The Boy Who Cried Freebird (28 page)

Once I was in New York City attending a jazz conference. On the second morning of the conference I walked over to the subway station on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue to take the F train up to Rockefeller Center.

Although I had no appointments, I was still in a hurry. And as I stood down in the subway waiting for a train, I became preoccupied with getting to where the action was. I wanted to be among my peers. I wanted to know what was going on.

For some reason, I felt that I was missing out on something. I kept shifting my weight from one foot to the other and staring into the dark tunnel, eager for any sign of an oncoming train that would take me where I wanted to go.

It took awhile, but I slowly became aware of a musician performing on the subway platform. The first thing I noticed was a distinctive guitar sound—the crisp acoustic picking reminded me of Neil Young in his early days. Then I focused on the voice and realized that it was a woman singing. I listened to the lyrics of her song, which mirrored the feelings I'd been having that morning.

She was singing about being in a rush and waiting on a train.

I was transfixed. The singer's words expressed my experience to a T. Her rich voice cut through the subway sounds and I forgot about my imagined lateness. I was caught up in the moment and walked closer, throwing a dollar into her guitar case.

Right then, I felt the F train approaching. There was the sudden draft, a distant rumble, and a light down in the tunnel—just as she had described in her song.

The train came to a stop and opened its doors. I boarded, hesitating for a moment before stepping onto the subway car. The doors closed sharply behind me and I turned to face the musician, who was still singing as she gave me a smile.

But the train didn't pull out of the station right away and I just stood there in the subway car, looking at her through the glass and listening to her sing.

As soon as we finally started moving, I realized that I was completely haunted by the troubadour's song. And as the train hurtled uptown, I got more depressed with every stop. Here I'd been in such a hurry to attend some music conference that I'd abandoned a real live experience that actually touched my soul.

When we arrived at the Fiftieth Street stop in Rockefeller Plaza, I got out. Then I ran up the stairs, crossed over the platform, ran down the stairs, took an F train all the way back to Fourteenth Street, got out, ran up the stairs, crossed over again, and ran back down to where I had begun.

She was still there, singing and playing her guitar.

So, I stood there for a good long while watching other people listen to the singer while they waited for
their
trains. I saw all sorts of different folks respond to her. One woman with a mink coat dropped a few dollars into her guitar case. A fellow street musician approached the singer, lingered a bit, and threw her some change.

When she finished her set, I introduced myself and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. I said that I hoped that her music would find an audience someday.

“I play for thousands of people every day,” she answered. Her name was Kathleen Mock.

That's all I can tell you. In the course of a New York minute I heard a song that should have stopped me in my tracks. Luckily, I was able to return to the source of my inspiration.

Maybe something like that will happen to you someday—when you're waiting on a train.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

A few years ago I was in Chicago sorting through my late uncle's belongings. My uncle, Shel Silverstein, was quite the Renaissance man, and among his many drawings, poems, songs, plays, scripts, notebooks, and ideas scrawled on napkins were hundreds of old audiotapes.

Aside from Shel's personal library of home recordings and studio demos, there was an odd batch of quarter-inch tapes on seven-inch reels. These tapes had no apparent link to his own musical works—it was just an arbitrary assortment of pop recordings collected by a friendly music publisher that Shel had once worked with.

Anyway, I was examining each box to note the contents and see if there were any stray recordings made by Shel, when a couple of reels grabbed my attention. They had the words
Graham Parsons—Demos
scrawled on them.

You see, Graham sounds similar to Gram. Gram is short for Ingram. And Ingram Cecil Parsons is one of my favorite country-rock artists.

Ah yes, Gram Parsons. Gram cut a romantic figure in the late 1960s and for a time he played with the Byrds. Parsons helped push the Byrds toward country music, and he was a prime mover on the band's Nashville album,
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
. After that, Gram
and fellow Byrd Chris Hillman formed the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram even hung out with the Rolling Stones. He also introduced the world to a gifted young singer named Emmylou Harris.

