Spring-time and thoughts of a long getaway fill my head. With this annual rite of passage upon us I am taking this opportunity to collect another batch of essential listening for my Desert Island Disc project. For this round of must-have music to sooth my jangled nerve endings I offer to you a group of artists one by one who marched only to their inner ear, troubadours of a singular stripe whose efforts were never based on popularity, trends, market-research and listening polls.

In today’s climate of “Idol” worship, where a tone deaf public pays for the privilege of anointing a new Lesley Gore or Bobby Rydell each season, it seems so radical to have just a few years back a wealth of talent so singularly inspired, and so anti-commercial that actually thrived. As we witness the music industry continue to implode with the only headlines of note being new litigation over content ownership squabbles and continued sales declines we find art on the brink of either breakthrough or collapse. Here’s hoping for a breakthrough while we recognize a monopolistic stranglehold has crippled our available choices to effectively hear and reward vibrant new voices.

As the Sixties were coming to a close, one of the greatest founding Los Angeles bands, the Byrds, were splintering apart with each new album release. One of the new additions to the Jim Roger McGuinn controlled line-up was a young man who had traveled west from Florida, Gram Parsons. Here was a true original whose idea of a great time was to play all rock tunes to a country bar scene, or all country tunes to a rock bar scene. Gram and Keith Richards became good friends, at a point in Keith’s life when drugs were beginning to be his only true companions. In 1968, after having released, as a member of the Byrds, the very under appreciated album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gram abandoned the band on a worldwide tour. Keith Richards had advised him that South Africa in 1968 was no place to travel to do a concert. He took Keith’s advice and went off to form the Flying Burrito Brothers with other former Byrd members Chris Hillman and Mike Clarke. For anyone interested there are a couple of fine websites devoted to the history of the Bryds, ByrdWatcher at http://www.ebni.com/byrds/ and the Roger McGuinn website, http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/mcguinn/.

The Flying Burrito Brothers, an itinerant collection of Los Angeles music players from Bernie Leadon to Leon Russell, made one decent record, The Gilded Palace of Sin. The album cover with band members dressed in Nudie’s country jackets was shot in the Mojave Desert. The Flying Burrito Brothers continued on for several years, but Gram Parsons had abandoned that project after only two records were released to go solo.

Several solo projects, and a tour called the Fallen Angels with Emmy Lou Harris left a trail of exhilarated or exasperated fans to praise or revile this mercurial musical talent. Parsons had gone to see Emmy Lou in a tiny club in Washington D.C. at Chris Hillman’s urging and decided on the spot to have her involved in his future music projects, but it would be a full year before he got on with it. His friendship with Keith Richards lasted up through the Stones epic release, Exile on Main Street, with an increasing addiction and the knowledge that several country tinged tunes of Jagger and Richards owed quite a debt to Gram Parsons. You certainly hear his influences on Country Honk, Dead Flowers, Torn and Frayed and Sweet Virginia from that period of 1968 through 1972. The Stones even offered him Wild Horses as a song for the second Flying Burrito Brothers album.

In spite of these outstanding credentials and continued critical support his solo album, GP, that he released during this period failed to sell. He thought Merle Haggard might produce the record, but things did not work out here in Bakersfield at the time. He ended up using Elvis Presley’s band along with Emmy Lou Harris and some old Burrito chums for the record. They would all get together during the spring and summer of 1973 for my Desert Island Disc selection here, Grievous Angel. Sadly, the album was released posthumously 1974, with Gram Parsons having died of drug overdose in the Joshua Tree Inn near the Joshua Tree National Park. His friend and road manager at the time, Phil Kaufman, ended up stealing Parsons dead body from an airport hangar, and torched it with his coffin in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park. In the wild early days of the Seventies, with Charles Manson still fresh on a lot of minds, this was just another ordinarily bizarre event for the folks living in California.

The album, Grievous Angel, still sounds fresh today, particularly with those great duets between Gram and Emmy Lou. Songs like Hearts on Fire, Return of the Grievous Angel, In My Hour of Darkness, Love Hurts, Cash on the Barrelhead and Hickory Wind tell the strange and unique story of Gram Parsons. The album is always worth the listen.

I've taken a hiatus from politics for about a month now. I've been feeling like a character in Robert Heinlein's novel, Stranger In A Strange Land. I don't "grok" a lot of today's happenings, and the criminal political behavior has become so tolerated as just the way government and business do business now. But, that's okay. I've tuned-up the high fidelity throughout my home with very little computer interface. No i-pod or jingling ring-tone cellphone reality for me. To be honest I've never been a big fan of the whole portable music experience with the exception of a great car stereo system. The Sony Walkman(TM) craze that started this obsession of individual isolation, with those little earplugs, or earphones, on walkers-bikers-joggers-cubicle dwellers never did it for me. It seemed like a clever way to have people avoid one another rather than communicate, and the sound was terrible besides.

