Come anticipate "Grand Theft Parsons" with me

Sunday Times (London)
September 14, 2003, Sunday
HEADLINE: Too fast to live, too young to die
BYLINE: Bryan Appleyard

A stolen coffin, a burning body: a low-budget gem of a film highlights the genius of Gram Parsons, country rock's inventor, for Bryan Appleyard
Thirty years ago next Friday, the country-rock star Gram Parsons died, aged 26, in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn in southern California. Tequila on top of morphine seems to have been the main problem, though heroin, cocaine and barbiturates were almost certainly in there somewhere. Parsons had, pharmacologically speaking, overidentified with his friend Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. "Gram thought he had Keith's metabolism," explains Phil Kaufman, one-time road manager both to Parsons and the Stones. "Keith could eat nails and piss rust. Gram thought he had the same gift. He tried, and he died."
The death was pure rock'n'roll, a cele-bratory binge -Parsons had just released the album Grievous Angel -that went wrong. He became one more headstone in the graveyard that includes Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and many others. "Yep," says Kaufman, "and to think that if Mama Cass and Karen Carpenter had shared that sandwich, they'd both be alive today." (For younger readers, Cass choked to death on a sandwich and Carpenter died of anorexia. Kaufman, you will gather, is quite a guy, definitely old-school rock.) Anyway, if the death was rock'n'roll, the aftermath was even more so. Kaufman, whose unconventional road-managing talents had got him known as the Road Mangler, had made a pact with his client. As soon as one of them died, the other was to take the body to the Joshua Tree desert and burn it. "He'd have done the same for me," says Kaufman, "but I guess he'd have hired somebody." Kaufman stole the body from Los Angeles airport, took it out to the desert and burnt it. Pursued by the police, he gave himself up a few weeks later. On November 5, 1973 -it would have been Parsons's 27th birthday -in the West LA Muncipal Court, Kaufman was fined $ 300 and had to pay $ 708 in damages for the coffin. He was not charged with the theft of the body, as a corpse is deemed to have no intrinsic value.
The irony of that "no intrinsic value" line is cutting. Alive, this particular body had an awful lot of value; indeed, it contained genius. For, if Bob Dylan is the Shakespeare of rock, then Gram Parsons is its Keats.
In songs like Return of the Grievous Angel, Hickory Wind, The New Soft Shoe, In My Hour of Darkness (written with Emmylou Harris) and Hot Burrito No 1, he matched Dylan's gift for raising the popular song to previously unscaled expressive heights.
And, again like Dylan, his influence is vast. He more or less invented "country rock". That bland but maddeningly successful band the Eagles would never have happened without him. He drew -or, rather, bullied -two key bands, the Byrds and the Rolling Stones, into country music. The Stones's song Wild Horses was written for and about Parsons. He made the career of Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of the greatest voices in any popular-music genre. Elvis Costello adores him, and even Nick Hornby got something right when, in High Fidelity, he chose Return of the Grievous Angel as one of the five best side-one tracks of all time. Leave out "five" and "side one" and he'd have been completely right.
Parsons broadened the vocabulary of rock to include the moral anguish and religious fervour of country. Modern rock was a hybrid, born out of a blending of black and white American music. But, after Elvis Presley's 1950s recordings, black music (the blues) began to predominate, and white music (country and western) faded. This may have been a political as much as an aesthetic development. Country was -and still is, to some extent -associated in people's minds with the racist, redneck culture of the South and Midwest. The blues, in contrast, is seen as the authentic voice of the oppressed. Country has, therefore, for most of its life, been distinctly uncool. In the supercool movie The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980), for example, it is portrayed as a thuggish, mawkish form, in contrast to the hot, sweet power of soul.