Parsons ultimately gained attention as a solo artist, but he died in 1973 at the age of twenty-six. That's when his popularity really began to soar. Ironically, Gram's rock-star mystique was enhanced when friend and road manager Phil Kaufman fulfilled a drunken promise and absconded with his dead body—cremating Parsons out in the desert of Joshua Tree, California.

Since his death several biographies have been written about Gram, and several of his early recordings were released posthumously. There've been tribute concerts, lavish CD anthologies, a documentary, and even a feature film called
Grand Theft Parsons,
which dramatized Kaufman's startling epilogue to Gram's short life.

If I had any doubts as to the identity of the “Graham” Parsons listed on the tapes, they vanished when I noticed the listing of a track entitled “Brass Buttons,” which is a classic Gram Parsons song if ever there was one.

I was definitely onto something.

So, I wrote down the song titles and took the list home. But even with all of my resources I was only able to identify about half of the songs. It soon occurred to me that these tapes might contain some extremely rare performances by Gram Parsons.

Looking for help, I started calling people in the music business, ones who knew Gram's story far better than I. And for the first time in my life, important record industry people actually took my calls.

I confirmed that several of the songs were previously unknown to the Parsons discography. It was also ventured that the tapes might have been from the summer of 1964 when Gram and one of his earliest groups, the Shilohs, spent a month in New York City.

The Shilohs had met folksinger Dick Weissman in Manhattan, and they all did some recordings together in a midtown studio. Supposedly, no one knew the whereabouts of the Weissman-Parsons tapes and the demos had never been heard or seen again.

Would you believe that there was a Dick Weissman listed on the Gram Parsons tapes that I'd found?

Now, I still hadn't listened to the recordings. The reels were at least forty years old and extremely fragile. The proper thing to do was find a professional studio to transfer the music onto a more durable, digitized format.

But I began negotiating with a small, independent record label that had released some other old Parsons recordings. The label's owner was very interested, and if the tapes turned out to be authentic, he had the connections to release the music commercially.

This was an exciting prospect. If the record guy released these recordings on his label, then I'd get a credit—like “Executive Producer.” Visions of writing the CD liner notes danced in my head and my future in the music business seemed bright.

Even my NPR producer was interested. He wanted to follow me into the studio and document the unveiling of these old recordings. Somebody on his production team thought it would be funny if the tapes turned out to be blank—kind of like Geraldo Rivera's much-hyped entry into Al Capone's vaults—which was a huge bust for Geraldo.

I declined my producer's offer.

Meanwhile, I
was
ready to visit the record label guy's home studio on the East Coast. We were going to examine the tapes together and take up the business end after that. Then, the label guy heard a rumor that I'd been shopping the tapes around to other record label guys. He felt insulted and cut off all communication with me.

I tried to explain to him that a friend of mine had merely mentioned
the tapes to a few other folks in the music industry. The label guy ignored my plea. I wrote him a long, rambling letter apologizing for the mistake and imploring him to resume our excavation of these historic recordings.

The record label guy never answered my rambling letter. I was back on my own.

With my ascent in the record business disrupted, I decided to book some time at a local studio and find out exactly what was on these tapes. There'd be plenty of time for a cool record deal after I determined the nature of the music I was dealing with.

I told my friend Ben Hunter that I was finally going to play the tapes. He insisted on documenting the event with his camcorder. I agreed, since by this time I was feeling certain that I alone possessed the lost 1964 recordings of Gram Parsons.

Besides the old tapes marked “Graham Parsons—Demos,” I'd dug up two other important reels from the same batch of tapes. These two reels actually had Shel Silverstein's name written on them. I figured that we could just digitize everything and I'd have enough rare recordings to keep me in the music business for quite some time.

So, Ben and I finally went into the recording studio. We watched the sound engineer examine the tapes and connect an old reel-to-reel tape player to his digital recording console.

As the engineer threaded the Parsons reel into the old tape machine, Ben turned on his camcorder. Then the engineer pressed play, the tape started to roll—and music filled the air.

But it wasn't Gram Parsons; it was just old generic Muzak and some bad, forgotten pop.

The engineer fast-forwarded the tape a bit. Still, no Gram. Soon, it became clear to me. Whoever had received the Parsons's demos at the publishing company had simply recorded over the tapes.

