album that gets rather underrated now.

It's an album that's mostly made up of cover versions by a band who are clearly lacking in new songs, and it's nowhere near as staggeringly innovative as the Gilded Palace of Sin, but it's still a very listenable album. But it's an album that was consistently talked down over the years by its primary creative forces. Graham Parsons thought it was a mistake to bring in Jim Dixon as a producer,

that Hillman had deferred to Dixon's decisions too much and that Dixon was trying too hard to make the album commercial while Hillman thought that Parsons was disengaged, drug-addled and more interested in his celebrity friends than working. One of those celebrity friends was Leon Mussel, who guested on one track on the album and who was at the time in the middle of rehearsing the band for Joe Cocker's legendary Mad Dogs and English mentor.

Hearing the Cocker band also caused stress as Parsons believed that that band were doing the kind of music he'd wanted to do with the burritos and that they'd been beaten to his new music. Parsons' behaviour became effemore erratic, especially as he, like so many in the bird's story, had a fear of flying and had to be drugged to take flights. Shortly after the release of Burrito Deluxe,

Parsons and Hillman parted ways, very acrimoniously. The Flying Barito Brothers kept going for a while longer, Indeed, a group just calling themselves the Barito Brothers, with no flaying, continues to this day, though they have no original members and their connection to the group that made the gilded Palace of Sin is tenuous at best. But Barreto Deluxe was where they stopped being a major creative force. The group continued with new lead singer Rick Roberts, and Roberts' first show with the group was at the Whiskey O'Gogo,

where the birds had previously made their name. Indeed, the new lineup of the Barito brothers were supporting the new line-up of the birds. and both bands spent the majority of the show on stage together, performing as one giant band, leading to the bizarre situation of both bands with which Grand Parsons had made his name, performing Grand Parsons' signature song, but without Grand Parsons on stage. Shortly afterwards, Gene Clark joined the Barreto Brothers briefly, though he left again quickly. But for that time, three of the original birds were in the Flying Burrito Brothers, but only one, McGuin, was in the birds.

After one more album, the Flying Burita Brothers split up, though various lineups would later reform. Bernie Ledden went on to join Linda Ronstadt's backing band, playing and singing on her third solo album. Other musicians on the album, though not on the same tracks as Ledden, included Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Mandy Meisner. And during the making of the album, those four discussed forming a band,

and we'll be picking up on that in a future episode. By this point, the birds were, by all accounts, a far better live band than they had been in their heyday. They had continued with the country rock sound that Parsons had inspired, and guitarist Clarence White, in particular, was considered one of the great live guitarists of his generation. He'd invented a device called the string bender, which allowed him to get a pedal steel style tone from his guitar,

and would use that to great effect. And for the first time in their history, the birds were a genuinely excellent live band. But despite getting back together with original producer Terry Moucher, the albums they were putting out were underwhelming at best. Some of them have their admirers, and there's some decent music on some of them, but there's a general consensus that the last great birds album

was Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and that the best of the later albums isn't as good as the worst album when Hillman was still in the band. And the albums did badly commercially, as well as critically. In February 1973, McGuin decided to sack the rest of that line-up of birds, and the original group reunited for one final album. but that was generally considered a failure

other than the songs Gene Clark contributed like Full Circle Clark had been continuing to make great music and after the dissolution of that line-up of birds he went on to make what is generally considered his masterpiece the country psych album, no other. But Clark's drug use and mental instability continued to mar his live performances

and it's heartbreaking reading descriptions of shows in later years in which he was apparently barely coherent. Clark, Hillman and McGuin formed a trio in the late 70s, but Clark was fired after their first album. In the 80s, he and Michael Clark formed another line-up of birds, with John York, Rick Roberts of the Barreto brothers,

Blondie Chaplin, formerly of the Beach Boys and later a touring member of the Rolling Stones, and Mick Danko and Richard Manuel of the band. That band deteriorated over lawsuits over the band's name, with McGwin, Hillman, and Crosby forming arrival birds for a time.

And both Jean Clark and Michael Clark died of drug and alcohol-induced illness in the early 90s. Clarence White also died young. He died, in fact, only months after being sacked by McGuin. Though, according to McGuin, the two had met the day before White's death and had talked about working together again. White was working on a solo album, and had just been on a package tour with Grand Parsons and Sneaky Pete Kleino and had become friendly with Parsons, but he was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver

and killed in one of the most senseless tragedies in a story full of them, aged only 29. At White's funeral, Grand Parsons sang the spiritual farther along, which White had sung on a bird's album and Parsons on Burrito Deluxe. Just before singing that, he said to his friend Phil Kaufman, Man, if I go first, don't let them put me in the ground like that, take my body out to the desert and burn it.

