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DISC ONE
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
The Byrds
Columbia Legacy C2K 87189
Original LP (Columbia CS 9670)
Released August 30, 1968
1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
(B. Dylan)
Record Date: March 9, 1968
2. I Am A Pilgrim
(R. McGuinn – C. Hillman)
Record Date: March 13, 1968
3. The Christian Life
(I. Louvin – C. Louvin)
Record Date: April 15, 1968
4. You Don’t Miss Your Water
(W. Bell)
Record Date: April 15, 1968
5. You’re Still On My Mind
(L. McDaniel)
Record Date: April 17, 1968
6. Pretty Boy Floyd
(W. Guthrie)
Record Date: March 12, 1968
7. Hickory Wind
(G. Parsons – B. Buchanan)
Record Date: March 9, 1968
8. One Hundred Years From Now
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: May 27, 1968
9. Blue Canadian Rockies
(C. Walker)
Record Date: April 24, 1968
10. Life In Prison
(M. Haggard – J. Sanders)
Record Date: April 4, 1968
11. Nothing Was Delivered
(B. Dylan)
Record Date: March 15, 1968
ADDITIONAL MASTER TAKES
12. All I Have Are Memories
(Master take – Kevin Kelley Vocal)
(K. Kelley)
Record Date: May 1, 1968
Previously Unreleased
13. Reputation
(J.T. Hardin)
Record Date: March 14, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
14. Pretty Polly
(R. McGuinn – C. Hillman)
Record Date: March 13, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
15. Lazy Days
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: March 11, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
16. The Christian Life
(Master take – Gram Parsons vocal)
(I. Louvin – C. Louvin)
Record Date: April 24, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
17. You Don’t Miss Your Water
(Master take – Gram Parsons vocal)
(W. Bell)
Record Date: April 15, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
18. One Hundred Years From Now
(Master take – Gram Parsons vocal)
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: May 27, 1968
Original Release: The Byrds Boxset
Columbia Legacy C4K 46773, 1991
19. Radio spot: Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album
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DISC TWO
The International Submarine Band
1. Sum Up Broke*
(G. Parsons – J. Nuese)
Producer: Jack Lewis
Record Date: October 10, 1966
Original Release: Columbia Single 4-43935
2. One Day Week*
(G. Parsons)
Producer: Jack Lewis
Record Date: September 14, 1966
Original Release: Columbia Single 4-43935
3. Truck Drivin’ Man*
(T. Fell)
Producer: Jack Lewis & Monte Kay
Record Date: February, 1966
Original Release: Ascot Single AS 2218
4. Blue Eyes
(G. Parsons)
Producer: Suzi Jane Hokum for Lee Hazlewood Productions
Record Date: December, 1967
Original Release: Safe At Home – LH1 S-12,001
5. Luxury Liner
(G. Parsons)
Producer: Suzi Jane Hokum for Lee Hazlewood Productions
Record Date: December, 1967
Original Release: Safe At Home – LH1 S-12,001
6. Strong Boy
(G. Parsons)
Producer: Suzi Jane Hokum for Lee Hazlewood Productions
Record Date: December, 1967
Original Release: Safe At Home – LH1 S-12,001
*Mono Recordings
Working Demos, Outtakes & Rehearsal Versions
7. Lazy Days (Alternate Version)
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: March 11, 1968
Previously Unissued
8. Pretty Polly (Alternate Version)
(R. McGuinn – C. Hillman)
Record Date: March 13, 1968
Previously Unissued
9. Hickory Wind (Alternate “Nashville” Version – Take 8)
(G. Parsons – B. Buchanan)
Record Date: March 9, 1968
Previously Unissued
10. The Christian Life (Rehearsal Version – Take 7 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(I. Louvin – C. Louvin)
Record Date: April 24, 1968
Previously Unissued
11. The Christian Life (Rehearsal Version – Take 8 – Gram Parsons vocal)
Record Date: April 24, 1968
Previously Unissued
12. Life In Prison (Rehearsal Version – Takes 1 & 2 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(M. Haggard – J. Sanders)
Record Date: April 4, 1968
Previously Unissued
13. Life In Prison (Rehearsal Version – Takes 3 & 4 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(M. Haggard – J. Sanders)
Record Date: April 4, 1968
Previously Unissued
