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Originally Posted by MandoMan
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Spending hours and hours rehearsing these Gram Parsons songs has been an honor. He was an unusually talented songwriter, and a lot of his songs are deeply moving. He loved country music, but his songs drew on country, yet were new in several ways. His voice wasn’t really a country voice, but it is often filled with longing and sorrow.
For a rich boy, he had a tough life. His maternal grandfather owned the largest orange grove holdings in Florida, and he he was a trust fund baby. His family bought him a nightclub when he was a teenager so his band would have a place to perform. (It’s still a going concern.) But his parents were alcoholics. His father died by suicide, disappointed and young, when Gram was 12. His mother died of alcohol poisoning or was perhaps murdered in a hospital the day he graduated from high school. His adored step-father was also an alcoholic and later thrust him away. The likelihood of drug and alcohol addiction was in his DNA, and when he turned to them to relieve the sorrow, they grabbed him and squeezed. He was dead at 26. Meanwhile, he was very much a part of the late sixties Los Angeles music scene that gave us such performers as Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown, The Doors, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas and the Papas, and many others. When he died of a drug and alcohol overdose, his body was stolen and he was cremated in the desert in a metal casket.