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Safe At Home
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Was this Gram Parsons-led combo the first country-rock band ever? With groundbreaking backwoods material this superb, who cares? Electrified honky-tonk laments like “Blue Eyes” and spooky little mini-epics like “Miller’s Cave” give Parsons’ soulful, pre-Burrito Bros. set of pipes plenty of George Jones-like elbow room here. Dim the lights, inhale the thick smoke and wallow in the loud, loud music. From the original 1968 LHI stereo masters; this is an exact repro plus the bonus track “Knee Deep in the Blues,” on vinyl for the first time ever!ecord meet a merciless, inevitable fate.The ISB had endured a skid before, forcing their endeavors into an enigmatic dead-end. In early 1967, the band recorded an indeterminate number of songs at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. Gold Star, located on a prime piece of Hollywood real estate at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street, was a state-of-the-art sanctuary for California’s pop royalty: Phil Spector produced many of his seminal “Wall of Sound” records there and the Beach Boys used the location to cut some of 1966’s greatest pop symphonies, including “Good Vibrations” and parts of Pet Sounds. Dreams may have been concocted, hatched, and foiled on just about every square inch of Los Angeles’ latticed topography, but this particular street corner was where the hit records were made.The ISB—Parsons, with the guitarist John Nuese, the bassist Ian Dunlop, and the drummer Mickey Gauvin—may have cut an entire album at Gold Star, or perhaps they only rifled through a handful of takes. It’s difficult to say; the master tapes were entrusted to the actor Brandon De Wilde, a friend of the band who died in an automobile accident a few years later, and have since gone missing. Those lost recordings are the only document of the band conforming to the climate of late ’60s American rock & roll.Although we can’t know what those sessions sounded like, we can assume the band’s 1966 single for Columbia Records, “Sum Up Broke”/”One Day Week,” serves as a faithful barometer: “Sum Up Broke” is a crackling, meaty riff-rocker of Moby Grape proportions with unrelenting tambourine, while “One Day Week” is breathless stuff, a bluesy rumble through the ecstasies of early Beatles, led by a prominent organ and Nuese’s slashing guitar. The ISB spent the rest of its short and tumultuous career rejecting rock’s progressivism in favor of more unpopular sympathies (to wit, country music) that struck many in the musical community as nothing more than hillbilly backpeddling.I’ve no intention of divining a more accurate account of the sessions, or of the songs knocked out at Spector’s reverberating urban palace. The ISB’s existence subsists on precisely these kind of foggy details and half-truths; to fill in the blanks would be tantamount to debunking its legend. (If those tapes are ever discovered, the finder should not release them, but, in the interest of modern mythmaking, should burn them.)Parsons is rock’s preeminent country boy, an advocate for a country-rock hybrid (“cosmic American music,” he called it—he hated the term “country-rock,” as do the rest of us who hear the Eagles and see red) that is, in actuality, a simple retrieval of rock & roll’s crossbred origins. Country music fights a constant uphill battle of acceptance outside of its core audience, and is routinely made to prove itself to prejudiced rockers who embrace all manner of oddities, but raise an eyebrow at a little twang. That could explain why Dunlop and Gauvin, admitted rock and r&b enthusiasts, both left the ISB, shortly after the Gold Star sessions were cut and shelved, and Parsons and Nuese had realigned the band’s sound to that of Bakersfield honky-tonk contemporaries Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.Even Parsons himself, a Southern boy born and raised in Florida and Georgia, shunned country music for years. He turned around to belatedly accept it, out there in California’s sprawl of canyons and valleys and asphalt, where the sun sets like a bloody, urgent coup of the sky. The funereal stalk of cars on the 405 freeway, the strip-mall ubiquities, the bitter payback of desert heat: This was Los Angeles, a mass of concrete webs and idling throngs, the birthplace of Safe at Home, the ISB’s one and only album. A defiant stance against the country-resistant status quo, Safe at Home is widely referred to as the first “country-rock” album, but that’s an apologist’s definition—it’s a country record through and through, perhaps even the purest piece of country music Parsons ever cut. Only $11.98 - Click here to buy now! |