Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons (born Ingram Cecil Connor III - Parsons was his stepfather's surname) may not have invented country rock but he was the first to perform country music with a Rock & Roll attitude. With a voice that was haunted and almost fatalistic, death became Gram Parsons as life never could. Largely ignored until a cocktail of drugs and booze spirited him away in September 1973, Parsons' influence and legend has spiraled ever since. Death has been the making of Gram Parsons.

Parsons' early life was straight out of a Tennessee Williams play: privileged Southern gothic upbringing; a father who committed suicide and a mother who boozed herself to death; heck, even a wicked step-dad. Add to that little lot a debilitating weakness for drink and drugs, his womanizing, his squalid death and bizarre desert cremation, and you've got a story that's just waiting to be told . . .

Parsons started this journey in his International Submarine Band, continued it in The Byrds and almost, almost shocked the world as one of The Flying Burrito Brothers. His groundbreaking subject matter of draft dodging and drug smuggling, his musical debates with God and his kaleidoscopic view of a freewheelin' America as a cosmic jungle of hippies, truckers and cowboy angels was all new to country music and to rock as well, and neither knew what to make of him.

He died a squalid death at the Joshua Tree Motel in the Mojave Desert after feasting on marijuana, Jack Daniels, Tequila and heroin, with possible side orders of morphine, cocaine and barbiturates. Little wonder the ice suppository his companions applied failed to revive him.