Parsons and Hillman, Reaching the End

Part Five of extended interview; see previous portions below. Gram Parsons emerged from the bathroom towelling his long hair and quickly reassumed the lead in our conversation, his ideas decidedly more fanciful ...

GP: I'd like to do a ((television)) series about The Flying Burrito Brothers. They could bring the cowboy thing in if they wanted--of course they would, to make it sellable. Like a hip Monkees... if you don't mind me using the word "hip" or the word "Monkees." Cowboy Monkees... no, Cowboy Monsters, that's what it would be! But I'm serious. I mean, if we wanted to do one week about pulling off a big bank robbery--a really deluxe, super bank robbery--whereas the Monkees never would have done a thing like that; they were never serious the whole time. One week we're into horror shows, the next week we're actually making some chick. Romance! Next week, train ride; next week, giant rodeo; next week, clothing trip. You get it? By "clothing trip" I mean sort of set up a hip commune, but real life--tranche de vie. "A Slice of Life with the Burrito Brothers..." Burrito Brothers Pie we could call the series.

Country Pie...

GP: Country Pie, and each week we'd take a different slice.

CH: The Burritos at Knotts Berry Farm...

GP: And we could do documentaries--a show that was just about freeways, a show that was just all of us driving, freaking out.

Do you own any property? ((me trying to reestablish some order to the interview)) Chris was saying he owns some land.

GP: Yeah, I own some land in Florida. It was left to me; I didn't buy it. I've lived near enough to it to know I wouldn't want to live on it. It's a citrus grove.

CH: ((restless)) You got a bathtub?

GP: You mean in your deluxe suite you got a color TV and no bathtub? Great. Me, a bathtub and no maid. We could even do a week on this hotel, staying in the crazy hotel where the bellman's coming down from his Methedrine shot or something. He was really a ghost, man--"Aw right, I'll get it for ya..."

Where do y'all go after this?

GP: Back to L.A., back to record.

What were the particulars of your joining The Byrds and then of your leaving, which was connected to that trip to South Africa?

CH: Ah could've murdered him that day.

GP: ((exaggerated accent)) Ah joined with a friendship an' left with a argument.

CH: I remember that day, just as good as I can see daylight.

GP: It was a year ago exactly. Roger ((McGuinn)) said, "This is the anniversary of South Africa."

CH: I was duped into goin' myself, and I didn't realize that. Nothin' good happened except that they had real good grass down there. No women. No... ((stops))

Let's get heavy for a minute. What was the word you were using earlier? Let's get profound. Here you are out of backwoods Georgia... not just backwoods Georgia, but the whole idea of you refusing to go to South Africa probably surprised a few people.

CH: Yeah, you know what he is--a "redneck racist."

GP: Somethin' a lot of people don't know about me, I was brought up with a Negro for a brother--I was brought up with a spade brother. Like all Southern families, we had maids and servants, a whole family that took care of us, called the Dixon family. Sammy Dixon was just a little bit older than me, and he just lived with me. He wasn't paid for doing it. His older sister was paid for cooking, and his oldest sister was paid for being the maid, and his mother was paid for cooking and doing the laundry. He just grew up with me. I learned at a real close level that segregation was just not it. It comes in my mind, lots of things, why I didn't stay with country music and I went on and was, like, a folk singer. I pictured myself as a sort of male Joan Baez at the age of 16; I was singing protest songs, things like that. I think I was hip to how carried away I had gotten by the time I graduated from high school. I had cooled off...

But you still went to Harvard for one quarter.

GP: That was the result of running away, in the "Bomb" phase, running away to the Village at 14, 15, 16... getting hip to it... then returning and settling down. Then at that time, I got into bluegrass. One of my favorite records was one the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers did--that was Chris's group, and I would have given my left knee to have been in that group. Of course, I didn't know he was in it. Then the Dillards were another of my favorites. Because they were young, and I'd say, "God, I'm old enough that I could be in one of those groups, man. Boy, are they far out." They weren't doing that protest number, that resistance sort of number; they were just slappin' down music. I suppose since then I've just gotten into performing and the technology of it--a thousand percent more than I was.

What are your feelings about the South?

GP: It's not a nice place to live. If you're gonna live there, you got to do or die. I wouldn't go back there for any amount of money. The climate's great--North Carolina, Blue Ridge Mountains, man, whew! Fantastic! Virginia's all right; Charleston, South Carolina, is Deep South; New Orleans has a nice climate. Anywhere you get that's close to a city like New Orleans, they're not the kind of people you want to live around for very long. They can be fun for an evening--for one drunk, two drunks. It all just circles around in my head--the North and the South, the Civil War or Uncivil War, and where the South is at and where the North is at. But I can't get it all straight in my mind--bein' from the South, what a difference it's made. The South is less affected in a way; it's less organized, it's harder to understand in some ways than the North. It's not a matter of it being ethnocentric. The people down there are... ((stops)) Oh, I don't know, I just can't say, I just can't say...