After leaving the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons had taken to hanging out with Terry Moucher, who as well as producing the birds was dealing with the aftershocks of a trauma we're going to talk about in a future episode. Parsons and Maltcher started working on a Parsons solo album, the tapes for which have never been released, or, as far as I can tell, bootlegged,

and which fell apart due to both men's instability. After that, Parsons had travelled to Europe with his new wife Gretchen to hang out again with Keith Richards, and spent a month with the Stones while they were recording Exile on Main Street. Some sources say that Parsons played on the album, though he's not officially credited, and we'll discuss that album more in a future episode. But what is definitely the case is that Parsons and Richard spent much of the time

encouraging each other to excesses of drug use, and that Parsons was eventually thrown out of the sessions by Jagger. Dominique Tarle, a photographer at the sessions, said later, Keith and Graham were intimate like brothers, especially musically. The idea was floating around that Graham would produce a Graham Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Graham and Keith might even tour together to promote it.

And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones. So yes, there was tension. Richards never produced a Graham Parsons album, and Parsons returned to the US. And while Hillman later made comments about how Parsons had deteriorated, saying a lot of fatphobic things about his alcohol-induced weight gain, and also calling him a monster and a loud stupid person, he allowed part. he allowed Parsons to join the barritos on stage a few times right before the band fell apart, and Hillman and Rick Roberts told Parsons about a new singer Roberts had discovered,

who they thought of getting into the band were it not on the brink of collapse. Emmy Lou Harris was at this time a failed folk singer, who had released one album which hadn't been very successful and which she now disowns, but Roberts and Hillman had been hugely impressed by her and suggested her as a duet partner to Parsons, who met up with her and sang a couple of songs with her on stage. Parsons asked her to join him on his first solo album and she agreed

but then heard little from him for months during that time Parsons was wrestling more with his heroin addiction but he was also seriously putting together a plan for his first album he got signed to one of the other's records by Andy Wickham the A&R man who had been responsible for signing Van Morrison to the label initially his hero Merle Haggard agreed to produce the album but Haggard pulled out due to personal problems and was replaced by Rick Gretsch,

the former bass player from Traffic and Blind Faith, before the sessions started. Gretch also played bass on the sessions and was joined by Baritashian, founder of the original Flying Beretta Brothers, on rhythm guitar, and, excitingly for Parsons, who had wanted to be Elvis since he was a small child,

the core of Elvis' then current live band, the TCB band, James Burton on lead guitar, Ronnie Tut on drums, and Glenn Hardin on piano. But even with that line-up, the most impressive musician on the album was Emily Lou Harris, who is now rightly regarded as one of the best harmony singers in country music history. Harris later said,

I would say until I had met Graham and started working with him, I didn't really understand or have a real love or feel for country music. Like most of my generation, you know, country music was politically incorrect for us at that point. It was associated with Republicans and right wing and that sort of thing. He taught me the beauty and the poetry, the simplicity, the honesty in the music, and the love of harmony came from rarely singing with him. And that love of harmony rarely shines through, like on their duet on the George Jones song, That's All It Took. Even though the album is credited as a Grand Parsons solo album,

it's a collaboration in every way that matters. Parsons was, more than anything, a great collaborator. All his most famous songs are co-written. He'd been successful in two bands, and on this album, titled GP, While he wrote or co-wrote half the material, the other half was cover versions, the arrangements were by Glenn Hardin, who also did Elvis's arrangements, and Emmylou Harris's voice is almost as prominent as Parsons on many songs. Indeed there's one track, Cry One More Time, a cover of a Jay Giles band song,

which has Barry Tashy and take the lead vocals rather than Parsons. Partly this can be explained by Parsons' own infirmity, he was by this point seriously unwell from alcohol and heroin abuse, and he spent much of one session literally crawling on the floor. As a result of this, when Parsons put together a band, The Fallen Angels, to a tour to promote the album, Harris seems to have taken as much control as Parsons, and by all accounts was the main reason the band were anything like listenable.

But it was on that tour that Parsons played her a recording of the two of them singing together, and she really realised what a blend the two of them had and how wonderfully they sang together. After the tour, they went back into the studio to record the album that is generally considered Parsons' third masterpiece, after Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Guilded Palace of Sin. Grievous Angel was an even more collaborative album than GP had been.

