Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons - born Ingram Cecil Connor III on 5 November
1946 (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 spiralled 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 womanising, 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 on 19 September 1973 after feasting on marijuana, Jack Daniels,
Tequila and morphine, with possible side orders of cocaine and
barbiturates.
Little wonder the ice suppository his companions applied
failed to revive him. He was only 26.
His corpse was famously stolen from LA International Airport -
where it was being shipped to New Orleans to his step-father - by road
manager Phil Kaufman and cremated - in a rather amateurish fashion
with five gallons of gasoline - in the desert at Joshua Tree (in
accordance with Parsons' wishes).
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