((and sadly that's where my notes and the interview ended))

The Burritos with Chris and Gram went on for another album and a bit more, then Gram headed off for some sort of cosmic karma drug life with Keith Richards. When I saw him at Altamount later, he was already pale and puffy and pretty much out of it. As all fans know, he worked to straighten out (some), teamed up with an unknown folkie named Emmylou Harris, and then died suddenly and tragically, his coffin shortly thereafter road-manglered and Viking-burned.

Chris hung in for a while after Gram's early departure and then split off to discover his incredibly varied creative life ever since, with Stephen Stills, Byrds semi-reunions, solo albums, the Desert Rose Band, bluegrass, great vocal duets with Herb Pedersen, and more--still going strong and sounding great in 2007.

But there is a strange P.S. to my brief acquaintanceship with Gram. In April 2000, my wife and I and another couple headed off to (pre-Katrina) New Orleans for the ever-phenomenal Jazz and Heritage Festival. The music was great that year of course but not really relevant.

We four were staying at a house near the park owned by, as we soon discovered, Bonnie Parsons and her later husband Sal Fazzio--Bob Parsons' widow, that is, Gram's stepmother, remarried again years after the Southern Gothic deaths and financial maneuvering that took Gram from Georgia and Florida to New Orleans and then the world. Bonnie was charming (Sal pretty much monosyllabic or uninvolved), telling us stories about Gram and lamenting her alienation from other surviving family members. I still have the card they gave us to get back in touch if and when we returned to the Big Easy.

But life's never that "easy," is it? September 11th came, and family duties as my parents were declining, and then the hurricanes hit the Louisiana-Mississippi coast, and the damned useless Bush Administration--to coin a phrase--bailed on 'em.

I don't know if Bonnie was still there at the time, or if her home survived the flooding. Maybe I'll dial that phone number one of these days...

Hillman Alone, Interview Part Four

To reiterate the basic info, the place was Seattle and the year was 1969. In the hotel room Gram hit the showers, and Chris and I talked for a while...

I don't want to ask old, tired questions, but you've been in the rock scene for about five years now--are you glad? Are you tired of it?

CH: Yes, I'm a little tired. But on the other hand, it's changed so much. The pace has gotten so fast. It's not new and fresh like it was four years ago. There's so many groups, so much goin' on. But now it's just starting to go down, the whole thing. Madison Avenue got a hold of the whole thing, and record companies are just squeezing it dry--promoting this group and that group, and half of them don't even make it. ((half? guess those were the good old days!)) I'll tell you, man, I just want to get some money and beat it. If I ever play music again, it will be in a bar for twenty bucks a night--really--just to play, 'cause there's no pressure there and you can actually play. I mean, I figure most musicians in the scene actually only spend about half their time playing. The rest of the time is full of bullshit--record producers and record companies, managers and all that. ((the "all that" probably including journalists!)) If I did it all over, I'd just go into a bar and play.

I've got a friend here in Seattle who is a pretty good guitar player, but he decided a long time ago that he just didn't want to go through it all. I guess he has killed off a little of his talent by just sitting around, but at the same time he has kept out of the whole thing.

CH: I'm sorry I didn't save some money, you know?, when I had the chance. But I had a good time and that's that.

I can't imagine that your career is over by any means, 'cause the Burritos ought to be big.

CH: Personally, I don't like to live in cities. I really don't like crowds. I want to get my own little place; that's what I'd like to do.

Have you got a place you want to settle picked out?

CH: I have fifty acres in New Mexico. So someday I'll build.

Whereabouts?

CH: Near Taos.

Where all the people have moved back to the country now lately...

CH: I don't know. There's no hippies around where I live. ((laughs)) They don't like hippies down there.

I know they don't; I've been reading about that.

CH: I mean people who are on the streets, hitchhiking. But it's a good place.

How far along are you-all in the next album? Have you done any recording?

CH: We've cut three things, but I think we're going to end up doing the whole thing live instead of doing it in the studio.

Did you do the first one track by track, or "live" in the studio?

CH: It was done live, singing and playing at the same time, mostly. A couple of them were overdubbed. But that's about all, nothing else.

You could tell out there today that you were playing the same music.

CH: That's one of our whole things, you know--no extra bullshit, man. It's us playing... funky... just us. The only person we'd ever use is Clarence ((White; see previous segment)) on guitar. We've tried--we had Leon Russell play piano with us once, and it just wasn't the same, you know, as the five Burritos playing. It was just something alien.

Does Gram play the keyboards on the album usually?

CH: Yeah, that's what he overdubs. Or he'll put the piano down with everybody else.

You concentrate on guitar?

CH: Yeah, rhythm guitar. We either sing it then or sing it later.

That honkytonk song you opened up with... will that be on the new album? ((possibly was "Close Up the Honkytonks."))

CH: I don't know what we're going to cut. That's like standard stuff.