This growing isolation from community has taken an ugly turn. Without peer review we argue alone. We play video games one on none. We glean information through the Internet on our own, and can usually be seen driving solo in our singular vehicle environment. Today's cars, much like our homes are curious odes to individual retreat, complete with individual climate controls and entertainment options for each occupant. We have become turtles with hard shells not easy to penetrate and adverse to exploration.

It is not hard to understand that we now consider ourselves separate and unequaled. The small testaments to communal social enterprise finds like minded viewpoints and opinions that when challenged usually means excommunication at church, club, sporting event or workplace. Gates close off the public to little suburban developments where sameness is regimented by design, color, landscape and garbage can placement. This culture is so withdrawn that a growing number of parents homeschool little Jane and Johnny to avoid contamination with the rest of the public. I find this trend of turtle-ship ominous. It becomes pointless to try and engage in discussions with those of differing perspectives who wish only to maintain their vision of hide-behind-the-rock reality, who simply do not wish to reach beyond their shell.

This self imposed isolation by people might be a reason so many now simply shoot the messenger presenting alternate takes from their defined comfort zone of reality. You see this in the stupefying responses by these outraged turtle-people at newspapers, magazines and television when confronted with the disordered reality of the brutal day to day that is life. The government censored all photos of coffins because the pictures could harm the war effort. What does that indicate to you? When did less information and less knowledge become the preferred methods for making decisions? When did adult become child? When did the presentations of scientific research cause a vast personal attack on the presenters? We never need to examine and think about the data, that would require research and reading, and that is something busy Americans in their controlled habitats plugged into laptops, cellular phones and i-pods have no time for.

As the walls go up around this entire nation seeking withdrawal from the rest of the world, and as illiteracy becomes the national statistical norm there will be fewer messengers to present just the facts, and fewer to understand the facts when presented. When the Wall came down in Berlin we applauded freedom. What do we applaud as we erect our own Wall on the border? Fear?

Maybe the non-stop politics of today's life, or the non-stop pollution in the air, caused my sinus filters to finally snap, and filled my head with the unending fluid sack of misery. We come upon the ides of March in 2007, and witness a full blown 2008 Presidential campaign underway. We have been forced to live a life of unending political campaigns based solely on money while ignoring responsible public debate to find solutions to our growing economic crisis.

There will be no substantive campaign finance reform, ever. There will be no addressing the nation's tottering infrastructure where health care costs rob the citizens of life savings. There will be no progress on affordable alternative energy sources for consumers and real public transportation alternatives. Will a defense budget ever be lowered in the name of sanity? There was a recent warning regarding China spending $90 billion on defense for this past year, while failing to note that we in the land of liberty are on pace to spend two thirds of a trillion dollars on defense projects for year 2008. We committed $575 billion for our defense this year. We obviously prefer to build bombs over everything else with maybe one exception, prisons.

We are the most frightened nation on earth without a doubt. Our schools are now built to keep people out, or lock the kids down, much like ancient fortresses. Our open borders, a shining example to the rest of the world for so long, are now being fenced off. We are afraid of most of our own citizens today, which is why we incarcerate as a percentage more people than any other nation in the world. The other industrial nations of the world treat drug addiction as a health issue, we declare war and round up the usual suspects creating castles of power for drug distributors. Prisons are now simply the office complex for illegal drug distribution in America. At some point in the last century we gave up on rehabilitation, and are now creating the most angry and violent sub-culture imaginable with their own fortresses.

We're about as bankrupt a nation as a nation can get. Our apparent idea of democracy involves really rich people picking who they want to represent really rich people who can never honestly answer any simple question and refuse to solve any issue. In ancient Rome the plebes could vote down the patrician laws. There is no recourse for the plebes of today. This is not a liberal point of view. This is not a conservative point of view. The fact of the matter is that no political party matters much today for people without means. What keeps these parties alive is the dreamstate most people live in regarding their own circumstances, afterall everyone is only a lottery scratch away from being admitted to the country club.

It is already so boring to read about the current candidates raising piles of campaign money to get elected to do nothing but sustain the folks that hosted these fundraising dinners. We have become a very closed society with fading prospects and very little inclination to pay as we go. We are on borrowed time.