14. One Hundred Years From Now (Rehearsal Version – Takes 12 & 13 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: May 27, 1968
Previously Unissued
15. One Hundred Years From Now (Rehearsal Version – Takes 14 & 15 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(G. Parsons)
Record Date: May 27, 1968
Previously Unissued
16. You’re Still On My Mind (Rehearsal Version – Take 13 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(L. McDaniel)
Record Date: April 17, 1968
Previously Unissued
17. You’re Still On My Mind (Rehearsal Version – Take 48 – Gram Parsons vocal)
(L. McDaniel)
Record Date: April 17, 1968
Previously Unissued
18. All I Have Are Memories (Alternate Instrumental – Take 17)
(K. Kelley)
Record Date: May 1, 1968
Previously Unissued
19. All I Have Are Memories (Alternate Instrumental – Take 21)
(K. Kelley)
Record Date: May 1, 1968
Previously Unissued
20. Blue Canadian Rockies (Rehearsal Version – Take 14)
(C. Walker)
Record Date: April 24, 1968
Previously Unissued
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“They brought country and rock together.”
On Saturday, March 9, 1968, pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Green – one of the best and busiest country-and-western session musicians in Nashville, Tennessee – walked into the Columbia Records Studio on Music Row and prepared to cut his first tune of the day. The song was Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a gem of devilish non sequitur and hobo ennui from Dylan’s demo reels of the previous year, the now-legendary Basement Tapes, Green’s client that morning was a rock group from Los Angeles with a lot of nerve. The Byrds were in Columbia’s Studio A, cutting their first country album in the country-music capital of America: Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
“I was aware of their popularity,” says Green, twenty-five years later, “so I knew this was going to be special.” Green did not know how special until he asked the Byrds’ two singer-guitarists, Roger McGuinn and Gram Parsons, what they wanted him to play on the Dylan number.
“Nashville sessions were very regimented,” explains Green, who was then doing up to 500 local recording dates a year, for stars such as Charlie Pride, Lynn Anderson and Porter Wagoner. “I was used to doing an intro to a song, laying out for eight bars, then filling in at different spots. It was pretty formulaic.”
“So my first question to Roger and Gram was, ‘Where do you want me to fill?’ And they said, in unison, ‘Everywhere!’ I said, ‘Are you serious?’ Nobody has ever let me do that before!’” Green repaid the Byrds with an unforgettable opening lick, a rush of sunlit stairstep picking that he improvised on the spot, and a thrilling series of skids and curls that were unmistakably country but fired off with rock & roll cheer: pure Nashville, without the rules.
Green played with the Byrds during the rest of their stay in Nashville, including a historic live appearance on the Grand Ole Opry radio show, then joined them for a final Sweetheart session in L.A. at the end of May. “Nobody of that caliber, except Dylan, had even come to Nashville to record before,” he points out. “And none of the other rock groups would have entertained the notion of making such an album.
“But the Byrds did it,” Green says with undiminished admiration. “They brought country and rock together.”
Or as McGuinn puts it today, “We were pioneers – with arrows in our backs.”
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They rehearsed, recorded and toured together for just five months: hardly long enough to be called the Byrds.
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is one of the most infamous and enduring failures in American popular music. The original LP – eleven tracks of Tennessee twang, acoustic mountain song and rock & roll barn dance – was issued by Columbia Records on August 30, 1968. The album peaked at number 77 on Billboard’s pop chart, and produced no hit singles: a dismal showing for an act with six Top Fifty LPs and eight Top Forty singles from 1965 to early 1968, a band that single-handedly introduced young America to the songs of Bob Dylan, the literate golden jangle of folk-rock and the rainbow rush of psychedelia.