Oh, that's right, you mean if it's live. I didn't recognize the song. Is it yours?

CH: No, but we'll do six originals and six standard songs. We use that song in our sets all the time... Buck Owens.

Pretty nice, I should have known it... Buck Owens. What country cats do you listen to?

CH: I like Buck--I like his earlier stuff better than now. I don't know what he's doin' now; he's into some weird bag. But I like Wynn Stewart.

Wynn Stewart... I know his name, that's about all.

CH: He's had some really good records. George Jones and Jerry Lee Lewis are doing good stuff, and Johnny Bush, Kitty Wells...

Because you're into country yourselves, is that who you listen to mostly these days?

CH: That's how I started playing music, you know. When I was 14, it was the same people--Kitty Wells, whoever was goin' on then. Mostly bluegrass too, like the Stanley Brothers, early Flatt and Scruggs. And I was playin' in like hillbilly bars when I was 17; I had a fake i.d. That's what I grew up on. I'm not from the South, but that's what was goin' on in our house. I played it all the way up until The Byrds, then started out playing bass and doin' all this other shit, and I just got completely out of it. I forgot all about it, until I met him ((Gram)) and, bang, we started doin' it. Because I always used to want to find a cat to sing with. That's how I used to sing, with one guy, when I started out... tenor and lead. ((Herb Pedersen, I hear a voice calling!)) I listen to rhythm 'n blues too. I don't really follow the current rock 'n roll unless it's on the radio--FM, whatever you call underground. I hear Crosby's album a lot on the radio. But Taj is my favorite... he's my favorite. I can listen to that album he cut all night, the second one. And I've heard some stuff he's cut for his third album. He did "Six Days on the Road"--you know, that truck-drivin' song. Incredible, yeah, really funky. It's gonna be a good album. ((pauses to reflect for a moment)) It's just not the same. The Whiskey a Go-Go, the Strip, it's just gotten so crazy. Thousands of kids, you know, and not the same kind of kids--scruffy, funky kids. There's a lot of violence goin' on all over. All the nice scene's been squashed out, and dirt came over it.

It was like the Monterey Pop Festival was sort of a peak, and it's been sort of slipping back--at least the scene with the people has been slipping back--ever since.

CH: Yeah, that's a good place to pick. It's just gone downhill.

How did you make your break with The Byrds?

CH: I just quit. We had a crooked manager at the time too. I was just sick of being in The Byrds, of being a Byrd. It wasn't the same as when the five started out, or even the four, the original Byrds. It got down to me and McGuinn and two other guys that we hired on a weekly salary. It was bullshit, you know; it was really stale. We had a bad producer and a bad record company. So I just got fed up one day and quit. I couldn't take it any more.

Wasn't ((Gary)) Usher producing you in those days?

CH: I don't like his work. You see, we ((Chris and Gram)) got together, and he moved in for a while. We started singin', we started formin' this idea, and it just happened, you know. We started out, bang, out of the cannon. We had a little money from the company, the record company ((A&M)), an advance and everything. We had direction, where we were going to go--but had the wrong managers. Mishandling the whole thing, telling us lies, steering us this way. We stumbled and tripped and fell back to L.A., because the original thing was we worked our way across country to New York, to go to England, where they were waiting for us. We're really very big in England, you know; we've never been there, but we're always in the paper. So we get to New York, and the managers haven't gotten the work permits. We had to turn around and come back here, starving and in debt. We'd burned a lot of bridges when we left. Phone company bills... we come back and, bang, they got us. It's been one setback after another. We're finally getting on our feet, I think. Then Clarke ((drummer Mike)) breaks his leg one night. Ethridge got busted--he just got out of that--so Michael breaks his leg. Little things like that, setbacks. But we got good managers now.

Did you pick these guys originally, or did the company pick them for you?

CH: Gram knew this guy, Steve Allsbury, and as we started along in the early stages it was just me and Gram. It just worked into where Steve was the manager. He made mistakes--not on purpose; he just didn't know what he was doing. He bungled--he didn't follow through, he didn't answer phone calls, he didn't mail out things when he was supposed to. That really blew it. Then again, we've had rough times in the studio, when we can't get together, just like any other group. But there's magic in the group when it's together. Boy, there really is. And it's gonna happen, I know it is. It's just no bullshit--straight-out, honest, we mean what we're doing, we're not jiving. That stuff just ruined rock 'n roll. I mean, I respect Hendrix as a musician, he's a good musician, but all the other cats that are on the bandwagon are using that as a gimmick. Gimmicks come into the thing, and it just destroys it. San Francisco, that whole bunch of bullshit ((hippies, Summer of Love)) wrecked it too. I mean, there ain't one group up there... I may sound like a hardass or somethin', but there really isn't one group up there worth shit. Maybe people that moved there... like the Youngbloods moved there, and I love that cat singing, Jesse ((Colin Young)), he's a beautiful singer. And ((Michael)) Bloomfield lives up there, he's a good musician. But the groups that came out of there full of all the jive... ((Jefferson Airplane? Moby Grape? The Grateful Dead? who knows? Chris broke off his rant as Gram emerged from the bathroom))

You're ready to take on the world now, huh?