Parsons produced the album himself this time, but it was intended as an album by Grand Parsons with Emmylou Harris, the launch of a new country duo to rival George Jones and Tammy Wernett. This time, Parsons was in better, health. He was still drinking too much, but he'd managed to cut out the heroin. He was losing weight and feeling better and singing better than he had in years. It again featured Elvis's TCB band, this time also including their bass player Emory Gordy Jr., replacing Gretcher's bass player,

and again had relatively few new Parsons songs on it. There were only two new songs, the rest being a mixture of cover versions and songs Parsons had written much earlier. There were so short of material that they actually included a faked live medley. Medley live from northern Quebec features a cover version of the Lovine Brothers's Cash on the Barrelhead and a new version of Hickory Wind with lovely harmonies from Harris rather spoiled by the crowd noises.

The crowd noises on the track were provided by former birds manager Ed Tickner, Seenster Kim Fowley, Parsons as Road Manager Phil Kaufman and more. The last song to be recorded for the album was one of the two new originals. In my hour of darkness had been started by Parsons after the funeral of Clarence White, and finished with the help of Harris, who is credited as a co-writer, though she says of it, I was an energy source rather than composer on that one. All I really did was make a few odd suggestions in the wording of the lyric. It was really Graham's song, a song very personal to him,

and I tend to feel that his giving me credit was just an example of his generosity, a token of friendship and an acknowledgement of my help. Much of the song is, sung in three-part block harmony by Parsons, Harris and Linda Ronstat, who guested just on that track. After recording that track, Harris was optimistic about the future of the duo. Parsons was doing better and had largely kicked heroin, and they'd made a great record. Parsons mixed the album, then went off to the Joshua Tree National Park in the desert, the same place he'd spent time taking rescull in with Keith Richards. This time he was going with a girlfriend, Margaret Fisher, and didn't tell his wife that she was going with him.

The two decided to take morphine, and as we've seen so often with people who got themselves clean and fell off the wagon, Parsons' tolerance had gone. He died on September the 19th, 1973. A man safely strum, his silver string guitar, when he played to people everywhere, While the intention had been to credit the album to Grand Parsons with Emily Lou Harris, Parsons as Widow, who had been jealous of Harris, though there's no evidence I've seen that

their relationship was anything other than a professional one, changed the credit to just Grand Parsons, with Harris just being given a line of credit, and insisted that the cover photo be just Parsons. The album did no better commercially than any of the other albums Parsons was involved in during his lifetime, but has since become considered one of the great classic albums of the 70s, not least because of the efforts of Harris to keep her mentor's memory alive. As Harris became one of the great superstars of country rock music, she would record many of his songs and talk about how he had been the one who had shaped her love for the genre.

Parsons became legendary after his death, thanks as much as anything to that conversation at Clarence White's funeral just months before his own. Phil Kaufman decided to honour Parsons' wishes. He partly blamed himself, because his job with Parsons, like the job he'd had with the Rolling Stones before him, was in part to try and stop him from doing anything dangerous

and fix it if he did. Kaufman stole his body before it could be buried, drove it back out to the desert, covered it in petrol, and set it on fire. He didn't manage to completely destroy the river, remains, which were reclaimed by Parsons' family and buried. Parsons' nieces said, It's kind of cool, if it's not your family.

Kaufman's legal bills for the corpse theft were paid for by a party, with performances by Bobby Boris Pickett of Monster Mash fame, the modern lovers, the same band who had been present at Miss Christine's death the year before, and the DJ Dr Demento. The corpse theft turned Grand Parsons, who had only been a minor success during his lifetime, but had always desperately craved stardom, into a legend who has eclipsed all his collaborators,

and who more than 50 years later still gets biographies and documentaries about him, and his face on magazine covers. So Kaufman may well have been might. It may well have been exactly what he would have wanted. And Chris Hillman, Parsons' main collaborator on the albums that made his name, the man who shared a musical and aesthetic partnership with Parsons, even as he often despised him as a person, has had to be the one who lived. the one who has made music for 50 more years but had to do so in the shadow of the legendary genius who died too young

and has had to see the work he's most responsible for often credited to his junior partner alone. With the death of David Crosby, who will be coming up more in future episodes, last year, Hillman and McGuin are now the only two surviving members of the original line-up of the birds, and in 2018 they did a tour together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sweetheart of the Rodeo,

playing the whole album live. The album where they'd allowed a young country singer to take control of their hit band and drive them into commercial irrelevance, but which, 50 years on, was regarded as their greatest legacy. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity

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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 link. in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey,

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