The Byrds who wrote Sweetheart Of The Rodeo were a calamity in themselves, McGuinn, Parsons, singer-bassist Chris Hillman and Hillman’s cousin, drummer Kevin Kelley, rehearsed, recorded and toured together for just five months: hardly long enough to be called the Byrds; barely long enough to qualify as a band. By the time Sweetheart was released, Parsons was gone, in a gush of bad blood, to run his own country-rock band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. By the fall of ’68, Kelley was gone, and Hillman had quit to join Parsons in the Burritos. There was nothing and no one left standing except McGuinn, who stubbornly rebuilt the group and led new versions of the Byrds into the early 1970s. (Kelley, who later played with John Fahey and Phil Ochs, died in April, 2002).
Yet Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is now recognized as one of the Byrds’ greatest triumphs, among the most important and prophetic albums ever made, because we would have so little modern pop without its: the cosmic-cowboy and singer-songwriter movements of the 1970s; the 1980s roots-rock and paisley-jangle revivals; the parallel rise, in the 1990s, of a pop-wise, platinum-smart Nashville and the rugged sincerity of alternative country. In sales and celebrity, Poco, the Burritos, the Eagles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, R.E.M., Wilco and the Dixie Chicks – to name just a handful – owe a huge debt of influence and sacrifice to the Byrds and Sweetheart Of The Rodeo.
There are immediate riches too: definitive readings of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and a second Basement Tapes jewel, “Nothing Was Delivered”; the moving studio debuts of Parsons’ signature songs, “Hickory Wind” and “One Hundred Years From Now”; the combined inspired presence of tunes by Woody Guthrie, the Louvin Brothers and the R&B belter William Bell, an affirmation of the deep shared roots between country, rock, folk and soul; the gleaming production of Gary Usher and the immaculate contributions of the era’s top country sessioneers, including pianist Earl Ball, bassist Roy “Junior” Huskey, banjo man John Hartford, West Coast steel guitarist Jaydee Maness and future Byrd, guitarist Clarence White.
“Sweetheart was a noble experiment,” says Hillman today. “I’m the first to admit that I was not a good singer yet. And for Gram, a trust-fund child, to be singing ‘I’ll do life in prison for the wrongs that I’ve done’ [Merle Haggard’s “Life In Prison”] – that went completely against the grain of what our first manager Jim Dickson drilled into us, with our early Dylan covers, about picking the right material.”
“But there was a style and personality to Sweetheart,” Hillman contends, “that was above and beyond what a lot of later groups did with that sound. Sweetheart was a great album – and a lot of great things came out of it.”
For example, Maness says, “As a country musician, I learned something very important from that record – that steel guitar can fit into any kind of music, if it’s allowed.”
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At the end of February, 1968, less than two weeks before the first Sweetheart session in Nashville, a new, seven-year contract went into effect between Columbia and the Byrds, replacing a pact that had been in place since November, 1964. McGuinn and Hillman were the only founding members, to sign the agreement. Of the classic five, singer Gene Clark had quit at the end of ’65; tempestuous singer-guitarist David Crosby was fired in October, 1967 during the making of Sweetheart’s immediate predecessor, The Notorious Byrd Brothers; and drummer Michael Clarke left that following month.
“I was going ahead,” McGuinn says. “The Byrds were a good brand name, and I have a built-in perseverance. Chris and I needed a rhythm section to keep going, but we weren’t looking for new partners. Anybody we got in would be a sideman.
“Gram,” McGuinn adds, “didn’t like that idea.”