((his answer? find out next time in the final segment))

Parsons and Hillman, Part Three

So your intrepid interviewer next inquired about the Burritos' (later much-honored) pedal steel guitarist, Sneaky Pete Kleinow...

Can we talk about Pete for a minute?

GP: I'd love to talk about Pete.

CH: He's been playing steel for ten years. He's from Indiana originally; he migrated out west.

GP: He also made most of the special effects that were used in Outer Limits. ((Sixties sci-fi TV show))

CH: He's an animation expert.

GP: He played the music in front and then he did the other thing on the side, and he went back and forth. He's a true-to-life maniac. He's 34; he's got a daughter who's 15 and sings country music and can take his steel apart and put it back together--she's just as crazy as he is! He's got a son that's 14 and went on the road with us, that can drug any of us under the table. And Pete himself doesn't need nothin'. He's on the natch.

And here he comes now...

GP: The Maharishi of country music, here he is now, Peter Kleinow!

CH: Beat it, Sneaky. Take a powder.

GP: Tell him ((meaning interviewer)) what you did with Projects Unlimited.

SP: I ran them out of business. I joined these guys, and I'm workin' on them... I used to be special effects, in the animation business; used to do all kinds of movies for George Pal and Outer Limits.

Well, are you still in animation?

SP: No, I'm just keepin' it in case these guys fire me next week; then I can go back to it.

GP: He does all the hirin' and firin'. I don't know what he's tellin' you.

SP: Well, if I can't do somethin' without workin' at it, I won't do it.

GP: He's the original country musician-administrator.

SP: Lazy Bones and the Burrito Brothers.

GP: When any of us are trying to figure out what's the basis to what we're doin', we always talk to Pete.

SP: Well, if you'll excuse me... ((repeating his earlier quick exit; as Gram says below, Pete was focussed on repairing his steel))

Chris E: Sneaky. He done snuck off.

I get the impression it's the music he's interested in. This external stuff like a reporter asking questions...

GP: Not at all. The music is what he's interested in, but he loves to talk when he's got the time.

Chris E: He and Michael Saul get along real well... ((Saul)) sat in with us in New York and played every song we play just perfectly.

GP: He's the one cat that's sat in with us that didn't make mistakes.

CH: ((reminding them of another)) Richard Greene...

Chris E: Aww, that guy, fiddle his ass off. But Michael Saul, him and Pete got along so good they just ran all over New York together. Went to restaurants together, got drunk together, just had a ball--and Pete doesn't even drink, so they really got along.

GP: He'll have some of that good, what is it... ((phoney French)) Pea-not Nwah?

Pinot noir?

GP: Yeah. And he'll tell you all about the steel guitar--all the ethics of it, the mechanics of it and everything. But he's just so mad now tryin' to get it fixed. He's got a funky old steel, you know. It's funkier and older than the funkiest, oldest Telecaster ever made--an old, old Fender steel that has... well, you notice on "Dark End of the Street" how much it sounds like a Telecaster. It can me made to sound that way. And we have such a time getting people to understand our specific equipment difficulties and the sounds we're trying to make.

Yeah, because everybody's used to working with Ten Years After and that kind of Blues thing.

((Gram makes guitar sounds with his mouth))

CH: All the groups sound like that shit. All of them doin' that stuff.

I've been listening to black Blues for like ten years, and it took me about five years before I'd listen to any white groups play. And now it's all the same, it seems.

CH: The best group is Taj Mahal. Taj feels the music, and he can sing.

GP: And Indian Ed'll lay more guitar on you than any of them Blues guitar people you can name. Indian Ed ((Davis, who died of an overdose a few years later)) is the cream of the crop; he's better than Clapton and Hendrix put together.

Seems to me The Byrds made some noise ((meaning bluesy or experimental guitar)) in their time too.

CH: Yes, but there was some sort of context to the music--not just "turn up to 10 and jam in one chord, one key, E..."

GP: I used to know the Injun back before Bonnie and Delaney got together with the Main Street Blues Band--as they ((Indian Ed's group)) were called before they joined them.

((fiddling with tape deck I lost some conversation about Seattle and also about Bo Diddley, who appeared as did the Burritos at the Seattle Pop Festival; resumed with a question for Ethridge))

How did you get over to L.A. from Meridian? What were the steps?

Chris E: I flew. ((laughter all around)) Really, I was playing with this group in Biloxi, and I met this cat, and he brought me out. I played session stuff with different people then for about a year and a half. Then I joined the Burritos.

