Six Degrees of Grievous Angel
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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In Rolling Stone's 1973 obituary for the star-crossed Gram Parsons, they parlay the man as "the fucked-up young lord of zig-zaggingfrom purity to debauchery[they] light their candles at both ends and sweep out the ashes in the morning." Like all great artists, their genius lies in somehow marrying the furthest extremes of their personas, even as such a merger ultimately destroys them. For the man born Ingram Cecil Connor III, the melding of his rich-boy upbringing with his down-and-out songwriting made for strange bedfellows, much as his reveling in sinful excesses and the stringent church-bound notions of redemption clashed within him. What incandescent sparks, though! While his debut solo album, GP, had its sessions bogged down by drug abuse, Grievous Angel found Gram cleaned up and focused on putting down his tracks as quickly as possible. Wrapped quickly, Parsons never lived to see its release. Posthumously put onto the market, Grievous Angel faltered on the charts, peaking meekly at 195. By comparison, the death of soft rock crooner Jim Croce, whose plane crashed two days after Parsons OD'd in Joshua Tree, sent his product straight to number one. While GP contains an even keel of classic songs, Grievous Angel hits bittersweet highs that hint at what might have been had he pulled up on the reins a bit. From the honky-tonking self-deprecation of "I Can't Dance" to the shimmering "Hearts on Fire," the heartbreaking twang of "Brass Buttons" to a reading of "Love Hurts" that plumb erases earlier versions recorded by the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison, Grievous Angel is a fitting finale to the zig-zagging life of Parsons. The secret weapon of the album lies in the twining vocals of Parsons and a Washington DC folksinger named Emmylou Harris, a sublime coupling that instantly sent the duo up to the highest echelons of harmonizing. Think Louvin Brothers, Everly Brothers, George Jones and Tammy Wynette it is here that Parsons and Harris keep their company. Even after her singing partner's death, it's a role Harris has fulfilled for innumerable others in the decades that followed, from Willie Nelson to ex-Byrd Gene Clark, from Dolly Parton to Connor Oberst. None can match this pairing though, a match made in both heaven and hell, and sweeping out the ashes in the morning.
The Drugstore Truck-Driving Man
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While most fans would consider country music's hotbed to be Nashville and the deep South thanks to Buck Owens and his Buckaroos as well as Merle Haggard a trucker/ biker stop just north of California called Bakersfield produced its own piquant and pepped-up (amphetamines being friends to drivers, riders and musicians alike) variant on the country sound, to great chart success. The Beatles covered Buck's hit ("Act Naturally") on Help! and Parsons' country-rock designs drew heavily from the rockabilly sound of the Nudie-clad Owens and lead guitarist Don Rich's steel guitar tones: crystalline, speedy, and rollicking. Some (but not all) of Buck's big hits are here.
The Hard-Drinking Buddy Bluesman
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In Stanley Booth's crucial tome, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, he describes a backstage scene in LA wherein Gram Parsons gets drunk with legendary bluesman Bukka White, which makes for a funny scene: a spoiled white boy from Florida and a prison-hardened African-American from Arkansas. Regardless, they all hang out backstage with Mick and Keef, trading licks on a National steel guitar, the same guitar Bukka made famous with his 1937 and 1940 recordings (bookending a stint in Parchman Farm for shooting a man). Stinging and hard, stark and harrowing, these recordings represent the last gasp of country blues before a more urbane and electrified strain of the blues outshone it.
The Other Great Speckled Byrd
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A founding member and primary songwriter of the Byrds, Clark has the distinction of birthing three musical hybrids: folk-rock with the Byrds, new-grass (combining trad. bluegrass with electric instrumentation) as Dillard & Clark, and country-rock with his s/t album (frequently called White Light). While eclipsed by the mythology of Parsons, Clark remains a tragic musical genius as well. No Other, his masterpiece, delves deep into truly "cosmic" country spaces, layering choirs, pedal steel, violin, piano, congas, and synthesizers to dizzying effect. Songs like "From a Silver Phial" and "Lady of the North" remain some of the most exquisite musical peaks of 70's SoCal.
The $1000 Wedding Couple
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A southern guitar-slinger who had his roots and soul music down cold, Delaney Bramlett also struck out for the west coast to make it as a musician. With his knock-out belter of a wife (and the lone white Ikette) Bonnie, the duo were a crucial &8212; albeit forgotten influence on 60's rock. They nurtured Clapton with the blues after the end of Cream (also hooking him up with Duane Allman and the future Dominoes) and counted George Harrison as a member of their band after the Beatles broke up. They even had Gram Parsons sing on their woefully-overlooked 1971 classic, Motel Shot. Recorded a few years previous, Accept No Substitute nevertheless anticipates the decade's future alchemy of genre, melding down-home blues, ecstatic gospel, dusty country, and ramshackle rock with grit and aplomb.
A Couple that Sings “Oooooh, Los Angeles”
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In much the same way that Parsons and Harris infused the Bakersfield sound with the slow smoggy haze of reefer and barbituates, less than a decade on, punk rockers X brought that strain of country music back down to earth, stripping off the cosmic notions to reveal something harder beneath. Their singers, Exene Cervenka and John Doe, voiced that same downward spiral and hard time desperation but with a manic razor's edge, a ticking time bomb beneath them. "Last night everything broke!" their voices merge, the last bastion of sanity in their world. X strapped that west coast sound to their own rockabilly and punk-rock machine, the result being a speedy, breathless ride through the underside of Los Angeles. They, too, were desperate.
