Twenty Thousand Roads, page 44
The band toured once more, to little effect. Gram hated to fly; perhaps it was the residue of his Snively grandfather’s prohibition against traveling by air instead of by rail. Gram took downers to get through the flights. “He was in a wheelchair wasted on these pills,” Hillman says. “It was getting sad.”
“Perhaps the country-rock sound is getting passé or else too many groups are using it,” sniffed one writer reviewing a May 1970 gig at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. “In any event, the Flying Burrito Brothers just don’t have a strong impact on the crowd here…. The Burritos were hurt probably by the crowd’s anticipation of Joe Cocker, who topped the bill.” The review mentioned only one song from the Burritos set: “Wild Horses.”
How that critical attitude stung. Here the originators of country rock were being told they were passé, that they were being eclipsed by bands coming in on their coattails. To make matters worse, the only song that garnered any praise belonged to the Rolling Stones.
That same month, May 1970, Gram suffered a serious motorcycle accident. His friends had been worried ever since he moved from his smaller BSA to a larger Harley-Davidson. The big bike was part of his pose, they felt. John Phillips described Gram’s Harley as “pure redneck, all buckskin and fringe.” Gram decorated the bike with airbrushed outer-space scenes that Jimmi Seiter remembers as “costing almost as much as the bike.”
“Gram never ever did anything mechanical to that bike except put the key in the ignition and turn it on,” a Burritos insider says. “You can’t ride a Harley if you don’t know how to use a tool. So for him to buy that motorcycle was fucking ludicrous.” Gram was almost always high on downers or heroin, and that, combined with his lack of instinct for the machine, made a wreck inevitable.
“He was a little guy and wasn’t strong enough to hold it,” Hillman says. “I knew his accident would happen sooner or later. I knew he would eat it on that bike.”
The crash occurred through Gram’s negligence. He had repaired a broken front fork with a piece of coat hanger wire. The wire came loose and the bike went down. Actress and singer Maggie Thrett was riding on back. John Phillips and Genevieve Waite were riding alongside.
“Someone was watering their lawn and we saw them scream and point,” Waite says. “We saw Gram and Maggie lying in the road, and blood was flowing out of Gram’s head.”
As Phillips bent over him, Gram, never one to miss an opportunity for melodrama, said, “John, take me for a long white ride.”
“Neither of them had a helmet on,” Waite says. “Maggie was thrown differently and she was all right. Gram fell hard. The people called an ambulance. I went with the ambulance and John rode his bike home. We left Gram’s bike in the road.”
It turned out Gram had his Blue Cross card in his pocket. “I remember thinking that for a fucked-up musician type, he was pretty together,” Waite says. “When we got to the hospital we had to go through his wallet to get his card and they were all there neatly. Most people didn’t even carry a wallet, or only have a couple of dollars.”
Gram after his motorcycle accident. (© Andee Nathanson, www.andeenathanson.com)
“When I found out I was like, ‘Holy fuck. Did he kill anybody?’ I was surprised the girl didn’t get killed,” the Burritos insider says. “When the handlebars come off and the forks dig into the pavement, you are in trouble. It doesn’t matter how fast you are going.”
Gram had a broken leg, and his head wound required stitches. “He was full of blood and bandages,” Stash recalls. Gram called Tony Foutz, who hurried to the hospital. John Phillips sent Genevieve over in a limo every day to sit by Gram’s bedside. She brought The Story of O and other erotica, which Phillips told Genevieve to read to the invalid. “I would read them to him, but he didn’t seem interested,” Waite says.
“The bike wreck led him to take all those drugs because he was in a lot of pain,” Miss Mercy says. “He never healed right.”
“Went to see GP with Mercy and Carlos [Bernal], took flowers and all,” Pamela Des Barres wrote. “He’s so beaten up, such a mess. It was hard not to scream, his face was blown up like a purple-and-blue balloon. God bless him and keep him through this, maybe it will help somehow, he’s been SO high all the time. I’ve been calling him Gram Richards. He hasn’t heard from Keith, so I sent him a telegram. I hope he gets it.”
