Talking with Tim

The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music

Over the past few years, my increasing interest in Americana music has prompted me to explore its roots. This exploration recently led me to David N. Meyer‘s book, Twenty Thousands Road: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music. As a Georgia native, it surprised me to learn that Parsons spent his earliest years in Waycross, Georgia. But that’s far from the only thing I learned in this engaging book. Meyer was kind enough to discuss the book and his research process in this recent email interview.

Tim O’Shea: In writing about Parsons’ life, considering that his musical career was essentially 10 years, were you surprised you were able to devote 300 pages to that aspect of his life or could you have written more if you had had the time and space (in publishing terms)?

David N. Meyer: I had to be conscious of holding back from writing too much. I found pretty much every detail fascinating, and given how compressed GP’s career was, illuminating as well. And it’s tempting to include every nugget; ask any biographer. So, no, I was not surprised.

O’Shea: Most biographies don’t sport encyclopedias. What motivated you to do one?

Meyer: I imagined a 15-year-old finding this book 15 years from now, and not having any idea who a number of the mentioned musicians, family members and cultural figures were. While ample web resources exist, I wanted to provide context. It’s that completist thing, too. I wanted readers to be able to instantly read and contextualize anyone mentioned in the book. It was also a lot of fun to write.

O’Shea: How key were your interviews with Margaret Fisher in terms of your understanding of Parsons?

Meyer: This is a perceptive question. Margaret Fisher was the single most crucial and enlightening interview for the entire book. There was a well-entrenched myth of the evening of Gram’s death, one that had endured for 30 years and put all the blame on Margaret. She had never been interviewed before and was open and willing to discuss the most painful memories. It’s from Margaret that we have the first credible, sequential account of Gram’s last night.

Margaret also provided a clear picture of the social life of Jacksonville when she and Gram were in affiliated private high schools there. She has a rare insight into Gram as a young man, and the world of southern privilege that shaped him and her. She was also candid about addiction and the drug lifestyle of her and Gram’s time.

O’Shea: Was it early or fairly far along in the writing process of this book when you felt that you understood Parsons?

Meyer: I can describe Gram, I can predict how he might respond to certain situations, I can make an educated guess at his motivations for certain actions and I feel intuitively and rationally that I have an understanding and an insight into his music.

As for understanding Gram Parsons, I can’t claim I do. The more I learned of how he acted, how he responded to various turns in his life and the more I listened to his music, the more clear it became that on some fundamental level Gram Parsons would remain opaque to me. One of the greatest challenges of the book was to communicate what I learned of Gram, and what remained mysterious. I don’t think it’s uncommon for biographers to discover that the deeper they go into their subjects’ lives, the more the essence of the subject drifts off, just out of reach.I often had this dream-like sense of Gram as a cypher, and what I learned could feel as obscuring as it did clarifying. Gram could be predictable and yet mysterious even those with whom he was most intimate. And everyone I talked to – everyone – found a basic mystery, a primal unknowable core that they could not penetrate. And in his last three or four years, that primal mystery was further obscured by drugs and alcohol. I think the best path to understanding Gram is to listen to his music.

O’Shea: Why do you so strongly dislike the Eagles? Was this an opinion you formed while researching the book?

Meyer: I had always found the Eagles music and personae deeply irritating. (Though, like everyone else in the world, I have the lyrics to at least four of their songs engraved in my memory.) Before I started the book I found their music repetitive, insincere, cheesy, sexist, faux-profound and moronic. Also, they always seemed to be such assholes. At the same time, I’m moved – in spite of myself – by Desperado and admire the band for covering a Tom Waits song [Ol' 55] and, one assumes, allowing him the financial freedom to make his great later albums. And Bernie Leadon disproved the asshole theory (at least regarding him) a thousand times over by his generosity, patience, and willingness to explain aspects of music to me that no one else ever made clear. My understanding of the pedal steel guitar grew exponentially after one of our conversations. As I said in the book, they took every aspect of Gram’s music and made it as stupid, mass market, predictable, dull, self-aggrandizing and obvious as they could….The more I learned of Gram’s musical progress, and of the burgeoning country-rock scene in LA, the clearer it became that the Eagles took the absolute worst of every musical virtue of country and turned it up to 11.

