Song 172, “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds: Part Two, Of Submarines and Second Generations

A history of folk music in 500 songs.

Song 172,

Hickory Wind by the Birds.

Part 2.

Of Submarines and Second Generations.

Before we begin, a brief warning.

This episode contains brief mentions of suicide, alcoholism, abortion and heroin addiction, and a brief excerpt of chanting of a Nazi slogan.

If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen.

As we heard in the last part, in October 1967, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired David Crosby from the Byrds.

It was only many years later, in a conversation with the group's ex-manager Jim Dixon, that Crosby realised that they didn't actually have a legal right to fire him.

The Birds had no partnership agreement, and according to Dixon, given that the original group had been Crosby, McGuinn, and Gene Clark,

it would have been possible for Crosby and McGuinness to fire Hillman, but not for McGuin and Hillman to fire Crosby.

But Crosby was unaware of this at the time and accepted a pay-off, with which he bought a boat and sailed to Florida, where he saw a Canadian singer-songwriter performing live.

Rose and flows of angel hair

and ice cream castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere.

I've looked at clouds that way,

but now they only block the sun.

They rain and snow on every one.

So many things.

We'll find out what happened when David Crosby brought Joni Mitchell back to California in a future story.

With Crosby gone, the group had a major problem.

They were known for two things, their jangly 12-string guitar and their soaring harmonies.

They still had the 12-string, even in their new slimmed down trio format, but they only had two of their four vocalists.

And while McGuinn had sung lead on most of their hits, the sound of the birds' harmony had been defined by Crosby on the high harmonies and Gene Clark's baritone.

There was an obvious solution available, of course, and they took it.

Gene Clark had quit the Byrds in large part because of his conflicts with David Crosby, and had remained friendly with the others.

Clark's solo album had featured Chris Hillman and Michael Clark, and had been produced by Gary Usher, who was now producing the Byrds records, and it had been a flop, and he was at a loose end.

After recording the Gene Clark with the Gustin Brothers album, Clark had started work with Kurt Becher, a singer-songwriter-producer who had produced hits for Tommy Rowe and the Association, and who was currently working with Gary Usher.

Becher produced two tracks for Clark, but they went unreleased.

To the crashing seas, she finds it seems that the shore she's looking for

is hardly showing.

Oh,

what is this song she's

That had been intended as the start of sessions for an album, but Clark had been dropped by Columbia rather than getting to record a second album.

He had put together a touring band with guitarist Clarence White, Bass player John York, and session drummer Fast Eddie Ho, but hadn't played many gigs.

And while he'd been demoing songs for a possible second solo album, he didn't have a record deal to use them on.

Cheesa Records, a label co-owned by Larry Specter, Peter Fonda, and Hugh Masakela, had put out some FOMO copies of one track, Yesterday Am I Right, but hadn't released it properly.

The letter that I got from you that told me you had gone has gone clear through me

What can I

say

that loses you

Clark like the birds had left Dixon and Tickner's management organization and signed with Larry Spector and Spector was wanting to make the most of his artists and things were very different for the birds now.

Clark had had three main problems with being in the birds.

Ego clashes with David Crosby, the stresses of being a pop star with a screaming teenage fan base, and his fear of flying.

Clark had really wanted to have the same kind of role in the birds that Brian Wilson had with the Beach Boys.

Appear on the records, write songs, do TV appearances, and maybe play local club gigs, but not go on tour playing to screaming fans.

But now David Crosby was out of the group and there were no screaming fans anymore.

The birds weren't having the kind of pop hits they'd had a few years earlier, and were now playing to the hippie audience.

Clark promised that with everything else being different, he could cope with the idea of flying.

If necessary, he'd just take tranquilizers or get so drunk he passed out.

So Gene Clark rejoined the birds.

According to some sources, he sang on their next single, Going Back, though I don't hear his voice in the mix.

No more electric trains,

no more trees to climb.

But thinking young and growing older

is no sin,

and I can play the game of life

to

According to McGuinn, Clark was also an uncredited co-writer on one song on the album they were recording, Get to You.

But before sessions had gone very far, the group went on tour.

They appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show, mirroring their new single and Mr.

Spaceman, and Clark seemed in good spirits.

But on the tour of the Midwest that followed, According to their road manager of the time, Clark was terrified, singing flat and playing badly, and his guitar and vocal mic were left out of the mix.

And then it came time to get on a plane, and Clark's old fears came back, and he refused to fly from Minneapolis to New York with the rest of the group, instead getting a train back to LA.

And that was the end of Clark's second stint in the Birds.

