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Post by the Scribe on Jun 2, 2021 20:11:15 GMT
WHEN LINDA MET EMMYLOU:  1973
February 24: Following their concert at Sam Houston Coliseum, Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt join a late night set by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, in the midst of a run of shows at Liberty Hall. At the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors, Harris remembered it this way:
“Linda, opening for Neil Young, had just wowed his crowd of thousands in Houston, Texas, and then made their way across the tracks to Liberty Hall, a hippie honky-tonk where I was doing two shows a night as part of a band called the Fallen Angels. There we would meet for the first time and begin a friendship and collaboration lasting almost five decades. It has been one of the great joys of my life to sing with Linda, but even more to have fierce, unfaltering friendship.”
www.houstonarthistory.com/a-houston-timeline-19721985/
Linda and Emmylou Harris at Liberty Hall in 1973   Gram Parsons & The Fallen Angels - Liberty Hall, Houston, TX 1973-02-24
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 2, 2021 20:12:04 GMT
More about THAT night:Classic Rockers Firefall Drop First New Record in Two Decadeswww.houstonpress.com/music/things-to-do-listen-to-comet-by-firefall-11513235
BOB RUGGIERO | NOVEMBER 30, 2020 | 4:00AM
Firefall in 2020: Jock Bartley, David Muse, Mark Andes, Gary Jones, and Sandy Ficca.Photo by Jamey Bartley/Courtesy of Leighton Media
It was, according to guitarist/singer Jock Bartley, not only one of the highlights of his musical career, but of his life. And it happened onstage at Liberty Hall here in Houston late in the evening of February 24, 1973.
Bartley was playing just his second gig behind country rock pioneer Gram Parsons in his backing band, the Fallen Angels. It also included singer/guitarist Emmylou Harris. That’s when they were joined by two musical luminaries, fresh off their own Houston show earlier that evening at the much larger Sam Houston Coliseum.
Classic Rockers Firefall Drop First New Record in Two Decades
Sunset Blvd. Records cover
“We were onstage, and Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt walked out and started playing and singing with us. And that was the first night Linda and Emmylou met and sang together,” Bartley recalls on the phone via Zoom.
“Then they invited us all to go back to their swanky Houston hotel, and we stayed up all night playing and singing and taking massive quantities of everything. If there was a guitar around, Gram would pick it up and play 20 or 30 country songs. But to hear Emmylou and Linda sitting next to him and blending their voices together, it was magical. And wonderful.” Ronstadt and Harris would become lifelong friends, musical collaborators, and – with Dolly Parton – later record as the Trio.
But just five days before that Liberty Hall show, Bartley was holding not a guitar in his hand, but a brush. He was laying down fresh coats of paint at his apartment building in exchange for his rent.
“I wasn’t a country picker, but I was better than the last guy in Gram’s band, I guess. He was nervous and had gotten drunk and the show was awful,” Bartley continues. “They called me up and the next morning, and I was on the road to play Austin at the Armadillo World Headquarters. The next gig was in Houston.”
Bartley’s stint in the Fallen Angels wouldn’t last much longer, but there were bigger things on the horizon. He – along with Rick Roberts and Larry Burnett (vocals/guitars), Mark Andes (bass), and Michael Clarke (drums) formed the country rock group Firefall in 1974. They added David Muse (keyboards/flute/sax) shortly thereafter.
Firefall scored three big radio hits on their first trio of albums with “You Are the Woman,” “Just Remember I Love You,” and “Strange Way.” Fans also enjoyed deeper cuts like “Livin’ Ain’t Livin’,” “Cinderella,” “Mexico,” and “Headed for a Fall.” The group went through breakups, reunions, and many lineup changes, but the current band (Bartley, Andes, Muse, singer/guitarist Gary Jones, and drummer Sandy Ficca,) are releasing “Comet” (Sunset Blvd. Records) on December 11. It's the band's first new studio album in nearly two decades.
The ten tracks are penned by both band members and outside writers. Jones handles most of the lead vocals, with contributions from Bartley and one by band friend Mark Trippensee. But the whole project started when they recorded a cover of Spirit’s “Nature’s Way” with a lead vocal by Andes, a former member of that group.