By June, Gram had healed enough for the band to play at the Sound Factory in San Antonio. The show did not go well.
“We didn’t have a set list,” Bernie Leadon says. “Hillman would say, ‘Let’s start this song.’ We would count it off and it would be an up-tempo song in one key, and when it came time for Gram to sing the verse, he would sing another song in another key at a different tempo. His acoustic guitar wasn’t plugged in and it didn’t matter if he broke a string. He had these big heavy-gauge strings so he’d beat on that thing. If he broke a string he would keep playing. It looked pretty dramatic—he had all these strings flapping off and he would still be going. He would play until he broke two or three strings. Then he’d take the guitar by the neck and he would throw it up over his body, over his head, and it would spiral down right by the drums and Michael would have to duck. It would land with a clatter on the wooden stage back behind the amp line. One of the roadies would shake his head, pick the thing up, and see if the neck was still on. He’d go slap some more strings on it and take it out to Gram.”
Gram was too wasted to play guitar. His guitar playing became so distracting that the band unplugged him, harkening ominously to the last days of Brian Jones. When Jones showed up too addled to play, Mick and Keith took the strings off his studio guitar. As the rest of the band recorded, Brian would lie on his back, lost to the world, his fingers scrabbling away at his stringless instrument.
In an interview with Melody Maker, Gram predicted that the days of groups dominating the charts were numbered. “We may be the only group left,” he said. “We’re the underground group anyway, the only true outlaw band.” The article was entitled “Gram Parsons, the Burrito Ego Man,” and the interviewer, Jacoba Atlas, wrote that the musician’s ego was prominently on display—but that he seemed oblivious to how he came across when he boasted of being a poet or a member of the only outlaw band still standing. He earnestly talked about his motorcycle accident and what he’d said to John Phillips immediately after it happened. “I must be a poet,” he told Atlas. “Because I told John, ‘Take me on a long white road.’ I mean, I said that.”
The article ends there.
In late June, at a gig at the Brass Ring in the San Fernando Valley, Chris fired Gram from the band. Leon Russell and Delaney Bramlett were in the audience. Leadon: “We were down in the Valley at some club and Gram didn’t show up till late,” Leadon says. “Chris was pissed and Gram was fucked up. Chris had had enough and fired him.”
Hillman declared himself sick of Gram’s “rock-star games” and his lack of commitment to the Burritos. “It got to the point where we couldn’t work with him,” he said later. “Michael and I said, ‘Out!’ And that’s why he left.”
“Gram was totally not into it anymore,” Jimmi Seiter says. “They were having to drag him to do anything, everything.”
“I may seem callous but we’ve all had family problems,” Hillman says. “But of course it was tough for him, especially with money from the trust fund. But hey, people with no legs hold down jobs. I’m a team player. I like to work in groups. I like a clean team effort. But it was definitely not working out that way with the Burritos.”
“Chris Hillman never got over how much more credit Gram got than he did,” Jim Dickson says. “They did the same thing, but Gram was willing to put feeling into his songs and Chris never was. Gram was more interesting than Chris. He wanted to be a legend. Hillman was never willing to let himself expose his emotions or be vulnerable in front of everybody. He couldn’t do it—he was always pretty tight-assed.”
Pamela Des Barres was traveling in the Netherlands when she heard the news. “I found a newsstand with Rolling Stone displayed and, foaming at the mouth, I perused the pages rapidly,” she wrote. “Much to my bitter sorrow, Gram Parsons had quit the Burrito Brothers to branch out on his own, and I grieved as though a death had occurred. I wrote to him, sobbing on a postcard, while I chewed pommes frites from a paper cone. ‘My dear GP. I could cry that I missed you all playing together one more time. Your music has made me so happy at times I thought I would pop open with joy…’”
In an interview that predicts the rambling, loopy accounts Gram would henceforth give journalists, Gram told Chuck Cassell, “I waited to see if the album was going to be a freak hit. And I split. I was starting to duck out on road gigs about that time. Starting to say, ‘I can’t handle it. I don’t want to go to Seattle for eight hundred bucks. No, thank you.’
