Sunday, August 08, 2021

SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Samuel Palmer, by JD

 "A bird deprived of her wings is not more incomplete than than the human mind without imagination"


Before The Pre-Raphaelites there was another, less well known, group of painters who styled themselves as The Ancients. Not having a self-publicist as good as Dante Gabriel Rosetti is one of the reasons they are overlooked by art historians but another, and probably more important reason, is that their art was somewhat out of tune with a society in the process of being converted to the new faiths of Darwinism and scientific materialism which were offered as an alternative to religious explanations of the world and a society in which the favoured style of art was verisimilitude, naturalistic representation.


The most famous of The Ancients was Samuel Palmer (1805 - 1881)

Palmer had already enjoyed success at the age of fourteen, selling a painting at the the Royal Academy but it was his future father in law, the painter John Linnell, who mentored his career "it pleased God to send me Mr Linnell as a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art" and it was Linnell who in 1824 introduced Palmer to William Blake.

Blake proved to be an inspiration and the nineteen year old Palmer left 'modern art' behind him and followed the artistic lead set by the older man.

Among the advice from Blake was -

"Draw anything you want to master a hundred times from nature till you have learned it from heart."
"You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision and the thing is done."

Palmer assimilated this advice as can be seen in his letters and notes -

"The general characteristics of Nature's beauty not only differ from, but are in some respects opposed to, those of Imaginative art."
"Nature is not at all the standard of art, but art is the standard of nature. The visions of the soul, being perfect, are the only true standard by which nature must be tried."

Both Palmer and Blake's visionary style of painting can best be described as 'imaginal' a word coined by Henry Corbin in his book Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alone-Creative-Imagination-Bollingen-General/dp/0691058342/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321027797&sr=1-1

Instead of realistic landscapes, Palmer produced work in a style that was almost dreamlike and reflected this 'imaginal realm' somewhere between this world and the next. The world available to our five senses is a reflection of, and arises out of, this 'imaginal realm', an idea which bears an uncanny similarity to the physicist David Bohm's theory of the implicate order giving rise to the explicate order, this latter being the world around us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order_according_to_David_Bohm

These paintings are a splendid antidote to the marxist-materialist-miserabilism of our current politically correct art world.







Saturday, August 07, 2021

WEEKENDER: Decline and fall of the 'colour supp', by Wiggia


Fleet Street has gone: the centre of the newspaper industry has been dispersed all over London and its spiritual home is now just a few hollowed out buildings of interest. Even the old watering holes full of journalists are now just tourist attractions; the most famous, El Vino, a bastion of its time for male journalists and refugees from the law courts - the ghost of Horace Rumpole may well stalk the place but that is all - has been absorbed into a wine chain selling tapas to the tourists who still visit the area. Fleet Street is no more; even Micks Cafe - the apostrophe was never there - the original and pretty rough 24 hour, 365 days a year original greasy spoon has gone to wherever those places go to in the sky.

This is not about Fleet Street, though it is about the addition of weekend supplements to newspapers that emanated from there before the street died.

When I left school with little in the way of qualifications and few prospects (a long story and not for here), I was fortunate that I had emerged into the working world during a period of full employment. A friend of a friend got me into a job of little consequence at the time in the ‘print’, an all-enveloping word that meant you had got yourself into the most lucrative trade in the country at the time: a union card in that industry at any level realised well above average wages for what was very little effort. It served me well until I moved on.

Why do I tell this story? In those early days I had access to all the news media on a daily basis; I became adept at scanning a paper in record quick time, even the heavyweights. My favourite was the Telegraph simply because its sports pages were in a different league then from all the others.

It was during this period that Fleet Street as it was then hit on the idea of including supplements in the Sunday editions of their papers. Naturally everyone involved in the handling of the papers cried foul at the ‘extra’ work involved in the handling and distribution of these extras and all got paid extra as was the norm in those days.

These weekend supplements, an American invention, were introduced to Britain in 1962 in the Sunday Times by Harold Evans the then editor. In original form they contained high quality photography and investigatory journalism; the latter has long gone, along with the in-house photographers.

