Over the years, Record Store Day has morphed from a music collector’s dream with long-lost audio and never-before-released music finally finding its way out to the public to an excuse for every record label in existence to grab anything still sitting in their vaults, drip it onto vinyl, and sit back and count the money. But there are still treasures out there to be found between vinyl releases of Peppa Pig and Macho Man Randy Savage (separate albums, by the way). The Last Roundup: Live from the Bijou Café in Philadelphia, March 16, 1973 by Gram Parsons and his band is one of those treasures.
Coming out 50 years after that set was initially recorded and 50 years after Parsons’ death, it’s a beautiful reminder of just how influential he remains to an entire generation of Americana musicians and singer/songwriters. The set also includes one of the earliest (if not the earliest) recordings of Emmylou Harris, who sang alongside Parsons. There was another live album from this tour, Live 1973, released in 1982 and recorded just three days before at the Hempstead, New York stop, but this two-LP set is not only longer by three songs, but also captures a more animated set. The set lists are a little different as well. Like the New York show, The Last Roundup starts off with “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes,” off GP – released just months before the start of the tour – before Parsons and band go into a great cover of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “My Uncle” and then follows with The Byrds’ “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” both of which sound inspired. The recording sound is good, but not great, which is not surprising considering the technology at the time. And the crowd, though clearly into the music, was not exactly stadium-sized (the venue only sat 275 people max), but Parsons and Harris took advantage of the intimacy and interacted quite a bit with the crowd.
One of the high points here is a five-minute version of “Love Hurts” (initially an Everly Brothers tune but covered by just about every musician at one point or another), and “Six Days on the Road,” despite a little crack in Parsons’ voice at the begging, is fantastic. They end the set with a five-song medley that includes “Hang On Sloopy” and “Boney Maronie,” among others. It’s almost heartbreaking to realize that this was one of the last shows the band would ever play. This tour was notorious for its unevenness, but the tape captured at the Philly shows finds the band in remarkable form, only adding to the sadness that Parsons would be dead eight months later.
Apparently, pedal steel player Neil Flanz thought this night marked the best show of the tour and requested a copy of the soundboard recording. He saved the cassette for almost 40 years, before it was bought by Amoeba Music for a future Parsons release. It had been in the Amoeba vault for another 10 years before it was rediscovered and eventually set for release on Record Store Day 2023. The set is rare enough to impress the diehard Parsons/Burrito Brothers/Byrds fan, yet accessible enough to appeal to someone who has never heard a single Parsons record. The Last Roundup is one of the reasons Record Store Days are still so vital; even at a time when some labels treat it as little more than a cynical cash grab.
