Song 172, Hickory Wind by the Byrds: Part 4, Hour of Darkness

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickies

Song 172

Hickory Wind by the Birds Part 4

Hour of Darkness

Before I start a brief warning.

This episode deals with drug addiction and death both by drug overdose and in car accidents.

Plus some discussion of misogyny misogyny and general bad male behavior towards women, and what is arguably corpse desecration.

Chris Hillman has always had a complicated relationship with Graham Parsons.

When Parsons left the birds, as we heard last episode, Hillman said, he was a drag personally, but a good musician.

In recent decades, Hillman has had what we might call the Paul McCartney problem.

Since Parsons' death at the far too young age of 26, Parsons, like so many musicians who die too young, has been hailed as a unique genius and as a pioneer in a genre he created more or less single-handed.

And there is an element of truth to that.

Parsons was a visionary, and he was a truly great songwriter.

But Parsons made six albums while he was alive, and his reputation rests, more or less, on three of those six.

And for two of those three, and one of the other three, Chris Hillman was his principal collaborator.

Hillman was the more senior musician.

In his eyes at least he was Parsons's mentor, and they shared a musical vision.

And when Parsons himself became a mentor to Emily Lou Harris, at times who in many ways has since outshone either of them, Hillman was the one who had told Parsons about her in the first place.

So for decades Chris Hillman has had the work he is proudest of, the work that he feels contributed a great deal to the world, and which has influenced generations of musicians, talked about not as great collaborative work that he did with his collaborator, but as the work of the great Graham Parsons.

But on the other hand, Chris Hillman is still alive, which is an advantage he definitely has over Parsons.

You may be

sweet and nice,

but that won't keep you warm at night

cause I'm the one

who showed you how

to do the things you're doing the Flying Burrito Brothers started out as a splinter group from the International Submarine Band

but one that was opposed to the turn towards country music that Graham Parsons was pushing for and one that didn't have Graham Parsons in.

As we talked about about two episodes ago, the original Flying Burrito Brothers consisted of Barry Tashian and Billy Briggs from the Remains.

And Ian Dunlop and Mickey Govin of the original lineup of the International Submarine Band.

Various other people would sit in with the Flame Burrito Brothers from time to time, like the sax player Bobby Keys,

who would later become a long-time sideman for the Rolling Stones, the guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who would go on to play with Taj Mahal, and Graham Parsons.

But after having a lack of success in California, this lineup of the Flying Burrito Brothers moved to the East Coast, and while they continued performing, Graham Parsons seems to have thought that this meant that he could just take the name of their band and use it for his own new project after leaving the birds.

How the West Coast version of the Flying Burrito Brothers formed is something that is told differently by different people.

And given the loose way in which everyone in this story seems to come and go from everyone else's bands, it seems likely that all the different stories have some element of truth to them.

The way Chris Hillman tells the story, he'd been thinking along the lines of the Flying Burrito Brothers before he even left the Birds, and he had brought in Clarence White and Gene Parsons with the idea that they would join him and Graham Parsons, who had apologised to him for quitting the group, and that Forsam had recorded some demos together, but White and Gene Parsons decided to stay with the Birds.

The way Graham Parsons told the story, after he got back from spending time with the Rolling Stones in the UK, he met up again with Chris Everidge, the former guitarist for the International Submarine Band, and the two of them had started performing together, including jamming with Leon Russell, the wrecking crew keyboard player who was just dipping his toe into the waters of performing himself with his band Asylum Choir.

else.

Welcome to Iron.

Give me western sons and daughters.

Oh, welcome to Iowa.

They talked with various other musicians, including Clarence White, and almost formed a band with Richie Fury of the Buffalo Springfield, before they decided to form separate bands.

Fury's band Poco would become another of the proto-country bands whose membership would intertwine with the other bands we've been talking about in this mini-series of episodes.

According to Parsons, when Hillman got back from the tour of South Africa, he came to see Parsons and said, I'm sorry, look, I didn't want to go to South Africa either.

It was the wrong thing to do, and I think I'll quit the birds and join you guys.

