Missing Parsons Bureau : Newport Beach Admen Breathe Some Life Into One of Their Dead Rock Heroes by Hiding His Name in Plain Sight

Remember “The Hidden Persuaders” and the other paranoia-inducing books that claimed to expose a world of subliminal messages in advertising? Powerful images and words of sex and death were supposedly airbrushed into every ice cube and shadow in product ads, secretly coercing you into buying, buying, buying.

If you someday find yourself inexplicably humming songs with such titles as “Hot Burrito No. 1” and “Hickory Wind” while buying an album called “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” blame advertising art directors Bruce Mayo and Jon Gothold.

For the past couple of years, the two award-winning Orange County admen have been dropping the name of country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, creator of the above works, into their ads whenever possible.

While far from being a household name, Parsons had a massive effect on the music world. In recording the “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album during his brief tenure with the Byrds in 1968, he initiated the country-rock movement that spawned such bands as the Eagles and anticipated the rocked-up sound of contemporary country music.

He continued to define that sound with the Flying Burrito Brothers (with Chris Hillman, later of the Desert Rose Band) and two solo albums that also marked the debut of singer Emmylou Harris. His work went on to influence everyone from Rodney Crowell to Elvis Costello, but Parsons himself checked out in September, 1973, suffering a drug overdose at his beloved Joshua Tree State Park. His death sparked more press attention than his life had, when his friend and road manager Phil Kaufman fulfilled a promise to the singer by stealing his body and cremating it at Joshua Tree.

For a guy whose ashes settled into the sand 20 years ago, Parsons has been turning up in some curious places of late.

There’s the cellular phone ad with the grim newspaper headlines about carjackings and traffic snarls, with one of the made-up articles quoting “Police spokesman Gram Parsons” (the piece also bore the byline of Nick Drake, actually a dead British cult folk singer).

There are ads for a chain of print shops, displaying stacks of neat forms for G. Parsons Inc. and stationary reading “From the desk of Gram Parsons.” Then there’s the public service ad warning against sources of burns in the home, displaying a “Gramma Parsons” microwave dinner.

“Sometimes, we might need a something with a name on it, so why not his?” says Mayo. “To most people, it won’t mean diddly. Jon and I do it for the 10 people who might notice, and to amuse each other.”

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The first things one notices when entering the modern Newport Beach offices of the Lawrence & Mayo advertising agency are all the awards on the walls. The second thing is a life-sized cardboard stand-up of Barbara Bush, altered to hold a sign reading “Will work for food.”

Creative Director Mayo started the firm a year and half ago with Lynda Lawrence. The fledgling, six-member team has just walked away with 21 Orange County Ad Club awards, bested by only two of the 177 other entrants. One of those two was the relatively giant dGWB agency, where Mayo’s friend Gothold is senior art director.

If management types are defined by their cars, consider that Gothold drives a ’68 Mustang, while Mayo’s two vehicles are a ’67 VW van with a busted water bed and a weathered gray Ford LTD nicknamed the Narc-mobile.

The two rarely use their own names when calling each other, instead giving receptionists the names of a succession of dead musicians.

“We especially like dead, blind black people, but we like anybody who’s dead and not known very well,” Mayo said.

Gothold continued, “The receptionists never know who we are, so one of us will just call up and say, ‘Hi, this is Jesse Ed Davis,’ and the other knows to pick up the line right away.”

“Mr. Mayo, Nick Drake’s on line three!” Mayo intoned.

“Edward Cochran, please,” parried Gothold.

“Samuel Cooke calling,” Mayo said. “We have an ever-growing list of names, unfortunately.”

The pair met 12 years ago at a different agency.

Gothold recalled: “I’d been working there for a couple of years before Bruce came in. I was told I was going to be sharing an office with him, and I’d heard he was a devout Christian guy. I thought, ‘Oh man!’ because I was used to playing my records as loud as I liked, and thought ‘I’m sure going to enjoy having this real conservative here.’ Then we just hit it off instantly.”

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Though he does indeed take his Christianity seriously, there aren’t too many other things Mayo is particularly solemn about. The stereo stayed cranked, and they discovered that each was a huge fan of Parsons’ music.

