The Heir and the Submarine
Ingram Cecil Connor III was born November 5, 1946, in Winter Haven, Florida, grandson of citrus magnate John A. Snively. His father shot himself when Gram was twelve. His mother drank herself to death the day he graduated high school. By the time he enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1965, he was a grieving teenager with a trust fund paying $30,000 a year and a fixation on merging country music with rock and roll. He lasted one semester.
At Harvard, Parsons formed the International Submarine Band with guitarist John Nuese, who pushed him toward the country sound that would define his short career. The band relocated to Los Angeles and recorded Safe at Home at Capitol Records’ Studio B between July and December 1967. Released in March 1968 on Lee Hazlewood’s LHI Records, it mixed four Parsons originals with covers of classic country. The album sold almost nothing, but it drew a line: this was not folk rock with a twang. Parsons called it “Cosmic American Music,” a term he preferred to “country rock” for the rest of his life.
Nashville Meets the Longhairs
Before Safe at Home reached stores, Parsons had joined the Byrds. He persuaded Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman to scrap their planned album and record a country record. On March 9, 1968, the band arrived at Columbia’s Nashville studio with session players including pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Green, a member of Nashville’s A-Team with over 5,000 recordings to his name. Sessions continued through March 15, then moved to Columbia Studios in Hollywood. The result was Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Columbia’s lawyers forced the removal of most of Parsons’ lead vocals due to his prior LHI contract, replacing them with McGuinn’s overdubs.
During the Nashville sessions, the Byrds played the Grand Ole Opry at Ryman Auditorium, introduced by Tompall Glaser. The audience met the long-haired Californians with booing and mocking calls of “tweet, tweet.” Parsons, ignoring the agreed setlist, launched into his own “Hickory Wind,” stunning regulars including Roy Acuff. The Byrds were never invited back.
Nudie Suits and the Gilded Palace
Parsons and Hillman regrouped, forming the Flying Burrito Brothers with pedal steel player “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow. Kleinow played a Fender 400, an outdated cable-operated eight-string pedal steel, and ran it through fuzz and delay pedals no Nashville player would have considered. He was among the first to use the instrument in a rock context, translating its weeping sustain into something psychedelic.
For the band’s image, Parsons commissioned suits from Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, where head designer Manuel Cuevas created them. Traditional Nudie suits featured wagon wheels and cacti. The Burritos’ suits were embroidered with marijuana leaves, naked women, poppies, and pills. Parsons’ suit now hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Their debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969), fused Buck Owens’ Bakersfield honky-tonk with soul and psychedelia. It sold poorly and remains one of the most influential commercial failures in American popular music.
The Canyon, the Troubadour, the Eagles
Country rock flourished in Laurel Canyon, the wooded neighborhood above the Sunset Strip where Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, and Frank Zappa all lived within walking distance. The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard served as the scene’s living room. It was at the Troubadour’s bar where Glenn Frey first met Don Henley in 1970.
Poco, formed in 1968 from Buffalo Springfield’s ashes, had been working the same territory. Richie Furay and Jim Messina built the band around Rusty Young’s pedal steel, dobro, and banjo. Original bassist Randy Meisner left during the debut album’s recording after a dispute with Furay. He would surface again.
In early 1971, Linda Ronstadt’s manager John Boylan assembled a backing band: Frey, Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Meisner. Their only gig with Ronstadt was at Disneyland on July 12, 1971, but in rehearsals Frey and Henley discovered they could write together. David Geffen signed the four to his new Asylum Records in September 1971. They recorded their debut at Olympic Studios in London with producer Glyn Johns. “Take It Easy,” co-written by Frey and Jackson Browne, hit number 12 in the summer of 1972. Desperado (1973), a concept record about the Doolin-Dalton Gang recorded at Island Studios in London, anchored its country sound with Leadon’s mandolin and five-string banjo. By 1976, with Joe Walsh replacing Leadon, the Eagles recorded Hotel California at Criteria Studios in Miami and the Record Plant in Los Angeles with producer Bill Szymczyk. Black Sabbath, tracking Technical Ecstasy next door at Criteria, bled through the walls so loudly that “The Last Resort” had to be re-recorded. The album sold over 32 million copies. Country rock had become the American mainstream.
The Voice That Carried It Forward
In December 1971, Parsons took a train to Washington, D.C., to hear a singer Chris Hillman had recommended. He found Emmylou Harris performing at Clyde’s in Georgetown on a rainy night for five people. He asked her to come to Los Angeles. She sang on his solo debut GP (1973), featuring Elvis Presley’s guitarist James Burton and pianist Glen D. Hardin. For the follow-up, Grievous Angel, Harris was promoted to full duet partner. The two sang so close together that their voices bled across separate microphones, staring into each other’s eyes while they recorded. Parsons died September 19, 1973, at the Joshua Tree Inn, from a morphine and alcohol overdose. He was 26. His road manager Phil Kaufman stole the body from Los Angeles International Airport, drove it to Cap Rock in the desert, and cremated it with five gallons of gasoline. He was fined $750 for stealing a coffin.
Harris signed with Reprise, assembled the Hot Band (recruiting Burton and Hardin from Presley’s TCB group, adding pedal steel player Hank DeVito), and released Pieces of the Sky in 1975. It included “Boulder to Birmingham,” written about Parsons’ death. She charted consistently through the late 1970s with Elite Hotel (1975) and Luxury Liner (1977), carrying Parsons’ vision into the country mainstream and seeding the Americana movement that would follow decades later.
The Bridge That Held
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band built a different kind of bridge. In August 1971, the California band entered Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville to record with Roy Acuff, “Mother” Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and Merle Travis. Doc Watson met Merle Travis for the first time, the man after whom Watson had named his son. Bill Monroe, then sixty, refused to participate. The resulting triple album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972), sold over a million copies and did more to build trust between Nashville traditionalists and young rock audiences than any single record of its era.
Essential Listening
- The International Submarine Band – Safe at Home (1968)
- The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)
- The Flying Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)
- Poco – Pickin’ Up the Pieces (1969)
- The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)
- Gram Parsons – GP (1973)
- Gram Parsons – Grievous Angel (1974)
- Eagles – Desperado (1973)
- Linda Ronstadt – Heart Like a Wheel (1974)
- Emmylou Harris – Pieces of the Sky (1975)
- Emmylou Harris – Luxury Liner (1977)
- Eagles – Hotel California (1976)