The magazine sections included glossy articles on fashion, cookery, motoring, travel and the inevitable advice on health, wealth and an agony aunt, plus the investigatory pieces.

It was a new fillip to newspapers that finally had a competitor, television, and so they became a staple of the weekend editions and certain papers even started later to include mini mid-week versions as pull-out supplements.

Sadly for the newspaper industry it has not stopped the never-ending slide in sales since those heady days when the Daily Mirror could boast under its header 10 million readers a day. In many cases, only the culling of staff and the cost savings of the digital age in production has kept many titles going at all.

In many ways I must be typical of many of today's readers: unlike the time when I would read all the titles or at least scan them, I now rarely buy a newspaper, not because I don't like the printed word but because all those papers that I once upon a time thought had news articles of merit have now all dumbed down to a common denominator, and I can’t honestly see a revival. How many young people buy a newspaper these days? The digital age is the newspaper for them, and they are not likely to cough up to go behind a paywall either; but my wife stills buys a paper a couple of times a week and naturally I scan it - I have always been a voracious reader, put a catalogue or a phone directory in front of me and I will read it even if it has no obvious interest.

Back to the weekend magazine sections. When I purchased a Saturday edition of the Times last week - a shadow of the former ‘Thunderer’- a weekend section and a couple of pull-outs fell on the table as I opened it. I genuinely have not looked properly at a weekend magazine for some time, but for one reason or another this time I did. So what was new, what was luring me in to read further? Er, nothing. I could have been looking at a version from one of those editions from sixty years ago, minus the photography and the investigatory pieces. Obviously the contributors had changed, but they were all there, clones of an earlier generation of contributors; these are not journalists, in fact real journalists especially of the investigative kind are virtually extinct. No, these all come under the heading of features, people who make a living by writing endlessly about the same subject. Nothing has changed at all in all those years except that features now trump news content.

Until quite recently a couple of sections did still serve a purpose: best buys in travel and holidays did have genuine help in finding good deals and avoiding problems, and the money sections can still be good, plus the original ‘Ask Jessica’ column when she would take up the cudgels publicly on behalf of people who had been taken to the cleaners financially by banks, institutions etc. It was always worth a read; now gone, of course: the replacements if they exist are a pastiche of the original - can’t upset the advertisers, can we?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with feature writers, but the format is moribund. You turn the page hoping for something new, a bit different, to find the same items regurgitated endlessly over the year or years.

There is an awful lot of filler writing. Little is said about the item in hand but word salad fills a large part of most articles. I remember in the early Sunday Express motoring section the writer who filled that page (Benson?) would fill two thirds of the page with the aforementioned word salad every week before the car being reviewed was even mentioned. Nothing has changed. Food writers are good at this: every week the restaurant being reviewed will have an extra dimension that takes up paragraphs, usually a puff piece on how the sustainability in the chef's menu makes him a good bloke or similar; or how difficult it has been to make a living in such a backwater - why go there, one asks, until the same food writer put it on the map. There is a lot of nepotism in this magazine section as well: Coren, Rayner for starters - where would they be without their famous, and in the case of Coren talented, parents.

Before magazine sections the late (lamented by many!) News of the World, ‘all human life is here’ at least had articles you knew were ridiculous and made you laugh, and yet the paper did expose some serious items during its life.


About the only things that have changed are the now endless 'lose weight and eat healthily' pieces. These comprise of favourite actors/actresses/minor celebrities looking for exposure, many of whom like Oprah Winfrey re-appear with same advice after another five years when it obviously didn’t work the last time.

Plus of course the latest work out routines: going to the gym was not an option in the Sixties unless you were an actual athlete, but today pages are given to the latest routines and machines favoured by whoever they can get to endorse it.

Food is the same. The cooks of old who had a page that actually gave advice on something you could cook easily have given way to chapters on exotic dishes from all over the world that contain items that cannot be found unless you have a new world deli round the corner. I am never quite sure why celebrity chefs and these pages of exotic food are so popular when few cook these days or have to; the nearest most people get to a menu is when ordering on Just Eat or ordering two of number 57 from their local Chinese takeaway.