GP: We could get real profound, but I guess Rolling Stone doesn't like that. They like the hillbilly side... sit around and talk like ol' Bonnie and Delaney: "Waal, mah ol' gran'mama down there, she cooks the best Hoppin' John anybody ever made. You don' know what Hoppin' John is?" But I really got off livin' with some guys over in England--with Keith and Mick of the Stones, diggin' things that are profound about where music's at and where it's goin'. I can't ignore things like that, you know. If everybody wants to think we're simple, that's fine. And if everybody wants to think Bonnie and Delaney are simple, that's fine. But they're not, and neither is Leon, who is a very big part of that album. But there are guys that didn't join that band, that left that band, that were with them back then, that could be the band that, like, Rolling Stone was projecting them to be... J.J.Cale, Jimmy Karstein, Junior Markham, and Carl from Bonnie and Delaney--put them together with those horn players that Markham knows, and you got yourself a funky white band. You got yourself some people who don't know nothin' except the bottom of a beer can when they see it through the hole, you know?

Chris E: They're all just good people. Bobby Keyes...

GP: Bobby Keyes is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the first time Junior Markham turned him on, Bobby called Junior a "homosexual" and a "dope-pusher." That's how funky and down into it Junior is, man. He's just there. And that's why everybody hates him--why he's gotten all those knife and shotgun scenes.

Chris E: Shoulda heard the song Leon wrote about that, played it the other night down at the session. I didn't believe it... ((sings)) "There's a shoot-out on the plantation... da da da da da-da... Junior better run, 'cause he ain't got nothin' but a knife, and Gary's got the gun." Gary Sanders, cat that went back down to Galveston.

CH: That came from woman problems.

GP: "Woman poisonin'," as Junior Markham calls it. Junior Markham and the Tulsa Rhythm Group would be the wild flower group. Bonnie and Delaney would be... ((I still don't know what he was getting at here.)) They're not the simple people everyone thinks they are; they been around a long time. And so have we, but our past is more difficult to hide. And it sort of flashes out. "Waal, uh-hum, how about the old Byrds?" They were never into The Byrds to that extent. They're more into the Burrito Brothers.

How did you come up out of Waycross?

GP: I just started runnin' away from home at an early age. I was scared to death of Waycross. My father's name was "Coon Dog," and he was really into it.

God, I guess.

GP: "Coon Dog" Connor--Connor was my original name. I got adopted later on. But he lived in the woods and was from, like, Columbia, Tennessee, and taught me how to dig it. And I dug it as long as I was with him, but he passed on early. When I was about 13, I got my new parents--Parsons now. My family's from New Orleans, and it's much more acceptable. But when I was a Connor from Georgia, I didn't like it too much. I moved from Waycross down to Florida. Parsons came from New Orleans and moved my mother down to Florida. And then she died. He just moved back to New Orleans a few years ago, and that's my home now. That's where my Mon and Dad live.

((Gram here has skimmed over a complex Southern Gothic snarl of families and deaths, which later also claimed Bob Parsons, the stepfather who adopted him. As though discomfited by the family talk, he decides to go clean up... and I foolishly tried to ask a few hurried questions while he was preparing to head for the shower.))

Where do y'all live now?

GP: Livin' in Beverly Glen, near David Crosby.

When did you form the Submarine Band?

GP: I formed the Submarine Band when I was at college. At Harvard. I dropped out my freshman year.

((He then said some friendly words about the man who had become his mentor and friend, Harvard's freshman dean the Reverend Dr. James E. Thomas--which I failed to get on tape. And I said something about the performance clothes he was going to put on later.))

Speaking of Nudie, how much does one of those fancy suits cost?

GP: Starting about $350, anywhere up to $10,000.

((With that, he scooted off to the shower... a good place to end this portion. Next time, the long solo talk I had with Chris Hillman while Gram was gone.))

Parsons and Hillman, Part Two

The interview with the Burritos continued with me asking for some history, and soon came the remarks that made Jim McGuinn very unhappy...

(But first a few many-years-later second thoughts: note how dismissive the guys are of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the album they recorded as Byrds before splitting off, now generally considered the defining moment for the transition from rock into country-rock. "Mighty Sam" (see below) was likely Mighty Sam McClain, not so old back then, still recording Blues and gospel just a few years ago. And Steve Cropper, of course, was/is one of Stax Records in-house geniuses, an influential white guitarist and an integral part of Booker T. and the M.G.'s.)

Could you tell me something about the old Byrds?

CH: I don't know... The Byrds to me were really together when the five original Byrds were there--and no other time since. The five started out from scratch, you know, like playing on nothing. That was The Byrds. Clarke ((meaning Mike)) was hittin' cardboard boxes, I was playing a $20 red Japanese bass, and McGuinn had an acoustic 12-string. That was the real Byrds. Gene ((the other Clark)) didn't really add that much. It just got stale. We ran through the mill; it had its good moments, but it's long gone.

At what point did Crosby leave, in terms of the records?