“Chris and I always remained friends, though. He hit my guitar once, but we’ve always understood what the other one was going through. The old country flavor, it was always there somewhere. And finally when it became too much, I split.”
SEVENTEEN
NELLCÔTE
NO MATTER WHAT THE LEVEL OF SELF-LOATHING OR SELF-DESTRUCTION, nobody enjoys failure. The desire to succeed can be perverted into a desire to fail, of course. A certain temperament might require the suffering that failure brings, or renewed proof of the validity of a tormented self-image. For the addict, failure reliably produces a good reason for another fix. If The Gilded Palace of Sin had sold ten million copies, would Gram have done less heroin? He likely would have done more.
But no one seeks negation, oblivion, as an artist. The drive to create, despite its tortured path to expression, yearns for success—for an audience—no matter how forcefully or unknowingly the self-hating artist might push it away.
Gram’s denial took the form of insisting that nothing was his fault. He masked his refusal to get out of his own way by being increasingly dissatisfied with everyone else. He claimed to be fed up with Chris Ethridge, with Sneaky Pete, with touring, with the idea of groups, with having to collaborate. The self-loather survives his self-hatred by finding reasons that everyone else is more hateful still. While Gram worked that vein diligently, he also insisted on negating his own gifts. Even as he desired acclaim for his talents, he sought to minimize what they might produce.
Contradictions in human nature are not surprising or in themselves puzzling; contradictions are our essence. Those baffled by Gram’s self-destruction in the face of his talents miss the point. Gram’s sensitivity might generate paralysis in anyone. That sensitivity, combined with all Gram had lost, could make the usual internal artistic struggles well-nigh unbearable. Gram’s prominent and more intriguing contradiction remains the unbridgeable gap between his gifts and his want-to. He rarely tried to improve what he produced. He seldom took the extra step, spent a bit more time, worked with greater discipline, or examined his own processes. If Gram had the motivation to do so, he seldom showed it.
Gram had more of a classic self-hater’s approach to his work. He cast his gems away from him as if their existence undermined his self-definition. He seldom rehearsed, seldom prepared before entering a recording session, seldom spent any time on album production, and treated every notion however profound as a throwaway. He could justify this pattern under any number of theories of Beat, post-Beat, and hippie creativity. They held that spontaneous creation was best: that to work too hard on a moment’s inspiration cheapened it. Gram cherished an image of himself as a star whose abilities could save him in any situation: playing live, the studio, whatever. He could step up at the moment and nail it. He created that myth for himself and was stuck living it out. Trying to ignore reality and keep that myth going must have been full-time work.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who were as wanton, pleasure-seeking, and distractible as Gram, never let their distractions distract them from their ruthless ambition. Nothing and nobody got in their way, including themselves. No matter how fucked up they might be, they’d still rehearse for days, plan every detail of a tour, and build their songs piece by piece. The recording of a song—the final step for Gram—was only the beginning for the Stones. They reveled in the details of their own work. That’s why Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street are among the best-produced records in history.
Gram fled those details, refusing to confront them, thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great and great work immortal. Among the worthy, lasting, and influential albums of the last forty years, it’s hard to find one more shoddily produced or sloppily performed than The Gilded Palace of Sin. To their advantage, Jagger and Richards had each other as inspiration, motivation, and competition. Gram insisted on fighting the creative battles himself. It’s no accident that some of his best songs were written with Chris Hillman and Chris Ethridge. Or that Burrito Deluxe has no worthy numbers at all; when Gram turned his back on collaboration, his songwriting suffered. He could not, it turned out, walk that lonesome valley.
Having made what he knew were two masterpieces (Sweetheart and Gilded Palace), Gram was left with nothing. He was no longer a Byrd or a Burrito. Neither record sold worth a damn. The first produced little critical understanding, the second only slightly more. The first appeared to have no supporters or followers, the second sufficient that—even though it never charted—Gram was no longer perceived as the innovator of a scene that was already outgrowing any tracing of its origins.