“Firefall’s been doing a log of package shows, and we’ve been playing the same 45-minute set for 20 years. So for me, it was nice to include ‘Nature’s Way’ in the set as a doff of our hats to Spirit and Randy California,” Bartley says.
“A lot of classic rock bands won’t put out albums because it won’t get on radio and will just be sold at the gigs. We have new stuff to play and to say. And we’re excited that it’s out.”
Leadoff track “Way Back When” has Bartley reminiscing about some of the great performers of the ‘60s, weaving in song titles in the lyrics in which each chorus is dedicated to a different year. “I wrote the first verse about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Byrds in 1965. Then, I Googled the top 100 hits of 1967 and I saw Aretha Franklin and the Rascals and all the songs,” he says. “Then I did the same on the next verse for 1969 with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Led Zeppelin.”
Jock Bartley onstage recently.Photo by Jamey Bartley/Courtesy of Leighton Media
Other tracks include “A Real Fine Day, “Younger,” “There She Is,” “Ghost Town,” “Before I Met You,” and “A New Mexico.” The band actually finished recording it in November 2019, but the pandemic delayed its release. And while some voices in their management wanted to hold the album even longer, Bartley and Andes made the final call.
“The new record is our way of staying in touch with our audience without being able to tour,” Andes says via video on the same Zoom call. “We’re gonna have to test the waters with [concerts], but doing it in a responsible way. Like being careful and hopefully getting vaccinated. It’s just so complicated.”
The original Firefall was already in existence in the mid-‘70s when Bartley, Andes, and Roberts were moonlighting in former Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers bassist Chris Hillman’s band.
A tour was ending with a three-date run at New York’s The Other End when Hillman fell ill after the first gig. The trio convinced the club owner to let them fly out Burnett and Clarke to finish the shows as Firefall. Hillman also produced the band’s demo that helped get them a deal with Atlantic Records, whose reps had seen the band play at the club.
The band took its name from a longstanding tradition at Yosemite National Park, where organizers would light a large wooden bonfire, then push it over the edge of a cliff as thousands watched it fall. After the practice was discontinued due to safety and image reasons, visitors can now see a "natural" firefall during mid- to late February. That's when the setting sun makes the Horsetail Fall near El Capitan appear to be "on fire," with an optical illusion river of flames cascading down the cliff.
Asked as to how his and the band’s base in Boulder, Colorado affected their music, Bartley says it’s partially because Firefall was smack dab in the middle of the burgeoning scene that mixed county and rock, but with a different perspective than their California cousins.
“I grew up in Boulder, and in 1972 or so Stephen Stills, Chris Hillman, Richie Furay, Dan Fogelberg, Carl Wilson from the Beach Boys, and the great Mark Andes all moved there,” Bartley says. “When Rick and I were first getting together and Mark came and sat in with us, it felt like we could be a band. The California sound that started with the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and Poco moved to Colorado, and Firefall was an outgrowth of that.”
“That western kind of music has a depth and feel that is more expanded than typical [rock],” Andes adds. “The songs sounded like they filled the void of desertscape.”
With the success of the Roberts-penned “You Are the Woman” – the third single off the band’s 1976 self-titled debut record and the band’s biggest hit – casual listeners pegged them in the soft rock/ballad category. That had its pros and cons.
“In later years, Rick didn’t want to even play it anymore! And I said ‘Rick that’s our biggest hit! People are buying tickets to hear that song!’ Thousands of people have told me over the years they got married to that song!” Bartley says.
“When Rick presented it, it was a late addition to the album. But we all figured it could be a hit. I’ve been working 25 years because of that song!” he continues. “But the downside is that after it was huge, and so was ‘Just Remember I Love You,’ people who listened to AM radio thought we were just a ballad band. But a lot of our other music was more rock and roll.”
In its commercial heyday, Firefall opened for many contemporaries including Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Doobie Brothers, and even the Band on the last dates before their breakup—the last being Bartley’s personal favorite.
But their most memorable run may have been with Fleetwood Mac on the massive Rumours tour. “It was unbelievable. We opened for them during the previous album in ’76 and they liked us,” Bartley says. “To walk onstage in front of 80,000 or 100,000 people a couple of nights a week, it was amazing. Those were some of the best shows we ever played.”