For the moment, the Byrds decided they were going to continue as a trio on stage and a duo in the studio, though Michael Clark did make an occasional return to the sessions as they progressed.

But of course, McGuinness and Hillman couldn't record an album entirely by themselves.

They did have several tracks in a semi-completed state still featuring Crosby, but they needed people to fill his vocal and instrumental roles on the remaining tracks.

For the vocals, Usher brought in his friend and collaborator Kurt Becher, with whom he was also working at the time in a band called Sagittarius.

the

Because by there's sharing of the path I've only dreamed

Another time

you'll be the one who's found the light and love

She's also found her dead

Becher was a skilled harmony vocalist.

According to Busher, he was one of the few vocal arrangers that Brian Wilson looked looked up to, and Jerry Yester had said of the modern folk quartet that the only vocals that competed with us back then was Kurt Becher's group.

And he was more than capable of filling Crosby's vocal gap, for there was never any real camaraderie between him and the birds.

He particularly disliked McGuinn, who he said, was just such a poker face.

He never let you know where you stood, there was never any likeness.

And he said of the sessions as a whole, I was really thrilled to be working with the birds, and at the same time I was glad when it was all over.

There was just no fun and they were such weird guys to work with, they really freaked me out.

Someone else who Usher brought in, who seems to have made a better impression, was Red Rhodes.

Rhodes was a pedal steel player and one of the few people to make a career on the instrument outside pure country music, which is the genre with which the instrument is usually identified.

Rhodes was a country player, but he was the country pedal steel player of choice for musicians from the pop and folk rock world.

He worked with Usher and Becher on albums by Sagittarius and the Millennium, and played on records by Cass Elliott, Carol King, The Beach Boys, and The Carpenters, among many others, though he would be best known for his long-standing association with Michael Nesmith of the Monkeys, playing on most of Nesmith's recordings from 1968 through 1992.

Someone else who was associated with the Monkeys was Moog player Paul Beaver, who we talked about in the episode on Hey Jude, and who had recently played on the Monkeys Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones Limited album.

And the fourth person brought in to help the group out was someone who was already familiar to them.

Clarence White was, like Red Rhodes, from the country world.

He'd started out in a bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels.

But White had gone electric and formed one of the first country rock bands, a group named Nashville West, as well as becoming a popular session player.

He had already played on a couple of tracks on Younger Than Yesterday, as well as playing with Hillman and Michael Clark on Gene Clark's album with The Gustin Brothers, and being part of Clark's touring band with John York and Fast Eddie Ho.

The album that the group put together with these session players was a triumph of sequencing and production.

Usher had recently been keen on the idea of cross-fading tracks into each other, as the Beatles had on Sergeant Pepper, and had done the same on the two Chad and Jeremy albums he produced.

By clever cross fading and mixing, Usher managed to create something that had the feel of being a continuous piece, despite being the product of several very different creative minds, with Usher's pop sensibility and arrangement ideas being the glue that held everything together.

McGuinness was interested in sonic experimentation.

He, more than any of the others, seems to have been the one who was most pushing for them to use the Moog, and he continued his interest in science fiction with the song Space Odyssey, inspired by the Arthur C.

Clarke short story The Sentinel, which was also the inspiration for the then-forthcoming film 2001 A Space Odyssey.

And every song of fear the men ever looked so bad.

Then there was Chris Hillman, who was coming up with country material like old John Robertson.

No one cared to take any time to find out

what he was all about.

And finally, there was David Crosby.

Even though he'd been fired from the group, both McGuinn and Hillman didn't see any problem with using the songs he had already contributed.

Three of the album's eleven songs are compositions that are primarily by Crosby, though they're all co-credited to either Hillman or both Hillman and McGuinn.

Two of those songs are largely unchanged from Crosby's original vision, just finished off by the rest of the group after his departure.

But one song is rather different.

Moving slow.

Draft Morning was a song that was important to Crosby, and was about his and the group's feelings about the draft and the ongoing Vietnam War.

It was a song that had meant a lot to him, and he'd been part of the recording for the backing track.

But when it came to doing the final vocals, McGuinness and Hillman had a problem.

They couldn't remember all the words to the song, and obviously there was no way they were going to get Crosby to give them the original lyrics, so they rewrote it, coming up with new lyrics where they couldn't remember the originals.

But there one other contribution to the track that was very distinctively the work of Usher.

Gary Usher had a predilection at this point for putting music concrete sections in otherwise straightforward pop songs.

He'd done it with Faking It by Simon and Garfunkel, on which he did uncredited production work, and did it so often that it became something of a signature of records on Columbia in 1967 and 68, even being copied by his friend Jim Guercio on Susan by the Buckinghams.