Parsons was too driven to be a mere employee. Born Ingram Cecil Connor III on November 5, 1946 in Winter Haven, Florida and raised in Waycross, Georgia, Parsons came from wealthy, troubled stock. His father committed suicide when Gram was twelve. (Parsons was his stepfather’s surname.) But the family fortune enabled him to attend boarding school, then Harvard University, while pursuing a musical career – teen-party rock with the Legends, folk music with the Shilohs – without fear of poverty. “I didn’t know that about Gram until after he was in the Byrds,” says McGuinn. “I was in my car in L.A., and he came along in a brand new Mercedes. He’d just gone and bought it.” McGuinn was driving a Porsche that day, but he had the hits to pay for it.
Before he joined the Byrds, Parsons was briefly a labelmate. In 1966, Columbia issued a flop single of eccentric garage rock by Parsons’ Harvard combo, the International Submarine Band. “Sum Up Broke” featured a grinding, Kinks-like riff over an oddly chopped Bo Diddley rhythm, while the B-side, “One Day Week,” was more Cavern Club (frenetic electric piano, aspiring-Paul McCartney vocals) than country rock. “Truck Drivin’ Man,” the B-side of an earlier ISB stiff on Ascot, was more prescient: a song previously cut by Buck Owens and Bill Anderson and, in the ISB arrangement, a spirited knockoff of the Beatles' 1965 hit cover of Owens’ “Act Naturally.”
Drummer Jon Corneal – who played with Parsons in the Legends, then emigrated to Nashville to do session work, which included percussion on Sweetheart – points out that Parsons was not born into the country way: “In 1965, when Gram was playing folk music, he made fun of me for playing country.” But in the spring of ’67, a very different Parsons contacted Corneal and asked him to join the ISB, replacing original drummer Mickey Gauvin. “Gram had this reel-to-reel tape, and it was full of George Joes, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard. I’d been playing with Grand Ole Opry stars and touring with hillbillies for three years. Now, all of a sudden, Gram had discovered this stuff. And he could sing it too. Some of the best singing Gram ever did was on Safe At Home.”
Recorded in Los Angeles for Lee Hazelwood’s LHI label in 1967, months before the Byrds laid down their first notes in Nashville, the International Submarine Band’s only album, Safe At Home, is often cited as the first official country-rock record. Corneal claims it was simply “hot, clear pure country” – the produce of Parson’ obsessive study. The thin, stiff production, by Hazelwood’s girlfriend Suzi Jane Hokum, makes it hard to feel the rock in the three Parsons originals included in this set. But the clever jolting chorus of “Luxury Liner,” Parsons’ first great song, and the high lonesome freeze of his voice in the hook are vivid previews of his future with the Byrds and beyond.
They also reflect the country state of mind in California in the mid-‘60s: the crisp energy of Buck Owens’ Buckaroos; Haggard’s roughneck romanticism; Clarence White’s guitar-hero virtuosity in Nashville West, the pioneering L.A. quartet he started with another pre-Byrd, drummer Gene Parsons. “The country guys out here – they liked the edge,” says Maness, a native of Loma Linda, California who played on Safe At Home. “In Nashville, they like country the way they played it, or not at all.” The Byrds had also recorded plenty of country music their way since 1965: folk-rock treatments of “Oh! Susannah” and Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind”; the hoedown galactica of McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar in “Mr. Spaceman”; Hillman’s song “Time Between” on the ’68 album, Younger Than Yesterday. “We brought Clarence in on guitar,” Hillman says, “and did this bluegrass thing with a rock & roll backbeat. To me, that is the first country-rock song.”
But Parsons came to the Byrds with a singular vision – and a golden tongue. In February of ’68, Hillman invited Parsons to audition for the band. The two had met earlier, running into each other at a bank in Los Angeles. “I’d heard of the Submarine Band without hearing them,” says Hillman. At the time, Safe At Home was finished but unreleased. “But I knew their guitarist Bob Buchanan, and I found Gram to be charming and motivated. So I said, ‘Come down to rehearsal tonight, and see what works out.’”
“I knew nothing about him,” says McGuinn, who was looking for someone “to continue the direction of ‘Eight Miles High,’ to play piano like McCoy Tyner.” At the audition, however, in addition to running through some jazzy Floyd Cramer licks on the piano, Parsons sang another Buck Owens number, “Under Your Spell Again.”
