As a young man I grew up in the South and I hated country music. That changed when I first started hearing songs from The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons solo work, all of which seemed to me to be quite different from the hillbilly shit I’d grown up around. The West Coast country vibe had a wide-openness about it that was more in tune with my Jack Kerouac inspired desire to hit the road…a road that was as much a metaphor for spiritual yearning as a slab of tar and concrete. Gram Parsons’ western music wasn’t solely about blue collar blues, booze and bad women. Parsons was a romantic in the traditional poetic sense, a seeker of beauty in the coarseness of everyday life. Yes, it was honky tonk music, but in Gram’s world the honky tonks weren’t violent dives of retribution, they were a kind of cowboy cafe society that weren’t far removed from the cafes of the French surrealists in Paris of the 1930’s, where absinthe was drunk instead of tequila.
This interview with Michael Bates in 1973 was Gram Parsons’ last recorded conversation. 6 months after the interview Parsons O.D’d on morphine and tequila in a motel on the edge of the Mojave desert.
Bate’s connection to Gram is almost accidental. In 1973—while he was the host of a CBC radio show in Ottawa, Ontario—Bate was on a road trip when he happened to spot Parsons’ beaten-up tour bus by the side of the Massachusetts Turnpike, 90 miles from Boston. He stopped and arranged an interview, which he says turned out to be the final recorded conversation with Parsons, who died that September from an overdose of morphine and tequila.
Gram candididly talks about Keith Richards and The Stones, bad dealings with The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and how Waylon Jennings had to walk around the block to smoke a joint during a recording session with Chet Atkins. In the beginning of the interview Parsons makes mention of being stuck in England and left penniless by The Byrds. Gram was fired by Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman when he refused to join them on a South Africa tour as he was was opposed to apartheid. Some of his friends at the time thought Gram actually quit The Byrds so he could hang out with The Stones in London.
It’s Gram’s birthday today (Nov. 5).