Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Gram Parson and the Louvins

There's an excellent post on the Onion's sister site AV Club that discusses two of the musical inspirations for Bad News Gospel: Gram Parsons and the Louvin brothers:

Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is a masterpiece, but it would have been even more masterpiecey had Parsons been allowed to sing lead on more of the songs. McGuinn has said that his vocals on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo were little more than a parody of Parsons’ original versions. Parsons approached country from a place of deep reverence, but McGuinn treats the songs with a certain academic detachment. This proves ruinous on a woefully misguided cover of The Louvin Brothers’ “The Christian Life,” where McGuinn adopts a Dippety Dog cartoon drawl that coats the song’s deeply personal endorsement of faith at the cost of worldly pleasure in smug irony. McGuinn seems to be making fun of the Louvin Brothers, which you just don’t do. You don’t fuck with them, for they have a scary, take-no-prisoners, smite-humanity-just-to-prove-a-point deity behind them.

1 comment:

Piso Mojado said...

in case you didnt see the deity's "25 things you dont know about me" posting on his facebook page....

1. Guilty pleasure: Smiting people.

2. I had another universe once that was so much better than this one. But I got really wasted one night and lost it in a game of craps. :( I'm never doing that again.

3. In my old universe, the really cool one, the dominant species was a race of hyper-intelligent beetles. It was so cool. Unfortunately, when I lost that universe, I also lost the beetles-as-master-race patent, so now I have to settle for primates.

4. I picked up this universe at a 50%-off sale. I thought I was getting a bargain. But as soon as I took it out of the box at home, I figured out why: space and time are both a bit bent in places, and most of the mass is missing. I wish I had saved the receipt.

more at: http://9a4440c5.fb.joyent.us/haggadah/ultraModern2.php

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