“I thought, ‘This guy’s got something else going on,’” Hillman recalls. “I knew this music. I was playing in hardcore country bars south of L.A., with a fake I.D. when I was nineteen. But Gram understood the music too, and he knew how to sing it. Roger and I were a little jaded at that point, having been around the block. But Gram was ambitious, full of vinegar, and ready to go.” With Hillman’s support, Parsons convinced McGuinn to drop his plan for a new Byrds concept album – a double LP covering the whole of American musical history, from traditional folk and classic country to rock & roll and the new dawn of the Moog synthesizer – and go all-country.
“We decided that during rehearsals in LA.,” says McGuinn. “Gram’s selling point was that country sold worldwide, in massive numbers. I don’t know where he got his statistics,” McGuinn adds with a laugh. “But because he was a rich kid, Gram had this confidence that he could do anything he wanted, and people would go along with it. He was used to getting his way.”
“That caused a tension between us,” McGuinn admits, “a power struggle for leadership of the band. But there was a unity as well, a love for this music. We got into the whole country thing – playing poker everyday, drinking whiskey, wearing cowboy hats and boots.” And the Byrds did the unthinkable for a rock group in 1968: Before they left for Nashville, they got haircuts.
They also had their material in place, practiced and ready to record. McGuinn brought no new songs of his own, for the first time on a Byrds album, because, he states simply, “I didn’t have any country songs.” But he chose and sang Woody Guthrie’s Depression-outlaw tale, “Pretty Boy Floyd” – a selection that reflected his early-‘60s experience as a solo folk singer – and characteristically took the lead vocals on the two Dylan songs. Thanks to their earlier success with the bard’s catalog – “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “My Back Pages,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” “Chimes Of Freedom” – the Byrds often got first crack at Dylan’s latest work. Hillman remembers getting the demos for “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered” in the mail at his home but can’t figure out why: “The Dylan songs usually went right to Roger.”
McGuinn was surprised and impressed by the songs’ rustic foreboding. “We had not communicated in years,” he says of Dylan, “so it was interesting to hear him simultaneously going in the same musical direction we were. I can hear the despair, the way he was probably holed up after his motorcycle accident [in 1966]. He’s immobilized, it’s grey and cloudy, he’s suffering from color deprivation.” After Sweetheart was released, Dylan notice that McGuinn had taken an accidental liberty in “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” singing the lines “pick up your money, pick up your tent.” In his own 1971 studio recording, issued on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume II, Dylan changed the song and added some backhand: “Pack up our money, pull up your tent, McGuinn!” “A bit of a stab,” notes McGuinn.
Hillman contributed and sang “Blue Canadian Rockies” – “a Gene Autry thing I’d heard someone do years before” – and the traditional hymn “I Am A Pilgrim,” “which I’d heard Clarence White play on guitar.” Parsons delivered everything else, including William Bell’s heartbreaking “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and the Louvin Brothers’ fundamentalist pledge “The Christian Life.” “Reputation,” recorded for Sweetheart but left off the ’68 LP, was a Tim Hardin number Parsons had cut as a solo demo in April, 1968. “Hickory Wind,” co-written with Bob Buchanan of the ISB, was the gorgeous homesick result of an early ’68 trip back East, a reflection on innocence, wealth and emptiness that was recorded on the Byrds’ first morning in Nashville, right after “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” It was also one of the few Parson lead vocals to make the final record, and right so. No one else cold have sung it with such autobiographical ache.
The Byrds were shocked by the later vehement reaction to Sweetheart Of The Rodeo from the country-music establishment, because they never heard an unkind word from the Nashville players on the record. “McGuinn and I were coming off The Notorious Byrd Brothers, this completely free, undisciplined way of creating,” says Hillman, “and going into the most disciplined song factory in the world. The guys who came in to play with us probably looked at the way we worked as unstructured. But I never had a problem communicating with any of them. Sweetheart was really a pleasant record to make.”
