19 minute read
THE GRAM SCHEME OF THINGS
THE GRAM SCHEME THE GRAM SCHEME OF THINGS OF THINGS
Gram Parsons was born Ingram Cecil Connor III in Winter Haven, Florida. The Conners moved to Waycross, Georgia where his father, Cecil “Coon Dog” Conner II, worked in a family box plant. In Waycross, Gram saw an up-and-coming Elvis Presley at the city auditorium in February 1956. Gram Parsons biographer Bob Kealing noted that the effect this had on Gram was “immediate and long-lasting.” The pursuit of music and celebrity would be a fixture in Parsons life from this moment forward.
Gram’s maternal grandparents were the exceedingly wealthy Winter Haven citrus family, the Snivelys. Patriarch John Snively was a fertilizer salesman turned real estate investor and citrus millionaire. The Snively mansion can still be seen in LEGOLAND Florida Resort today as John was the one who’d sold the land on which Cypress Gardens was built. This charmed citrus-money lineage guaranteed Gram a rather healthy trust fund.
That trust fund didn’t mean he would be spared tribulation though. Parsons lost his father to suicide on December 23, 1958, and his mother to alcoholism on the day of his high school graduation from the Bolles School. Gram’s own death at 26, in Joshua Tree, California, on September 19, 1973 and the circumstances that followed have unfortunately – at least partially – cast a shadow over his musical contributions.
Kealing felt compelled to tell Gram’s story for this reason. “It really felt like Gram had an unfinished life,” he said. The overemphasis on the morbid circumstances surrounding Parsons’s death in the California desert inspired Kealing to write a book that forwent the macabre for what mattered. During a 2013 book signing at the Winter Haven Public Library, the author said, “I was looking for some sort of redemption in Gram Parsons’s story. Less about the hype and sensationalism, more about the rich fabric of the definative places that he called home. The people with whom he played and those who carry on his legacy. That’s why I wanted my book to be a song of the south — Gram’s story rooted in places like Winter Haven and Waycross — not LA, not Joshua Tree, California.”
In the same spirit, this article will focus on stories from Parsons’s formative years and career – on his contemporaries and friends – those who shaped the music scene within and beyond the orange groves, pine scrub, and murky lakes of Polk County, Florida.
Following the death of his father in 1958, Gram moved with his mother, “Big Avis” Connor and younger sister, “Little Avis” back to Winter Haven. It was here that Gram would step into the limelight, and never really leave.
The first band Parsons played with was called the Pacers. In 1960, he sang to a crowd of some 50 kids at the Dundee train depot. Gram would eventually move on to start his own band called the Legends. There are several iterations of the band throughout the years seeing members come and go. The Legends started in 1961 with Gram playing guitar and piano, Jim Stafford from Eloise on lead guitar, Lamar Braxton on drums, and his friend Jim Carlton on upright bass.
Jim Carlton met Gram Connor in 1959 when he transferred to St. Joseph Catholic School. “I am not Catholic, and neither was he, but my folks were told I’d get a better education there and I probably did. It was a heck of a lot more fun than public school,” Carlton said.
Jim’s father, Chicago musician Ben Carlton, moved his family to Winter Haven in 1954 to work in-studio for the radio show Florida Calling. Contracted by the Florida Citrus Commission, the show was broadcast five days a week from the Florida Citrus Building.
Within ten minutes of meeting, Jim and Gram became friends, united by a sharp sense of humor. Carlton described Gram as a bright kid, and said, “Even then he was very magnetic.” In a time where boys called one another by their last names, Carlton took notice that for the young Connor boy – everyone just called him Gram.
At school, the nuns would task Gram with watching over younger classes if a teacher had to step out. He was known to tell stories to keep the children entertained. “He was confabulous,” Carlton laughed. “If you believed everything Gram ever said, you were a fool. He spread a lot of his own legend if you will. […] But he was so damn good at it.” In fact, Gram would go on to ‘spread his own legend’ while at Harvard. In a comical turn of events, he convinced the school paper that he and his college band, the Like, had signed with RCA Records, a falsehood picked up by The Boston Globe with even more fabulous claims tacked on – carried further down the line, the following week by The Tampa Tribune.
Storytelling aside, there was a maturity about Gram, gilded with boyish charm. Carlton described Parsons as a nonjudgmental character who rejected the prejudices that were a hallmark of the 1960s deep south. Adults like Carlton’s father remarked on Gram’s intellect.
