“No, Nazareth didn’t f***ing write Love Hurts. It was Boudleaux Bryant, a guy who most definitely knew a thing or two about love and how it simultaneously sets you free as the wind and carves raw chunks out of your soul. My essential version has to be Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s take — quiet, heartfelt, grievous and true. Unfortunately, Mr. Parsons would be dead before the world ever heard it.” (Philip Random)
Installment #2 of what we’re calling The Research Series aired Sunday, March-18-2018.
The plan is for a total of forty-nine movies, each forty-nine minutes long, featuring no particular artist, working no particular theme, pursuing no particular agenda beyond boldly going … who knows? Or as Werner Von Braun once put it, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” And we definitely have no idea where all this will take us.
002. reSEARCH – liars + rivers
Gram Parsons + Emmylou Harris – love hurts
Van Morrison – you don’t pull no punches but you don’t push the river
Bill Bruford – Sahara of snow [part 1]
George Harrison – in the bed
Canned Heat – on the road again
Tony Wilson – Saturn [fragment]
Rip Rig + Panic – liars [part 2]
Sly + the Family Stone – spaced cowboy
Bourbonese Qualk – boggy creek
John Lee Hooker – doin’ the shout
Young Marble Giants – searching for Mr Right
Crusaders – that’s how I feel
Further installments of the Research Stuff will air most Sundays at approximately 1am (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options usually available within twenty-four hours via our Facebook page.
“Gram Parsons’ Grievous Angel being perhaps the one album more than any other that made me realize just how wrong I could be about what constitutes great f***ing music. Because I was that kind of fool when I was younger – happy to tell you just how much I hated ALL country music. And I’m sure I was loud about it. Sorry. I know better now. I know that hating all of any kind of music is like hating a part of your soul. Because in what other form could you take a simple song about a simple wedding gone wrong and turn it into something epic, apocalyptic even. Because such are human souls – we’ve all got entire universes exploding inside of us. And why would you want to deny any of that?” (Philip Random)
Gram Parsons was dead before the world ever heard his final album, Grievous Angel. Which made In My Hour Of Darkness, its final song (completely concerned with people who had died before their time) all too relevant, particularly the part where he sings his own eulogy: he was just a country boy his simple songs confess – and the music he had in him so very few possess. Who says there’s no such thing as ghosts? And angels, because that’s Emmylou Harris singing backup.
In which Emmylou Harris, who never found a song she couldn’t somehow make her own, takes one of the very few sweet, poignant, utterly beautiful Beatles songs that we’re not all allergic to and, if anything, improves it. “If I ever actually get married, I can imagine it will be prominent in the day’s proceedings.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 