The Byrds recognized their own limitations as country musicians. At the March 12th session for “Pretty Boy Floyd,” McGuinn ceded the central banjo part to John Hartford. “I tried to play a little of it,” McGuinn says, “but then John said, ‘You’d better let me to do that.’ He played it better – much better.”
The Nashville corps, in turn, respected the Byrds’ sincerity. “It was a different type of music,” Green says. “I came from a Nashville perspective, where everything is pristine, with no flaws. Their music had a roughness, but it was part of the magic. This was the first time I’d cut anything with a group outside the country or gospel mainstream, and it was wonderful.”
The Byrds recorded at Columbia’s Nashville facility long enough – March 9 – 15 – to complete five Sweetheart tracks as well as “Reputation,” McGuinn and Hillman’s arrangement of the traditional “Pretty Polly” and “Lazy Days,” a breezy Parsons outtake that he resurrected for the second Flying Burrito Brothers album. On the evening of March 16th, thanks to the powerful local leverage of Columbia Records, the Byrds climaxed their Nashville stay with a two-song set on the Grand Ole Opry, the live-radio sanctuary of country-music tradition broadcast from the stage of Ryman Auditorium. Lloyd Green joined the group on pedal steel; Kevin Kelley was allowed to bring only a lonely snare drum on stage.
The amount of abuse the Byrds suffered that night depends on who tells the story. Hillman recalls the nasty sound of people going “Tweet, tweet” when the Byrds came out. Green remembers loud outright booing during the entire first number, Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home”: “I was so embarrassed I wanted to crawl off the stage. I didn’t believe they would get such rude redneck treatment. I’m from the South, from Mobile, Alabama, and I didn’t have those biases. I felt sadness, that people would to that to musicians just because of their hair.”
Parsons, then committed an unpardonable crime: switching songs on air, ditching a second Haggard number, “Life In Prison,” for “Hickory Wind,” which he dedicated to his grandmother. “We played on Tompall and the Glaser Brothers’ portion of the show,” says Hillman, “and Tompall got very upset, because he felt we had made him look like a fool on the radio. Afterwards, Skeeter Davis followed us outside and said, ‘You guys were great. Don’t listen to these people.’” The Byrds did not take the censure lying down. When country DJ Ralph Emery later blasted the Byrds on his program, McGuinn and Parsons responded with perfect vengeance, writing the bulls-eye putdown “Truck Drivin’ Man,” a volley of hick stereotypes set to a stone-country waltz. (McGuinn recorded it in October with his next Byrds lineup, for the album Dr. Byrds And Mr. Hyde.)
The Byrds completed Sweetheart in Los Angeles in sessions spread out over April and May with Jaydee Maness on steel and Earl Ball delivering authentic honky tonk piano. (The superb May 27th version of “One Hundred Years From Now” features Lloyd Green, who was specially flown in for the date.) In L.A., the Byrds reverted to their leisurely ways in the studio, which you can hear in the previously unissued rehearsals in this set. They spent sixty takes refining Leroy McDaniels’ upbeat weeper “You’re Still on My Mind,” then, according to Maness, used Take One on the album anyway.”
Maness was invited to join the Byrds on tour, but he declined after doing one gig with them at Ciro’s in L.A., where the Byrds had been the house band in 1965. The occasion was a going-away party for the Byrds’ former publicist Derek Taylor, who was moving back to his native England. “I was miserable,” Maness concedes. “The band was so loud, and the music was so different from the record.” On a late spring tour of Europe, the Byrds compensated for the lack of steel guitar by recruiting Doug Dillard to play amplified banjo. A widely circulated bootleg tape from the May 7th show at the Piper Club in Rome captures the short-lived Parsons-era Byrds in raw high-stepping form, mixing then-unreleased Sweetheart material with folk-rock chestnuts (“Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “Chimes Of Freedom”) and recent exotica like the acid-bluegrass of “Old John Robertson” from Notorious.