These food sections do serve a purpose though: the adverts for new kitchens, costing £20k and upwards, jostle for position around these pages. No kitchen is complete without a worktop filled with Heston Blumenthal’s latest £1000 blender and bread maker. All can be found in the food sections, they obviously sell as they wouldn’t be there otherwise, but are they ever used or are they an essential talking point in this non cooking world? They are simply an adornment on the work counter along with the very expensive Japanese knives that take more time to sharpen than the job you use them on.

The health sections - always prefaced with ‘ seek advice from your doctor if in doubt’ - have changed from 'my bad back is….and what should I do?' to more salacious items such as 'my husband can’t get it up any more, should I seek help from another?' and the more woke cries for help such as 'my husband has confessed to being bisexual, should I join in to save the marriage?' Tanya replies, 'follow your instincts what have you to lose?' None of that would have been in the early supplements.

Property has never gone away in these extra pages. How to improve your home used to be a Barry Bucknell page on essential woodwork, or how to change a lock; not any more. Now it is how to ruin the look of your property by adding a hideous box on the back with bi-fold doors costing trillions, and however small your outside space is, an entertainment area is a must. A gas-fired barbie or pizza oven are the current go-to’s; even in a climate that only allows you three days a year to use it, you can on those rare occasions fire up and ruin the same few days your neighbours wanted to spend outside enjoying the clean air and sun; and of course as men for some strange reason commandeer the barbie on these days, suitable pinnies and gloves for the man/cook are advertised alongside with advice on how not to burn your wagyu beef from your local artisan butcher.

The property section has always had a regular chart on the best/most convenient/most desirable and priciest regions in the country; even worse are the same charts telling everyone which is the most up and coming area, in one swoop ruining a lifetime of pleasant repose and steady prices.

Allied to the property section, often these days itself a separate item, we have the gardening pages. In days of yore Adam the gardener would suffice with his weekly tips on compost and veg growing all in an easy-to-follow illustrated strip. In this age of the celebrity gardeners that simply won't do; we have them instead of sage advice from an actual gardener such as the much-missed Percy Thrower or my favourite Geoffrey Smith, who would seek out real gardens with real people and not the estates that dominate TV gardening today - anyone who believes that Monty Don actually looks after that enormous multi-garden he appears in on his own, needs their bumps felt! Smith was the archetypal real gardener who could come across on TV:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Smith_(gardener)

But gardening today is big business and the supplements all have their celebrity gardeners fronting the sections. To be frank, nearly all just repeat the months of the year every year, but they are responsible for fashion changes and therefore get industry support: from ‘this year it will be mainly Geraniums’ or 'decking is so last year', to whatever, to fancy expensive Japanese secateurs, the adverts back up the articles.

The one big change in all the supplements is some form of celebrity section, either interviews with established stars like Helen Mirren who seems to appear on a regular basis in all of them, or the latest Love Island star very few have heard of and fewer care about; or even worse, the strange weekly up and down page Celebrity Watch in the Times supplement by Caitlin Moran: she actually has three columns a week all on the same themes, herself and celebrities. Amazingly by supplement standards this rubbish is popular, so dumbed-down have the papers become; you can, under pressure, read one of the Celebrity Watch columns and say to yourself 'what on earth is that all about?' and repeat the same thing every week of the year. Why would anyone bother, really?

Of course, she is not alone. The Daily Mail has made a whole online section on the same sort of layout, endless people from TOWIE (see, I am with it!) and Love Island apparently are the most clicked items in the mag, so what do I know? All I do know is it will not save the dead tree press from further contraction. The papers themselves have reduced in real content; apart from some business sections, and you don’t get many clicks there, they have all gone tabloid apart from the Telegraph which was once good and once had easily the best sports section - not any more - and the repetitive magazine sections get bigger and say less.

I used to enjoy sitting down and going through a decent paper like the Telegraph as was, but today on the occasions we buy a paper I find myself scanning it for the few items of interest left. When push comes to shove they all seem to toe a similar line; the consensus among them is like with political parties, they try to appeal to all and all end up very similar, pleasing ever fewer; the weekend sections follow suit.


 It used to be said that yesterday's newspaper was today's firelighter; now it doesn't even last that long.