Usher had done this in particular on the first two singles by Sagittarius, his project with Kurt Becher.

In particular, the second Sagittarius single, Hotel Indiscreet, had had a very jarring section, and a warning here: this contained some brief chanting of an artist slogan.

What for?

And how long, my children?

How long will we be made to suffer the utter degradation of everything we hold safe?

My fellow flower,

the time is upon us to open the doors and purify the foul

pestilent air within,

standing naked before the eternal judge and proclaiming

we are all hip

two three four hip two three four hip two three

here

That was the work of a comedy group that Usher had discovered and sent to Columbia.

The Fire Sign Theatre was so named because, like Usher, they were all interested in astrology, and they were all fire signs.

Usher was working on their first album, waiting for the electrician or someone like him, at the same time as he was working on the Birds album.

Oh, yes.

Oh, oh, that's very good.

Yes, that's very good.

Now, now you are going to stay there until you obtain true enlightenment.

Rubs again.

Rumble, grumble.

Folks, let me turn you on to Medium Rari.

And he decided to bring in the fire signs to contribute to draft mourning.

Crosby was, understandably, apoplectic when he heard the released version of Draft Morning.

As far as Hillman and McGuinn were concerned, it was always a bird song.

And just because Crosby had left the band didn't mean they couldn't use material he'd written for the birds.

Crosby took a different view, saying later, It was one of the sleaziest things they ever did.

I had an entire song finished.

They just casually rewrote it and decided to take half the credit.

How was that?

Without even asking me, I had a finished song entirely mine.

I left.

They did the song anyway.

They rewrote it and put it in their names.

And mine was better.

They just took it because they didn't have enough songs.

What didn't help was that the publicity around the album, titled The Notorious Bird Brothers, minimised Crosby's contributions.

Crosby is on five of the eleven tracks.

As he said later, I'm all over that album.

They just didn't give me credit.

I played, I sang, I wrote, I even played bass on one track, and they tried to make out that I wasn't even on it, that they could be that good without me.

But the album, like earlier Birds albums, didn't have credit saying who played what, and the cover only featured McGuinn, Hillman, and Michael Clark in the photo, along with a horse, which Crosby took as another insult, as representing him.

Though as McGuinness said, if we had intended to do that we would have turned the horse around.

Even though Michael Clarke was featured on the cover, and even owned the horse that took Crosby's place, by the time the album came out he too had been fired.

Unlike Frosby, he went quietly and didn't even ask for any money.

According to McGuinn, he was increasingly uninterested in being in the band, suffering from depression, and missing the teenage girls who had been the group's fans a year or two earlier.

He gladly stopped being a bird and went off to work in a hotel instead.

In his place came Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelly, fresh out of a band called The Rising Suns.

it's time you felt like you did that.

There's just no percentage in to remember in the past.

It's time you learned to live again at last.

You've got to leave your yesterday

and take a giant step outside your mind.

We've mentioned the Rising Suns briefly in some previous episodes, but they were one of the earliest LA folk rock bands and had been tipped to go on to greater things, and indeed many of them did, though not as part of the Rising Suns.

Jesse Lee Kinkade, the least well-known of the band, only went on to release a couple of singles and never had much success, but his songs were picked up by other acts.

His Baby You Come Rolling Cross My Mind was a minor hit for the Peppermint Trolley Company.

summer rain, you come back to me

again

when the feeling comes, it's like a thousand drums

pounding in my heart.

Since we've been apart,

baby, you come rolling across my mind,

baby, you come rolling across my mind.

And Harry Nilson recorded Kincaid's She Sang Hymns Out of Tune.

Early that morning she passed away.

Passes to the people,

the people who are

she

sang hymns out of tune,

she

sang hymns out of tune, and carried

But Kinkade was the least successful of the band members, and most of the other members are going to come up in future episodes of the podcast.

Bass player Gary Mark had played for a while with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Lead singer Taj Mahal is one of the most respected blue singers of the last 60 years.

Original drummer Ed Cassidy went on to form the progressive rock band Spirit.

And lead guitarist Rai Kuda went on to become one of the most important guitarists in rock music.

Kelly had been the last to join the Rising Suns, replacing Cassidy.

But he was in the band by the time they released their one single, a version of Reverend Gary Davis's Candyman, produced by Terry Melcher, with Kincaid on lead vocals.

That hadn't been a success, and the group's attempt at a follow-up.

The Goffin and King song Take a Giant Step, which we heard earlier, was blocked from release by Columbia as being too druggy, though there were no complaints when the Monkees released their version as the B-side to Last Train to Clarksville.