Either way, Parsons and Hillman moved in together, into a house that got christened Burrito Manor, and they put together a band consisting of themselves, Etheridge on bass, and sneaky Pete Kleinow, a pedal steel player who up to that point had mostly worked as a stop-motion animator, working on films like The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and T V shows like Gumby.

Kleino would continue working in animation and special effects, contributing to such films as Gremlins and The Empire Strikes Back, but would also develop a second career as the Pedal Steel player who played on basically every country rock session in LA the Red Rhodes didn't play, playing with Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, John Lennon, Joe Cocker, and many more.

And on drums was Fast Eddie Ho, who we first encountered as a member of the modern folk quintet, when they recorded This Could Be the Night.

Ho had gone on to be a session drummer, often getting work on records produced by other former MFQ members, like The Monkey's Pleasant Valley Sunday, produced by Chip Douglas, and Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello, produced by Jerry Yester.

He had also played on Mike Bloomfield, Al Cooper, and Steve Stilzer's Super Session album, and had been the Mamas and the Poppas live drummer, including playing with them at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Parsons described the group, just after it formed, as basically a southern soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar.

But the image they chose was far more country than soul.

They all went to Newdie's Rodeo Taylors to get rhinestone suits made.

For those who are unaware, Newdies had a very specific aesthetic that defined the look of a generation of country singers, and that was later taken up by several Californian rock musicians.

Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys would often wear nudie suits in the seventies, as would Michael Nesmith, and Parsons insisted on the Burrito brothers all wearing nudie suits.

Parsons' featured embroidered cannabis leaves and naked women on his lapels.

The core of the band was Parsons and Hillman, and the two men, who had a love-hate relationship, relationship, were at their closest at this point.

In particular, the two men had bonded over the fact that they both lost their fathers at an early age to suicide, and over their shared sense of humour, though they had little else in common.

Hillman says in his autobiography, in some ways it was like the odd couple, I serious and focused with a disciplined work ethic, while Graham was charismatic and completely disorganised.

I wanted to make great music, Graham wanted to be a star.

Though that's Hillman's assessment, and others have a very different view of Parsons.

Remember the quote from Keith Richards in the episode before last,

in which he said that Parsons was, along with John Lennon, the only pure musician he knew personally other than himself.

But importantly, as Hillman also said, we could practically finish one another's thoughts while writing or singing, and they soon began a songwriting collaboration that provided what would be the core of their first album, The Gilded Palace of Sin.

The first song they wrote together is definitely more Hillman's work than Parsons's.

As Hillman tells the story, the first verse and chorus of Sin City are about Larry Spector, the bird's manager, who Hillman regarded as a thief, and whose office was apparently on the 31st floor of the building it was in and had a gold door.

It seems like this whole town's been the same

On the 31st floor

A gold-plated

door

Won't keep out

the Lord's burning rain

Hillman says he wrote the first verse and chorus while Parsons was asleep before waking him up to complete the song

Though contemporary witnesses remember that Parsons sent a telegram to Keith Richards with the line, On the 31st floor a gold-plated door won't keep out the Lord's burning rain, because he was so proud of having written those lines.

But then it wouldn't be out of character for Parsons to take credit for a good line from Hillman, either.

According to Hillman, Parsons' main contribution to the song was the second verse, whose lyrics Hillman finds obscure.

But we don't

believe it

anymore

Cause we've got

our recruits

And our dream more

suit

So please show

your ID

and the door And then Hillman wrote the final verse which was about the murder of Robert Kennedy.

There were other songs on the album which leave a bad taste in the mouth though though, once one knows the stories behind them.

For a start, there's the opening track, Christine's Tune.

A lot of listeners may have wondered why that was called Christine's tune, rather than the more obvious devil in disguise.

There are actually two people who have been identified as the Christine in the title, both by authoritative sources.

One was a 19-year-old girl named Christine Frucker, who went by the name Miss Christine, because she and her friends were always referred to by Tiny Tim as Miss and their first names.

Miss Christine was the girlfriend of Alice Cooper, and was part of a group of girls known as the GTOs who did backing vocals on the closing track on the Burritos album.

