A Year of Music

I always knew on some vague level that I “should” like Gram Parsons; he’s one of those names you can’t escape if you grow up with your nose buried in old Rolling Stone books, and The Flying Burrito Brothers were one of those California bands, like Little Feat or Quicksilver Messenger Service, that get namechecked frequently by Deadheads. I probably avoided them for exactly those reasons – they were eminently worthy, I was surrounded by Deadheads and I really, really hated the Grateful Dead with a passion. While I’ve since decided that’s pointless, because (among other things) the Dead wrote “Ripple” and a handful of other gorgeous songs, I don’t apologize for my former disdain; Deadheads did (and still do) drive me crazy with their blinkered way of assuming that a band didn’t exist if it didn’t share a stage with Jerry Garcia at some point.

And what do you know, Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Bros’ Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969 was recorded at a couple of live dates with the Dead in 1969 and I love, love, love it. Apparently these recordings had to be carefully pried from the suspicious hands of Bear, the Grateful Dead’s most dedicated recordist and custodian of the closest thing that exists to a comprehensive Grateful Dead archive (somebody should write a good, non-Deadhead biography of Owsley Stanley, because the dude has lived like three lives, all of them fascinating). I can only imagine why he took so much persuasion to allow Amoeba Records to turn these recordings into a widely-released double CD, but the quality of the recordings is amazing. It sounds like it could have been recorded last week.

Getting wanky about tape quality is one of the things I detest about Deadheads, so I’ll just move along and say the sound quality would be irrelevant if it weren’t for the fact that the band play astonishingly well. They make what they’re doing sound so easy, which is remarkable given that Parsons & Co more or less invented the style of country-fried psychedelia and R&B they were playing. Parsons famously coined the term “cosmic American music” to describe his sound, and it fits like a glove. It’s not a million miles from the Dead in sound, but it’s on a completely different spiritual plane. The fluid, confident guitar playing meshes perfectly with a set of classic high & lonesome country standards and is a bizarre and completely apt merging of Californian and Texan sensibilities. This sounds more graceful and assured than most studio recordings (of anybody) from the period, and I could listen to it all day.