Friday, August 06, 2021

FRIDAY MUSIC: Brittany Haas, by JD

If violinist/fiddle player Brittany Haas is known at all it would be as a member of bluegrass band Crooked Still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Still who are currently having a break from performing while their members pursue other musical avenues.
https://www.brittanyhaas.com/biopress

Brittany Haas has also recorded with her sister the cellist Natalie Haas and some of those are included in this selection below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Haas








Thursday, August 05, 2021

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 5 August 1961

 At #2 this week is Helen Shapiro (headed for the top spot next week):


Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

30 July: Tennessee's Bristol Motor Speedway hosted its first NASCAR event. 
    'Country music star Brenda Lee, who was 17 at the time, sang the national anthem and the field of 42 cars got underway. Jack Smith of Spartanburg, S.C. entered the record books as the first NASCAR winner. Unusually, he wasn't actually in the driver's seat when the car took the chequered flag – after 290 laps the extreme heat had taken its toll and blistered Smith's feet, so he turned over driving duties to Johnny Allen, of Atlanta, who finished the race as a relief driver.' 
    [Table of results here.]

31 July: IBM markets its revolutionary new typewriter, which instead of a host of individual 'typebars' uses a rotating 'golfball' with all the characters on its surface. 'Initially selling at $395, the Selectric soon became the most popular typewriter in the world, until superseded by the word processor,' says Wikipedia.


4 August: the 'Berlin Crisis' continues. At Vienna on 4 June, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, had issued an ultimatum to France, Britain and the USA, demanding the withdrawal of their forces from West Berlin, giving them a deadline of 31 December. 
    Now he 'ups the ante' with... 'a "secret" speech at the Conference of first secretaries of Central Committees of Communist and workers parties of socialist countries for the exchange of views on the questions related to preparation and conclusion of German peace treaty. Describing his encounter with U.S. envoy John J. McCloy, he said, "I told him to let Kennedy know...that if he starts a war then he would probably become the last president of the United States of America." '
    The following day, 1,500 people flee from East Berlin into the Western sectors and Khrushchev gives his approval to East Germany's leader Walter Ulbricht to close off East Berlin with a barbed-wire fence. 

    Also on 4 August 1961: future President of the USA Barack Obama is born in Honolulu, Hawaii.


UK chart hits, week ending 5 August 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1

Well I Ask You

Eden Kane

Decca

2

You Don't Know

Helen Shapiro

Columbia

3

Temptation

The Everly Brothers

Warner Brothers

4

Halfway To Paradise

Billy Fury

Decca

5

Pasadena

The Temperance Seven

Parlophone

6

A Girl Like You

Cliff Richard and The Shadows

Columbia

7

Runaway

Del Shannon

London

8

Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man

Ricky Nelson

London

9

Romeo

Petula Clark

Pye

10

Don't You Know It

Adam Faith

Parlophone

11

You Always Hurt The One You Love

Clarence 'Frogman' Henry

Pye

12

Time

Craig Douglas

Top Rank

13

Johnny Remember Me

John Leyton

Top Rank

14

Baby I Don't Care / Valley Of Tears

Buddy Holly

Coral

15

Weekend

Eddie Cochran

London

16

Quarter To Three

The U.S. Bonds

Top Rank

17

Marcheta

Karl Denver

Decca

18

Reach For The Stars / Climb Every Mountain

Shirley Bassey

Columbia

19

Surrender

Elvis Presley

RCA

20

Runnin' Scared

Roy Orbison

London


Sunday, August 01, 2021

SUNDAY SMILE: A quick shag

(pic source: Wikipedia)

FACT: In flight, the cormorant manages about 33.5 mph over long distances:

'Cormorants have a flapping flight style which enables them to achieve medium speeds for birds – 54km/h has been measured over long distances. The length of individual, unbroken flights has not been studied in detail, but distances of several hundred kilometers are possible.'
    https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/cormorants/faq.htm

NOT A FACT:

'The Common Cormorant or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag...'

Saturday, July 31, 2021

WEEKENDER: An Olympic Year Story, by Wiggia


I wrote a piece about the involvement of the Regent Street Polytechnic, now Westminster University, in the 1908 Olympics some years back, but the piece has disappeared and the print version I have somewhere can’t at this moment be unearthed; probably buried with much else when we moved house a few months ago, so I thought it appropriate to re-write it.