“The Byrds were better in the studio,” Hillman confesses. “We were sloppy guys. Sometimes we were good, sometimes we were bad. It was a matter of being professional. And in the Byrds, Gram was very professional. He was young and focused, and Roger and I would probably have made him a full-time member, if he had stuck it out.”
But on July 8th, the day after the Byrds appeared at London’s Royal Albert Hall on a charity bill with the Easybeats, the Move, the Bonzo Dog Band and an unknown Joe Cocker. Parsons refused to leave the hotel and accompany the band on a scheduled ten-day tour of South Africa. He told the English press that he objected to playing in a nation ruled by apartheid. “I first heard about the South African tour two months ago,” he told Melody Maker. “I knew right off the when I heard about it that I didn’t want to go. I stood firmly on my convictions.” The Byrds left without him, using roadie Carlos Bernal on guitar. The trip was a disaster.
Parsons had other reasons for not going to the airport. On an earlier tour stop in London, he met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Their celebrity aura and negative reaction to the South African tour, combined with the career advancement Parson sensed in his evolving friendship with Richards, made life in the Byrds less attractive. Parsons was also hurt and angry by the removal of most of his Sweetheart vocal performances, thanks to a threat of legal action by Lee Hazlewood.
While the Byrds were finishing Sweetheart in L.A., Hazlewood came forward to assert his contractual rights to Parsons as a member of the International Submarine Band. “He was under contract to Hazlewood,” says Jon Corneal, who was stuck trying to hold the ISB together without Parsons. “Lee was so mad at Gram that he didn’t want to hear from the rest of us. Of course, Gram was like, ‘Well, my lawyer will fix it.’ He wasn’t as afraid as them as I’d have been.”
For once, Parsons’ bravado failed him. A hazy settlement somehow left Parsons’ vocals on “Hickory Wind” and “You’re Still On My Mind” untouched. But McGuinn replaced Parsons’ singing on “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “The Christian Life.” “One Hundred Years From Now” became a low-key McGuinn-Hillman showcase. “Lazy Days” and “Reputation” were pulled from consideration. “Gram’s vocals were better,” McGuinn admits. “He was better at this stuff than I was. When I did “The Christian Life,” it was a parody. I thought the song was corny, and you can hear it in my vocal.”
For Parsons, South Africa was a convenient excuse for leaving the Byrds. The insult and injury of losing his co-starring role on Sweetheart sealed his realization that the Byrds would never be his band. But he did not live long enough to truly appreciate Sweetheart’s lasting impact – how much he accomplished as a Byrd, in less than half a year. On September 19, 1973, after two Burritos LPs and a pair of solo albums, Parsons overdosed on a fatal combo of morphine and tequila in his room at the Joshua Tree Inn, in the California desert. He was twenty-six.
In a 1968 print advertisement for Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, Columbia Records boldly announced, “This Country’s for the Byrds.” A tag line at the bottom added, “Their message is all country … their sound is all Byrds.” A short unbylined review in Britain’s Melody Maker disagreed: “Not typical Byrds music, which is rather a pity.” Barry Gifford ended his mixed critique of Sweetheart in a September, 1968 edition of Rolling Stone by paraphrasing Dylan: “‘Bringing it all back home’ has never been an easy thing to do.” In an very next issue, Jon Landau came to the Byrds’ defense in a full-page ode to country rock. “The Byrds, in doing country as country, show just how powerful and relevant unadorned country music is,” he wrote. “And they leave just enough rock in the drums to let you now that they can still play rock & roll. That’s what I call bringing it all back home.”
