Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 140

Record label: Columbia

Produced: Gary Usher

Recorded Nashville; March 9–May 27, 1968

Released: September 27, 1968 (UK) July 29, 1968 (US)

Chart peaks: 27 (UK) 24 (UK)

Personnel: Roger McGuinn (g, v, banjo); Kevin Kelley (d); Chris Hillman (b, v, mandolin); Gram Parsons (g, v); Earl P Ball (p); Jon Corneal (d); Lloyd Green (sg); John Hartford (banjo, g); Roy M Huskey (b); Jaydee Maness (sg); Clarence J White (g); Roy Halee, Charlie Bragg (e)

Track listing: You Ain’t Going Nowhere (S); I Am A Pilgrim (S); The Christian Life; You Don’t Miss Your Water; You’re Still On My Mind; Pretty Boy Floyd; Hickory Wind; One Hundred Years From Now; Blue Canadian Rockies; Life In Prison; Nothing Was Delivered

Running time 32.26

Current CD: Sony 82876891302 adds: Live At Filmore West album

Further listening: Younger Than Yesterday (1967)

Further reading: The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited (Johnny Rogan, 1997); www.thebyrds.com (fan site)

Download: iTunes

Streamlined to a trio at the start of 1968, The Byrds were reduced to playing small club dates and support slots. ‘We really needed somebody,’ Roger McGuinn recalls. Three months later, he was auditioning for a jazz keyboard player and improbably chose Gram Parsons. It rapidly transpired that Parsons knew nothing about jazz but was a promising country singer and songwriter. A Harvard dropout with a southern background that would not have been out of place in the tortured pages of a Tennessee Williams play, Parsons was thrusting and ambitious enough to replace the recently fired David Crosby as The Byrds’ resident troublemaker. After allying himself with fellow country enthusiast Chris Hillman, Parsons successfully deflected McGuinn from pursuing his dream concept of a double album chronicling the history of twentieth century music. McGuinn had intended to tackle traditional country, move on to folk, R&B and rock, then conclude the work with some snatches of jazz and synthesizer experimentation. Once Parsons arrived, they never got beyond the country.

‘Chris, Gram and producer Gary Usher just didn’t want to go along with the electronic music idea, so I was outvoted,’ McGuinn explains. The Byrds certainly played the country angle to perfection. First they cut their hair, then moved to Nashville and even risked their lives playing before a staunch redneck audience at the Grand Ole Opry. The new line-up appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in July and sounded highly accomplished with a neat combination of country-style material and Byrds classics. The future looked bright but on the day they were due to set forth on a controversial tour of South Africa, Parsons quit.

The following month, his four months as a Byrd were validated with the release of this groundbreaking and innovative album. At a time when rock was in danger of suffocation by the overblown excesses of hard rock and stale psychedelia, Sweetheart offered a sense of place and respect for tradition. Like Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Band’s Music From Big Pink, it evoked an America before the fall, articulated most vividly in Parsons’ Hickory Wind and the Woody Guthrie classic Pretty Boy Floyd. The sales were disappointing – hardly surprising considering Gram was now gone – but in challenging their audience, The Byrds had shown a courage that was commendable.