David Meyer (7)

It took Gram Parsons just over six years to change the face of American music. Parsons brought fresh force to country tradition with the International Submarine Band, remade the Byrds in his own image on the classic Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, and recorded two solo albums of aching beauty, all before his death in 1973.

Along the way, he taught the Rolling Stones about country music, discovered Emmylou Harris singing in a nightclub in Washington D. C., wrote a handful of songs — “Sin City”, “Hickory Wind”, “Brass Buttons” — that stand as classics of down-home American soul, and, by all accounts, ingested more alcohol, cocaine, and heroin than seems possible. It would be hard to overstate his influence on country, alt-country, Americana, roots music, and all their permutations.

Despite his towering legacy, the most complete biography Parsons has received until now is Ben Fong-Torres’s well-intentioned but slapdash Hickory Wind (1991). Fong-Torres has a keen sense of Parsons’s music, but he scrambles to keep track of the myriad musicians and scenesters who moved in Parsons’s orbit, and his narrative feels choppy and rushed.

With Twenty Thousand Roads, Parsons has finally received a book equal to his musical accomplishments and outsized personality. David N. Meyer’s biography is an exceptional piece of research and writing, lucid and penetrating about the music, fair-minded yet tough about Parsons’s shortcomings and wasted potential. Meyer has tracked down and interviewed hundreds of Parsons’s associates, some of whom have never spoken on the record before, and his synthesis of these sources is fluid and absorbing.

Meyer has gone farther than anyone else in understanding the roots of Parsons’s self-destructive tendencies, tracing them to his upbringing in a rich Southern family haunted by suicide and alcoholism. He also debunks many of the myths that have grown up around Parsons, and provides as objective an account of Parsons’s doomed last night at the Joshua Tree Inn and its notorious aftermath as we will ever have.

For the most part, Meyer’s analysis of Parsons’s music is articulate and perceptive, with the exception of his dismissal of the Fallen Angels, the pickup band that toured with Parsons in 1973 (Meyer faults drummer N. D. Smart for his inability “to play anything other than a 4/4 shuffle,” even though Smart’s drumming on the waltz-time “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” is sprightly and swinging). Meyer’s book is otherwise especially illuminating about the technical aspects of the music Gram made his own, whether explaining the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield country or discussing the intricacies of pedal-steel guitar playing. As a bonus, the book includes a comprehensive and often droll (Keith Richards is identified as “the only man who can play a Chuck Berry song worse than Chuck Berry”) encyclopedia of Parsons’ contemporaries.

The true strength of Twenty Thousand Roads, however, is its insight into how Parsons’s demons and excesses were inextricably linked to the greatness of his music. Meyer is clear-eyed and occasionally brutal about Parsons’ drug use, wobbly work ethic, and callow self-absorption, but he refuses to romanticize his subject’s excesses or exploit them for prurient effect. In the end, Meyer’s book betrays a deep sense of sadness over what could have been. That sadness is part of what made Gram Parsons’s music so moving. It is also part of what killed him.

From NO DEPRESSION magazine, November 2007
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Remember 1968? (Yeah...I know...if you can remember it you weren't really there...baloney.) Among other things, that's the year The Byrds released their album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" and pissed off everybody--the "real" country artists who thought those long-haired freaky people were trying to subvert country music, and the band's fan base who thought they'd lost their minds with this redneck shit. Well, there were a few music critics back then who got what was really happening, and now it's pretty well accepted that this album was the mother of country-rock. The father, often unidentified, was a 22-year-old phenomenon named Gram Parsons, who hardly anybody had heard of then, and a lot of people even now know only vaguely as that guy whose body got burned up in some weird ceremony in the desert. And wasn't he shacking up with Emmylou Harris back in the day? (Kinda wrong, on both counts.) Well, he's a legend in certain circles, and like most legends his truth has become a bit obscured. David Meyer seems to have done a lot of homework trying very hard to track down the truth about Parsons' short, chemically enhanced and shattered life, and it makes fascinating reading. It's about a rich southern boy with big ideas, too much loose change and not enough guidance or maturity to handle either well, who nevertheless left his mark on American popular music in uncounted ways. And it's about so much more---a valuable reference of influences, crossed paths, coincidences and lost chances. If you can't imagine a connection between Keith Richards and Buck Owens, let Meyer show you not only that it exists, but how essential it is in music history. His list of recommended listening and his encyclopedia of performers, songwriters, producers and followers make the book worth owning if you have any interest in country music, rock & roll, or their holy matrimony. Fascinating, sad and thought-provoking. I left more book darts in the pages of Twenty Thousand Roads than I've used in a long time.… (plus d'informations)

I grew up listening to country-rock music, and Gram Parsons was one of my musical heroes. And while I knew he'd died young and that he'd been a heavy drug user, I was never really aware just how influential he really was, how sad a life he had and how energetic he was in pushing away success and wasting his considerable talent and charm.

Parsons hit the big time when, after gaining a bit of notice with his International Submarine Band in L.A., he joined the Byrds and helped steer that band from psychedelia towards country, recording the now iconic Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. Then it was on to co-leading the the even more influential Flying Burrito Brothers and the sound that spawned a million imitators. Meyer also chronicles the friendship between Parsons and Keith Richards that helped push the Stones towards country and the sound that would produce Exile on Main Street but also helped bury Parsons even deeper into the vortex of hard drug use.

The "tragic, sensitive artist as his own worst enemy" story has been told a million times, of course, but Meyer, with a writing style that flows nicely and seemingly deep and impeccable research, really does succeed in making Parson's story a compelling one. We don't see Parsons as a hero or as a tragic victim. We see him as a man who brought about his own demise, and yet earned his iconic status in American music history. We also get an interesting, close-up look at the rock world of the late 60s and early 70s.… (plus d'informations)