Mayo, 40, first heard of Parsons in 1968 while growing up in La Mirada.

“My brother bought ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ when it first came out, and said, ‘Ugh. Here, you want this?’ And it just knocked me out. I’d never liked country music before that,” he said.

Whittier-spawned Gothold, 37, went crackers for Gram a few years later when he and some friends got drunk and decided to buy a pile of country albums.

Both Gothold and Mayo feel advertising was one of the few options open to persons with their creative bents.

“We were both arty people as kids,” Gothold said. “I wanted to be a cartoonist. My aspiration was to work for Mad magazine. In college, I did political cartoons for the paper. It wasn’t until I had to take an ad art class in college that I realized what an art director was, that you could have fun and make money at it. It never dawned on me before that it was people who were coming up with these things.”

“I thought Darrin did it,” Mayo said, referring to the husband on “Bewitched.”

He continued, “In school I liked art and always got in trouble for drawing half-tracks and Japanese Zeros all the time.” After seeing some clever Volkswagen ads when he was in high school, he set his sights on an ad career.

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Though both have families and seem to get the job done for their clients, they still like to regard their work as play time. Gothold said: “I think doing this thing of getting Gram Parsons’ name into stuff goes back to a real root thing. When I was in school, you’d get assigned to do stuff, like write a report on Uruguay. As a kid, I’d always think, ‘Well, I could just write it, or I can . . . have as much different, weird fun as I possibly can with it, make it as entertaining for me as I possibly can, and still maybe pass.’

“I think advertising is just like that. When we get an assignment, we can either take a very straight approach or do something that is entertaining to ourselves and still sells the client’s deal.”

Mayo trotted out examples of some of the more audacious work he and Lawrence have done, including an ad aimed at teen pregnancy that featured a condom and the slogan “Remember, Bruce Springsteen did ‘Cover Me’ before ‘Tunnel of Love’.” Asked by a trade magazine last year how they would handle the presidential campaign, the pair submitted such potential slogans for Bill Clinton as “Think of him as JFK, but with fewer girlfriends,” and “Hold down taxes? George Bush can’t even hold down his lunch.”

Parsons’ name first began cropping up in Mayo and Gothold’s work four years ago, in humorous posters for spurious events the two made for an art directors’ retreat held on Catalina every year. They then began listing the late singer as an account executive in awards programs and other industry spots.

They now routinely get mail addressed to him. They began dropping his name into innocuous spots in their ads, checking first with clients if they thought there might be objections.

Mayo said: “Maybe one reason we chose Gram is part of me is pissed that Gram died, because I think the stuff he did was great. He had a big influence on a lot of people and didn’t get recognized for much. I guess this is our little way of carrying on.

“He’d go play the Palomino with long hair and all the rednecks would yell at him. Then five years later Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings have big cocaine habits and long hair and are selling zillions of records. Gram paved the way. I didn’t like country music at all before I heard him, and then I loved it.

Gothold added: “Gram’s music really hung in there for me, and there aren’t a lot of artists I feel that way about. The thing about Parsons is the guy had a lot of integrity. He did things that weren’t very popular to do at the time he did them. I don’t know that he was necessarily a missionary or a messiah, but I think some of his influence rubbed off on my life: Do something different, have a good time doing it, because something might happen to you, so you have to go for it now.”

The pair can remember the exact date the Byrds’ CD box set came out three years ago, because they rushed out to get the rare Parsons tracks on it. They attend the Parsons memorial show at the Palomino annually, and frequently take their families out to Joshua Tree, visiting Cap Rock where Parsons was cremated by Kaufman with five gallons of hi-test gasoline.

Asked if they force Parsons’ music on their kids, they simultaneously replied, “Uh, yeah.” It hasn’t had much effect. Mayo’s 15-year-old would rather hear Metallica, while Gothold says, “My son is 7, so he likes songs that mention animals.”

They don’t know where Parsons might appear in their ads next, though potential spots include Gothold’s work for El Pollo Loco or Yamaha guitars. They imagine his name will be in plain sight, rather than hidden in some ice cubes.

“Yeah, we’re too busy putting ‘death’ and obscene words in there,” Gothold said.