Einarson - Desperados : the Roots of Country Rock

Advance Praise

for

DESPERADOS

A good case study of an interesting period in the everchanging West Coast musical landscape. This book brought back wonderful and sometimes sad memories of the last thirty years, as well as recollections of some dearly missed compatriots.

Chris Hillman, pioneer of country rock music and member of the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Desert Rose Band

A skillfully woven story of Californias country rock and the people who played a part in the beginning. I learned a lot from reading Johns book.

Rusty Young, of Poco

Desperados

The Roots of Country Rock

John Einarson

Copyright 2001 by John Einarson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press
An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911
New York, New York 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Einarson, John, 1952

Desperados : the roots of country rock / John Einarson.1st Cooper Square Press ed.

p. cm.

Includes discography.

1. Country rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title.
ML3524 .E37 2000
781.642dc21

00-031752

ISBN: 978-0-8154-1065-2

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Respectfully dedicated to Buck Owens and his BuckaroosDon Rich, Tom Brumley, Doyle Holly, and Willie Cantufor inspiring the growth of country rock with their groundbreaking recordings.

Its a beautiful idiom thats been overlooked so much, and so many people have the wrong idea of it.... How little they know.

Gram Parsons

Musicians loathe pigeonholes. They go out of their way to avoid categorizing their muse. Journalists, critics, and record companies, on the other hand, love to dream up definitions and labels to lump together music that, while sharing similar attributes, is as diverse as the individuals who create it. Rock & roll itself is less a narrow genre than a melting pot of country & western, gospel, rhythm & blues, folk, jazz, and more. The results are often unique: a product of happenstance and what the cook has brought to the mix. If it tastes good, others attempt their own variation, and before long someone else comes along to identify the spices, count the number of stirs, apply a label, and market it.

Take country rock. In the late sixties, a small faction of young, long-haired musicians sought to inject some country music into their rock & roll. They worked in southern California, but their roots represented a broad spectrum of the North American experience. From a variety of personal perspectives and motivations, these musicians either played country with a rock & roll attitude, or added a country feel to rock, or folk, or bluegrass. There was no formula. They were concocting an entirely new brew.

Im not comfortable with the category of country rock, offers Michael Nesmith, one of the genres early purveyors, whose trilogy of albums in the early seventies with the First National Band are considered fine examples of country-influenced rock. Nesmiths inability (and the inability of others) to come to terms with the label is symptomatic of the difficulty of defining the entire country rock genre itself. Categorizing music is pretty much a waste of time. Theres nothing wrong with it, but its hard to do. There is an arbitrariness to it. I understand why an ethnomusicologist would say, Well, heres a striation. Heres something thats different and distinguishes itself from other types of music, so it should have a name. I dont go around saying that is this music, and this is that music. Its all just music to me. For Nesmith, the music he created became country rock not by some predetermined plan or grand scheme, but merely the result of drawing on his Texas roots. I was bringing together those early influences, but not consciously. I didnt wake up one morning and think, You know, Ive got all these influences, I think Ill bring them all together. I was like everybody else: those influences were utterly invisible to me. The idea that this was country rockI didnt know from country rock. I wasnt trying to do country rock, I was just trying to do music. I didnt set to stake out any territory, or say Im going to make rock & roll meet country.

Existing largely on the fringe of the contemporary music mainstream, playing a brand of music deemed commercially risky by record companies, these same musicians found common interests and pockets of support to sustain their vision of uniting the disparate music idioms of country and rock. Like those notorious outlaws whose oasis was the Hole-In-the-Wall Hideout, these renegade rockers found a creative wellspring in enclaves like the Troubadour and Palomino clubs, where kindred spirits offered an eager if limited audience. Here, bonds were formed and new associations born. From this milieu would emerge a brand of music later termed country rock, whose identity derives from a variety of country music influences also present in the work of several seminal artists, including the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, and the Eagles.

Though the name sounds straightforward enough, country rock is, in many respects, a branch of the rock & roll tree that may be one of the most difficult to accurately and inclusively define. Is it country with a rock beat, rock with a country twang, or something else entirely? What comprises country rock is largely in the ear of the beholder, and few of the genres best-known purveyors agree on its components. Like Justice Potter Stewart who, when asked to define pornography, responded, I cant, but I know it when I see it, the term country rock has come to embrace a varied group of artists whose only common link may be the fact that they all saw the positive qualities in traditional country music and, at some point, crossed each others paths. For several years country rock operated on the periphery, finding wider acceptance and commercial success in the early seventies with a group of musicians who had served their apprenticeship among the finest early exponents of the genre: the Eagles. Their pedigree was impeccable, as were the sources of their inspiration: Hearts And Flowers, Dillard & Clark, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons, Poco, Rick Nelsons Stone Canyon Band, Longbranch Pennywhistle, and Shiloh, a veritable Whos Who of country rock innovators. Wed watched bands like Poco and the Burrito Brothers lose their initial momentum, notes founding Eagle Glenn Frey on the formation of the group in the early seventies. We were determined not to make the same mistakes. The four members of the Eagles learned their lessons well and brought a collective experience to bear on the sound of the group, a radio-friendly soft rock with a dash of country flavoring. Today, you are just as likely to hear Eagles music on country radio as on a rock station. What radio has recently dubbed new country, with artists like Marty Stuart, Travis Tritt, Restless Heart, Clint Black, Diamond Rio, Little Texas, and Confederate Railroad, is the direct descendant of what the pioneering country rock musicians first attempted some three decades earlier.