We'll be hearing more about Miss Christine in future episodes as she intersects with all sorts of people but the important thing to know about her is that while she was by all accounts a talented, thoughtful, creative person who loved spending time with rock musicians, she didn't want to have sex with them particularly.

Partly because she didn't have a high sex drive, and partly because the scoliosis from which she suffered meant it was often painful.

Obviously, the existence of a 19-year-old girl who didn't want to have sex with them was the ultimate affront to the egos of rock stars.

The other possible Christine is Christine Gail Hinton, who was David Crosby's girlfriend at the time.

After splitting up with Nancy Ross, Crosby had first dated Johnny Mitchell, then dumped her for Hinton, who he fell in love with.

Either way, whichever Christine it was, was clearly hated by both Parsons and Hillman.

Both Christines died tragically young not very long after the release of the album.

Miss Christine died of a drug overdose while visiting the house shared by her boyfriend David Robinson and his band The Modern Lovers in 1972, aged 22.

Though I should point out here that the Modern Lovers were all very opposed to drug use and didn't even know she had anything on her at the time.

Christine Hinton died in a car crash aged 21 in 1969.

Crosby, who considered her the love of his life, later recorded the wordless a cappella tribute to her, I'd swear there was somebody here.

Out of respect to whichever dead young woman they'd slandered, the song's co-authors renamed the song Devil in Disguise in later performances.

Another song which leads to similar conflicted feelings is a song that Chris Etheridge started and which Chris Hillman later described as one of the two best lead vocals ever recorded by Graham, Hot Burrito No.

1.

you let me feel you deep inside.

And nobody

knew,

nobody's so.

Do you remember

the way you cried?

That and its companion, the faster hot burrito number two, were thrown together at the last minute because when the band started recording their first album, they didn't have enough songs.

Etheridge ended up bringing in two partial melodies he'd come up with as a child, which he used to play on the piano over and over again to annoy his parents so they wouldn't make him practice, and Parsons turned those melodies into the full songs, Hot Burrito No.

1 and Hot Burrito No.

2.

The lyrics to Hot Burrito No.

1 were written about Parsons' girlfriend Nancy Ross, the mother of his daughter and ex-girlfriend of David Crosby.

But around this time Parsons was in the process of dumping her, though she didn't realize this at first.

Indeed, he even asked her to marry him and told her to get herself a wedding dress made by nudie to match the band's nudie suits.

It turned out he was only doing it as a publicity stump for the band and had no intention of actually getting married.

Nancy told Pamela Debar, it was a big, awful, horrible joke.

This is the man I loved with my immortal soul.

I'm your toy,

I'm your old boy.

But I don't want no one but you to love me.

No, I wouldn't lie.

You know I'm not there to have God

The two soon split up.

As well as the six songs that Hillman and Parsons wrote together, and the two songs by Parsons and Etheridge, the album was rounded out with a remake of a song Parsons and Barry Goldberg had written for the International Submarine Band, Do You Know How It Feels, and two covers of soul songs written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman.

Do Write Woman, Do Write Man, originally recorded by Aretha Franklin, and Dark End of the Street, originally recorded by James Carr.

David Crosby added high harmonies to that track, making the album feature more original birds than the birds records that were being released at the same time.

And soon the band would have two original birds as permanent members.

While the covers are highlights of the album, they're also a sign of how rushed the album was.

The group had barely played together and were essentially rehearsing in the studio, and the group was similarly trying to sort their lineup out while they were recording.

When they started out, Fast Deady Ho was the drummer, as I've said, but Ho was in the band just long enough to get his share of the advance and play on two songs, Do you Know How It Feels and Sin City.

He was starting to suffer from substance abuse problems, and was literally falling asleep on the drum stool according to Hillman.

He left the band after those two songs.

He would go on to play on just one more album, Games Guitars Play by Harvey Mandel, the blues guitarist best known for playing in Canned Heat.

After that, Ho left the music industry and the public eye, to the extent that for decades most of the people he'd been associated with were convinced he was dead, though he eventually died in 2015, outliving of them.