So it goes, to this day. Few albums in the history of rock have been loved and dismissed, analyzed and misunderstood, in equal measure and for so long, as Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. And the old wounds have not entirely healed. McGuinn vividly recalls a promotional visit to a major L.A. country station shortly after Sweetheart’s release: “They had they Sweetheart album cover” – a beautiful montage of images from a 1932 rodeo poster by the Uruguyan artist Jo Mora – “pinned to a bulletin board. I thought, ‘Oh, cool!’ Then I looked closer, and there was a sign on it that said, ‘Do not play. This is not country music.’ That was cruel.”
“It took country people awhile to get the hang of it,” says Corneal, with generous understatement. “Remember that Lovin’ Spoonful record, Nashville Cats? I lived in Nashville when that was a hit, thinking ‘They’re being facetious.’ I found out later they weren’t. When the Byrds did the Opry, people thought they were pulling their leg. They weren’t. Making fun of those people was the last thing on their mind.”
“We did Sweetheart Of The Rodeo with a lot of heart and integrity,” McGuinn insists, looking back proudly. “We were trying to make country music, as purely as we could. But we were so young – and we were a rock band.
“So it came though as something else.”
Here it is, in all of its enduring glory.
David Fricke
New York City
June, 2003
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Many thanks to Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Lloyd Green, Jon Corneal, Jaydee Maness, Rick Clark and Steve Fishell for their insights and contributions to these notes.
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Original LP Credits
Produced by Gary Usher
Engineering: Roy Halee, Charlie Bragg
We would like to thank the following:
Roger McGuinn – Guitar, Banjo
Chris Hillman – Bass guitar, Mandolin
Gram Parsons – Guitar
Kevin Kelly – Drums
Earl P. Ball – Piano
Jon Corneal – Drums
Lloyd Green – Steel Guitar
John Hartford – Banjo, Guitar
Roy M. Husky – Bass
Jaydee Maness – Steel Guitar
Clarence J. White – Guitar
Album Package Design by Geller and Butler Advertising
Cover Illustration by Jo Mora © 1933
Legacy Edition Credits
Legacy Edition Produced by Bob Irwin
Mastered by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York
Mixes by Vic Anesini, Tim Geelan, and Jen Wyler at Sony Music Studios, New York
Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz
Project Direction: John Jackson
A&R Coordination: Darren Salmieri
Art Direction: Howard Fritzson
Design: Sean Evans
Photography: Digipak inner right & left panels: Fred Lombardi; pages 2-3: Michael Ochs Archives.com; pages 5, 6-7, 16, 17: Murray Neitlich; Digipak outer left & right panels, pages 4, 8, 13, 14 – 15 (background & bottom inset photo on 15), 20 – 21: Don Hunstein & Fred Lombardi / Sony Music Archives; pages 9, 14 (inset photo), 15 (top inset photo), 19: Bill Grimes; pages 11 (main photo & top inset photo), 12: Sandy Speiser & Don Hunstein / Sony Music Archives; pages 11 (bottom inset photo) 12 (inset photo), 13: Don Hunstein / Sony Music Archives
Booklet back cover: Les Leverett
Packaging Manager: Mark Unterberger
Photo Research: Liz Reilly
Special Thanks to: Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Adam Block, Jeff Jones, Polly Parsons, Josh Grier, Jessica Sowin, Tom Cording, Randy Haecker.
What are you going to listen to next? For a complete listing of titles from Legacy Recordings, please visit us at: www.legacyrecordings.com
© 2003 Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. / (P) 1966 Emi Records (Disc 2:3) Originally Released 1966 (Disc 2: 1,2), 1968 (Disc 1, 1-11) Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. 1968 Shiloh Records (Disc 1: 13-18, Disc 2: 4-6) (P) 2003 (Disc 1: 12, 19, Disc 2: 7-20) Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. / Manufactured by Columbia Records / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211 / “Columbia”, “Legacy” and L Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off. Marca Registrada / Warning: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication is a Violation of Applicable Laws.
These compact discs were manufactured to meet critical quality standards. If you believe the discs have a manufacturing defect, please call our quality management department at 1-800-255-7514. New Jersey residents should call 856-722-8224.
