Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons And The Roots Of Country Rock
By Bob Kealing
Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock is not a typical biography. It’s the story of author Bob Kealing’s search, four decades after the singer’s death, for information and interviews. Thus, this book includes primary source material not available in the five previous biographies on Parsons: how Gram attracted a Life magazine shoot when still a teen-ager, a major revelation about Gram’s family, quotes from the memoir of his sister Avis, a Jim Stafford interview on advising Gram to “go country.”
Often called “the father of country rock,” Parsons played with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. He gave Emmylou Harris her start, was a friend of Keith Richards, and served as an inspiration to musicians such as Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Griffin, and Elvis Costello. Tribute albums and concerts have honored him over the years.
Gram spent his childhood as Ingram “Gram” Cecil Connor III in Waycross, Georgia. Then, in 1958, when he was twelve, his father committed suicide. His alcoholic mother moved him and his younger sister to her family home in Winter Haven, Florida. The author says, “With all the ups and downs at home, the one constant in Gram’s life was his love of music.”
Gram Connor became Gram Parsons when his new stepfather adopted the two children. By then a teenager, Gram was playing in several local bands. From a sad childhood, he became a self-serving adult who seemed to care only about himself and his music. “His critics have said Gram was capable of dropping associates,” Kealing writes, “as soon as he felt he no longer had a use for them.”
When Gram left the International Submarine Band in 1968 to join the Byrds, with whom he shared a business manager, the move caused a rift between Gram and bandmate Lee Hazelwood. Gram spearheaded the transition of the Byrds to country rock. He brought country songs into the group, and was influential in making the Byrds the first rock act to record in Nashville and the first to appear on the Grand Ole Opry. Gram then dumped the Byrds while on tour in England, apparently preferring to party with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.
Back in Los Angeles, Gram helped form the Flying Burrito Brothers. “The beginning of the end for Gram came when the Rolling Stones returned to Los Angeles,” Kealing writes about the events of 1969. “Parsons was on his way to becoming the lost Burrito Brother, more likely to be found hanging around at the Stones’ recording sessions than fulfilling his own obligations with the Burritos or advancing his Cosmic American vision.”
In 1972, Gram met an unknown singer named Emmylou Harris, and she toured the following year with Gram’s new band, the Fallen Angels. She would later write “The Road,” a song in which she states, “So I took what you left to me and put it to some use, when looking for an answer, with those three chords and the truth.” When inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, she acknowledged Gram as one of her musical influences.
Gram’s alcoholic excesses and drug use caught up with him at a motel in Joshua Tree, California, on September 19. 1973. “Gram had been drinking all day even before he decided to take a second hit of morphine,” Kealing writes. “Gram had ingested a lethal cocktail of drugs and alcohol.” He was 26 years old.
Although the format of the two-layer story in Calling Me Home remained uniform, I found it disruptive. Every new chapter jerked me out of Gram’s life and back to the present, as Kealing moved on to his next geographic description and his next interview. Some material was repeated. For example, the appearance of Gram and the Byrds on the Opry sounded familiar, so I went back several pages and found the author discussing the dated photo with his interview subjects.
The timeline was hard to follow because dates were seldom mentioned. I couldn’t determine when Gram’s adoption occurred, and I had to go to another source for Emmylou Harris’s Country Music Hall of Fame induction date.
Once the reader accepts the above format, Calling Me Home is a book anyone interested in Gram Parsons or his musical era will want to read. It describes the Florida garage band culture of the 1960s. It addresses the rise of Gram’s musical counterparts–Bobby Braddock, Tom Petty, Jim Stafford, the Allman Brothers, John Anderson. It explains why Gram’s friends stole his body and set his coffin afire in the desert. Kealing’s search for interviews and material will excite both biographers and Gram Parsons fans.