Twenty Thousand Roads

The date for the book release is drawing near and reviews are trickling in.


From The Atlanta Constitution Journal:

Bottom line: A terrific biography of a rock innovator that hums with juicy detail and wincing truth.

By the time he died of an overdose at 26, Gram Parsons brought the Byrds to Nashville, taught twang to the Rolling Stones and turned the spotlight on Emmylou Harris' serenades of high lonesome heartache. In the process, this Harvard dropout, who wore sequined suits as homage to the Nashville stars he loved, essentially invented country rock.

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Publisher's Weekly:

Gram Parsons is remembered as much for wearing sequined cowboy suits on stage and for being illegally cremated in the desert by one of his friends after dying of a drug overdose as he is for the half-dozen albums he played on in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Byrds' classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Meyer (A Girl and a Gun) covers both aspects of the legend, but he gives particular attention to the way Parsons brought together elements of country and rock music to forge a new sound. After a leisurely telling of Parsons's “rich white trash” family drama in Florida and Georgia, including his father's suicide and the barely contained contempt of his mother's family, the biography plunges into his musical career, careening from one band to the next just as Parsons himself did. Meyer is appreciative but never adulatory of Parsons, who he believes threw his talent away; while citing the influence of the Flying Burrito Brothers' debut album, for example, he repeatedly mentions the band's “unbelievably sloppy” sound. This isn't the first biography of Parsons, but Meyer's semidetached stance as a critical fan makes it a valuable one, in the vein of Peter Guralnick or Greil Marcus. (Oct. 30)

Men's Vogue:
Now an encyclopedic and likely definitive Parsons biography, Twenty Thousand Roads, by David N. Meyer (Villard), gamely takes the measure of the man without fixing the legend even further in amber. Meyers, a journalist who teaches at the New School in New York, notes that Parsons "had everything: looks, cool, charm, charisma, money…?and threw it away with both hands." Nevertheless, "the most talented musicians in America would do anything for him." Why did they care? And, by extension, why should we?


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