Several other drummers were used for the rest of the album, but the one who came closest to being a full member was John Corneill, Parsons and Etheridge's former colleague in the International Submarine Band.

Corneill was with the band long enough to get a nudie suit, but didn't stay past the recording sessions.

According to Hillman, Corneill and Parsons didn't get on because Parsons thought that Corneille, who he'd known since they both lived in Florida, was lower class and Parsons didn't like working with someone who he essentially thought of as the help.

Corneille, though, always strongly disputed that characterisation, pointing out that he was from a fairly wealthy family himself.

His father had been mayor of the town.

What Hillman perceived as a difference in their class just came from the fact that Corneill had spent some time playing with country musicians in Nashville, and had picked up some of their accent and mannerisms to fit in, and was portraying himself as a little more of a hillbully than he really was.

Eventually, the group arranged a drummer swap.

Gene Clark, the birds' former lead singer, had formed a bluegrass rock group, Dillard and Clark, with Duck Dillard and guitarist Bernie Ledon.

Chris Hillman had also guested on a couple of tracks in their first album.

Get it on, brother, if

Michael Clark, the Birds' original drummer, had joined Dillard and Clark for live shows, but shortly before they made their second album, Dillard and Clark and the Burritos swapped drummers.

Michael Clark ended up in the Flying Burrito Brothers, meaning with Hillman they now had two original birds in the band, while the the Birds only had one.

Both Hillman and Sneaky Pete Kleino guested on the second Dillard and Clark album as well.

So, as the Flying Burrito Brothers' first album, The Gilded Palace of Sin, was released, they finally had a stable line-up.

Graham Parsons and Chris Hillman on guitar and vocals, Sneaky Pete Kleino on pedal steel, Chris Etheridge on bass, and Michael Clark on drums.

The Gilded Palace of Sin was an instant classic.

Though it never sold very well, it was hugely hugely influential on other musicians.

Bob Dylan said, The Flying Burrito Brothers, boy, I love them Their record instantly knocked me out and as we'll hear in future episodes on The Rolling Stones, the album had a huge influence on them as well.

They followed the album with a non-album single, The Train Song.

Several sources on the band say that the single was released to promote a tour the Transcontinental Pop Festival tour we heard about in the episode on the Grateful Dead, on which the group travelled by train with the dead, Gias Joplin, Joplin, the band, and others across Canada.

But the single came out almost a year before that tour and seems unconnected.

The track was produced by two musicians one would not expect to be producing a country rock band, but both of whom had been very influential on the California rock scene in which the Burrito Brothers came up.

Larry Williams, whose Little Richard Sandalite records for specialty records, had been huge with the British Invasion bands.

I got a girl named Pony Moroni.

She's as skinny as a stigma macaroni.

I see her rock and roll with her blue jeans on.

She's not very bad, just skinny and bone.

But I love her, and she loves me.

Well, how happy now we get and Williams's musical partner Johnny Guitar Watson, who had recorded tracks like Space Guitar back in 1954, more than a decade before people like Jimi Hendrix had started doing similar guitar experiments.

Everyone seems to have thought that the reason Parsons brought them in was just to party with his heroes, though, and the resulting single is not considered among the group's best work.

Six more days, and I'll be gone.

Get on the train that takes me home.

That old train's where I belong.

Home, home, it's gonna feel just fine

when that old train's gonna move me down.

That single is the only studio work by the first touring lineup of the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Soon after recording it, Chris Etheridge was gone from the band.

He decided to become a session player rather than continuing to perform with them.

Grant Parsons would later talk about this as having been the beginning of the end of the Flying Burrito Brothers, though at the same time he would also talk about Etheridge not having been the right bass player for the group.

There's probably an element of truth in both.

Etheridge was not a country player, and R ⁇ B was his first love.

That made his bass playing distinctive and brought the R ⁇ B element to what would otherwise be fairly straightforward country arrangements.

And after his departure, the Flying Burrito Brothers were a less interesting band as a result.

Dillard and Clark were also falling apart at the time, and so Bernie Leddon, their guitarist, joined the Flying Burrito Brothers, with Hillman switching back from guitar to bass.