CH: He was up till half the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, then he left. Then the next one came out. Then Gram left. Then I left. It just got to be ridiculous. It's very difficult to work with McGuinn, you know, on anything. He's the type of guy that... it's just a job. He goes up on stage and becomes a musician. Offstage, he's not--he doesn't buy records, he doesn't listen to the radio.

GP: He brings you down.

CH: And he doesn't really keep up with what's happening in music. The last album that they did, it was McGuinn, and the rest his hired group.

GP: He's always found a way to either buy the information or gather the information that he needs to keep up with what's goin' on. He himself doesn't live that life.

Has he got the same people with him now that he had for that album? Clarence White and whoever else?

Chris Ethridge: Wait'll you hear that little fucker play... whoo-ee!

GP: Clarence White has always been right. White's right--but he's an original friend of Chris Hillman. Chris and he played together years and years ago. McGuinn wouldn't know Clarence White from Mighty Sam if it wasn't for Chris. As a matter of fact, he probably never heard of Mighty Sam!

I got to admit I haven't...

GP: Well, Mighty Sam was an old, old Negro from Florida that put out a bunch of really great singles I'm sure you'd love. Model T. Slim's another.

CH: They should have just buried it, let it die; that was it, over. All it is now for McGuinn is ride it out till it ends... just for the money.

GP: A bad influence on children!

CH: It's not a creative, productive thing any more. He pays everybody's salaries every week, and he's the head Byrd.

GP: And everybody still writes all these comprehensive articles on it, like Crawdaddy and all that analytical bullshit.

CH: That's right. You read all this shit about superstar McGuinn.

GP: Singin' like Dylan, thinkin' like Dylan, sellin' like Dylan.

CH: It was the five Byrds together, Gene Clark and everybody. McGuinn just happened to be the last guy holding the bag. But that's what made it--the five together.

Seems to me at one time there was a rumor that White was gonna quit and come with you all.

GP: There's still a possibility of that.

CH: But, you know, Clarence has a family--a kid and one on the way. Clarence was originally asked to join this group, but he didn't want to take the gamble because of his wife and kids. He's been scuffling as long as I've known him. He quit school when he was thirteen and went on the road. He's been a musician since then, shuffling from honkytonk to honkytonk. And he finally gets in The Byrds and gets a salary, and you know he don't want to leave.

GP: But he gives up a lot of studio sessions by bein' on the road. It's a matter of keepin' yourself together and your phone hooked up. That's the way to be a studio musician and in a group at the same time.

Chris E: He loses a lot of money every time he goes out.

GP: Sure he does. Not go out, and then make more money in the studio than just recording with Linda Ronstadt and once in a while with the Everly Brothers. But the Burritos, man, everybody thinks we're just a country and western group. It's country music... but what people don't understand is that country music has as many fine points and as high a line drawn above it as Blues does. And everybody's longing to put it all together and just say it's this or that. They don't know 'cause they can't do it. Many a fine Blues musician has sat in with us and not been able to play what we play. You can't blame it on three-chord music, four-chord music, five-chord music, country music, or any other thing, man. It's just getting into what you do. And we're into it. And anybody who says that we're not is full of shit.

Has anybody said that you aren't?

GP: Sure they have--in Rolling Stone they have. An article written by our friend... by your friend and mine... ((the name forgotten perhaps))

CH: They look at us and they think we're puttin' them on, you know--up there yukkin' along and puttin' them on. That's not it. We're not. It's like he ((Gram)) says, man... everybody thinks, "That's three-chord music, that's easy. Country music is simple; I can cut it." But we've had people like Procul Harum sit in with us and blow it. They can't do it.

GP: You've got to feel it as much as anything else. It's like people have realized... they say, "Steve Cropper and others put all this fine stuff into Blues, even though they're white, because they have this knowledge of technology, and they've made something almost classical out of it." Well, that's what we're doing with country music. Other people are as well. There're just as many old funky artists ((in country)), there's just as much inside of it, there're just as few chords, there're just as many good musicians. And we would like to be able to make it immortal, in time, as Blues is being made immortal by young people. Only, it was created... no, not created, sustained and supported by white people; and it has an amazing amount of technology already in it. One steel player has to take care of as much as four horn players take care of, with nine pedals and a bar and a set of finger picks. That's a heavy job to do. There're very few cats who can cut it.


((Which cues the interviewer to ask more about Sneaky Pete... coming up in the next posting.))

Parsons and Hillman, Part One

By the late Fifties and early Sixties I'd moved on from my rockabilly roots to become a confirmed folkie, just starting to head into an every-day-since love of the Blues. But The Beatles and Stones, and Dylan's adventurous changes leading into The Byrds, made me take another look at rock music. I began writing rock criticism for various magazines, including Rolling Stone back when it mattered. And it was as a member of the press that I came to discover young musicians Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman and their new band The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Not-too-long after their split-off from The Byrds, the Burritos played Seattle three times in a short period. I caught them live and persuaded Gram and Chris to agree to an interview; and as a result of that, Southern-genteel Gram and I hit it off (more than Chris, whom I admired much but who was more stand-offish). Parsons and I both had Georgia roots--he from birth and me from my mother's family who were South Georgia farmers; I'd spent many weeks there as a kid.

