It is very hard for people growing up today to appreciate the extent to which the 1960's were steeped in an ethos which celebrated drug use as a rebellious act of liberation.
The Baby Boomer generation that came of age in the legendary 1960's was a unique generation in more ways than one. It was the first generation in human history that grew up relatively insulated from the great scourges of mankind, the Four Horsemen of Pestilence, Famine, War, and (early) Death. At the same time, the widely proclaimed "death of God" left many with little spiritual nourishment. By the mid to late 60's, the prevailing mantras had become "if it feels good, do it" and "turn on, tune in , and drop out". Many followed those prescriptions.
At Woodstock, the mythical apotheosis of the 60's zeitgeist, peace and love flowered in a haze of marijuana smoke and hallucinogens; warnings from the stage to stay away from the brown acid, along with the obligatory non-judgmental addendum that if you wanted to take it anyway, go ahead, it was your own trip, were interspersed with the musical acts, many of which celebrated drug use and intoxication as routes to greater inner knowledge and goodness. Change the world by getting high.
Not surprisingly, a million or two young people getting high did very little to usher in the Age of Aquarius and many became disillusioned with the counter-culture and took to more traditional methods of changing the world. Those who remained usually had their own, more personal reasons, for seeking salvation in intoxication. One person whose life and death was perhaps emblematic of the times was Gram Parsons, said by many to be the originator of the genre of music known as Country-Rock, or in his terms, "Cosmic American Music".
The lonely life and death of Gram Parsons.
April 2 was Emmylou Harris' birthday and Scott Johnson of Powerline posted an homage to her lustrous music at that time. He came to her music by way of his love of The Byrds and commented on her never resolved, and likely unconsummated, love for Gram Parsons:
Emmylou must have fallen hard for him; she seems to pay tribute to him in one way or another in every one of her shows as well as a few of her albums, starting with the song "Boulder to Birmingham" on her debut album. In her shows, whenever she introduces "Love Hurts" -- a song on which she provided the gorgeous harmony on the second Parsons solo album -- she says allusively: "This is what I like to think of as the beginning."
I came upon the music of Gram Parsons when he played on what I would consider one of the great albums of the 1960's, The Byrds'' fusion of folk-rock with country-rock, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He later left the Byrds and played with The Flying Burrito Brothers, who were one of the great bar bands of all time.
Gram Parsons was a true American original. He is widely credited with being the originator of country-rock music and at the least, was the fist country music rock star, complete with substance abuse and wild behavior.
His last album, Grievous Angel, was essentially a duet with Emmylou Harris, which was recorded in the fall of 1973 and released following his death from a drug overdose, in 1974. The album is heart breakingly beautiful and sad, and therein lies a tale.
Gram Parsons died on September 19, 1973, at the age of 26 from a mix of alcohol (reportedly Jack Daniels, the alcoholic intoxicant of choice by many rockers of the time) along with Heroin and morphine with traces of Cocaine and barbiturates for good measure. According to the web site The Gram Parsons Homepage, the death was accidental and overshadowed by what happened after his death, which became the stuff of legends.
When Phil Kaufman learned of the plan to bury his friend in New Orleans, he became distraught. He knew that Parsons had no connection whatsoever to that city. He knew that Parsons had little use for his stepfather, and would not have wanted any of his estate to pass to him. He knew that Parsons had not wanted a long, depressing, religious service with family and friends. Most of all he knew he had made a pact with Parsons, at the funeral of Clarence White: whoever died first, "the survivor would take the other guy's body out to Joshua Tree, have a few drinks and burn it."
There is much more background and explanation at the site and I encourage you to follow the links, however, my interest lies in a different direction.
I recall hearing of Gram Parsons' death and the subsequent excitement of the "body snatching" and feeling terribly sad but not surprised. I do not know when it crystallized for me but I always had the impression that his death was a suicide and after a while just assumed that was so. I used to make the macabre joke that "Grievous Angel" was a brilliant album, but not one to listen to when you were depressed. Almost every song deals with loss, with unrequited love, with people damaged and gone.
In the title song, Return of the Grievous Angel, the theme of loss and yearning runs throughout the refrain:
Oh, but I remembered something you once told me
And I'll be damned if it did not come true
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all lead me straight back home to youTwenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all lead me straight back home to you
In Love Hurts, the signature song for the Parsons-Harris duo, the vulnerability of love and the impossibility of love rubs raw:
Some fools think of happiness,
blissfullness,
togetherness,
Some fools fool themselves I guess,
but they're not fooling me.
I know it isn't true,
know it isn't true.
Love is just a lie
made to make you blue.Love hurts
Oooh oooh love hurts
Gram Parsons was born to Southern privilege, but his material wealth was marred by the chill of alcohol addiction and loss. His father committed suicide two days before Christmas Day 1958. A parent's suicide scars a child; the loss and rejection are often impossible to reconcile; Gram Parsons was 12 years old. His mother remarried Robert Parsons; Gram took the name and apparently was adopted by his step-Father. Shortly thereafter, Gram's mother began to drink heavily. She developed cirrhosis and died several years later, on the day Gram Parsons graduated from high school.
