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On September 19, 1973, musician Gram Parsons died of an alcohol and drug overdose at a hotel near the Joshua Tree National Monument in California. Shortly thereafter, he would join the annals of rock mythology when his body was stolen by his road manager, and taken back to the desert, where he cremated it. In death, he was as decadent and outrageous as he had been in life.
Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel is a documentary about the life of Gram Parsons, directed and produced by Gandulf Hennig for the BBC. It includes music and performances by Parsons both alone and with his bands, including the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, The International Submarine Band. It also features interviews with his family and friends, as well as musicians including Keith Richards, Emmylou Harris, Chris Hilman, James Burton and Peter Buck.
The life of Gram Parsons had enough high drama that this should have been a good DVD. I mean, when Keith Richards says that you were a wild man and Mick Jagger kicked you out of a Rolling Stones recording session in their partying heyday because he thought you were a bad influence, you would expect that the documentary would be a cautionary tale about the dark side of fame and the excesses of musicians in the late 1960's. Instead, it was a rather dry tale that, in the end, left me with more questions than answers when the end credits began rolling.
This documentary was lacking on so many levels that it is difficult to critique in the space that I have to write this review. There was no theme or common thread tying the film together. The interviews appeared to have been patched together without any apparent regard for placement or their value to the documentary. It failed to address or even offer a theory about key issues such as the failure of Parsons' music to attract a wider audience, in spite of its apparent influence upon many musicians that followed him; the reasons for Parsons' descent into alcohol and drug abuse; and the reasons for Parsons' ultimate alienation from his family. The documentary also alludes to the fact that Parsons himself was married and fathered a child, but no significant insight is offered into this aspect of his life.
Upon viewing the bonus features, one gets some sense of the reason for the shortfalls in the documentary. There is only one bonus item - an interview with producer/director Gandulf Hennig. While I give Hennig credit for his passion about the subject-matter, it is clear from the interview that he is a musician and not a filmmaker. In the end, all I can say is that he should have left the filmmaking to the pros and restricted his involvement in the project to music production.
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