As well as hotel or backstage talking, the guys came to my house for dinner during one visit, and I edited together a long interview that appeared in Seattle's underground paper The Helix in late-Summer 1969. But in typical hippie-lackadaisical fashion, my byline was omitted from the layout, and even though the Los Angeles Free Press subsequently picked up the piece, I never was credited! I heard later that the quotes from Chris and Gram made Jim/Roger McGuinn curse and gnash his teeth and threaten reprisals, demanding that The Helix fly down to L.A. to hear his side of the story. But he calmed down and nothing further occurred.

Meanwhile the Burritos came back north to play the Seattle Pop Festival; and since I was covering that one for Rolling Stone, I hung out backstage, part of the time with Gram--which lead to the ride through the country with Jim Morrison I wrote about in an earlier blog posting. I still have a photo from that day, seen up above, with Gram looking great and me looking goofy (probably snapped after that wild ride); this was posted somewhere years ago and wound up used in a Parsons bio written by some Australian journalist.

The last time I got to visit with Gram was at the ugly and depressing Altamont Festival--which I will write about at some future date. But today I'm launching a multi-part project, to put down in electronic print for the first time the unedited Hillman-Parsons interview, whole chunks at a time, and maybe complete eventually if there's enough interest. First, the lead-in I wrote for The Helix:

The Flying Burrito Brothers, in their own bittersweet honkytonk way, have become the subject of much foolish controversy. Hailed by numorous critics, fans, and even straight c&w artists as a breath of fresh country air in the cloying citified, low-down-and-blue world of rock, the Burritos have also been scoffed at and berated by other purist listeners as being slick and phoney rock musicians jumping on the country bandwagon. These decriers all manage to make the somewhat irrelevant point that Buck Owens is just so much "truer-to-life." (It would be enlightening to hear from Owens himself on the subject of the Burritos.)

The fact is, the so-called "citybilly" Burritos have deep-down rural roots. Chris Ethridge (bassist with the group at the time of the interview, since departed) hails from Meridian, Mississippi, and has been scrabbling for several years in the South and in the recording studios of Los Angeles. Sneaky Pete Kleinow (yes, Virginia, he does have a surname), a true genius on pedal steel guitar, has been playing that demanding instrument for more than a decade. Chris Hillman was strictly country/bluegrass until he hooked up with The Byrds back in the mid-Sixties. Gram Parsons escaped from Waycross, Georgia, and is still shaking the dust from his heels; and he has many fervent admirers among the c&w folk. Mike Clarke, another ex-Byrd, hails from the Spokane area and Texas.

That the Burritos' country music has some of the frills and fills of rock most often seems to offend only the people who demand categories and pigeonholes. The Burritos' A&M album exhibits some mixing problems, it is true; but the infectious country spirit and hick hijinx of their music, on record and especially in live performance, more than compensate for any first-album flubs.

When the Burritos are on, they're right on--as anyone who saw them at the Seattle Pop Festival or the Trolley Tavern or Sky River Festival can attest. Everyone on stage and off has a high old time as the Burritos' special magic turns a big, crowded open field into (alternately) a backwoods hoedown and a honkytonk bar...

But that's enough ancient set-up. Today Chris Hillman is still touring and recording beautiful bluegrass-based CDs; and though Parsons died too young, the usual drugs/health stuff, he's now viewed as the "father" of country rock and a major influence on alt.country and Americana performers. What the two had to say nearly 40 years ago may still be of interest; Ethridge was present part of the time but mostly silent, and Kleinow wandered in and out.

Here now, without my previous editing and rearranging...


GP: Johnny Cash? Why don't they talk about us? Bob Dylan? Why don't they talk about us? Waylon Jennings? Why don't they talk about him? I'm just saying it's about time people wised up. We're together with Waylon in a big way. Take Dylan and Cash, McGuinn and electricity, the Burritos and Waylon--same combinations.

Well, is he your main man as far as country music is concerned?

GP: No, not at all, just a good friend. There are very few country artists alive today that are top shitkickers that are willing to come down to the Whiskey and make friends with people like us. Moody, Tompal Glazer, and Waylon were the only real country artists at our last gig at the Whiskey. Roger Miller has been at some things that we've done, some other people--but I'll take Waylon. The Burritos' favorite artists would include George Jones, the Louvin Brothers (one of whom is dead), the Everlys. Yeah, I've played on Everly records, but I don't know if they're aware of us.

Somebody got a quote from one of them on your International Submarine Band album.

GP: Oh yeah, I played that album for Don. But he's a little bit out of touch. They ain't the old Everly Brothers, if you know what I mean. Not like those old Boudleaux Bryant... that stuff, man... They could still get that heavy, you know, but I guess they've got a brother thing goin', one of those brother problems.