The Rising Suns, despite being hugely popular as a live act, fell apart without ever releasing a second single.

According to Marker, Mahal realised that he would be better off as a solo artist, but also Columbia didn't know how to market a white group with a black lead vocalist, leading to Kincaid singing lead on their one-release single.

and producer Terry Melcher trying to get Mahal to sing more like a white singer on Take a Giant Step.

And some in the band thought that Terry Melcher was deliberately trying to sink their career because they refused to sign to his publishing company.

After the band split up, Marker and Kelly had formed a band called Fusion, which Birds biographer Johnny Rogan describes as being a jazz fusion band, presumably because of their name.

Listening to the one album the group recorded, it is in fact more blues rock, very like the music Marker made with The Rising Suns and Captain Beefheart.

But Kelly's not on that album.

because before it was recorded he was approached by his cousin Chris Hillman and asked to join the Birds.

At the time, Fusion were doing so badly that Kelly had to work a day job in a clothes shop, so he was eager to join a band with a string of hits who were just about to conclude a lucrative renegotiation of their record contract, a renegotiation which may have played a part in McGuin and Hillman firing Crosby and Clark, as they were now the only members on the new contract.

The choice of Kelly made a lot of sense.

He was mostly just chosen because he was someone they knew and they needed a drummer in a hurry.

They needed someone new to promote the notorious Bird Brothers and didn't have time to go through a laborious process of auditioning, and so just choosing Hillman's cousin made sense.

But Kelly also had a very strong high voice, and so he could fill in the harmony parts that Crosby had sung, stopping the new power trio version of the band from being too thin-sounding, in comparison to the five-man band they'd been not that much earlier.

The Notorious Bird Brothers was not a commercial success.

It didn't even make the top 40 in the US, though it did in the UK, to the presumed chagrin of Columbia, who'd just paid a substantial amount of money for this band who were getting less successful by the day.

But it was, though, a gigantic critical success, and is generally regarded as the group's creative pinnacle.

Robert Christgau, for example, talked about how LA rather than San Francisco was where the truly interesting music was coming from, and gave guarded praise to Captain Beefheart, Van Dyke Parks, and the Fifth Dimension, the vocal group, not the Birds album, but talked about three albums as being truly great: The Beach Boys Wild Honey, Loves Forever Changes, and The Notorious Bird Brothers.

He also incidentally talked about how the two songs that Crosby's New Discovery Joni Mitchell had contributed to a Judy Collins album were much better than most folk music, and how he could hardly wait for her first album to come out.

And that, more or less, was the critical consensus about The Notorious Bird Brothers, that it was, in Chris Gow's words, simply the best album the Birds have ever recorded, and that gone are the weak usually folky tracks that have always flawed their work.

McGuin though thought that the album wasn't yet what he wanted.

He had become particularly excited by the potentials of the Moog synthesizer, an instrument that Gary Usher also loved, during the recording of the album, and had spent a lot of time experimenting with it, coming up with tracks like the then unreleased Moog Vaga.

And McGuinn had a concept for the next Birds album, a concept he was very excited about.

It was going to be nothing less than a grand-sweeping sweeping history of American popular music.

It was going to be a double album.

The new contract said that they should deliver two albums a year to Columbia, so a double album made sense.

And it would start with Appalachian folk music, go through country jazz and R and B, through the folk rock music the Birds had previously been known for, and into Moog experimentation.

But to do this the Birds needed a keyboard player.

Not only would a keyboard player help them fill out their thin on stage sound, if they got a jazz keyboardist then they could cover the jazz material in McGuinness's concept album idea as well.

So they went out and looked for a jazz piano player.

And happily, Larry Specter was managing one.

Or at least, Larry Spector was managing someone who said he was a jazz pianist.

But Graham Parsons said he was a lot of things.

But the sun comes up without her,

that doesn't know she's gone.

And it remembers nothing

that she said.

Graham Parsons was someone who had come from a background of unimaginable privilege.

His maternal grandfather was the owner of a Florida citrus fruit and real estate empire, so big that his mansion was right in the centre of what was then Florida's biggest theme park, built on land he owned.

As a teenager, Parsons had had a whole wing of his parents' house to himself, and had had servants to look after his every need, and as an adult, he had a trust fund that paid him $100,000 a year, which in $1968 would be equivalent to a little under $900,000 in today's money.

Two events in his childhood had profoundly shaped the life of young Graham.

The first was in February 1956, when he went to see a new singer who he'd heard on the radio, and who according to the local newspaper had just recorded a new song called Heartburn Motel.