Hillman and Parsons were starting to drift apart, partly because the two of them were no longer living together, and so they weren't collaborating every day as they had been.

And the Rolling Stones had once again reared their heads.

The Stones were in America doing a tour and recording an album, and they invited the Flying Burrito Brothers to perform on the same bill as them on a free festival they were doing.

My hometown's coming inside if you think I'm happy right

six days on the road and I'm going to make it home tonight

six days on the road and I'm going to make it home tonight

We'll hear more about the Altamont Festival in a future episode.

But Parsons and Keith Richards were once again hanging out, and the two of them went on a trip to the Joshua Tree National Park and took mescaline and cocaine together.

Parsons was hoping that Richards would produce the next Burrito's album, but Richards was too busy working on the next Stones album, Let It Bleed, an album on which Parsons' country influence is very present.

Indeed, some have claimed that the initial version of Hunky Tonk Women was actually co-written by Parsons, a claim I don't believe, but which sounds more plausible when you hear the version titled Country Honk released on the album.

is shining.

But Parsons was spending so much time with the Stones that he started missing gigs with his own band, eventually leading to a confrontation when Hillman found him him in the studio with the Stones when he should have been on stage, and Mick Jagger lectured Parsons about professionalism and his obligations to his bandmates.

The connection with the Stones did have one positive for the Flying Burrito Brothers, though, in that Jagger and Richards gave the group a song they'd recorded but not yet released.

And so the second Burrito Brothers album, Burrito Deluxe, featured the first released version of Wild Horses.

You know who I am.

You know I can't let you

slide

through my hands.

Wild

horses

Burrito Deluxe is an album that gets rather underrated now.

It's an album that's mostly made up of cover versions by a band who are clearly lacking in new songs.

And it's nowhere near as staggeringly innovative as The Gilded Palace of Sin, but it's still a very listenable album.

But it's an album that was consistently talked down over the years by its primary creative forces.

Graham Parsons thought it was a mistake to bring in Jim Dixon as a producer, that Hillman had deferred to Dixon's decisions too much, and that Dixon was trying too hard to make the album commercial.

While Hillman thought that Parsons was disengaged, drug-addled, and more interested in his celebrity friends than working.

One of those celebrity friends was Leon Mussell, who guested on one track on the album, and who was at the time in the middle of rehearsing the band for Joe Cocker's legendary Mad Dogs in English mentor.

me about something that I learned.

I stand there and tell that you ain't put your fuse on.

She couldn't smile, tells you where to saw my craft.

Hearing the cocker band also caused stress, as Parsons believed that that band were doing the kind of music he'd wanted to do with the burritos, and that they'd been beaten to his new music.

Parsons' behaviour became ever more erratic, especially as he, like so many in the bird story, had a fear of flying and had to be drugged to take flight.

Shortly after the release of Burrito Deluxe, Parsons and Hillman parted ways, very acrimoniously.

The Flying Burrito Brothers kept going for a while longer.

Indeed, a group just calling themselves the Burrito Brothers, with no flying, continues to this day, though they have no original members, and their connection to the group that made the Gilded Palace of Sin is tenuous at best.

But Burrito Deluxe was where they stopped being a major creative force.

The group continued with new lead singer Rick Roberts, and Roberts' first show with the group was at the Whiskier Gogo, where the Birds had previously made their name.

Indeed, the new lineup of the Burrito Brothers was supporting the new lineup of the Birds, and both bands spent the majority of the show on stage together, performing as one giant band, leading to the bizarre situation of both bands with which Graham Parsons had made his name performing Graham Parsons' signature song, but without Graham Parsons on stage.

Shortly afterwards, Gene Clark joined the Burrito Brothers briefly, though he left again quickly.

But for that time, three of the original birds were in the Flying Burrito Brothers, but only one, McGuinn, was in the Birds.

After one more album, the Flying Burrito Brothers split up, though various line-ups would later reform.

Bernie Leddon went on to join Linda Vonstadt's backing band, playing and singing on her third solo album.

I never

got

over

those blue eyes.

I see

them every

way.

I miss

those arms arms that held me

when all

the Lord

was there.

