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Robin Lynam

The Byrds

Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

(Columbia)

Sweetheart Of The Rodeo was not the first country-rock album. That honour, arguably, goes to Safe At Home by the International Submarine Band led by Gram Parsons.

Few people ever heard Safe At Home, but by the time The Byrds went into the studio to record Sweetheart Parsons was effectively leading them too.

It was a commercial flop by the standards of a group that was accustomed to selling almost as well as The Beatles, but all the people in the music industry that mattered listened to it and raved about it.

For better or worse - Gram Parsons thought for worse - the country-rock movement starts here, and without the influence of this collection much of the music made by most of the American singer-songwriters of the early 1970s, not to mention bands ranging from The Eagles to Little Feat, would be impossible to imagine.

Parsons had joined The Byrds essentially as a sideman, but was nevertheless able to talk fellow country fan, bassist Chris Hillman, and Roger Mcguinn, whose singing and 12-string guitar playing had up to that point provided the band's signature sound, into a new direction.

The lineup lasted only five months before Parsons left, and his voice was replaced by McGuinn's on several of the songs he had originally sung - this year's two-disc expanded Legacy edition includes 14 bonus tracks, many of them with the original Parsons' vocals - but his influence was indelible.

Two new Bob Dylan songs got the countrified Byrds treatment - the opening You Ain't Going Nowhere and Nothing Was Delivered - and Parsons' own Hickory Wind and One Hundred Years From Now announced the arrival of a major songwriter, singing and playing country with rock'n'roll energy.

A lot of rockers and even more country fans hated the combination, and given that it ultimately gave us Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus and a raft of loathsome 'hat' acts perhaps they were right, but Sweetheart and Parsons' subsequent recordings with The Flying Burrito Brothers and Emmylou Harris have stood the test of time magnificently.

The Byrds first flop was also their best and most influential album.



FROM THE VAULT: 1968