Gram Parsons Emerges From the Lost and Found: How a Great, Misplaced 1973 Concert Tape Became One of the Record Store Day Hits of 2023

[Nergal]

Love hurts, and so, if you’re a Gram Parsons fan, does the idea that the world has had to do without him for 50 years, as of September of this year. Imagining how his style might have changed over the subsequent half-century is never-ending, as is conjecturing how he might have simply have brought the world closer to his own fearless hybrid of country and rock, with more years to grow his audience after what amounted to a mere five-year heyday.

But it’s as if he never went away, listening to the new album “Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels: The Last Roundup, Live From the Bijou Cafe in Philadelphia, 3/16/73,” released on vinyl this weekend exclusively for Record Store Day’s annual Black Friday event. Part of the immediacy is the constant presence of Emmylou Harris through the entire double-LP, as a harmony or duet partner; if she’s still so vibrant and still such a part of our lives, how can Parsons be 50 years gone? And part of it is the vitality of the recording itself, which did require some tender loving care from an expert engineer to sound as uncompromised as it does, but doesn’t much portray its age in either the quality or the sensibilities that have well outlived the man who still stands as the spiritual center of a movement.

 

 

The live album is a rare product bearing the label imprint of Amoeba Music, better known as the retail mini-chain in California that has succeeded Tower Records as the mascot and mecca of music in its physical form. Dave Prinz, who co-founded the first store in Berkeley in 1990, is a Parsons fanatic who previously issued a live album from the Flying Burrito Brothers with the singer-songwriter at the helm, and has hopes of doing more with his hero’s lost tapes. In the case of the current release, “lost” really does apply — Prinz acquired the tape of the ’73 Philly show 15 years ago, then misplaced it in Amoeba’s vast Hollywood store before it turned up in a move during the pandemic.

Also intimately involved in the release is Parsons’ daughter, Polly Parsons, who was 6 when her father died, and has had quite a journey of coming to terms with his legacy, including the celebratory sides as well as his well-known troubles. Her own legacy includes the establishment of a treatment center, the Hickory Wind Ranch, named after a song her father wrote during his tenure in the Byrds.

Earlier this month, Parsons and Prinz took part in a panel at the Grammy Museum, moderated by Variety’s Chris Willman — followed by a superb set by one of today’s leading roots-based artists, Sierra Ferrell, that included three Gram songs as well as several of her own. An edited and condensed version of that conversation follows.