Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (13 page)

Six months later, Gram was dead of a drug overdose.

8

Emmylou

Photo by Henry Diltz.

Performing at the Universal Amphitheater.

I
HEARD ABOUT
G
RAM’S
death somewhere on the road, and my immediate concern was for Emmy. I didn’t know exactly what the bond between her and Gram consisted of, but I knew it was deep. No one who had seen them sing together would have doubted it.

I called her and could hear in her voice that she was grieving hard. I asked her if she would like to fly out to Los Angeles and spend a little time with me. I had a booking for a week at the Roxy, which was the newest hip Hollywood performing space and bar, founded by Lou Adler and Elmer Valentine, and co-owned by David Geffen, Peter Asher, and Elliot Roberts. I asked her to sit in with my show, thinking it might stir some interest in Emmy as a solo act without Gram.

The first thing she did after she arrived at my apartment was to take out her guitar and play a song she had just written called “Boulder to Birmingham.” It brought me to tears and
established Emmy as a songwriter to be taken seriously. I was delighted to see she had written such an impressive song, and heartbroken for her about what had inspired it.

We spent a couple of days going through songs that we could harmonize on for the Roxy shows. We worked up a few Hank Williams songs: “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You),” and “Honky Tonkin’.” Emmy taught me an old song she knew called “The Sweetest Gift (A Mother’s Smile),” and we made it into a duet.

When she opened her suitcase, she showed me some clothes she had been given by Nudie, the haute couture fashion designer to all the biggest country-and-western music stars. Nudie and his son-in-law Manuel Cuevas, the brilliant designer from Mexico, had created the suits that Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers had worn on the cover of their debut album,
The Gilded Palace of Sin
. These clothes were treasures and far too expensive for us to buy. There was a pink Sweetheart of the Rodeo–style jacket that Emmy wore, and a red sparkly vest with white horseshoes on the front that Emmy brought for me to wear. Originally made for country singer Gail Davies, the sparkly vest had short sparkly cuffs to match. I wore them with the Levi’s shorts that I had worn to the San Mateo County Jail.

I don’t remember much about the shows that we played at the Roxy, only that, in Hollywood, word traveled lightning quick about the beautiful brown-eyed girl with the blazing talent who had been left by Gram Parsons’s death to wonder what in the world to do with her musical self. Not too long after that, Emmy signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records. The label paired her with Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who assembled the Hot Band to play behind her. It featured some of the finest musicians in Nashville, including Glen D. Hardin from Elvis Presley’s band, early rock-and-roll guitar hero James
Burton, and up-and-coming songwriter Rodney Crowell. They made a string of great records together, records that further helped to define country rock as a serious musical discipline.

Back out on the road, we were playing a show in Atlanta, and my band got word that a favorite band of theirs, Little Feat, was playing in a club nearby. I dimly remembered having once met Lowell George, their lead singer and principal songwriter, at my house in Topanga Canyon. I hadn’t heard the band. We went to see them after our show, and when we walked in, they were standing on the stage playing “Dixie Chicken.” Their Atlanta audience was in a frenzy. Little Feat, to this day my favorite rock-and-roll band, sounded like no other. It had layers of oddly syncopated New Orleans parade beats, with Bill Payne pounding out a keyboard part that conjured the spirits of Professor Longhair, Louis Gottschalk, and Claude Debussy. Sailing over the top of this was Lowell, playing slide guitar with an 11/16 socket wrench from Sears, Roebuck and Co. on his little finger. The socket wrench, heavier than the usual glass bottle top or lipstick tube preferred by blues musicians, gave him a languorous, creamy sound that was completely his own. Lowell had a rich, amber-toned voice that he could whip into and out of falsetto. His blues-saturated vocal embellishments had glimmers of classical Indian singing, and he had unerring pitch and rhythmic savvy. His songwriting style was unrestricted by conventional pop music forms, with quirky lyrics that suggested a prodigious intellect.

Backstage, Lowell walked up to me, opened his fist to reveal a large pill, blinked at me several times, and said, “Hi, want a Quaalude?” No, I didn’t want a Quaalude. I wanted to know the open tuning to a song of his, about a truck driver, that he had
sung in the show. He called it “Willin’.” We all went to someone’s house for a long jam session where Lowell played the song for me in open G tuning. We soon discovered that for my voice, it sounded better in the key of E. We agreed to meet when we were both back home in L.A., and he would show me how to play it in the new key.

True to his word, Lowell showed up at my apartment with his big blond Guild acoustic guitar and taught me the song. One of the problems with changing a song from its original key is that it can lose the charm of the way the chords are voiced. Also, the G tuning gains some resonance from having the strings loosened, or slacked, to make the G chord. Open E tuning is not a slack key. The relevant strings have to be tuned higher to form the chord, so it is not as big a sound. Still, the E tuning came roaring out of that big Guild, which he left with me for a few weeks so that I wouldn’t have to retune my own guitar every time I wanted to play the song. I played it till my fingers blistered.

