Gram Parsons, GP (1973)

It’s taken me nearly two decades to finally recognize the beauty of this album. I always had reasons, often fumbling music-crit rationalizations (about the unused well of emotion he refused to tap into because of his formalist embrace of artifice, say; or some intellectual rotgut about the inverted catch-22 of the self-applied beautiful-loser trope as a defense mechanism that undermined its force; or etc.). What it came down to, I now think, now that I finally consider this one of the finest post-Byrds records, is simply that I found Parsons distasteful, a smirking trust-fund folkie jerk with an idiotic self-mythologizing death wish.

Well, he was. And he got it. And it has nothing to do with the power of this album. Was it the 40^th spin of “Kiss the Children”? A solitary midnight stroll to the strains of “The New Soft Shoe”? I have no idea, but suddenly, recently, it hit me: this is freaking great. It really is. How I never heard it until now baffles me, but there it is: a conversion narrative GP himself might appreciate, all wasted years and then redemption. And when you play “A Song for You,” I finally concede, there ain’t a smirk to be heard in all that plaintive longing. Tragic, the whole damn thing. 

Skip Battin, Topanga Skyline (2012)

The mind boggles at the thought of hardcore Skip Battin fans—what is there to love, exactly, beyond Kim Fowley songs sung by someone other than Kim Fowley?—but they exist, at least two of them, contributing liner notes from France and Italy to contextualize this unreleased album from 1973, apparently lost during the petroleum crisis and finally recovered nearly four decades later.

As far as ecologically-debilitating uses of world resources go, slapping this on vinyl would have been better than refueling another gas-guzzling American car, but not by too much. Battin does drop some of his unendearing novelty-tune shtick and attempt to deliver a genuine roots-rock LP; it’s credible enough, but still no better than a set of non-Fogerty CCR tunes. Credit where credit is due, though: in “Wintergreen,” Battin and Fowley unexpectedly knock out a real song, full of genuine emotion. It’s certainly their high point to date (and the closing bonus track “China Moon,” taken from later sessions, might also come close, were it not for some questionable racialized lyrics). Otherwise, mostly this just leaves one with questions, such as, does this mean there are also Gene Parsons obsessives out there? John York ones?