Parsons had tried to persuade his friends that this new singer was about to become a big star.

One of his friends had said, I'll wait till he becomes famous.

As it turns out, the day Parsons and the couple of friends he did manage to persuade to go with him saw Elvis Presley was also the day that Heartbreak Hotel entered the billboard charts at number 68.

But even at this point, Elvis was an obvious star and the headliner of the show.

Young Graham was enthralled, but in retrospect he was more impressed by the other acts he saw on the bell.

That was an all-star line-up of country musicians, including Mother Maybell and the Carter sisters, and especially the Louvin brothers, arguably the greatest country music vocal duo of all time.

in things I despise.

I

like

the Christian mind.

Young Graham remained mostly a fan of rockabilly music rather than country, and would remain so for another decade or so.

But a seed had been planted.

The other event, much more tragic, was the death of his father.

Both Parsons' parents were functioning alcoholics, and both by all accounts were unfaithful to each other, and their marriage was starting to break down.

Graham's father was also, by many accounts, dealing with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder for his time serving in the Second World War.

On December 23, 1958, Graham's father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Everyone involved seemed sure it was suicide, but it was officially recorded as natural causes because of the family's wealth and prominence in the local community.

community.

Graham's Christmas present from his parents that year was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and according to some stories I've read, his father had left a last message on a tape in the recorder, but by the time the authorities got to hear it, it had been erased apart from the phrase, I love you, Graham.

After that, Graham's mother's drinking got even worse, but in most ways his life still seemed charmed, and the descriptions of him as a teenager are about what you'd expect from someone who was troubled, with a predisposition to addiction, but who was also unbelievably wealthy, good-looking, charming, and talented.

And the talent was definitely there.

One thing everyone has agreed on is that from a very young age Graham Parsons took his music seriously, and was determined to make a career as a musician.

Keith Richards later said of him, Of the musicians I know personally, although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too, the two had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine with Graham Parsons and John Lennon, and that was, whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial, that's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier.

You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling.

But Graham and John were rarely pure musicians.

All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game.

That's not the impression many other people have of Parsons, who was almost uniformly described as an incessant self-promoter, and who from his teens onwards would regularly plant fake stories about himself in the local press, usually some variant of him having been signed to RCA records.

Most people seemed to think that Image was more important to him than anything.

In his teens he started playing in a series of garage bands around Florida and Georgia, the two states in which he was brought up.

One of his early bands was largely created by poaching the rhythm section who were then playing with Kent Lavoie, who later became famous as Lobo, and had hits like Me and You and a dog named Boo.

Lavoie apparently held a grudge.

Decades later he would still say that Parsons Parsons couldn't sing or play or write.

Another musician on the scene with whom Parsons associated was Bobby Braddock, who would later go on to co-write songs like D-I-V-O-R-C-E for Tammy Winnette and the song He Stopped Loving Her Today, often considered the greatest country song ever written, for George Jones.

Jones would soon become one of Parsons' musical idols, but at this time he was still more interested in being Elvis or Little Richard.

We're lucky enough to have a 1962 live recording of one of his garbage bands, The Legends, the band that featured the bass player and drummer he'd poached from Lobo.

They made an appearance on a local TV show, and a friend with a tape recorder recorded it off the TV, and decades later posted it online.

Of the four songs in that performance, two are RB covers, Little Richard's Rip It Up and Made Charles's What Did I Say, and a third is the old Western swing classic Guitar Boogie Shuffle.

But the interesting thing about the version of Rip It Up is that it's sung in an Everly Brothers style harmony, and the fourth song is a recording of the Everly's Let It Be Me.

The Everlies were of course hugely influenced by the Louvin brothers, who had so impressed young Graham six years earlier, and in this performance you can hear for the first time the hints of the style that Parsons would make his own a few years later.

always

let

it

be

Incidentally, the other guitarist in The Legends, Jim Stafford, also went on to a successful musical career, having a top-five hit in the 70s with Spiders and Snakes.

wanna do

I got silly and found a frog in the water by hollow log and I shook it at her but I said just frogs for you

And she said

I don't like spiders and snakes

And that ain't what it takes to love me

I don't like spiders Soon after that T V performance though, like many musicians of his generation, Parsons decided to give up on rock and roll, and instead to join a folk group.

The group he joined, the Shilohs, were a trio who were particularly influenced by the Journeymen, John Phillips' folk group before he formed the Mamas and the Poppers, which we talked about in the episode on San Francisco.

At various times, the group expanded with the addition of some female singers, trying to capture something of the sound of the new Christie minstrels.

