Gram Parsons ..and how little we all really know about music

Gram Parsons-Streets of Baltimore          

It would be good to think that I’d been a Gram Parsons fan for a long time before I got this album but I hadn’t. It would be a name to drop in a sort of “I’ve always been into Gram Parsons” way before he became briefly fashionable; “Oh, Gram Parsons? Of course his early stuff was good. I’ve got all the original 1970 vinyl albums as imports somewhere around. But they are mixed up with all the Parsons bootlegs.” etc. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. I’m deeply suspicious whenever any music fan starts namedropping in such a manner-it’s the equivalent of the “Woody Allen early, funny stuff” translated into music. Of all the music that I’ve got and of all the music I really like and love, I don’t think that there are any artists at all-and this is out of thousands of CDs and tens of thousands of tracks on assorted iPods- that I can lay claim to having “discovered” off my own bat; that I heard merely on a whim and knew that they were going to be successful, either critically or commercially. In fact there are more than a few that I thought would be a shoe-in for fame and riches and that sunk without a trace. (A lifetime of listening to pop music would, you’d think, give me an ear for what would work but no, there are many more misses than hits cluttering up my shelves).

I think that there are only a few ways of discovering new music, or music that is new to you-either from reading about it and seeing it aligned to something you already like, someone personally recommending it to you or just stumbling across it at random either at a gig or clip on the TV or internet. We’d all be A & R people if there was some other way and that’s the reason why I’m sceptical about all the nonsense spouted by serious music fans-from whatever genre they are; jazz, classical, blues, rock-nobody has much of a clue and there’s a lot of one-upmanship and Emperor’s New Clothes-ism going on. It’s a bit like any hobby-train spotting, DIY or fishing-the more anyone is deeper into it ,then the greater the amount of sheer bollocks they come out with. There’s some sort of exponential formula to it all. (It’s all a male thing as well; women are much too sensible for all of this). The vast majority of music that I like has only come to my attention because I’ve read a good review of it, or that someone played me a record and badgered me about them, or that I heard some other artist raving about it as an influence. (Even The Fall, who I have loved nearly from their inception and for the past thirty odd years since, only crossed my radar because on one boring rainy Saturday afternoon, one of my friends pestered me into listening to their newly released first album. It was all by chance). I wouldn’t have got this Gram Parsons record if I hadn’t been into the Lemonheads in 1986 and heard Evan Dando going on about him. It’s as shallow as that. And any music fan who tries to convince you that being into anything with any hint of obscurity is fibbing. No-one really has a clue.