A stylish dresser and ever ‘his own man’ as Carlton described him, Parsons made other boys envious when girls would ogle over him. “He would take that in stride,” his friend said. Gram had even been hit a few times by jealous boyfriends – but he could take a punch. Parsons’s good looks and style would be a point of recognition for the rest of his life. His rhinestone-studded Nudie suit embroidered with naked ladies, pot leaves, pills, and poppies with a bold red cross radiating rainbow rays on the back remains an epic piece music fashion history. During a talk at a Brunswick, Georgia library in 1992 journalist Stanley Booth, who traveled with the Rolling Stones and wrote the book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, described the first time he saw Gram entering a room with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Booth, who also grew up in Waycross, Georgia,
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Tampa Tribune 1965 Newspaper clipping courtesy of Main Street Winter Haven
remembered Gram as “very handsome” and said he “looked like the sweetheart of the rodeo” with his long brown, frosted blond locks. “The Rolling Stones were famous – they were really famous. They were cool. […] And here’s this guy with them, who’s better looking, he’s got better clothes, he had better everything,” Booth said.
While young Gram did impress parents and girls, the sharpdressed kid never shied away from a good time. He and pal Jim Carlton much preferred the company of the adults in their lives. “They had the booze, and they had the cigarettes, and they had the parties. It kind of eclipsed our high school friends,” Carlton said. The dynamic duo would put together routines to entertain during get-togethers. Gram would play the banjo or guitar, with Carlton noodling on bass or guitar. “We worked up a Smothers Brothers routine once,” Carlton said. “Gram would have made a tremendous comedy writer. He had a terrific sense of humor – very sarcastic.”
Carlton would go on to have a noteworthy comedy career of his own. He kept in touch with Legends bandmate, funnyman, and guitar hero, Jim Stafford. Carlton has written with the likes of Stafford, the Smothers Brothers, Gallagher, and Joan Rivers. He traveled all around casino towns and LA as a writer, thanks to Jim Stafford who Carlton called a “tremendous influence” on his career.
Gram’s quiet maturity didn’t get in the way of goofing around with his friends either. Like when the Legends would go out of town for a gig and stay at a hotel, they’d stack beer cans in a pyramid against the mirror. Carlton said, “There was an adolescent sense of fun with him around. He loved having people around, loved having pals come over. He’d always have somebody hanging out because I think there was a sadness, and a melancholy to him.”
Stepfather Bob Parsons, whose last name Gram took after Parsons adopted him, was ceaselessly supportive of Gram’s musical aspirations. Bob bought Gram a Volkswagen bus with ‘The Legends’ inscribed along the side before he even had a license. Consequently, older bandmates like Jim Stafford would have to drive them to and from gigs.
The Legends line-up would shift in 1962 when Gram recruited the Dynamics band members, two boys from Auburndale, Gerald “Jesse” Chambers and Jon Corneal. Gram was on keyboards, guitar, and vocals, with Jim Stafford on lead guitar, Chambers on bass and vocals, and Corneal on drums. Sam Killebrew, now a Florida Representative, was their band manager. He still has the business cards to prove it.
Corneal appreciated Gram’s ability to land well-paying bookings, like a gig playing a horse show banquet in the ballroom of the Haven Hotel. The Legends played teen centers, holiday parties, hotel lounges, high school dances, and events at Nora Mayo Hall. “You have to have a place to be bad,” Carlton said. “Often the place to be bad is at teen centers and Holiday Inn lounges.”
The Legends made several appearances on WFLA channel 8’s musical television show, Hi-Time, along with other Polk County bands like the Dynamics. “Close Enough to Perfect” songwriter, and cousin to Jesse Chambers, Carl Chambers took a reel-toreel recording of the Legends playing “Rip It Up” and the Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me” during an appearance on the show. The Legends were a hit and won Hi-Time’s Band of the Year.
On the heels of his time leading the Legends, Gram entered his folk phase. Lakeland’s Dixieland district was a magnet for musically inclined and interested teens of the 1960s. The city even had its own happening coffeehouse called the Other Room, where folk artists performed. Casswin Music (where Gram got his first Fender Stratocaster guitar) was situated on the same stretch of Florida Avenue, along with Fat Jack’s Deli which opened in 1963.
“We’d all go over there together and goof off,” said Legends drummer Jon Corneal. He remembered Jay Erwin, part-owner of Casswin Music. Erwin wrote and funded Gram’s single, “Big Country.” Beyond his music store, Erwin’s mark on Lakeland’s music history was indelible. The Casswin Music owner was instrumental in organizing the Lakeland Civic Symphony in 1965, now the Lakeland Symphony Orchestra, even acting as their first conductor.
“He was a bee-bopper […], and he talked cool,” Corneal said of Erwin. “We’d go over there and get cool-talking lessons. It was ‘man this’ and ‘man that.’ He was the first person to ever call me ‘man.’ I was just a teenager – I liked being called ‘man.’” The boys would head over to Fat Jack’s Deli next door, where they’d go for a hot pastrami on rye, and Corneal would eat his weight in kosher pickles.
The Other Room, a coffeehouse and folkie spot, started by Lakeland guitarist Rick Norcross, was a regular haunt and performance venue for Gram, and a central part of his folk identity of the mid-sixties.