In 1964, with the band members still in school, the Shilohs decided to make a trip to Greenwich Village and see if they could make the big time as folk music stars.

They met up with John Phillips, and Parsons stayed with John and Michelle Phillips in their home in New York.

This was around the time the two of them were writing California Dreaming.

Phillips got the Shilohs an audition with Albert Grossman, who seemed eager to sign them until he realised they were still schoolchildren just on a break.

The group were, though, impressive enough that he was interested, and we have some recordings of them from a year later which show that they were surprisingly good for a bunch of teenagers.

Is there hope for the future?

Say

Other than Phillips, the other major connection that Parsons made in New York was the folk singer Fred Neal, who we've talked about occasionally before.

Neal was one of the great songwriters of the Greenwich Village scene, and many of his songs became successful for others.

His Dolphins was recorded by Tim Buckley.

Most famously, his Everybody's Talking was a hit for Harry Nilsson.

And he wrote Another Side of This Life, which became something of a standard.

It was recorded by the Animals in The Lovin' Spoonful, and Jefferson Airplane, as well as recording the song, included it in their regular set lists, including at Monterey.

And that's the other side of

According to at least one biographer though, Neil had another more pernicious influence on Parsons.

He may well have been the one who introduced Parsons to heroin, though several of Parsons' friends from the time said he wasn't yet using hard drugs.

By spring 1965, Parsons was starting starting to rethink his commitment to folk music, particularly after Mr.

Tambourine Man became a hit.

He talked with the other members about their need to embrace the changes in music that Dylan and the Birds were bringing about, but at the same time he was still interested enough in acoustic music that when he was given the job of arranging the music for his high school graduation, the group he booked were the Dillards.

That graduation day was another day that would change Parsons' life, as it was the day his mother died of alcohol-induced liver failure.

Parsons was meant to go on to Harvard, but first he went back to Greenwich Village for the summer, where he hung out with Fred Neal and Dave Van Ronk, and started using heroin regularly.

He went to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, and he was neighbours with Stephen Stills and Richie Fury, the three of them talked about forming a band together before Stills moved west.

And on a brief trip back home to Florida between Greenwich Village and Harvard, Parsons spoke with his old friend Jim Stafford, who made a suggestion to him.

Instead of trying to do folk music, which was clearly falling out of fashion, why not try to do country music, but with long hair like the Beatles?

He could be a country beetle.

It would be an interesting gimmick.

Parsons was only at Harvard for one semester before flunking out, but it was there that he was fully reintroduced to country music, and in particular to three artists who would influence him more than any others.

He'd already been vaguely aware of Buck Owens, whose act naturally had recently been covered by the Beatles.

Might win a lost skin.

You can't never tell.

But it was at Harvard that he gained a deeper appreciation of Owens.

Owens was the biggest star of what had become known as the Bakersfield Sound, a style of country music that emphasised a stripped-down electric band line-up, with telecasta guitars, a heavy drumbeat, and a clean sound.

It came from the same hunky-tonk and western swing boots as the rockabilly music that Parsons had grown up on, and it appealed to him instinctively.

In particular, Parsons was fascinated by the fact that Owens' latest album had a cover version of a drifters song on it, and then he got even more interested when Mae Charles put out his third album of country songs and included a version of Owens's Together Again.

And nothing else, baby.

Cause we're together again.

This suggested to Parsons that country music and the RMB he'd been playing previously might not be quite so far apart as he'd thought.

At Harvard, Parsons was also introduced to the work of another Bakersfield musician, who like Owens was produced by Ken Nelson, who also produced the Louvin Brothers records, and who we heard about in previous episodes as he produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson.

Merle Haggard had only had one big hit at the time, My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers.

I'm all through

ever trusting

anyone.

The only thing I can count on now is my fingers.

I wasn't good

But he was about to start a huge run of country hits that would see every single he released for the next 12 years make the country top 10,

most of them making number 1.

Haggard would be one of the biggest stars in country music, but he was also to be arguably the country musician with the biggest influence on mock music since Johnny Cash.

And his songs would soon start to be covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Everly Brothers to the Beach Boys.

And the third artist that Parsons was introduced to was someone who, in most popular narratives of country music, is set up in opposition to Haggard and Owens, because they were representatives of the Bakersfield sound, while he was the epitome of the Nashville sound to which the Bakersfield sound is placed in opposition, George Jones.

But of course, anyone with ears will notice huge similarities in the vocal styles of Jones, Haggard, and Owens.

Now the race is on, and here comes Pride at the backstretch.

