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He’d taken piano lessons and even written his first song (titled “Gram Boogie”), but after that Elvis concert, imitating his idol became his primary musical pursuit. Elvis’s music unified country, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues-and Parsons said, “It all penetrated my mind.” “He came on and the whole place went bonkers,” Parsons later said in an interview. Nine-year-old Parsons loved many things-Boy Scouts with scoutmaster Coon Dog, hunting, fishing, and football-but music became everything for him in 1956 when he stayed out late on a school night and saw Elvis perform. But he grew up mainly in Waycross, Georgia-the locale of North America’s largest “blackwater” swamp-in a single-story brick home where he carved his name on the concrete stoop. Parsons spent holidays at the Snivelys’ Magnolia Mansion inside Winter Haven’s Cypress Gardens amusement park (now the site of Legoland Florida). His mother, Avis Snively, came from a family of Florida citrus magnates and, like Coon Dog, was an alcoholic. He was born Ingram Cecil Connor III in Winter Haven, Florida, in 1946, but everyone called him “Gram.” His father, Ingram Cecil Connor II (nicknamed “Coon Dog” for either his sad eyes or hunting acumen, depending on the source), was a famous World War II fighter pilot who self-medicated PTSD with alcohol. Traditional country music was made by those who ached and suffered. The joke goes that if you play a country song backward, the singer’s wife returns to him, his dog comes back to life, his employer rehires him, and he gets out of prison. Harvard meant something to him, and throughout his career, he returned again and again. For a brief time in 1965, he was a Harvard undergraduate in Pennypacker Hall, sitting cross-legged with his guitar on his dorm-room floor. “It’s great copy.”īut Parsons had a whole life before Los Angeles, before heroin, far from Joshua Tree and the Sunset Strip. “Tragedy and myth and the heroic young death-there’s glamor to it,” Dunlop says, regretfully. They say, ‘Oh, Gram, he was on the road to hell, you know?’” There’s an elegiac way people talk about him that ignores the contingency of past events, as if all of it were inevitable: that he was always destined to start country rock, live hard, and die young. Parsons’s bandmate Ian Dunlop says, “People love the sensationalism of Gram’s story. My father, Fred Walecki, owner of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, was friends with Parsons and cringes at how his death has come to overshadow the rest of his life. Now, Parsons’s story is told mainly through the lens of his final years-artistically his most productive, but personally his most complicated. Honoring a pact Parsons and his road manager Phil Kaufman made at a friend’s funeral, Kaufman rented a hearse, stole Parsons’s body from a Los Angeles airport, and cremated it in Joshua Tree National Park-in what became the subject of a 2002 film and a macabre legend in rock ’n’ roll history. He’d just released a solo album featuring vocals from his protégée, future country music star Emmylou Harris, when he died of a drug overdose in 1973. Parsons started the International Submarine Band in Cambridge, played with the Byrds, then cofounded the Flying Burrito Brothers in Los Angeles. The lore of singer-songwriter Gram Parsons ’69 often goes something like this: considered the “father” of country rock music, he pioneered a new genre despite never having a hit record.
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