The 1908 games were hastily put together by Britain after the original site in Rome for the original 1906 games was considered unviable following the volcanic eruption in Naples and the fact the Italians had more on their plate than worrying about an Olympics. It was also suggested they didn’t have the money to put the games on in the first place and the volcanic eruption was a timely intervention; we, and it wouldn’t be the last time, stepped into the breach.

The Regent Street Polytechnic had a proud record as many of its sports clubs were among the finest in the country. The Polytechnic Harriers produced numerous Olympic medallists over the years and had their own sports ground at Chiswick. Many of the other sports clubs and associations also had individuals and teams competing at the highest level plus the organisational skills to run big events. This made them the obvious choice to turn to in helping put on the 1908 games; politics with the IOC means that very little, in fact nothing on that matter is admitted or recorded by that organisation today and you would be hard pushed to find a mention in any IOC history - there is none - of the help that ensured the games went ahead.

I have a personal interest in all this as I was a member of the Polytechnic Cycling Club, at the time the foremost track club in the country with many national champions in various disciplines. As a club it must have had the most celebrated club house in the country in London’s Regent Street. Though the club had just one small room to call its own it did have the run of all the facilities available there: swimming pool, snooker room, gym and educational facilities should you require them.

On entry as today the marble hall is very imposing and the history of sports success could be seen everywhere: a marble slab with the Polytechnic's own sports person of the year above the grand staircase read like a Who’s Who of sport at the time, and various glass cases in the corridors contained club trophies that outshone anything I had ever seen; one of these became subject to a row over ownership after the Polytechnic ceased to be and all the sports clubs were disbanded then or a little later as it changed to a university in ‘86, so no longer a Polytechnic with a history of success in so many fields, now a dubious change for the better with a uni that is famous only for being a hotbed of lefty thinking and no sports association.

Obviously the security barriers were not there in my time and the annual best sportsman names were inscribed in marble behind the centre welcome above the door, if it is still there.

I must also mention the late Lord Hailsham, Quintin Hogg, who was very much involved in the Poly and would respond in longhand to requests on things like law that would affect members.

This gives a summary of the lead up to those Olympics and the Poly’s involvement:

The Polytechnic Harriers and the Olympics

In 1908, when the Olympic Games came to the White City Stadium, the opening and closing ceremonies and the Marathon race were all organized by the Regent Street Polytechnic. This institution had been created by the vision of Quintin Hogg (1845-1903), a man who believed in the education of ‘mind, body and spirit’. In 1891 it became the model for applied education across London. Visiting athletes from abroad were invited to become honorary Polytechnic members and to use the sports and social facilities at 309 Regent St.

Edward VII, Queen Alexandra and the President of France visited the White City Stadium on May 26th, three weeks before the Games began. The Polytechnic staged the events, which included a parade of athletes and a gymnastic display. A series of postcards were produced to mark the occasion.

The Polytechnic Harriers Club organized the Trial Olympic Marathon race which was reintroduced as an event in the modern Games. The race was run from Windsor Great Park to the stadium and established the international distance which was fixed by the Games Organising Committee at 26 miles and 385 yards, enabling the runners to finish in front of the Royal Box. 

Twenty-three Polytechnic members were selected for the British Olympic team. Charles Bartlett of the Polytechnic Cycling Club won a gold medal, and the Poly won a further four silver and bronze medals in boxing, cycling and track events.”

The Polytechnic Harriers have played a major role in the destiny of world athletics.

The club was entrusted with organising the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1908 Olympic Games at the newly-built White City Stadium in London, which were lauded by the athletes and media alike. Athletes became honorary members of the Polytechnic and, in the absence of an Olympic village, used the organisation’s Regent Street headquarters for training and lodging.

There was also a 'rehearsal' held at Chiswick – as described by The Times – when members of the Poly competed against the athletes in a variety of events.

In the official report on the 1908 games the Polytechnic is thanked by the Council of London for its assistance in so many areas.

