Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976. Barney Hoskyns
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns страница 22
Название: Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976
Автор: Barney Hoskyns
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9780007389216
isbn:
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 the rest of the set with him like that.’
Ironically Doug Dillard accompanied the Byrds on a tour of Europe that summer, rooming with Gram Parsons and tagging along with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a nocturnal visit to Stonehenge. On his return to California, Clark asked Doug to play on a new solo album he was recording for A&M Records. Slowly the project evolved into a joint venture called The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. The album came together at Dillard’s place in Beachwood Canyon, east of Laurel Canyon. Rooming and jamming with Doug was country/ bluegrass guitarist Bernie Leadon, then nearing the end of a stint with Hearts and Flowers. Living upstairs was Dillard’s tenant – and Leadon’s occasional squeeze – Linda Ronstadt. ‘Doug and I were just sitting around playing this bluegrass stuff,’ remembers Leadon. ‘Gene started turning up in this magnificent V-12 Ferrari, and then he’d come back the next day with a whole set of lyrics for the instrumentals. That’s how a lot of the songs on the Fantastic Expedition album got written.’
Also on board the Expedition was ever-reliable bass player David Jackson, shyly approached one night at the Troubadour by Gene Clark. To this day Jackson recalls the rehearsals as magical. The same epithet could be applied to The Fantastic Expedition, released in October 1967. As much an example of Gram Parsons’s ‘soul-country-cosmic’ СКАЧАТЬ