429 - Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel

[csberry]

Quick background: Gram Parsons recorded this album and then died in the fall of 1973 of a drug overdose before the album was finished with post-production.

It is a down-right shame that Grievous Angel is a "Gram Parsons" album. Emmylou Harris carries a lot of the vocals and merely gets a line of credit with the rest of the band. Of course, on Wikipedia, there is a non-cited section that says that Gram's widow was jealous of Emmylou and was responsible for removing "Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris" as the actual album credit. If that is true, it is a real shame.

Ok...to the actual music. The music is such stereotypical country rock that after the past 40 years, it's kinda hard for me to appreciate how this album fit into the music scene. The 70's saw the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and others blur that line between country, folk, rock, and pop and these same artists were favorites of my parents, so the sound of this album is a familiar one to me. Grievous Angel is bookended by two songs Gram wrote for the album with a handful of country covers and songs previously written by Gram. The two "new" tracks were my two favorite. I can't help but wonder what an album where at least half of the songs were freshly written would have sounded like.

To be honest, the "laziness" of Gram's song choices and lack of new, original songs didn't bother me while listening to the tracks. It is a good sounding album. The songwriting situation frustrated me with my wondering how to appreciate the album and Gram's role as a musical "pioneer." How adventurous is he for doing a bunch of covers that are still quite loyal to the original? How good of an album can this be if the majority of songs he wrote for it were rejected from previous albums?

Songs I knew I liked: None

Songs I didn't know but now like: "Return of the Grievous Angel," "Love Hurts," "Ooh Las Vegas," and "In My Hour of Darkness"

Songs I can go the rest of my life without hearing again: The "live" medley of "Cash on the Barrelhead" and "Hickory Wind" were actually recorded in the studio with friends and bandmates playing the role of a raucous honky-tonk crowd. This medley sounded really hokey to me and dragged the album down.