Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  The day Rick’s twin sons, musicians Matthew and Gunnar, turned eighteen, they moved in with their father. Daughter Tracy remembered her father saying, “I feel like I have a home again.”

  Rick was feeling pretty good. Having done a couple of pilots, he was hopeful about renewing his television career; his all-age crowds were more enthusiastic than ever, and he had just completed a soulful new country-tinged album for Curb Records that featured a tender, moving version of Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways.” He had even spent a comfortable Christmas Eve with all four of his children and Harriet, David, and Helen.

  Because Kris had her attorney send Rick a letter saying he was behind in his payments and owed her money, Rick and his band booked a short tour that started the day after Christmas 1988. As usual, Helen joined Rick on the trip. It was a grumpy group that boarded Rick’s 1944 Douglas DC-3 that night. More than a plane, the “traveling house” DC-3 had recently been plagued with problems. In September Rick and the band had missed the first Farm Aid concert due to a malfunctioning spark plug. Drummer Ricky Intveld’s brother James told me that the band was afraid to fly on the DC-3. “Rick liked it because he thought it was a cool old plane. My brother used to call from the road and say, ‘The plane’s cheesing out. I don’t want to get on it. What do I do?’”

  Rick with Al Kooper. His T-shirt speaks for him. (GARY NICHAMIN)

  On Monday, December 30, Rick closed his show in Guntersville, Alabama, with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” shouting joyously to the crowd, “Rave on for me!” before patiently signing autographs for a long line of fans. Tuesday morning upon arriving at the airport, the sleepy travelers learned that there would be a delay due to a clogged primer line that prevented the left engine from starting. Finally, at a little after one o’clock, the DC-3 took to the gray skies. At 5:08, 120 miles from their destination, copilot Ken Ferguson radioed the Fort Worth Air Route Traffic Control Center: “I think I’d like to turn around, uh, head for Texarkana here. I’ve got a little problem.” At 5:11 another radio transmission: “Smoke in the cockpit. Have smoke in the cockpit …”

  At 5:14 Rick Nelson’s DC-3 disappeared from the Fort Worth air-traffic controller’s radar screen.

  The plane severed two power lines as it went down, snapped a utility pole, crashed into a tree that tore off its left wing, and plowed into a heavily wooded area. From two hundred yards away, eyewitnesses could feel the heat from roaring flames seventy-five feet high. Both pilots struggled from the wreckage and watched the inferno in horror. Firefighters wouldn’t let anyone near the blaze, and the flaming sepulchre, holding seven bodies, was left to smolder all night long.

  Harriet Nelson learned about her younger son’s death on a TV newscast. Rick’s son Matthew was enjoying “Garden Party” on the radio when the deejay announced sadly, “A tribute to Rick Nelson, killed in a plane crash earlier today.”

  When he heard the tragic news, an old friend of Rick’s, newscaster Charley Britt, remembered Rick telling him the two ways he didn’t want to die: in a plane crash or a fire.

  Even before the funeral, Kris threatened to sue for part of Rick’s life-insurance money, and to avoid a court battle, David let her have the money from one of Rick’s two policies. Kris also attempted to get control of the estate from David, who was the appointed administrator of Rick’s last will and testament. Two weeks later a judge rejected her request.

  The funeral, held on a bright blue Monday, was full of tension and hostility directed toward an ashen and defiant Kris. David told a touching childhood story, all of Rick’s children delivered moving eulogies, and Matthew and Gunnar brought tears to the mourners’ eyes as they sang their father’s song “Easy to Be Free.” Nobody mentioned Rick’s fiancée, Helen Blair.

  As the funeral ended, Kris and daughter Tracy got into a fight about Kris’s plan to sue for the life-insurance money. Kris knocked her daughter to the ground and hit her with her purse. A few days later Kris arrived late for the private burial.

  Rick Nelson was laid to rest near his father and maternal grandmother on a green hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Following the short prayer and interment, stolid David finally spoke his mind to his brother’s ex-wife. Turning on Kris, he roared, “Murderess!”