Gram’s hard drug use had gone from recreational to life-dominating. His L.A. reputation held him to be spoiled, lazy, willful, uncooperative, a commercial liability, and in thrall to the Stones. Money he had, and girls and style. But his best work, his brief periods of discipline and enthusiasm, had come to nothing. He had reached a dead end. All around him, the L.A. country-rock scene was growing. Gram was being left behind.
He began to hang out with Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, the former producer of the Byrds. “Terry liked witty, funny people,” Eve Babitz says, “and Gram was extremely funny. They were two dilettantes together.”
Terry had been a surf-rock producer at Columbia. He formed the group Bruce and Terry with Bruce Johnston, who later became a mainstay of the Beach Boys and wrote “Disney Girls.” Melcher was also part of the Rip Chords, who hit with “Hey Little Cobra,” a paean to an American sports car of the era. He produced “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” for the Byrds and worked with Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rising Sons (Taj Mahal’s band, from which came drummer Kevin Kelley, Ry Cooder, and Jesse Ed Davis). Melcher performed on the Beach Boys masterwork Pet Sounds and introduced Brian Wilson to L.A. songwriter and producer Van Dyke Parks, who helped Wilson create the psychedelic word-poems for Wilson’s never-finished opus Smile. (Much of the album’s content was re-created and released in 2004.) Melcher later produced Byrdmaniax and cowrote “Kokomo,” a hit single for the Beach Boys. He died of cancer in 2004.
In 1968 Melcher was involved, with John Phillips, in producing the Monterey Pop Festival. That same year Charles Manson, who had ambitions as a singer-songwriter, auditioned for Melcher through the auspices of Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. Melcher declined to sign Manson, and Manson was not pleased. Melcher had been living with Candice Bergen at the Cielo Drive house. They had moved out by August 1969, when Manson sent his acolytes to butcher the occupants. One of the killers, Susan Atkins, told the L.A. police that Manson knew Melcher no longer lived there but had chosen the house as the site for a murder to frighten him.
“Terry wanted to be hip,” Jim Dickson says, “so he found his way into the world of hippies with money and privilege and musical training. He had produced the Byrds but he didn’t understand what it was all about. He hired a girl from the Whisky to take him around and teach him. When I warned Gram about Terry, he bawled me out. Terry was still traumatized by the Manson thing. He was a victim. I told Gram he’d be sorry.”
Terry had a great deal of money and an appetite for drugs. Gram and Melcher wanted to work together. Melcher sold A&M’s Jerry Moss on the idea of a solo album with the argument that Gram was “the white Jimi Hendrix.” Session musicians for the recording included Clarence White, Ry Cooder, Earl Ball, Byron Berline, and singer Merry Clayton, a former Ikette who became famous for her wailing background vocals supporting Mick Jagger on “Gimme Shelter.”
“Terry loved Gram and wanted to produce him,” Eve Babitz says. “But neither of them could get anything done.”
Gram moved into Terry’s house in Benedict Canyon. “They would think up album titles for days,” Melcher’s secretary, Ginny Ganahl, says, “like These Blues Have Made a Nigger Out of Me or Money Honey. The way they related to each other was like outlaws, from being born to money.”
Jimmi Seiter says, “Working with Terry drained me of energy, and Gram could be the same way.” Ganahl agrees: “Gram was a little punk. It was all time to kill and so he killed it.” As another regular at Melcher’s house puts it: “If there were ever two guys who were alike it was those two. Both wasted so much talent, both wealthy and never had to earn. When they were bored with something they didn’t want to get involved.”
The recording did not go well. It was these sessions from which the legend sprang of someone—maybe Gram, maybe Terry—vomiting into an open piano. “I played on two songs, ‘Hand to Mouth’ and ‘White Line Fever,’” Earl Ball says. “I brought Don Rich [Buck Owens’ guitarist and bandleader] with me. We sat around and waited to see what Gram wanted to do…. I’ve had this experience several times, working with someone I care about and want to see do well because they have a vision. But they’ve let their habits get in the way and are not operating at maximum capacity. There’s nothing you can do about it. Terry was in the booth, but he didn’t say a whole lot. He was watching. This whole thing may have been planned when Gram was in a better situation, a better place in his mind….