For now of course, Firefall can’t tour to promote “Comet.” They do have a Houston-area date booked at the Dosey Doe Big Barn—though not until October 22 of next year. And while the five band members live in five different states, Andes will have the shortest distance to travel for that show, as he lives in nearby Magnolia.
“I had lived in Austin, but I reconnected with woman I knew in ‘80s, and she has a horse ranch out here,” Andes laughs. “So I guess I’ve been kind of put out to pasture!”
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Bob Ruggiero has been writing about music, books, visual arts and entertainment for the Houston Press since 1997, with an emphasis on classic rock. He used to have an incredible and luxurious mullet in college as well. He is the author of the band biography Slippin’ Out of Darkness: The Story of WAR.
CONTACT: Bob Ruggiero
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 16, 2021 19:59:23 GMT
Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris & The Fallen Angels - Live at Liberty Hall
The Original Emmylou Harris Facebook Group
8.92K subscribers
Live At The Liberty Hall, Houston, Texas 1973
Set List
-Big Mouth Blues
-The New Soft Shoe
-Streets Of Baltimore
-Six Days On The Road
When Gram Parsons began collaborating with folk-rockers the Byrds in 1968, the resulting LP was the hugely influential country-rock classic, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He soon left the group, followed closely by original member Chris Hillman. The pair formed the Flying Burrito Brothers, further cementing their roles as godfathers of the music genre now simply known (and recognized by inclusion in the Merriam-Webster dictionary)
Buck Owens, Bocephus and Brad Paisley: 50 LPs that will twang your head
After contributing to two of their albums, Parsons' tenure with the Flying Burrito Brothers ended. He then embarked on a solo career but it would be early 1973 before his album GP was released. Among the musicians who played on the album were the leader of Elvis Presley's TCB Band James Burton, and a singer from Birmingham, Alabama: Emmylou Harris. Living near Washington, D.C. at the time, in 1969 Harris had recorded a solo LP, Gliding Bird, which showcased the influence folk singers such as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell had on her, but it was Parsons who introduced her to the country music that shaped her artistry and has earned her the unofficial title of Godmother of Americana Music.
As a member of Parsons' band the Fallen Angels, Harris honed her harmony skills and performed duets with him on such iconic tunes as Boudleaux Bryant's "Love Hurts," one of the tracks recorded in summer 1973 for Grievous Angel, the follow-up to GP. But in the early hours of September 19th, 1973, in Room Eight of the Joshua Tree Inn in Joshua Tree, California, Parsons was dead, the official cause listed as drug toxicity. He was 26.
Precious few clips of Parsons and Harris on stage together exist, but the above performance in black-and-white from Houston's Liberty Hall and dated February 25, 1973, certainly highlights the intensity the pair created with their voices and their rock-influenced energy. Opening with Parsons singling out legendary steel guitarist Ben Keith, the band hits the gas on Dave Dudley's ode to truckers, "Six Days on the Road," and while the picture and the music fades before the song ends, there's some bonus color footage of Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers' doing a weepy and theatrical lip-synched version of "Hot Burrito #1 (I'm Your Toy)" during an appearance on a public-access TV series in Philadelphia. Dressed in their best rhinestone-studded Nudie suits, for whatever reason a couple of the band members gamely switched places for the performance, with bassist Chris Ethridge seated at the drum kit and drummer Michael Clarke playing bass. Also featured is "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow on pedal steel. Of this band's original members, only Hillman is still living.
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 11, 2021 22:32:38 GMT
Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt - In My Hour Of Darkness
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 9, 2022 11:29:45 GMT
WHEN GRAM MET EMMY
Gram Parsons - How Did You Meet Emmylou Harris (Interview)
167,642 views Oct 5, 2011
David Borucki
4K subscribers
Interview date unknown. Bonus track on the "GP" disc of "The Complete Reprise Sessions" boxset.
Emmylou Harris talks about Gram Parsons BBC 1999
Gram Parsons w/ EmmyLou Harris & The Fallen Angels - Six Days on The Road - 2/25/73 Liberty Hall
Gram Parsons w/ Emmylou Harris & The Fallen Angels - Big Mouth Blues - 2/25/73 Liberty Hall
Gram Parsons w/ Emmylou Harris & The Fallen Angels - New Soft Shoe - 2/25/73 Liberty Hall
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