It was all too devastating. The engineer kept fast-forwarding and playing more Muzak and I was just sick about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Ben was recording the entire incident on video.

“Dude, turn that thing off,” I said. “You're killing me.”

The engineer flipped the tape over, just in case. Nothing. Then he put the second “Parsons” demo on the old tape machine. The results were the same and Ben kept on filming.

“Dude,” I pleaded. “Get that camera out of my face! I'm going down here.”

Finally, I conceded that there was absolutely no Gram Parsons on either of the two reels. In hopes of salvaging our studio time, we turned our attention to the other two tapes, the ones with Shel Silverstein's name marked on them.

Did I mention that those two reels were from the same batch as the Parsons stuff? Well, guess what? The same thing happened. Shel's demos had been taped over, too. There was just more of these common, boring pop tunes.

I was totally dejected.

Then, right near the end of our last reel, a voice emerged from the studio speakers that we recognized. It was a thin, reedy singing voice backed by a lone acoustic guitar.

No, it wasn't Shel Silverstein, and it wasn't Gram Parsons, either. It was the godfather of American folk music—Woody Guthrie.

Woody Guthrie, the outspoken singer-songwriter from Oklahoma whose dustbowl ballads and working-class anthems gave voice to so many local and national concerns and inspired the careers of countless musicians.

It's true; we had actually stumbled onto four forgotten performances by the great Woody Guthrie. The first two compositions were entitled “Rollin' Ocean” and “Roll on Waters.” The third song was
an end-of-the-war tune called “Wear My Ribbon,” which dates back to at least 1951 and may have been cowritten by Woody and his old running buddy, Cisco Houston.

The fourth song, which we found at the very end of our last reel of tape, was a version of “This Land Is Your Land.”

Now, history tells us that Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as a populist response to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America.” While there is certainly a standard version of this iconic folk song, Woody had been known to add an extra verse or two as he sang the tune repeatedly over the years.

So, as our newfound recording of “This Land Is Your Land” played that day in the studio, good old Ben wondered aloud if the tape might contain one of those mythical, unknown verses that Woody occasionally sang.

We listened and held our breath.

But the tape ran out before Woody finished singing. And although we
did
find a few different lyrics in the first part of the song, we'll never know if there was yet another, never-before-heard verse to Mr. Guthrie's most enduring composition.

Still, the tapes had provided us with some extremely rare Woody Guthrie performances, which we gladly donated to Nora Guthrie and the Woody Guthrie Archives in Manhattan, where they are now safe and sound.

Our friends at the Guthrie Archive think that Woody's performances may have been recorded by the legendary record label guy, Moe Asch—perhaps
even before
Moe had started the Folkways Records label back in 1948.

Anyway, no rare Gram Parsons demos and no cool record deal.

But…Smithsonian Institute—here we come!

Undying thanks to Peg (editor in chief), Liz (for the photo idea and squeezing into the jeans), Rick, Tsipora, Lulu and Twinkie, Sarah, Matt, and Gino.

 

Special thanks to Hap Mansfield. Extra thanks to Michael Dorr for instigating the project and to the late David Walley for his unwavering support. Gracious thanks to Maureen O'Brien for believing, Stephanie Fraser for the awesome list, and everyone else at HarperCollins.

 

Thanks to Harvey Kubernik, Colin Berry, John Draper and Laura Sandlin, Ben and Tina Hunter, Holly George-Warren and Robert Burke Warren, Shirley Halperin and Thom Monahan, Cecille Kramer and Kevin Calaguiro, Jerry Goldner, Mike Rowe, Felicia Kelly, Scott and Debbie Cohen, Pat Thomas and Sonia Clerc, Bob Boilen, Steven Bernstein and the Sex Mob, Betsy Palmer, Billy Martin, Paul S. Williams, Richard Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Jaan Uhelzski and Matthew Kaufman, Scott and Ali Giampino, John Humphrey, Michael and Paula Fracasso, Al Rose and Rhonda Welbel, Harlan and Rachel Wallach, Michael Carr and Linda Fiore, Tom Asch, Martin Northway,
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