“A beautiful song”: The night Gram Parsons first heard ‘Wild Horses’
Despite their run of pivotal singles that placed them alongside The Beatles in defining the mid-1960s’ energy and social evolution, The Rolling Stones faced creative challenges with the dawn of psychedelia and the concept of the ‘album’ as a unified artistic statement. While they were seasoned veterans of rock ‘n’ roll and the blues, the ‘Summer of Love’ was not their defining moment. As Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band mesmerised the music world with its vibrant pop ingenuity and Peter Blake’s Technicolor cover art, the Stones appeared somewhat lost, posing as disinterested magicians on the uneven Their Satanic Majesties Request.
It was when the hippie dream started dying that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ushered in their ‘golden era’, four LPs between 1968 and ’72 that didn’t just cement Jagger and Richards’ brilliance as songwriters but finally put to bed the stubborn perception they were just a singles band, with Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St all routinely acclaimed as some of the most celebrated albums of popular music.
Around this time, country rock singer Gram Parsons, after a brief stint with The Byrds, became acquainted with Richards and spent time at his Wiltshire home, even instilling a love of country that would inspire future Stones cuts like the 1969 effort ‘You Got The Silver’. A trust fund kid who had $30,000 a year to play the decadent, struggling artist spent his short life wavering undecidedly between producing acclaimed country rock with Flying Burrito Brothers as well as his solo work and immersing himself in his second love in life: copious amounts of smack, cocaine, and LSD. With Parsons’ heavy drug use and constant partying, naturally, he and Richards became even closer.
Following the Stones as they flew back to America to continue the Let It Bleed sessions, an exhausted Flying Burritos fatigued by their singer’s unreliability eventually were booked as support for the infamous Altamont Concert of December 6th, 1969. On the last helicopter flight out of the Altamont Speedway following a disastrous day of Hells Angels violence and the symbolic crushing of peace and love, a morose and adrift Parsons received a demo tape from Richards as a consolatory gesture.
“The first time I heard it was the night after Altamont, we were all just shaking from the whole experience…they (Richards) said, ‘I want you to hear this song man’,” Parsons recalled in a 1973 interview, not long before his death at 26. “You might be interested in this, he played me ‘Wild Horses’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ and I really dug they recorded them…it was a couple of months later I got a call from him, and he said ‘If I send you the master will you put a steel guitar on it?’ and I said ‘sure I will!'”
Curiously, this led to ‘Wild Horses’ first recording, appearing on Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1970 LP Burrito Deluxe. While it doesn’t quite plumb the depths of aching beauty the Stone’s definitive version reaches, it’s a soulful rendition which Parsons performs with evident love. Jagger recollected in 1993: “I remember we sat around originally doing this with Gram Parsons, and I think his version came out slightly before ours. Everyone always says it was written about Marianne (Faithfull), but I don’t think it was; that was all well over by then. But I was definitely very inside this piece emotionally. This is very personal, evocative, and sad. It all sounds rather doomy now, but it was quite a heavy time.”
“It’s a beautiful song,” Parsons declared over fifty years ago. While it may not be as immortalised as its appearance on Sticky Fingers, pure and unabashed love of ‘Wild Horses’ carries Parson’s cover version some length, illustrating just how affecting The Glimmer Twins’ songwriting can be.
