The man has just walked off his plane home from LA and is looking at his chicken and avocado wrap like a lioness looks at a gazelle. It’s understandable that interviews sometimes have to take a back-seat to hunger, so Jordie does his best to talk about his upcoming stage debut as the lead role in the biographical musical, Grievous Angel: The Legend Of Gram Parsons whilst politely annihilating some chips.
Directed by Michael Bates, the last man to ever interview the mythical folk legend, Lane is humbly shitting his pants at the thought of portraying a man who is undeniably a legend of modern music. “Yes I’m still finding it very daunting,” he admits, “and I think I will be up until opening night.”
As crazy as he thinks playing the legendary country music maverick is, Lane says he “felt compelled to do it.” Adding that, “once Michael and I bonded over our mutual love and respect for Gram’s music then I just had to deal with my own fears of acting… the fear of spending my nights pretending to be a musical legend.”
Discussing the story of Pasrons and the tragedy that engulfed his family life: mental institutions, suicides, boat crashes and alcoholism, it reads like a John Grisham book. Curious then that so much retrospective material relating to Gram includes the word ‘angel’, most notably, the 2004 documentary, Fallen Angel. “Maybe that’s the irony, there was always a battle between good and evil within Gram and even in his lyrics there’s a lot of wordplay between heaven and hell, especially in a song such as ‘Sin City’.
“But I think his entire life was lived in those extremes,” reasons the man set to play him onstage, “he feared he was going to turn out like his parents and he spent his life trying to escape that and push away from it.”
So how then does a nice, humble Aussie boy like Jordie Lane summon the devil within? “It’s a real challenge to portray all of Gram’s pain and anguish onstage, thankfully I had a pretty blessed upbringing myself. There hasn’t been addictions or dramatic deaths, but it has made it that much harder to get inside this heavy soul he had. I’ve been talking to Michael Bates who obviously met Gram, Polly Parsons, his daughter and Pamela Dubois, who was the ultimate groupie at the time – to try and learn about his character. I’ve also been listening to all of his recordings and trying to form a vision of the man behind the tragic circumstances, in many ways it’s like putting a puzzle back together.”
Quite a bit of the singer’s own preparation for the show took place at Room 8, the infamous bedsit at The Joshua Tree Inn where Parsons passed away. Lane travelled to the Californian desert to gain inspiration, not only for the upcoming show, but his own flourishing solo career as well. Speaking candidly about the ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, it seems a little focus on Mr. Parsons was just the distraction needed to kick-start Lane’s own writing.
“I was in a real rut after the first album,” confesses Lane, “I toured so much that I got a little absorbed in life on the road and suddenly I hadn’t written a song for two years, but when I went and stayed at Room 8 something instantly happened. I’m not into ghosts and spirits, but there was an energy in there, it was freaky, like a soft nudge on the shoulder to work more and write more songs. I even did a Gram Parsons cover of ‘I Just Can’t Take It Anymore’, which was like his take on Bob Dylan.” Jordie’s cover is a heartbreaking song about a tortured love; and that is precisely where Emmylou Harris comes into the story.
Now considered to have rightly earned her place in the pantheon of music, she was in Gram’s lifetime, his apprentice and the love he could never have. Harris still refuses to openly talk about her relationship with the Parsons. For the stage production, Parson’s muse will be played by the talented Clare Reynolds, a serendipitous casting decision Lane is thankful for considering his own Emmylou is someone with whom he already shares such a unique bond.
“Clare and I have performed and written together before, so that was much easier than meeting a complete stranger and trying to find the creative chemistry that was needed to do this. In many ways what Gram and Emmylou had cannot be written into a script, so we have to be able to get that out there on stage and make the audience believe it.”
Hitting 27 must come as bit of a shock to a musician that has been spending their days looking at the achievements of someone who managed to influence The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and, of course, the brilliant career of Ms Harris – all before dying at 26. Jordie though can only laugh at the notion of comparing himself to Gram, “even The Eagles sat in his audience taking notes. I think he was very bitter about how everyone was getting a huge amount of success whilst he was alive and he was stuck playing tiny gigs. But I don’t find myself comparing my career to his, but I do often wonder what else he could’ve done if he had of lived longer, what amazing songs he could have written.”
The tragic end to Gram Parsons’ life at the Joshua Tree in 1973 from a deadly cocktail of tequila and morphine obviously places a question mark over the backstage rider at the musical. Is a sneaky Jose Cuervo in bad taste? “God I hope not!” exclaims Lane, “Clare and I both love tequila and I don’t think it’s in bad taste at all. If anything, it adds a bit more reality to the show. Gram needs to be in a drunken state for much of the performance, so maybe we could make it a bit of a ceremony and have a few before the curtain goes up…you know, in remembrance of the great man.”
Grievous Angel: The Legend of Gram Parsons opens at Melbourne’s Athaneum Theatre from Friday 20th July 2012. See the website for full details.
