Gram Parsons
This past November 5 would have been Gram Parsons’ 65th birthday. Ms. Anne Cunningham and I celebrated by venturing from our home in Saugerties across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to Club Helsinki in Hudson, NY to see a Gram Parsons tribute show. A southerner now residing in the nearby Berkshires named Johnny Irion got the call as Gram, and Otto Hauser was on drums. A fine show as far as tributes go, but really, with a body of work like GP’s, there’s not a lot that can go wrong.
Driving home, I remembered one defining incident explained in David Meyer’s excellent biography, Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music, an event that deserves reflection here, as it was key to Gram’s later musical development.
In the canon of Rock ‘n’ Roll myths, Gram Parsons’ now imfamous decision to quit The Byrds prior to their tour of South Africa ranks high. The story goes like this: The Byrds, who at this point were pared down to a business partnership between Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, had a contact through singer Miriam Makeba’s management, and were told they could do well performing in South Africa. Another well known fact is that at this point, Gram was spending a lot of time with the Rolling Stones, specifically Keith Richards. Either Mick or Keith informed the politically naive Parsons about the situation in South Africa with respect to the “brothers.” Gram was appalled, and famously, though not entirely inaccurately, cited Mississippi as a frame of reference for his new found contempt. He knew he wasn’t going there.
Accepted wisdom is that Gram didn’t go only after he was told it wasn’t cool. According to David Meyer, because Parsons was “such a bullshitter and never admitted fault”, he reached for the high ground. Popular opinion has historically emptied his refusal to go to South Africa of political content, reducing it to a facile attempt to align his growing disenchantment with the Byrds and attraction to hanging with the Stones with an ethical concern in which he scarecly believed. McGuinn and Hillman, on the other hand, couching their decision to go to South Africa behind the acceptable rhetoric of “professionalism” played the part of jilted lovers and seemed more like the victims of bad luck than reactionary opportunists.
But to place Parsons’ ulterior motives and subsequent actions above the political situation strikes one as funny, not to mention unfair. According to this sort of rigid ”persona moralism” one should never follow one’s pleasures following any act, lest it be unethical. Should Gram have been participating in racial sensitivity workshops rather than playing music with his friends in the Rolling Stones simply because he didn’t want to work under conditions of apartheid? It seems absurd to hold him to that. Everyone knew Gram was basically apolitical, but even he had his limits. Again according to Meyers: “The Byrds were sold a load of shit by their promoter and went to South Africa and got pilloried” playing dicey shows to segregated audiences. Parsons, however passively and questionable the manner in which he weaseled out of it, did not. The Byrds found this galling, and vented their frustrations on Gram’s reputation, not to mention nearby inanimate objects: upon returning from their disastrous trip Chris Hillman reputedly smashed his bass, claiming he never wanted to play that thing anyway, quit the Byrds and joined the nebulous Flying Burrito Brothers, taking up residence with GP at the house where they would later write the majority of The Gilded Palace of Sin, arguably the finest document of the then nascent Country-Rock genre. That should stand.
And it might have, if Gram himself didn’t say anything and simply let his actions speak Unfortunately, Gram’s statements on the matter nearly undermine any attempt to recover his actions as totally righteous. Claiming he “had a negro brother” based on having grown up alongside a servant family is off the mark, to say the least. However, according to Meyer, this was typical of his class and era: “white southerners…felt they could claim soulfulness by extension and ignore the class realities that underlay the racial ones.”
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