  On January 15, 1986, the Washington Post headline trumpeted DRUG-RELATED FIRE SUSPECTED IN RICK NELSON PLANE CRASH. Because of the discovery of eighteen aerosol cans (sometimes used as freebase solvents), the media speculated that one or more of the passengers had been freebasing cocaine, perhaps starting the fire on the aircraft. Although no evidence of paraphernalia was found in the wreckage and everything pointed to a malfunctioning or faultily repaired Janitrol gasoline heater, the rumors still persist today that Rick Nelson, in a drug-induced daze, heedlessly set fire to his own plane, killing all the passengers. In fact, when the smoke-filled plane went down, the teen idol, “irrepressible Ricky,” gallantly covered his fiancée’s body with his own.

  I was working on a magazine project a little while back and had Rick’s daughter, actress Tracy Nelson, interview her twin brothers, Matthew and Gunnar, of the band Nelson.

  GUNNAR: All of us have grown up in a really weird way and we’ve had a lot of serious pain in our lives—you can go either way with that pain.

  TRACY: It’s a lot like Pop with “Garden Party.”

  MATTHEW: Can you imagine anything more awful than that? To be out there in front of all those people who used to love you, and it’s not like you’re unproven, you’ve been proven. You’ve had to be taken off the Atlantic City Boardwalk in a helicopter ’cause you couldn’t get through with a car, and then you’ve got all these people booing you onstage—the same people.

  GUNNAR: That was around the time he showed up to play that rock-and-roll revival show and was going through a huge personal renaissance—the first time he was writing his own material.

  TRACY: And he was out from under the shadow of Grandpa.

  GUNNAR: For the first time he was really getting into himself and what made him tick. It was a really gutsy thing to do—to come from all that success and just decide, “Hey, I’m going to be real now, I’m going to do it on my own.” When I saw him happiest was after the “Garden Party” date, when he turned that incredibly horrid situation around, getting booed off the stage and turning it into a hit song. He was so happy. Even when he wasn’t as commercially acceptable or successful, he loved writing, he loved playing his own stuff.

  TRACY: I’ve told you guys this before—one of my most important memories is his music room being right below my bedroom. I would get out of bed and take my blanket and lie on the floor and listen to him play the piano— that’s how I’d fall asleep, with my ear to the floor, listening to that piano. I think we grew up with a certain amount of pressure. Our family is the only family that has an exhibition at the Smithsonian. It was like an institutionalized morality that everybody felt compelled to protect. I don’t deal with it as well as you guys do. I have a certain amount of resentment … .

  GUNNAR: Like a stigma?

  TRACY: I told you the story about how I thought I was premature? And it turned out that I was actually put in an incubator when I didn’t need to be because Grandpa didn’t want people thinking that Mom and Pop had had sex before they were married.

  MATTHEW: Right. But then again, it was a different time.

  TRACY: I know, but what’s so amazing to me is people would watch television and they’d think, “This is the way we want to be.” And Grandpa was actually writing about his childhood in the thirties. In a way, Pop did all the work for us, because he broke free of that.

  GUNNAR: I had somebody come up to me in New York and say, “If it wasn’t for your family show, I wouldn’t have been a good person. I think I would have really fucked up. I didn’t feel a part of my family, but once a week I sat down in front of the TV, and got to feel a part of yours.”

  TRACY: When I think about Pop and all the shit that was said about him when he died, the thing that infuriates me i
s here’s a man who was basically a public servant from the time he was a child … .

  MATTHEW: It’s strange. A guy who interviewed us said, “How your dad died, I was really disappointed—the cocaine and all that stuff. I had been led to believe that he was flawless.” And I said, “Well, first of all, that’s not true. The shit’s not true.” We unfortunately still have people thinking it was free-basing that caused the crash. The truth is, as you know, the heater blew off the plane. It was an accident. We feel that we can be real, and part of being real is having feelings. That shit hurts, you know, some kids lost their father.

  TRACY: I can remember being with Pop in an airport and him racing for a plane and he never turned anybody down when they wanted to shake his hand or talk for a minute.

  MATTHEW: Not once, ever. It didn’t matter what kind of hurry he was in.

  TRACY: Yeah. And I think part of the problem he had in life was that he let people take a little too much and didn’t stand his ground enough because he didn’t have the security of knowing he could do it on his own.

  MATTHEW: Then you get to the issue of being nice as opposed to being real.