Heartaches are going to the inside.

My dear, Owens, Haggard, and Jones are all somewhat outside the scope of this series, but are seriously important musicians in country music.

I would urge anyone who's interested in them to check out Tyler May Hanko's podcast, Cocaine and Rhinestones, season one of which has episodes on Haggard and Owens, as well as on the Leuven Brothers who I also mentioned earlier, and season two of which is entirely devoted to Jones.

When he dropped out of Harvard after one semester, Parsons was still mostly under the thrall of the Greenwich Village Folkeys.

There's a recording of him made over Christmas 1965 that includes his version of Another Side of This Life.

I've been living

and there's another side of

But he was encouraged to go further in the country direction by John Noose.

And I hope that's the correct pronunciation.

I haven't been able to find any recordings mentioning his name.

Who had introduced him to this music and who also played guitar.

Parsons, Noose, bass player Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Govind formed a band that was originally called Grand Parsons and the like.

They soon changed the name though, inspired by an R-Gang short in which the gang became a band.

We now present the International Silver Screen Submarine Band.

Okay, men.

Shortening the name slightly, they became the International Submarine Band.

Parsons rented them a house in New York, and they got a contract with Gold Star Records and released a couple of singles.

The first of them, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, was a cover of the theme to a comedy film that came out around that time and is not especially interesting.

The second single is more interesting.

Some up folk is a song by Parsons and Noose and shows a lot of influence from the birds.

Do you have me

with my

While in New York with the International Submarine Band, Parsons made another friend in the music business.

Barry Tashian was the lead singer of her band called The Remains, who had put out a couple of singles.

The remains are now best known for having been on the bill on the Beatles' last ever tour, including playing as support on their last ever show at Candlestick Park, but they split up before their first album came out.

After spending most of 1966 in New York, Parsons decided that he needed to move the International Submarine Band out to LA.

There were two reasons for this.

The first was his friend Brandon DeWyld, an actor who had been a child star in the 50s it's him at the end of Shane, who was thinking of pursuing a musical career.

DeWilde was still making TV appearances, but he was also a singer.

John Neos said that DeWilde sang harmony with Parsons better than anyone except Demi Lou Harris, and he had recorded some demos with the International Submarine Band backing him, like this version of Buck Owens's Together Again.

And nothing else matters

We're together again

And nothing else matters

But we're together again

DeWilde had told Parsons he could get the group some work in films.

DeWilde made good on that promise to an extent.

He got the group a cameo in The Trip, a film we've talked about in several other episodes which was being directed by Roger Corman, the director who worked a lot with David Crosby's father, and was coming out from American International Pictures, the company that put out the Beach Party films.

But while the group were filmed performing one of their own songs, in the final film their music was overdubbed by the electric flag.

The Trip starred Peter Fonder, another member of the circle of people around David Crosby and another son of Privilege, who at this point was better known for being Henry Fonda's son than for his own film appearances.

Like DeWilde, Fonda wanted to become a pop star, and he had been impressed by Parsons and asked if he could record Parsons' song November Nights.

Parsons agreed, and the result was released on Cheesa Records, the label we talked about earlier that had put out promos of Gene Clark,

in a performance produced by Hugh Masakala.

You've seen all my best, and you heard all the stories I tell

You think you've been taken for granted You're probably

right

I'll remember an November night when the dawn on your doorway The other reason the group moved west though was that Parsons had fallen in love with David Crosby's girlfriend, Nancy Ross, who soon became pregnant with his daughter.

Much to Parsons' disappointment, she refused to have an abortion.

Parsons bought the International Submarine Band a house in LA to rehearse in, and moved in separately with Nancy.

The group started playing all the hottest clubs around LA, supporting bands like Love and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but they weren't sounding great, partly because Parsons was more interested in hanging around with celebrities than rehearsing.

The rest of the band had to work for a living, and so took their live performances more seriously than he did, while he was spending time catching up with his old folk friends like John Phillips and Fred Neal, as well as getting deeper into drugs and, like seemingly every musician in 1967, Scientology, though he only dabbled in the latter.

The group were also, though, starting to split along musical lines.

Dunlop and Govind wanted to play RB and garage rock, while Parsons and Noose wanted to play country music.

And there was a third issue.

Which record label should they go with?

There were two labels interested in them, neither of them particularly appealing.

The offer that Dunlop in particular wanted to go with was from, of all people, Jay Ward Records.

Let's greet them as they come on.

The Bullwinkle Phil Harmonic.

Jay Ward was the producer and writer of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Peabody and Sherman, Dudley Doo Wright and other cartoons, and had set up a record company which as far as I've been able to tell had only released one record, and that five years earlier.