Jim Carlton still has the 45-rpm acetate thought to be Parsons’s earliest studio recording. Gram recorded two acoustic tunes in recording engineer Ernie Garrison’s Lakeland home: “Big Country” and “Racing Myself with the Wind.”
“Those were his first efforts at songwriting,” noted Carlton. Well, that, and all his compositions to flatter the girl du jour, songs like “Pam” and “Joan,” which Jon Corneal had accompanied him to record in a modest studio inside Casswin Music.
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Tampa Tribune 1965 Newspaper clipping courtesy of Main Street Winter Haven
Like his buddy Gram, Carlton played the folk scene as he joked, through “the folk music scare of the late 60s.” He went on to play on the same circuit and become friends with prolific singersongwriter and “Florida Troubadour,” Gamble Rogers. He later joined a show trio called Solomon, Carlton and Jones which performed shows around Disney. The group was a regional darling with regular photos and write-ups in the newspaper.
Gram joined his first professional band, a Greenville, South Carolina group called the Shilos, in 1963. Later the band would record “Big Country” together.
In April of 1964, the Shilos made a trip to Chicago on the dime of Cypress Gardens owner Dick Pope, tasked to make promotional recordings for the park in preparation for a visit from King Hussein of Jordan. Author Bob Kealing spoke with Shilos’ banjo player, Paul Surratt, about the trip in his book:
Surratt remembered the Shilos recording five or six songs in Chicago, including “Julie-Anne,” a New Christy Minstrels song Gram convinced his confederates he’d written. There was also a jaunty tune Gram actually did write as a kind of Cypress Gardens theme, “Surfinanny,” patterned closely after a song called “Raise a Ruckus Tonight.” It kills Surratt to this day that the other songs recorded were left at the studio and apparently lost to history.
The Shilo’s returned to Winter Haven later that year for another special occasion – the opening of the Derry Down. Bob Parsons wanted to gift his stepson a space he and his buddies could play whenever he was in town. Gram’s very own club was hosted in a nondescript warehouse on Fifth Street in Winter Haven. “He and Avis encouraged Gram’s musical pursuits,” Kealing said. “It was far from perfect in their own home and in a sense, Gram was raising himself. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that they opened the Derry Down as a teen club to encourage Gram’s musical talent.”
The club’s name and theme were Old English-inspired. The Derry Down menu included Derryburgers and Downdogs, prepared by Gram’s stepdad. “Bob Parsons was cheffing. He loved to do that more than just about anything,” Carlton said. The teen club served up nonalcoholic beverages befitting the Old English motif including a Wales Sunset, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hotspur.
In a Tampa Tribune article Gram commented, “We were really going to go old English, but the trouble is nobody here understands it. Even Hotspur is pretty far out for Winter Haven. All they want to know is what’s in it.”
The article notes that kids would pay “a dollar a head to hear Gram Parsons and the Shilos, a merry band of teen-age folk singers with surprising talent.” Derry Down patrons had to show identification at the front door to prove they were under 21 to get in.
The stage was set up along the right wall as guests walked in. There was a small kitchen for Bob Parsons to cook the burgers and hot dogs. In the ladies bathroom was a vanity table and chair for girls to powder their noses. Jim Carlton described the opening of the Derry Down, on December 20, 1964, as an affair attracting Winter Haven’s well-to-do socialites – the elbow rubbers and friends of Gram’s moneyed mother “Big Avis.” Carlton said, “Opening night was a soiree for the ‘e-lite and the po-lite’ as we’d call it in Winter Haven.” Both Carlton’s mother and Big Avis donned fur stoles for the event.
Radio station WINT was on-site to simulcast the Shilos performance from the grand opening, and Carlton sat stageside with a reel-to-reel recorder for the concert. He still has the recordings.
Jon Corneal remembers the espresso machine Gram brought into the Derry Down – an almost alien luxury in 1960s Winter Haven, rumored to be the first of its kind here. “I’d never heard of an espresso machine,” Corneal said.
The Derry Down building on Fifth Street would later become the Pied Piper, and the Derry Down teen club moved to Cypress Gardens Boulevard.
By the summer of 1965, Gram had graduated high school, his mother had died, and the Beatles wave had crashed into the United States, ebbing the folk era out to sea. Parsons had left the Shilos and found himself at a career crossroads. That summer, between his time in Greenwich Village and Harvard, a dejected Gram shared his frustrations with Jim Stafford at his Winter Haven home. “Everybody that I knew was trying to figure out where our place was in all of this,” remembered Stafford. “He was a little bummed out.”
There, Stafford gave Gram the advice that would change his musical trajectory. “I said it without an ounce of thought,” Stafford said. He told Gram that with his long hair and good singing voice, “Well, you should be a country Beatle.”
