Gavin B.

I've always wondered about the acclaim for Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It's been praised as being the foundation album in country rock. The Band's Music From Big Pink was released before Sweetheart of the Rodeo and to my ear sounded authentically country than Sweetheart.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo took a long time to get noticed. The release of the Notorious Byrd Brothers earlier in the same year 1968 outsold Sweetheart nearly 2 to 1.

If I'm remembering correctly, the public interest in Sweetheart began to take off in 1990 when Uncle Tupelo had a minor hit with country oriented album No Depression. Both Jeff Tweedy (now of Wilco) and Jay Farrar (now of Son Volt) had mentioned both Parsons and Sweetheart as big influences on Uncle Tupelo. Around the same time Parson's fans began to sound the drumbeat for the original session takes of Sweetheart with Parsons singing on 6 of the 11 songs on the album. It took another seven years to get that to happen.

The 1968 verison of Sweetheart only had Parsons singing on two songs and playing a marginal role. Part of the problem was Lee Hazelwood threatened to sue the Byrds because technically Gram Parsons was still under contract Hazelwood's Gold Star label. The compromise was that Parsons could sing on only two songs Hickory Wind and You're Still On My Mind. On four other songs Parson's voice was erased and McGuinn replaced Parson's vocal on three songs and Hillman sang on one.

Early on McGuinn had wanted to make an ambitious genre busting album but Hillman and Parsons convinced him to record a country album in Nashville. Going into the sessions for Sweetheart Chris Hillman, Parsons and McGuinn were all influenced by Bob Dylan and the Band's music on their yet to be released Basement Tapes. Hillman and McGuinn had heard a bootleg of the Basement Tapes and loved the courtrified sound. Two songs from the Basement Tapes were covered on Sweetheart: Yet To Be Delivered and You Ain't Going Nowhere. The Byrds also used Dylan's rustic sounding John Wesley Harding which released the previous year as an aesthetic model. Both Sweetheart and JW Harding have a remarkably similar unadorned no frills sound, which was the antithesis of the lush orchestral sounds the bands like the Beatles, Love and the Moody Blues were experimenting with back then.

The Byrds didn't go over too well with the Nashville music establishment. McGuinn and Parsons were treated so shabbily by a popular Nashville redneck deejay who had them as a guest on his radio show that they wrote the song Drug Store Truck Driving Man humorously accusing him of being the head of the Ku Klux Klan among other things. The deejay had spent the entire interview making his views on pot smoking hippie bands like the Byrds known to his listeners. McGuinn and Parsons couldn't get in a word edgewise. The Byrds were also booed at a performance at the Grand Ol' Opry. The Opry fans were far more polite a year later when Bob Dylan took the stage of the Opry with Johnny Cash in tow. Nobody messes with the Man in Black.

So prior to 1997, when the legal issues with Parson vocals were resolved and the four additional Parsons vocals were restored Sweetheart of the Rodeo sounded more like a Byrds album and less like an album that Gram Parsons had a big role in.

The 1997 remix is a big improvement and finally gave Parsons his due, but it came 29 years too late for fans that had listened to earliest version of the album for so many years. It's probably why I like Gilded Palace because for nearly 30 years most folks thought Parsons' involvement in Sweetheart was minor. Parson left the Byrds largely because he thought McGuinn had something to do with the scaling back of the his vocals on Sweetheart but he didn't. Once McGuinn released that Hazelwood wasn't going to budge on the use of Parsons he decided to redo the vocals to get the album out before Columbia's deadline date. The other choice was to scrap the album completely face a lawsuit from Columbia for not delivering the product by the stated date.