WHAT DRIVES TALENTED PEOPLE to destroy themselves? It's an old question, even something of a cliché, yet it is still a valid one. In the case of Gram Parsons, it is also especially poignant, because if anybody had it all, he did.
A talented child
born into money and privilege, a boy who had "Elvis in his heart" from an early age, he was the musical mind at the heart of a revolution in American music – a revolution that said country music did not belong to Nixon-loving, pro-Vietnam "Okie from Muskogee" types, but was the very lifeblood of American culture.
Parsons was the man who, with the Byrds, then later with the Flying Burrito Brothers and on solo projects, reunited rock, pop and country – with a good helping of honky-tonk thrown in – to give us what we now know as "Americana", and he was one of the great songwriters of his era.
He was also, as Keith Richards so colourfully said, the man with "better dope than the Mafia", and he lived a brief, but spectacularly excessive, existence until his untimely death, in a Joshua Tree motel, at the age of 26.
Nobody did more harm to himself than Parsons, and nobody did more to harm his reputation, flickering between seemingly effortless success and total unreliability, and throwing away the goodwill of those who admired his work and recognised his essential sweetness, in what came to seem an almost brutally casual approach to work and friendship.
Now, in Twenty Thousand Roads, David Meyer has given us a compendious account of Parsons's life and music, calling on witness testimony and other accounts to reveal just what life on the road might have been like with a crazy man like him. And Parsons was crazy, in so many ways. The alcohol, the drugs, the arrests, the police beatings – it's all here.
Meyer lets us see how hard it was for other musicians to work with Parsons, who never did the same thing twice, and was constantly wandering away from the song, so even a musician of Emmylou Harris's ability was exhausted by just keeping up with him. He also lets us hear from all those who, as maddening as they might have found him, were inspired by this astonishing musician. That is the impression that stays after 500 pages, that sense of Parsons as an inspiration. That, and the sadness of his loss. Gram Parsons was a man who reinvented American music, but in the process, he threw himself away. So why did he do it? It would be unfair to look for an answer in this marvellous, compendious study of a still neglected musician – because it would be wrong to look for an answer anywhere.
There is no straight or simple answer. What drives talented people to destroy themselves may well be what drives them to produce their best work in the first place: congenital restlessness, fear of boredom, insecurity, and passions that can find no other expression than art and druggy or alcoholic excess. Add to this the fact that every new song offered up for public scrutiny is an occasion for doubt and second-guesses, even if the singer looks as if he frankly doesn't give a damn.
In fact, the more he looks as if he doesn't give a damn, the more we suspect that he cares a great deal – even when he knows that the near miracle of work like Sweetheart of the Rodeo, or Grievous Angel is just another commodity for the people who run the show.
The full article contains 619 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