Other musicians on the album, though not on the same tracks as Leddon, included Don Hanley, Glen Frey, and Mandy Meisner.

And during the making of the album, those four discussed forming a band, and we'll be picking up on that in a future episode.

By this point, the Birds were, by all accounts, a far better live band than they had been in their heyday.

They had continued with the country rock sound that Parsons had inspired, and guitarist Clarence White, in particular, was considered one of the great live guitarists of his generation.

He'd invented a device called the string bender, which allowed him to get a pedal steel style tone from his guitar, and would use that to great effect.

And for the first time in their history, the birds were a genuinely excellent live band.

But despite getting back together with original producer producer Terry Mocher, the albums they were putting out were underwhelming at best.

Some of them have their admirers, and there's some decent music on some of them, but there's a general consensus that the last Great Birds album was Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and that the best of the later albums isn't as good as the worst album when Hillman was still in the band.

And the albums did badly commercially, as well as critically.

In February 1973, McGuinness decided to sack the rest of that line-up of Birds, and the original group reunited for one final album.

But that was generally considered a failure, other than the songs Gene Clark contributed, like Full Circle.

Clark had been continuing to make great music, and after the dissolution of that lineup of birds, he went on to make what is generally considered his masterpiece, the country psych album, No Other.

So the Lord is love, and love is like no other.

All alone we must be one.

But Clark's drug use and mental instability continued to mar his live performances, and it's heartbreaking reading descriptions of shows in later years, in which he was apparently barely coherent.

Clark, Hillman, and McGuinn formed a trio in the late 70s, but Clark was fired after their first album.

In the 80s, he and Michael Clark formed another lineup of birds, with John York, Rick Roberts of the Burrito Brothers, Blondie Chaplin, formerly of the Beach Boys and later a touring member of the Rolling Stones, and Mick Danko and Richard Manuel of the Band.

That band deteriorated over lawsuits over the band's name, with McGuinn, Hillman, and Crosby forming a rival birds for a time.

And both Gene Clark and Michael Clark died of drug and alcohol-induced illness in the early 90s.

Clarence White also died young.

He died, in fact, only months after being sacked by McGuinn, though according to McGuinness, the two had met the day before White's death and had talked about working together again.

White was working on a solo album and had just been on a package tour with Graham Parsons and Sneaky Pete Kleino, and had become friendly with Parsons, but he was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver and killed in one of the most senseless tragedies in a story full of them, aged only twenty-nine.

At White's funeral, Graham Parsons sang the spiritual Farther Along, which White had sung on a Birds album, and Parsons on Burrito Deluxe.

Further along,

we'll

know more about

it.

Further along,

Just before singing that, he said to his friend Phil Kaufman, Man, if I go first, don't let them put me in the ground like that.

Take my body out to the desert and burn it.

After leaving the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons had taken to hanging out with Terry Melcher, who, as well as producing the birds, was dealing with the aftershocks of a trauma we're going to talk about in a future episode.

Parsons and Melcher started working on a Parsons solo album, the tapes for which have never been released or, as far as I can tell, bootlegged, and which fell apart due to both men's instability.

After that, Parsons had travelled to Europe with his new wife Gretchen to hang out again with Keith Richards, and spent a month with the Stones while they were recording Exile on Main Street.

In my tornado

Yeah, I hear

Some sources say that Parsons played on the album, though he's not officially credited.

And we'll discuss that album more in a future episode.

But what is definitely the case is that Parsons and Richard spent much of the time encouraging each other to excesses of drug use, and that Parsons was eventually thrown out of the sessions by Jagger.

Dominique Tahl, a photographer at the sessions, said later, Keith and Graham were intimate like brothers, especially musically.

The idea was floating around that Graham would produce produce a Graham Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones records.

Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Graham and Keith might even tour together to promote it.

And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones.

So yes, there was tension.

Richards never produced a Graham Parsons album, and Parsons returned to the US.

And while Hillman later made comments about how Parsons had deteriorated, saying a lot of fat phobic things about his alcohol-induced weight gain, and also calling him a monster and a loud, stupid person, he allowed Parsons to join the burritos on stage a few times right before the band fell apart.