  TRACY: Exactly. In a funny way this family has got a certain amount of light about it. It always has, from the beginning. What’s really wild is that we are a lot more real than they were. The fifties stuff with Ozzie and Harriet, there was a lot of trauma and a lot of pain, but it was never expressed. For us to be able to do that …

  MATTHEW: … brings a sense of reality in this family that has never been there.

  TRACY: You know that line in your song … “Listen from my heart/He’s never lied to me … .” It’s so true. You always do the right thing if you listen from there … that little voice you’re always talking about. Do you feel like maybe that’s Pop?

  GUNNAR: I do. ’Cause I didn’t have it before he died. Call it coincidence or whatever, call it growing up. But I do. I feel like I’ve got someone watching over me.

  GRAM PARSONS

  Fallen Angel

  Gram Parsons in his magic Nudie suit—pot, pills, naked ladies, and cubes of LSD. (COURTESY OF JOHN DEL GATTO)

  One of the finest moments of my entire life happened at the Whiskey-aGo-Go in the summer of ’69. It might have been my finest musical moment of all time. Gram Parsons was singing, wrapped up in the splitting sorrow of “She Once Lived Here,” an aching George Jones sob song about this poor guy who couldn’t bear to stay in town because his ex-girl used to reside there. Seemingly all alone in the half-crowded rock den, Gram was a lost man, hurting through his voice better than anybody I have ever heard. He hurt so damn good, so hard, he made a pitiful broken heart feel beautiful and profound. His voice cracked, it caught, and sometimes it was ragged, but Gram Parsons was a visionary soulman extraordinaire. He bled for his audience, whether they noticed it or not.

  As usual, I was front and center for the Flying Burrito Brothers’ weekly foray into the rock world. They would play the Palomino on Monday nights and the Whiskey on Tuesdays, attempting to unite the two seemingly different universes of country and rock to sparse and skeptical audiences. The heady mantle of “country-rock pioneer”—a term he came to despise—was settling itself on Gram’s head like an ill-fitting cowboy hat. He preferred to call his music “white soul” and “white gospel”—“cosmic American music.”

  I was swaying on the dance floor, in sync with Gram’s exquisite pain, and when he launched into the bridge “I see her faa-aace in, the cooo-ool of the evenin’ / I hear her voice in each bree-eeeze loud and clear,” tears started sliding down his face as he gazed into the lights, his heart so stuffed with emotion, I could feel my own swelling love-pump pressing against my rib cage. It literally took my breath away. I forgot to breathe.

  When I came out of the spinny-fit and found myself back on the Whiskey dance floor, I looked around to see what Gram’s sopping display of angst had done to the rest of the audience, but they seemed absurdly unchanged. But Gram had validated all the pent-up heartache I had ever felt in my life by shamelessly exposing his own shattered heart.

  Gram Parsons’s short, tangled life was like one of George Jones’s weepy songs—full of Southern madness, backstabbing, cheating, suicide, liquor, lawsuits, more drugs than should be allowed, too much family money, and too little love.

  By November 1965 Gram had escaped to Harvard. In a letter to his little sister, Avis, who was desperate to get away from the family, Gram wrote that he hoped they could learn from their difficult past, make some changes, and be “real people,” not “sick or haunted” by what life had put them through. Gram believed that he and Avis actually had an advantage because of the poor family examples set for them. They could see that some people “permit life to tangle them so badly that there is no escape.” He told Avis he felt they still had time. “[L]ife can be real and beautiful if you build it that way honestly so there will be no lies or shadows to be afraid of later.”

  Unfortunately, the way Gram saw fit to exorcise his shadows in the little time he had left on the planet was to drop, pop, shoot, inhale, and imbibe every available life-threatening substance known to man. As his musical career progressed, so did his intake of lethal misfortune. The fact that he was never without a lot of cash, due to his trusty trust fund, made it all too easy.

  Gram Parsons got real high with Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger gave him the song “Wild Horses.” Nudie, the renowned “Rodeo Tailor,” put naked ladies, cubes of acid, Tuinals, and marijuana leaves climbing up Gram’s cowboy suit, and in the end, Gram’s dead body was stolen, driven out to the desert in an old hearse, and set on fire. Pretty legendary stuff. His old friend Keith had this to say about Gram’s influence: “He kind of redefined the possibilities of country music for me, personally. If he had lived, he probably would have redefined it for everybody.”