O’Shea: What first made you interested in writiting this bio, the music or legend of Gram Parsons?

Meyer: As I wrote in my intro, I heard Gram’s voice floating out of a dorm window onto a quad in Chapel Hill NC and that was it. I ran up the stairs to the room his voice emerged from, and bought the GP/Grevious Angel LPs the next day. I’ve been obsessed with Gram ever since.

O’Shea: Who among your many interviews were the least and most reticent to talk to you?

Meyer: Margaret Fisher was the most reticent who finally agreed to speak. But Jim Stafford, Emmylou Harris, Phil Kaufman, Gram’s wife at the time of his death, and Chris Hillman were the most reticent – they wouldn’t talk to me at all. A couple of those wanted money to be interviewed, and of course I would not pay. The Snively family was remarkably ready to talk, and were hugely helpful, as was Chris Etheridge.

O’Shea: When you delved into Parsons’ family history and did your interviews in Waycross, Georgia, were you surprised to find folks still willing to talk about the family (considering by the time of your research, they’d been gone from the town for well over 30 years)?

Meyer: No I was not surprised at all. That’s the way of small towns; all of Gram’s contemporaries in Waycross and Winter Haven remembered him as someone special, and the Parsons/Snivelys were the most glamorous folks in both towns. Folks were a bit obsessed with them, and Gram’s death cemented that obsession. It’s important to remember that Gram was not famous and not regarded as influential when he died. For the people in both towns, he was a home-town boy who pursued an inexplicable career (rock star?) and died of drugs. That’s how they remembered him.

O’Shea: Given the number of fascinating musicians you interviewed in the course of this book, have you found yourself tempted to pursue a biography of any of them?

Meyer: Not so much other musicians, but I very much wanted to write, and pitched unsucessfully, a biography of a group of insanely cool, forward-thinking and acting groovesters in whose orbit Gram moved, people whom you could reasonably argue invented the Sixties. And I’d love to write about James Burton, who’s seen and done it all.

O’Shea: In covering a subject like Parsons, a person who’s life was heavily shaped by addiction, did it ever get too depressing for you–did you ever have to step away from the book just for your own well-being or were you careful to guard against getting overwhelmed?

Meyer: I couldn’t stay away from both time and money constraints, but yes, the constant interviewing of junkies and ex-junkies proved really depressing. Margaret Fisher is quite insightful about her own addiction, but she is the exception that proves the rule. I got really tired of drug stories, and grew to truly despise the romantic, Dionysian myths that sprang up around the early and drug-derived deaths of that era (Gram, Hendrix, Joplin, Lowell George, etc.). The saddest lesson of writing this book is how little romance accrues to addiction and its consequences.

O’Shea: In writing this book do you hope readers take away an appreciation of how much Parsons influenced American music–up to even today?

Meyer: Very much so. I made some grandiose claims in the introduction to alert readers to how seminal Gram remains in the dominant musical trope of our day – that of appropriation and the blurring of boundaries between one sort of music and another. Sadly, mainstream commercial country has turned more toward the Eagles and less to Gram, though the rock aspects in mainstream country could be connected to Gram easily.

O’Shea: Are you in the midst of developing your next book?

Meyer: I am – I’m going to write about The Bee Gees for Da Capo books.

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Meyer: Writing the Gram book really opened me up to the world of country music and how many great, moving singers sprang from that world. So I’d urge everyone to listen to the Louvin Brothers, Wynn Stewart, Webb Pierce, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzel, Conway Twitty, Porter Wagoner, Charlie Pride, George Jones, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline…even now, with all their success and fame, I think they’re underrated as emotional interpreters of American music.