You're from Waycross, Georgia, right? I guess you read that thing in Rolling Stone talking about Waycross. It was in a review of y'all's record.

GP: Yeah, yeah, that was really nice. And whoever said that was right about Waycross, although I felt sort of bad that it was so much about me. Chris is one of those hicks too--he's from Rancho Santa Fe.

Wow, where's that?

CH: It's down about a hundred-twenty miles from Los Angeles. It's inland; it's just a real small town.

GP: And knowin' him, it's just got to be weird. And Chris Ethridge is from Meridian, Mississippi, which is most certainly weird.

Yeah, I was telling him that I lived in Montgomery for a year back in the Fifties, and my mother's from Georgia... ((nervous interviewer forgets name of town of 300, which actually was Mystic!)) What the hell's the name of the place...

GP: If you say Macon, I'll die.

Well, I've got relatives in Macon.

GP: That makes eight people this week who've told me they have relatives in Macon, Georgia. There are more hippies from Macon... Waycross, Georgia is in the wiregrass country and the Okefenokee swamp--and that, I will admit, is one of the strangest areas of the world. Strange for many reasons, a lot of them he ((RS writer)) didn't cover because he'd never lived there. It was a very comprehensive article except for the damn quotes from the songs, which were just all wrong: "Ventura may be just my kind of town." Really. "I'm your top, I'm your old boy." Jesus Christ, you cats. (We said "Jesus Christ" before John Lennon!) The right words are "Vancouver may be just my kind of town"; "I'm your toy, I'm your old boy."

How about "This whole town's filled with sin..."?

GP: "It'll swallow you in."

CH: That's L.A., boy.

Did y'all write that in honor of the coming earthquake?

CH: We wrote it when we were very dragged one morning. It was just before Christmas and it was about to rain; and we were living in the San Fernando Valley in a tract type home.

GP: We were looking forward to the earthquake!

CH: A bunch of redneck creeps all over the place. Fuck. Town's full of sin, you know.

GP: It really is, and it'll swallow you in--the sooner the better. ((laughs)) We drive down Lancashire Boulevard all the time just to take a look at it. The people who don't look at what's goin' on are in trouble, the ones who think the Sunset Strip is what makes you hip. The Sunset Strip is about ready to...

CH: Blow up.

GP: That's the "earthquake" ((song)) line.

CH: It's lousy. We all hate it. But there's one side of L.A. that's rather funky--North Hollywood and the valley. There's all kinds of clubs in the Valley that have all these good bands--clubs that we haven't even been to. And we check them all out.

Is this the area where Delaney and Bonnie got together?

CH: Yeah, and there's the kid ((pointing at Gram)) who found them. He was the first guy to find them.

GP: Me! Chris E. worked with them three years ago; I was working with them--we were together, and they were workin' at the Prelude and Snoopy's. And now we're out at the Palomino, a place where no one can play. I just dare 'em to try playin' at the Palomino. ((laughs)) The Palomino is the toughest...

Chris Ethridge: Delaney worked there.

GP: But he worked there five years ago, before he had long hair.

CH: It's a country-western club, the top club in L.A.

GP: Tough mothers. Truckers galore. It's like a truckdrivers' Whiskey; it's got red velvet and everything. It's the biggest, money-makin'est club in the Valley. But we fill it up every Monday night, or whenever we play there now, with a bunch of long-haired, long and lanky people. And girls... at first they wouldn't let the GTO's dance with each other there. Now they will. Leon Russell comes in, Leon and Rita--Rita sat in with us there, Rita Coolidge, Leon's wife. She sang back-up on Delaney and Bonnie, as they call themselves; I've always called them Bonnie and Delaney. I have a big plaque they gave me that says "in appreciation" to me and to the Burritos for all the nice things we've done for them. And it's signed "Bonnie and Delaney."

They're playing up here in about a week with Blind Faith.

GP: That cat who plays bass with Blind Faith, Rick ((Gretch, originally in the group Family)), I lived for a while with him in England. He's really a nice cat. Rick and I honkytonked it throughout London; he was the only cat I could find who liked honkytonkin'. I first met Rick in Rome, met him on a bus--he had a bottle of Scotch in one hand and a bunch of pills in the other. ((to Hillman)) You remember that, when we met Family on that bus?

((Arrival of Kleinow prompts a question.)) "Sneaky Pete..." Do you spell that with an "a" or an "e"? I've seen it both ways.

SP: Everybody spells it different. I don't care.

GP: I can't even figure out if in Kleinow the "e" comes before the "i"...

SP: Sometimes. Well, excuse me, please. ((He leaves again.))

That was quick.

CH: Yeah, he snuck off.

GP: I told you we were the most misunderstood band in show business. ((And then he cryptically writes "MOURNING BECOMES ELEKTRA" on the tapedeck mic.))

((more to come on other posts soon.))