  But in a letter to an old friend in late 1972, Gram admitted that his music was “still country” but felt that there were no boundaries between “types” of music. “I keep my love for variations, even tho I’ve some sort of ‘rep’ for starting what (I think) has turned out t’ be pretty much of a ‘country-rock’ (ugh!) plastic dry-fuck.”

  Before he died a mysterious, drug-addled death in the desert at his beloved Joshua Tree, Gram recorded his second album with Emmylou Harris—sweet, bleeding songs that dreams and nightmares are made of. In that late September of 1973, the trailblazing, sad-eyed Southern boy had just filed for divorce from his wife, Gretchen, and was about to go back out on the road with Emmylou. Some of the life tangles finally seemed to be clearing up. Gram didn’t mean to die, he just couldn’t help it.

  When people asked Gram where he was from, he’d answer, “The Swamps.” Smack dab on top of the Okefenokee Swamp, Waycross, Georgia, is a town of twenty thousand with well over a hundred churches and only eight bars, where regular Ku Klux Klan meetings are still held. Raised by his strict, moneyed, alcoholic citrus-heiress mother, the former Avis Snively, and the charming, hard-living Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, Gram was a privileged child—friendly, well mannered, and popular with peers as well as teachers. Catered to by black servants, Gram had weekly parties in the sunroom and spent his weekends on the yacht. Coon Dog led Gram’s Boy Scout troop, took him camping and hunting. Piano lessons began at age eight, and in the fourth grade, Gram had already written his first song, “Gram Boogie.” At nine precocious Gram took two teenage girls to see his hero, Elvis Presley, at City Auditorium, sneaking them backstage after the show to get an autograph. Then Gram got a guitar, pomped his hair, and started entertaining the neighborhood, lip-synching to Elvis records while the little girls swooned.

  Gram filming flying saucer flick Saturation 7 in the Joshua Tree desert, where he died. (ANDEE COHEN)

  After reading about the Bolles School in Harper’s Bazaar, Avis shipped her son off to the military academy for the sixth grade, where despite all the rules twelve-year-old Gram seemed to thrive. But his well-heeled, idyllic world was about to be turned upside down. On De
cember 21, 1958, Coon Dog dropped his family off at the train station, signed some checks at the office, then blew his brains out with a .38 pistol. He left no suicide note but a few weeks earlier had told his brother Tom that he had finally figured out a way to break free from his job in the Snively citrus business. And there had been whispers that Avis was having an affair. The night before Coon Dog’s funeral, Avis had a huge party, and friends and family were appalled by her seeming lack of grief. She waited until the day after Christmas to tell Gram and little Avis that their father was gone. Gram was desolate. Everything fell apart. Citing him as a “bad influence,” in June 1959 the Bolles School sent Gram back home. After a summer of traveling across the country by train, Avis took her children to the Snively home in Winter Haven, Florida, to start over again.

  Just as Gram was pulling his life back together, Avis married a shrewd, good-looking salesman whom family members believed to be “in it for the money.” Robert Ellis Parsons lost no time, immediately adopting Avis and Gram and arranging for new birth certificates, which stated that Robert was their father. Gram Connor was now Gram Parsons.

  At their new house on Piedmont Drive, Gram had a piano in his room and his own private entrance, which soon became the neighborhood hangout where Gram and his friends listened to records by Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, and favorites Jake and the Gospel Soul Stirrers. For Gram at fourteen, music had become his solace and reason for living, and he formed his first band, the Pacers, playing and singing Top Forty hits at all the local teen spots, actually making decent money. He was getting comfortable with his voice and good on the guitar, winding his absurdly long, beautiful fingers around the Fender neck almost a time and a half. A year later Gram left the Pacers to join another cover band, the Legends, with Jim Stafford, who was called “the fastest guitar in town.” The band became regulars on a local radio show, but there wasn’t enough work to keep Gram happy. He also played with the Rumours, headed by Kent Lavoie, who would later become Lobo. Then, bolstered by the success of folk groups like Peter, Paul and Mary, Gram and his girlfriend Patti Johnson formed the Vanguards.