We just heard a snippet of it.

But in the mid sixties several cartoon companies were getting into the record business.

We'll hear more about that when we get to Song 186.

And Ward's company apparently wanted to sign the International Submarine Band and were basically offering to throw money at them.

Parsons, on the other hand, wanted to go with Lee Hazelwood International.

This was a new label set up by someone we've only talked about in passing, but who was very influential on the LA music scene, Lee Hazelwood.

Hazelwood had got his start producing country hits like Sanford Clark's The Fool.

He'd then moved on to collaborating with Lester Sill, producing a series of hits for Dwayne Eddy, whose unique guitar sound Hazelwood helped come up with.

After splitting off from Syl, who had gone off to work with Phil Spector, who had been learning some production techniques from Hazelwood, Hazelwood had gone to work for Reprise Records, where he had a career in a rather odd niche, producing hit records for the children of Rat Pack stars.

He'd produced Dino Desi and Billy, who consisted of Future Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinchy, plus Desi Arnaz Jr.

and Dean Martin Jr.

While you're out running around, yeah,

I'm sitting home all alone.

I'm a fool,

just a silly fool

to be in love with you.

He'd also produced Dean Martin's daughter, Dina.

While you're resurrected,

those long private sessions and cool on expressions found somebody new.

She may turn on, but I'm glad you're gone.

Cause baby, I see you.

And rather more successfully, he'd written and produced a series of hits for Nancy Sinatra, starting with These Boots Are Made for Walking.

messin'

and now someone else is getting all your best.

These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do.

One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

Hazelwood had also moved into singing himself.

He'd released a few tracks on his own, but his career as a performer hadn't really kicked into gear until he'd started writing duets for Nancy Sinatra.

She apparently fell in love with his demos and insisted on having him sing them with her in the studio.

And so the two made a series of collaborations like the magnificently bizarre Sun Velvet Morning.

girls

And maybe

tell you about Phaedra Learn from us

very

luck

And how she gave me life

Look at us

but do

not touch

And how she made it in

Hazelwood is now considered something of a cult artist, thanks largely to a string of magnificent orchestral country pop solo albums he recorded, but at this point he was one of the hottest people in the music industry.

He wasn't offering to produce the International Submarine Band himself, that was going to be his partner, Susie Jane Hocum, but Parsons thought it was better to sign for less money to a label that was run by someone with a decade-long string of massive hit records, than for more money to a label that had put out one record about a cartoon moose.

So the group split up.

Dunlop and Govind went off to form another band with Barry Tashian, and legend has it that one of the first times Graham Parsons visited the Byrds in the studio, he mentioned the name of that band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and that was the inspiration for the Birds titling their album, The Notorious Bird Brothers.

Parsons and Noose, on the other hand, formed a new line-up of the International Submarine Band, with bass player Chris Etheridge, drummer John Cornill, who Parsons had first played with in The Legends, and guitarist Bob Buchanan, a former member of the new Christie Minstrels who Parsons had been performing with as a a duo after they'd met through Fred Neal.

The International Submarine Band recorded an album, Safe at Home, which is now often called the first country rock album, though as we've said so often, there's no first anything.

That album was a mixture of cover versions of songs by people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard.

I've seen it happen many times

to other guys I knew

surely I must be somebody else you've known

and Parsons originals like Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome, which he co-wrote with Barry Goldberg of The Electric Flag.

Do you know

how it feels to to be long

some

when there's just no one left who really cares?

Did you ever try to smile at some people

and all they ever seem to do is scare?

But the recording didn't go smoothly.

In particular, Corniel realised he'd been hoodwinked.

Parsons had told him, when persuading him to move west, that he'd be able to sing on the record and that some of his songs would be used.

But while the record was credited to the International Submarine Band, everyone involved agrees that it was actually a Grand Parsons solo album by any other name.

He was in charge, he wouldn't let other members' songs on the record, and he didn't let Corniel sing as he'd promised.

And then, before the album could be released, he was off.

The Birds wanted a jazz keyboard player, and Parsons could fake being one long enough to get the gig.

The Birds had got rid of one rich kid with a giant ego who wanted to take control of everything and thought his undeniable talent excused his attempts at dominating the group and replaced him with another one, who also happened to be signed to another record label.

We'll see how well that worked out for them in two weeks' time.

A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on.

With a little help from my friends by Joe Cocker.

Visit patreon.com/slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes.

This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

Visit 500songs.com.

That's 500 the numbers songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here.

If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves.

Thank you very much for listening.