And Hillman and Rick Roberts told Parsons about a new singer Roberts had discovered, who they'd thought of getting into the band were it not on the brink of collapse.

Emilou Harris was at this time a failed folk singer who had released one album which hadn't been very successful and which she now disowns.

But Roberts and Hillman had been hugely impressed by her and suggested her as a duet partner to Parsons, who met up with her and sang a couple of songs with her on stage.

Parsons asked her to join him on his first solo album, and she agreed, but then heard little from him for months.

During that time, Parsons was wrestling more with his heroin addiction, but he was also seriously putting together a plan for his first album.

He got signed to one of others' records by Andy Wickham, the ANR man who had been responsible for signing Van Morrison to the label.

Initially, his hero Merle Haggard agreed to produce the album, but Haggard pulled out due to personal problems and was replaced by Rick Gretch, the former bass player from Traffic and Blind Faith, before the sessions started.

Gretsch also played bass on the sessions, and was joined by Barry Tashian, founder of the original Flying Burrito Brothers, on rhythm guitar and, excitingly for Parsons, who had wanted to be Elvis since he was a small child, the core of Elvis's then current live band, the TCB Band, James Burton on lead guitar, Ronnie Tutt on drums, and Glenn Hardin on piano.

But even with that line up, the the most impressive musician on the album was Emmy Lou Harris, who is now rightly regarded as one of the best harmony singers in country music history.

So good night, when you hold me tight, we'll let the fire burn

Harris later said, I would say until I had met Graham and started working with him, I didn't really understand or have a real love or feel for country music.

Like most of my generation, you know, country music was politically incorrect for us at that point.

It was associated with Republicans and right-wing and that sort of thing.

He taught me the beauty and the poetry, the simplicity, the honesty in the music.

And the love of harmony came from really singing with him.

And that love of harmony really shines through, like on their duet on the George Jones song, That's All It Took.

Even though the album is credited as a Grand Parsons solo album, it's a collaboration in every way that matters.

Parsons was, more than anything, a great collaborator.

All his most famous songs are co-written.

He'd been successful in two bands, and on this album, titled GP.

While he wrote or co-wrote half the material, the other half was cover versions.

The arrangements were by Glenn Hardin, who also did Elvis's arrangements, and Emily Lou Harris's voice is almost as prominent as Parsons on many songs.

Indeed, there's one track, Cry One More Time, a cover of a Jay Giles band song, which has Barry Tashian take the lead vocals rather than Parsons.

Partly, this can be explained by Parsons' own infirmity.

He was by this point seriously unwell from alcohol and heroin abuse, and he spent much of one session literally crawling on the floor.

As a result of this, when Parsons put together a band, The Fallen Angels, to tour to promote the album, Harris seems to have taken as much control as Parsons, and by all accounts was the main reason the band were anything like listenable.

But it was on that tour that Parsons played her a recording of the two of them singing together, and she really realised what a blend the two of them had, and how wonderfully they sang together.

I've learned

from

you.

I've really learned a lot,

really learned a lot.

After the tour, they went back into the studio to record the album that is generally considered Parsons' third masterpiece, after Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gilded Palace of Sin.

Grievous Angel was an even more collaborative album than GP had been.

Parsons produced the album himself this time, but it was intended as an album by Graham Parsons with Emmy Lou Harris, the launch of a new country duo to rival George Jones and Tammy Winnette.

This time Parsons was in better health.

He was still drinking too much, but he'd managed to cut out the heroine.

He was losing weight, and feeling better, and singing better than he had in years.

It again featured Elvis's TCB band, this time also including their bass player Emery Gordy Jr., replacing Gretsch's bass player, and again had relatively few new Parsons songs on it.

There were only two new songs, the rest being a mixture of cover versions and songs Parsons had written written much earlier.

They were so short of material that they actually included a faked live medley.

Medley Live from Northern Quebec features a cover version of the Louvre Brothers' Cash on the Barrelhead.

sun.

You can take a choice if you're twenty-one.

No money down,

no credit plan.

No time to chase you, cause I'm a beast of man.