Modest about his role in Gram’s subsequent genre migration, Stafford laughed and said, “He probably thought that was stupid. […] At the moment, I don’t think that sounded so hot to him.”
Gram must have mulled that over harder than Stafford realized at the time, because he would later tell Jim Carlton, that advice was a catalyst for his country rock career.
“Gram wanted to be a celebrity, that was first and foremost,” Carlton said. After learning to play “Steel Guitar Rag,” a twangy tune by country western crooner Bob Wills, he played it for Gram at his house. Gram said, ‘Carlton, what are you doing?’ and sat down at the piano to play some Floyd Cramer country licks, poking fun at his pal. “So, he didn’t give a damn about country music then,” Carlton said. “But he was grooming himself to be a celebrity of some kind. […] Somebody had said that if he’d have grown up in Minnesota, he would have figured out a way to make polka music hip.”
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Where someone like Jim Stafford would spend hours a day mastering his guitar, Gram was more unabashedly interested in the star power of it all. Not to say the music wasn’t important to him, just if being a country Beatle was going to bring him fame and acclaim, a country Beatle he would be. “Gram, as I used to say, he’s about as countryfied as Gore Vidal,” Carlton said. “Nevertheless, he became a wonderful exponent of country music.”
The day after Christmas, 1965, Gram Parsons picked up an acoustic guitar for an impromptu recording session at Jim Carlton’s house. The latter had received a Sony 500 reel-to-reel recorder from a Pan Am pilot friend who brought it over from Tokyo. “It was the best toy train set a musically inclined boy ever had,” he said.
Gram wanted to share music he’d pick up from his time in Greenwich Village and a few songs he’d written. “He’d come home with these terrific songs by Fred Neil or [....] Bob Dylan,” Carlton said. “He had these terrific songs and wanted to share them with somebody who would appreciate it. They certainly weren’t going to make their way to Winter Haven.” These recordings would be some of the last vestiges of Gram Parsons’s folkie persona.
In 2000, Carlton co-produced the album Gram Parsons: Another Side of This Life, with Bob Irwin on Sundazed Records. “What’s significant is that these were during his folk music era,” he said. These “lost recordings of Gram Parsons” as the album cover reads, include music from those 1965 recordings, along with some from the year following, including tracks “Another Side of This Life,” “Codine,” and “Brass Buttons.” The album has sold over 20,000 copies worldwide and continues to garner interest from “completionist” Gram fans and the music industry the world over. “It is beautiful,” said Parsons fan and founding father of the Derry Down Project, Gene Owen. “It’s a transitional Gram.”
Gram could play a country tune like “Together Again” or “Love Hurts” and inspire goosebumps if not tears. Carlton said, “Give it to Gram and he brought something special to it that would touch people, and in a nutshell that was his magic. He was very soulful, and it was genuine.”
Perhaps this is what Jim Lauderdale experienced the first time he heard Gram. Cosmically gifted in his own right, two-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale looks at Gram Parsons‘s like the sun. The soul and sincerity permeating Parsons’ catalog is nothing short of spiritual for the musician who has written for George Strait, Patty Loveless, George Jones, the Dixie Chicks, Gary Allen, and Elvis Costello.
Of Parsons, Lauderdale said, “It was an important musical event when I first heard him – like hearing the Beatles for the first time or George Jones or Ralph Stanley – those musical moments where you remember exactly where you were and what you felt the first time you heard them.”
The first album Lauderdale picked up with Gram’s soulful country sound was Grievous Angel. He said, “From the very first song, all through the album, I was transfixed.” Eager to get his hands on anything Parsons was involved with, Lauderdale sought out his other music from GP to Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Gilded Palace of Sin. He read interviews with Gram and those associated with him, and biographies of the late musician – the first of which would go on to inspire the song, “King of Broken Hearts.”
Lauderdale wrote “King of Broken Hearts” as a tribute to Gram Parsons and George Jones after reading Gram Parsons: A Musical Biography by Sid Griffin. Lauderdale said, “I read about a party that Gram was at. He was playing George Jones records, and he started crying, and he said, ‘That’s the king of broken hearts.’”
He released the song, produced by Rodney Crowell and John Leventhal on his 1991 Planet of Love album. The following year, George Strait included it, as well as another of Lauderdale’s songs, “Where the Sidewalk Ends” on his record, Pure Country.
Jim Lauderdale sings “King of Broken Hearts” at just about every show. “I think about Gram when I’m singing it.”
Lauderdale would get the chance to sing that song and think about Gram in a place that has become sacred to his legacy and his hometown – Gram Parsons Derry Down. But first it would need to be resurrected.
Gram Parsons remains a holy man for those who worship at the altar of good, honest music. But, he wasn’t the only one of his friends and contemporaries to make it out of Winter Haven, or to make music history, for that matter.
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Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)
The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)
GP (1973)
Grievous Angel (1974)
