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.