How did I get hear? #2 - Nick Bollinger on Gram Parsons' "Grievous Angel"
When I was sixteen my father died suddenly. I had just left school and was living in my first flat, partying too hard, working as little as possible, and occasionally going home for meals. Suddenly home wasn’t there anymore.
Noticing my shocked and aimless state, my friends Matthew and Katie suggested I accompany them on a trip to Dunedin where they were going to spend a few days with a painter, a family friend of Katie’s. Though the painter and her husband had a new baby and the last thing they really needed was three unwashed teenagers from Wellington crashing on their carpet, they welcomed us into their tiny, tidy Portobello home. At some point over the few days we were there I got talking about music with the painter’s husband, who turned out to be a passionate music fan, and he played me this life-changing record.
Up until then I had thought of country music as the voice of right-wing, Christian, conservative, short-haired, pro-war, white Americans; in short, everything that I, an aspiring hippie, stood against. The few country songs I liked had been filtered through the rock’n’roll of the counterculture: Janis Joplin’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sweet Virginia’, or Bob Dylan’s eccentric Nashville Skyline album (which had also indicated to me that there might be more to Johnny Cash than the Jesus albums and comedy singles he seemed to be churning out at the time, though I wouldn’t fully explore his music until later.) I didn’t even trust the way country records sounded: slick, facile and factory-finished compared to the raw inspiration of the rock’n’roll I loved.
Hearing the two-beat pedal steel guitar lick that opens Grievous Angel, one might expect this album to be as slick and shiny as any country record, only the voice that comes in next isn’t shiny at all. It is shaky, as though struggling to hold its footing under the emotional weight of the song it is carrying. And it was only a second voice, the sure-footed voice of a woman I learned was Emmylou Harris, that seemed to be keeping the main singer from buckling over.
It was the combination of these voices and how shockingly believable they were that drew me in. Then I started to sink into the songs, which were mysterious, occasionally humorous but mostly deeply sad. More than half of them dealt with death, or some other loss perhaps equally profound. Most were written by Parsons himself, including some of the most anguished ones - ‘Brass Buttons’, ‘In My Hour Of Darkness’, ‘$1000 Wedding’ - but perhaps the saddest and most piercing performance of all was of an old Everly Brothers’ song, ‘Love Hurts’.
Gram Parsons had already died eighteen months or so before I first heard his voice. I don’t remember thinking that my response to this record had anything to do with my own recent loss; only that I sank deeper into the music with each listening. I sought out its antecedents - Sweetheart of the Rodeo from Parsons’ brief time with the Byrds, and the two albums he had made with the Flying Burrito Brothers - but I also now had the courage and curiosity to explore some of the music that had inspired Parsons. People like Merle Haggard, George Jones and Harlan Howard whose music had previously been anathema to me. Now they didn’t seem slick or facile at all, but more like tear-soaked pages torn from someone’s life.
Nick Bollinger
(Nick's wonderful book on the NZ Counterculture, "Jumping Sundays", is available from our buddies at Unity Books, here!)