I bought this disc(which is made up of his two solo studio albums) a couple of years ago and had not listened to it much. Recently I put it in the player in my car and have been listening to it quite a bit since. There is some really good music from both albums.
If you like the Eagles or Stones more country sounding stuff you would probably like this album. I did some reading up on Parsons, and he really had a lot of influence among bands/musicians in his era of the late 60's and into the early 70's of both rock and country music.
He was for a short time a member of the Byrds and was the driving force behind their Sweetheart of the Rodeo LP and hung out with the Stones a lot. In fact one of the articles I read about him said that Mick/Keith wrote Wild Horses for him, and were going to have Gram sing the song on the Stones' album however the record company nixed it. Also he influenced them on the arrangement of Honky Tonk Woman(the Country Honk version).
He also was a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers and Emmylou Harris pretty much got her start singing on his solo albums.
He seems to be one of those artists that in his time had marginal personal success but his influence on others was wide and inspired some pretty groundbreaking music in his own era and beyond.
His personal story is pretty interesting as well, he was the grandson of a man who owned at one time 1/3 of the Citrus orchards in Florida and as a result had a huge trust fund. He went to Harvard, for one semester. He drifted into a lot of alcohol and drug abuse, which for the time was not all that uncommon, and died in the Joshua Tree desert of California at 26 of a Tequila/Morphine overdose. It is hard to believe that he wielded such musical influence by that age and it is also depressing to think of what a waste his early death was, how much music was lost because of it.
[This message has been edited by SPO_Rat_91 (edited 3/22/2005 10:18a).]