And a new version of Hickory Wind with lovely harmonies from Harris, rather spoiled by the crowd noises.

of the richness

and pleasures.

What else could Lambra

feel

better?

The crowd noises on the track were provided by former birds manager Ed Tickner, scenes to Kim Fowley, Parsons' road manager Phil Kaufman, and more.

The last song to be recorded for the album was one of the two new originals.

In My Hour of Darkness had been started by Parsons after the funeral of Clarence White, and finished with the help of Harris, who is credited as a co-writer, though she says of it, I was an energy source rather than composer on that one.

All I really did was make a few odd suggestions in the wording of the lyric.

It was really Graham's song, a song very personal to him, and I tend to feel that his giving me credit was just an example of his generosity, a token of friendship and an acknowledgment of my help.

Much of the song is sung in three-part block harmony by Parsons, Harris and Linda Ronstadt, who guested just on that track.

After recording that track, Harris was optimistic about the future of the duo.

Parsons was doing better and had largely kicked heroin, and they'd made a great record.

Parsons mixed the album, then went off to the Joshua Tree National Park in the desert, the same place he'd spent time taking rescaling with Keith Richards.

This time he was going with a girlfriend, Margaret Fisher, and didn't tell his wife that she was going with him.

The two decided to take morphine, and as we've seen so often with people who got themselves clean and fell off the wagon, Parsons' tolerance had gone.

He died on September 19th, 1973.

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 been fixed

And the music he had in him

so very futs

While the intention had been to credit the album to Graham Parsons with Emmy Lou Harris, Parsons' widow, who had been jealous of Harris, though there's no evidence I've seen that their relationship was anything other than a professional one, changed the credit to just Graham Parsons, with Harris just being given a liner credit, and insisted that the cover photo be just Parsons.

The album did no better commercially than any of the other albums Parsons was involved in during his lifetime, but has has since become considered one of the great classic albums of the 70s, not least because of the efforts of Harris to keep her mentor's memory alive.

As Harris became one of the great superstars of country rock music, she would record many of his songs and talk about how he had been the one who had shaped her love for the genre.

one single day.

But you sure could sing

my

mind,

but you sure could sing.

Oh,

she sure could

sing.

Parsons became legendary after his death, thanks as much as anything to that conversation at Clarence White's funeral just months before his own.

Phil Kaufman decided to honour Parsons' wishes.

He partly blamed himself, because his job with Parsons, like the job he'd had with the Rolling Stones before him, was in part to try and stop him from doing anything dangerous and fix it if he did.

Kaufman stole his body before it could be buried, drove it back out to the desert, covered it in petrol, and set it on fire.

He didn't manage to completely destroy the remains, which were reclaimed by Parsons' family and buried.

Parsons's nieces said, It's kind of cool, if it's not your family.

Kaufman's legal bills for the corpse theft were paid for by a party, with performances by Bobby Boris Pickett of Monster Mash fame, the Modern Lovers, the same band who had been present at Miss Christine's death the year before, and the DJ Dr.

Demento.

The corpse theft turned Grand Parsons, who had only been a minor success during his lifetime but had always desperately craved stardom, into a legend who has eclipsed all his collaborators, and who more than fifty years later still gets biographies and documentaries about him and his face on magazine covers.

So Kaufman may well have been right.

It may well have been exactly what he would have wanted.

And Chris Hillman, Parsons' main collaborator on the albums that made his name, the man who shared a musical and aesthetic partnership with Parsons, even as he often despised him as a person, has had to be the one who lived.

The one who has made music for fifty more years, but had to do so in the shadow of the legendary genius who died too young, and has had to see the work he's most responsible for, often credited to his junior partner alone.

With the death of David Crosby, who will be coming up more in future episodes, last year, Hillman and McGuin are now the only two surviving members of the original line up of the Birds, and in twenty eighteen they did a tour together to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, playing the whole album live.

The album where they'd allowed a young country singer to take control of their hit band and drive them into commercial irrelevance, but which, 50 years on, was regarded as their greatest legacy.

Ecury Wind

keeps calling me home

Echery wind

balladoo, rock and roll,

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