Two things emerge from this:

  • Without the help of the Poly the games could never have taken place, or would have struggled severely; it was the only sporting organisation with the size and knowledge to have helped out in the task; and
  • The marathon distance was fixed by the route chosen, for all time: the Polytechnic marathon which followed on from the games was the oldest established race over the distance in Europe and for decades the most prestigious.

“At the time of its demise in 1996, the Poly was Europe's oldest regular marathon. It had seen more world records and had been run over 42.195 kilometres (26.219 miles) more often than any other marathon.“

It also had a magnificent trophy awarded to it by the Sporting Life and the Poly marathon had a status as the most prestigious marathon in the world after the Olympic version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Brasher_Sporting_Life_Trophy

The link doesn’t tell the whole story as there was a legal dispute over ownership of the trophy: it had been gifted to the Poly for their race but the Mirror group which owned the Sporting Life refused to return it and the rest is history. What those who claimed it, rightly or wrongly would have done with it is doubtful as the club no longer had a race or a winner to present it to.

Images for some reason of the trophy have completely disappeared, but in this Movietone clip of the race won by the great Ron Hill the trophy can be clearly seen.

The marathon was not without controversy. Pietri Dorando was the first man into the stadium but was suffering from extreme fatigue and did not look as though he would make the line and so was helped, and then disqualified. Such was the public sympathy for Dorando that the Queen awarded him a gold cup the next day as a consolation prize. In this old postcard of the event Dorando can be seen running through Harlesden, accompanied, as were all the runners, by a cyclist supplied by - you guessed it - the Polytechnic Harriers and cycling club.


Back to the Olympics. Having stepped in to save the Games we only had two years to prepare for the event. The challenge of preparing London for the 1908 Games with such little notice was taken up by Lord Desborough (1855-1945), chairman of the British Olympic Association. This formidable aristocrat had climbed the Matterhorn, rowed in the Boat Race for Oxford and swum across the base of Niagara Falls, so organizing the Olympic Games was not an especially intimidating prospect. He persuaded the organizers of the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 to build the stadium, at their own expense, to accommodate an athletics ground. In return they would receive a proportion of gate receipts. Soon named ‘White City’ after its ugly concrete structures, the stadium was completed in ten months by George Wimpey and included a swimming pool and cycle track as well as facilities for track and field athletics. It was designed to accommodate 66,000 spectators but could hold as many as 130,000 standing on terraces.

It is difficult to imagine such an undertaking being completed in that time today; oh, and it made a small profit !

For the only time the British team won the most medals, 146 including 56 gold medals. The White City stadium survived, later mainly as the home of greyhound racing, until it was demolished in 1986 to be replaced by a 'white elephant', the BBC television centre, itself now gone.

The velodrome/cycle track was never really used after the 1908 games and further grandstanding was built on it to increase capacity.

The games had one other first: women were allowed to compete in a small number of sports for the first time.

The games suffered from appalling weather and were extended to finish all the events: they actually lasted for six months. This photo of the track cycling gives an idea of the weather; for safety reasons, track cycling is never held in the rain, but the program got so behind they changed the rules.


So despite the IOC erasing every detail about the Polytechnic involvement in the 1908 games, it can be safely said they would not have gone ahead without that institution's involvement. 

_________________________________________-
Some sources / suggestions for further reading:

Friday, July 30, 2021

FRIDAY MUSIC: Gram Parsons, by JD

Gram Parsons is probably unknown to most people but he was a member of one of the iconic groups of the sixties, The Byrds. He was not one of the original five members but the band went through many, many personnel changes over the years and Parsons joined them in early 1968 and was a major influence on the musical style of that year's album 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo,' a record which more or less invented 'country rock' a coming together of Country music and the 'easy' lyrical rock and roll of previous Byrds records. As it says in Wiki, Parsons made Country music fashionable again.


A note on the first video here: it is often stated that the song is a premonition of Parsons' own early death but that is not so. The song is about another band member, the guitarist Clarence White. After a show one night White was helping to load equipment into a car when he was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver. 

About Parsons' own death there is rather a lot of controversy about what happened and why. I make no comment but fellow band member Chris Hillman is in no doubt and expresses his views forcefully and bitterly in a YT video which you can find if you wish. I prefer to remember the music.