A few nights before I met Lowell, I was in my room at the now infamous Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., with a night off and nothing to do. The phone rang. It was Emmy, saying that she was spending the evening with a group of musicians she felt I just had to get to know, and would I meet her at one of their houses. She gave me the address and directions to a place in the suburbs in Bethesda, Maryland. It was the home of an ear, nose, and throat specialist named John Starling and his wife, Fayssoux. When John wasn’t taking out people’s tonsils in the OR, he played guitar and sang baritone in a bluegrass band called Seldom Scene. Fayssoux, a speech pathologist, was a beauty with a cameo profile and shimmering coppery hair to her waist. She spoke in the refined tones of southern aristocracy, kept an immaculate home, and was an even more immaculate harmony singer. She, Emmy, and John had spent countless evenings
working up three-part arrangements to traditional songs and country music classics and blended like family when they sang together. There were two other Seldom Scene members: Ben Eldridge, a mathematician, was the banjo player. Mike Auldridge, a graphic artist, played dobro.

Most dobro players have a lot of swagger and growl in their sound, but Mike was an original. Quiet and shy, he approached the music with a kind of hushed reverence that gave his playing an unusual lyrical quality. His was a seminal style that has influenced many younger players, including current dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas.

We played and sang long into the night, and the next evening I went back and we did it all again. Emmy, who has an infallible ear for a song with integrity, was beginning to explore material for her major label debut record,
Pieces of the Sky
. She played us Billy Sherrill’s “Too Far Gone,” Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Sleepless Nights,” and the Stanley Brothers’ “Angel Band,” John and Fayssoux harmonizing flawlessly. I couldn’t wait to get another night off in D.C. so I could sing with them again.

9

Peter Asher

K
ATE
T
AYLOR TURNED UP
backstage at a show I played with the Eagles at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. We talked about knitting for a while. She had taught me how to knit woolen socks on five needles, and I told her about the pattern of hearts I had plotted on graph paper and how cool it was to watch the socks take shape. After a while, she changed the subject and told me she no longer wanted a singing career that involved constant touring; she preferred to play music at home and not perform very much. She urged me to ask Peter Asher to manage me again and said she thought he would agree.

We were walking toward a staircase that would take us from the dressing rooms to the stage on the floor below, where
the Eagles were beginning their show. I was studying her face closely, to make sure she was comfortable about what she had told me, and I wasn’t watching where I was going. I caught my heel on the edge of the top step and tobogganed all the way to the bottom. I had the wind completely knocked out of me, and as I lay in a heap struggling to catch my breath, I made a decision to speak to Peter as soon as I returned to L.A.

Back home in California, I phoned Peter’s wife and told her what Kate had said to me. I asked if she thought Peter would still be interested in working with me, and she said she thought it was possible. Why didn’t I come for dinner, and we would all discuss it? Betsy made us a casserole out of pork medallions, onions, and potatoes, and we ate it in front of the fire in the dining room of their charming house in Beverly Hills. By the time we got to dessert, we had an agreement. Neither of us wanted a written contract. We sealed the deal with a handshake and a hug.

Having Peter on board meant that John Boylan could go back to doing what he loved most, which was full-time record production. He became a vice president of A&R for Epic Records and produced a series of hits for numerous artists.

By the time Peter and I were able to record together, I had already made
Don’t Cry Now
for Asylum and was getting ready to make the album I still owed Capitol. I hadn’t played “Heart Like a Wheel” for him because I couldn’t bear to see the song rejected again.

One night, I was rehearsing with Andrew Gold, the piano player and guitarist in my band. During a break, he began to play the introduction to “Heart Like a Wheel,” and I started to sing it with him. Peter thought it was a beautiful song. The following night, Jackson Browne and I were co-billed to play Carnegie Hall in New York City, so I added it to the show. It got a great response.

My financial ambition for the next tour, slated to begin in January 1974, was simple: I wanted to make enough money to buy a washing machine. Lugging heavy bags full of dirty clothes to the Fluff ’n Fold on the two days I had off before starting another tour was a drag, and I wanted a washing machine almost as much as I had wanted a pony.

The tour was with Jackson Browne, and it was a long one: three months. We had our own bus but could not afford a customized one with sleeping bunks and kitchens. Ours had hard bench seats turned around to face each other. That way we could play endless poker games and music together. We had a lot of overnight trips, so we went to a hardware store and bought pieces of plywood that we used to bridge the seats. We put air mattresses over the plywood and made beds that, in terms of comfort, were only slightly less miserable than sitting up all night. It was two to a bunk, and we climbed in wherever there was a space. The air mattresses all leaked, so in the middle of the night, one of the pair had to blow it back up.