[Digression: Early losses of loved ones predispose people to later depressions. Depressions that arise in such cases often have different characteristics than what are commonly thought of as depressions based on chemical imbalances (an over-simplification, but an often useful over-simplification.) I will not get into the differences here, but will note that in such cases, Psychotherapy can be particularly helpful, augmented by anti-depressants when appropriate. While the pain never disappears and the loss is never fully resolved (how could it be?) its power to induce the pathological state of sadness known as depression can be significantly lessened. I could find no evidence that Gram Parsons became involved in any Psychotherapy; his self-medication consisted of various substances which offered him the illusion of peace and re-union.
At one time, there was an effort among Psychoanalysts to connect specific unconscious fantasies with specific, drug/alcohol induced, altered states. The effort ultimately failed to be clinically useful but did offer a worthwhile framework for understanding intoxication. Most intoxicants, especially in high doses, break down ego boundaries. Thus, people talk about "losing their sense of self" or "fusing with the cosmic oneness" when under the influence of hallucinogens. For vulnerable people who have never been able to metabolize significant losses, the urge for re-union can be partly met by using various intoxicants.]
Many suicidal people express the conscious wish to be re-united with lost loves. I imagine that Gram Parsons was particularly prone to this. Both of his parents died because of their substance abuse, yet rather than avoid such, he was drawn to drug and alcohol use; he first got high by using some of his mother's drugs, which she had secured from local Doctors.
Gram Parsons recorded two albums with Emmylou Harris and after the first, they embarked on the Fallen Angels tour and he suffered yet another devastating loss:
During the course of this tour, Parsons renewed his friendship with Clarence White, whom he had known at least since the recording of Sweetheart in 1968. But on July 14, after a gig with the Colonels in southern California, Clarence White was struck and killed by a drunk driver as he was loading equipment into his car.
Gram did not handle the loss well. Very often, current losses evoke many of the feelings and thoughts that were initially stirred up with earlier losses; this is especially true when the earlier losses had never been adequately dealt with:
The funeral was held on July 19, 1973 at a Catholic church in Palmdale, California. Parsons, drunk and extremely distraught, didn't enter the church for the official services, but waited outside and rejoined the mourners as they headed out to the gravesite. After the priest performed the burial rites, he and Bernie Leadon began to sing "Farther Along." Soon many of the mourners joined in on the country gospel standard, which both the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers had recorded. Clarence White's standout track on the last Byrds album became his own epitaph. Roland White expressed his thanks to Leadon and Parsons for the farewell hymn.
Those present at the funeral described Parsons as being very depressed. According to Chris Ethridge, Parsons told Phil Kaufman, "Phil, if this happens to me, I don't want them doing this to me. You can take me out to the desert and burn me. I want to go out in a cloud of smoke."
Shortly thereafter, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris recorded his last album, Grievous Angel, with 9 tracks. (Note: The lyrics from the lyricsondemand web site are mislabeled, and I have made the correct connections below.)
Return Of The Grievous Angel
Hearts On Fire
I Can't Dance
Brass Buttons
$1000 Wedding
Medley Live From Northern Quebec: (A) Cash On The Barrelhead/(B) Hickory Wind
Love Hurts
Ooh Las Vegas
In My Hour of Darkness
All but "I Can't Dance" (an ode to his inability to feel joy, perhaps), and "Ooh Las Vegas", (a paean to addiction), were overtly about loss and reunion. The final song on the album, "In My Hour of Darkness" was a tribute to three friends who had died. The middle verse was written for Clarence White but could have been written for Gram himself, and the refrain is a prayer:
Another young man safely strummed his
silver string guitar
And he played to people everywhere
Some say he was a star
But he was just a country boy,
his simple songs confess
And the music he had in him,
so very few possessIn my hour of darkness
In my time of need
Oh, Lord grant me vision
Oh, Lord grant me speed
It is certainly possible that Gram Parsons was not consciously and overtly suicidal when he drank and ate the lotus flower of oblivion, but his determination to negate himself and his determination to find blissful reunion could ultimately only have one ending.
"Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Rock" of the 60's represented a desperate, suicidal search for connection and meaning to many Baby Boomers; it offered the short cut of intoxication for the hard work, sometimes impossible work, of intimacy and psychic nourishment. It ultimately proved to be deadly to many of my contemporaries.
Gram Parsons had a wonderful gift but his own tortured, conflicted needs deprived us of his genius; his loss was as tragic as it was inevitable.
[NB: The original Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll ... and Suicidality was posted 4/21/06 and is a look at some of the current residual effects of the drug culture of the 60's.]
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