Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns
Parsons into the Byrds. ‘If you delve into his background, though, it’s pure Southern Gothic.’
Parsons had first come to Los Angeles in late 1966, in the company of actor Brandon De Wilde, a hyperactive screen rebel in the Dennis Hopper mould. Within a month De Wilde had introduced the lanky charmer to his circle of rock and roll friends. Just before Christmas the two men wound their way up to Beverly Glen to meet David Crosby. When Crosby’s girlfriend Nancy Lee Ross returned from shopping, Gram’s eyes locked with hers. That evening, Crosby split for a Byrds tour and Gram and Nancy fell in love. By early 1967 they’d moved into an apartment in West Hollywood, with the Submarine Band installed in a Laurel Canyon pad dubbed ‘the Burrito Manor’. Gram’s trust fund paid for everything. ‘Gram and Nancy lived on Sweetzer Avenue in a beautiful apartment with stained-glass windows,’ says Eve Babitz. ‘He was like a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald hero in a place where nobody had ever heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald.’
A musical break of sorts came when De Wilde recommended the Submarine Band to Peter Fonda, another hip actor with rock aspirations. Fonda persuaded director Roger Corman to hire the band for his drugsploitation movie The Trip, a paean to LSD scripted by fellow acid-head Jack Nicholson. Converted to country music by John Nuese, Parsons made the first of several visits to Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood, kitting himself out like a hippie Hank Williams. With Nuese he ventured out to redneck dives in distant satellite suburbs such as El Monte and City of Industry, soaking up the subculture of farmers and truckers and befriending a coterie of pickers that included Clarence White and Pete Kleinow. On Thursdays he’d play talent nights at the Palomino, north of Laurel Canyon in the San Fernando Valley. ‘It took me two years to win the talent contest,’ he said. ‘I would religiously drive out there and wait my turn. For two years I was beaten by yodelling grandmothers and the same guy who sang “El Paso” every week.’
In late June 1967 a new International Submarine Band auditioned for Suzi Jane Hokom, girlfriend of Lee Hazlewood. With her blessing they were signed to Hazlewood’s LHI Records, recording the Safe at Home album in two sessions in July and November 1967. ‘My main recollections are of the hours and hours of rehearsals Gram and John and I did at my house in Laurel Canyon,’ says Hokom. But there was immediate friction between Parsons and Hazlewood. ‘Lee was older and his ego just kind of got in the way,’ Suzi says. ‘I think he was jealous – he couldn’t stand all this attention I was lavishing on these guys who were more of my generation.’
There are those who dispute Safe at Home’s status as the first country rock album, along with Gram’s posthumous standing as godfather to the genre. ‘There were probably twenty, thirty guys on the West Coast who were all basically trying to do the same thing,’ says Chris Darrow. ‘I don’t think any of us thought of Gram as the Duke Ellington of our deal.’ This may sound like kvetching from an unsung hero who has watched Gram’s star ascend in death, but it is a fact that the true roots of LA country rock have been persistently overlooked or discounted by rock historians. (Former teen idol Ricky Nelson, no less, recorded the Bright Lights and Country Music album as early as February 1966.) Yet the very fact that Gram – like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell – was an outsider was what gave his music its distinctive flavour.
Sadly the Submarine Band sank before Safe at Home was even released. By the spring of 1968 Parsons was once again a free musical agent. One day he ran into Chris Hillman in a Beverly Hills bank. ‘I knew very little about Gram,’ Hillman says. ‘On first acquaintance he was very sweet, very naive in the sense of being in Hollywood.’ By Hillman’s own admission the Byrds were in crisis. ‘We were in a state of limbo,’ he says. ‘We were looking at each other thinking, “We’re the last guys left and we don’t know where this is going” – and now here comes Gram.’
‘We were simply looking for someone to replace Crosby,’ recalls Roger McGuinn. ‘It was only gradually that he started to play his Hank Williams things. And we thought, Wow, that’s really cool.’ McGuinn would be the first to admit that he was less interested in country than Hillman. But when he heard Chris and Gram harmonising on Buck Owens’s ‘Under Your Spell Again’ he was happy to let things take their natural course. The chemistry between the two country freaks led to a radical rethink in Byrdland. In March 1968 a session was booked at Columbia’s studio in Nashville.
When Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released in August, heads were scratched – and not just in Los Angeles. To hear the band that flew ‘Eight Miles High’ now sporting short hair and warbling bluegrass classics ‘I Am a Pilgrim’ and ‘The Christian Life’ came as a shock. ‘Our fans were heartbroken that we’d sold out to the enemy,’ McGuinn says. ‘Politically, country music represented the right wing – redneck people who liked guns.’ McGuinn also felt upstaged by Parsons. ‘He was a rich kid, which meant that he was already a star,’ he reflects. ‘It was as though Mick Jagger had joined the band.’
As with most of Gram’s musical involvements, his stint as a Byrd wouldn’t last long. And among those who played a part in his departure was Mick Jagger himself.
Gene Clark, the original ex-Byrd, finally released his first solo album in February 1967. Except that he called it Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers, a selfless nod to harmonising vocalists Vern and Rex Gosdin. The album, which also featured Glen Campbell and Van Dyke Parks, blended bluegrass soul (‘Tried So Hard’, ‘Keep on Pushin’’) with baroque orchestral pop (the Leon Russell-arranged ‘Echoes’). Clark, a prolific writer, loved the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and wanted to make a Californian version of that masterpiece. But he was as lacking in confidence as ever. ‘Gene was nervous about doing his first album,’ said the velvet-voiced Vern Gosdin. ‘He was a good fella but he was into drugs too much.’
It was typical somehow that Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers was released the same week as the Byrds’ Younger than Yesterday. If Columbia had intended to bury the album they couldn’t have done a better job. Sessions for a second Clark album in April 1967 were canned. Lost and disenchanted, Gene was coaxed back into the Byrds as David Crosby’s replacement in October. Once again his fear of flying led to his departure. After just three weeks, Clark refused to board a flight from Minneapolis to New York, taking a long and lonely train ride back to California. ‘Gene was a really sweet soul who got waylaid by everything negative and the fight just got taken out of him,’ Chris Hillman said. ‘Sometimes I think it would’ve been better if he’d have stayed in Missouri.’
Back in LA, Gene fell into the easy-rolling company of Doug Dillard, who’d played on Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers. The two Missourians shared a passion for the bluegrass and country music they’d been raised on. They also shared a passion for alcohol and chemicals. One of their favourite pastimes was to drop acid and then down rows of Martinis at Dan Tana’s, the Italian restaurant next door to the Troubadour. The combination of ersatz sophistication and lysergic fracturing delighted them. In April 1968 Clark drunkenly gatecrashed a farewell party for Derek Taylor, who was returning to England to rejoin his original employers the Beatles at the newly founded Apple Corporation. After stumbling onstage with the Byrds at Ciro’s, Gene was very nearly ejected from the club. ‘He watched the show for a little while and then literally crawled across the dancefloor to the stage,’ says former Byrds groupie Pamela Des Barres. ‘Finally he just wound up curled around a microphone on the floor, and they played