JOCK BARTLEY

(1950 – )
MUSIC ::: GRAM

Jock Bartley was nine years old when he began studying guitar with jazz master Johnny Smith in Colorado Springs. By twelve, he was playing Bach and Duke Ellington; then the Beatles landed on The Ed Sullivan Show and blew open the door. Eric Clapton and B.B. King taught him how to play with fire, but Smith had already taught him the greater lesson: the notes you leave out matter as much as the ones you play. Bartley left art school, replaced Tommy Bolin in Zephyr and became the rare guitarist who could bring jazz discipline to rock-and-roll abandon.

In 1973, a Boulder club manager told the twenty-three-year-old Bartley to get down there because he might land a gig with Gram Parsons. “Gram who?” Bartley replied. The Fallen Angels needed three things: a country picker, a rhythm guitarist and a rock soloist. Jock was two out of three, which beat the other fellow’s zero. At nine the next morning, he boarded the tour bus and tried to learn James Burton’s parts by dropping the needle onto GP while the record bounced beneath him. Days later, he was standing beside Gram and Emmylou Harris at Houston’s Liberty Hall when Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young joined them. Afterward, three bands crowded into Neil’s hotel suite and sang until dawn. Bartley watched Emmylou and Linda sit face-to-face, their heads nearly touching, discovering the sound of their voices together for the first time.

In New York, Bartley met Rick Roberts, the man who had replaced Gram in the Flying Burrito Brothers—and who had helped bring Emmylou to Gram’s attention in the first place. Back in Boulder, they joined forces with Mark Andes, Larry Burnett and former Byrds and Burritos drummer Michael Clarke to form Firefall, carrying the tangled bloodlines of the Byrds, Burritos and Fallen Angels onto American radio. Bartley never regarded the music as soft rock or worried much about what anyone called it. The song came first; everything else existed to carry it. In 2017, he brought that history back to its source, performing at the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull in Waycross—the young rock guitarist Gram hired by accident returning, forty-four years later, as one of the last living witnesses to the sound they made together.