Parsons, on the face of it, came from exactly the wrong background. He was born Ingram Cecil Connor III, to a rich white family in Georgia, who had made their money from citrus fruit. A servant used to pick him up from school every day. He never quite lost the air of a privileged Southern dandy. If you want to picture him in his prime, imagine a slender, beautiful young man in a $ 10,000 C&W suit made by Nudie Rodeo Tailors in Los Angeles -he had a white one embroidered with marijuana plants -with a joint in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. Or just seek out the original LP of his album GP. It has one of the most exquisite sleeves ever designed, and shows Parsons sitting in the green haze of a room in what must be an antebellum Southern plantation house. Inside the gatefold is a wonderful picture of a gleaming truck -"RJ Cano's Rig of the Month" -a glamorised, romantic symbol of life on the road.
But the background was not what it seemed. At the age of 10, he met Presley backstage at a concert. At 12, his father, "Coon Dog" Connor, killed himself. His mother drank, and remarried, to one Bob Parsons, who seems to have been a nasty piece of work. Parsons may have had Southern roots, but they were looking pretty twisted by the time he hit the road.
Via a folk group called the Shilos and a sort-of-rock group called the International Submarine Band, he made a specialised reputation for himself that was enough to get him into the Byrds. By this time, he was marinated in country music. Kaufman remembers him teaching the Stones all about it in a mansion in the south of France, with $ 1,000 worth of records he had picked up locally. He inspired the Byrds to produce their country album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was their worst seller -Parsons was never a hit-maker -but it created country rock, a form he went on to develop with the superb Flying Burrito Brothers and then, solo, with two wonderful albums, GP and Grievous Angel. Then he checked into Room 8 and never checked out.
For the next 20 years, I vaguely thought that a friend of mine from Carshalton and I were the only people who had heard of or ever listened to this strange lost singer of what Parsons called "cosmic American music". Then I noticed the albums were appearing on CD. I began to hear fleeting mentions of his name. I became aware that, unknowingly, I had been a member of a surprisingly large Parsons cult.
If you want to join, you can start at www.gramparsons.com. Or, if you're feeling ghoulish, try www.joshuatreeinn.com, especially the Room 8 guestbook.
Now, as a climax to this process of redemption, the strange story of Kaufman and the coffin has been made into a film, Grand Theft Parsons, thanks to the efforts of the British writer Jeremy Drysdale and the Irish director David Caffrey.
"Weirdly," says Drysdale, "I'm not the world's biggest Gram Parsons fan. But I'd just been working on a script about Johnny Rotten and that was about the darker side of life. I wanted to do something more positive, about friendship and honour and loyalty."
Reality is somewhat modified in the film. The father who comes to take the body back to New Orleans is Coon Dog brought back to life, not the stepfather, who actually wanted to pick up the corpse for his own nefarious gold-digging purposes.
And Parsons's litigious wife, Gretchen, and daughter Avril are wisely left out.
They are replaced by a rock-chick girlfriend (played by Christina Applegate). Kaufman is played by none other than Johnny "Jackass" Knox- ville, though he appears himself as "Handcuffed Felon", being dragged out of a police station shouting: "I didn't do it!" ("Yeah, I thought it kinda dragged till that scene," he says. "It lifted the entire project.") Otherwise, the film, both Kaufman and Drysdale say, is God's honest truth. And, in reality, Kaufman likes it. "I do like it, very much. I was so impressed with Johnny Knoxville that I gave him the jacket I wore at the time -that's the one he wears in the movie."
The film is also rock'n'roll truth.
"Guerrilla film-making," Drysdale calls it. It was made for $ 1.2m and shot in 24 days. The budget was so low, they couldn't afford hair extensions for Applegate. She bought them herself with a $ 2,000 gift token given to her by Cameron Diaz when The Sweetest Thing wrapped. They also used leftover film stock from Terminator 3.
Grand Theft Parsons is a delight, a comic tragedy that, though it does not say much about Parsons's art, says a great deal about the context in which it emerged.
That context was the mobile, hallucinated world of the road, the gig, the cheap motel, the drugs, the drink and the almost innocent anti-authoritarian bewilderment that de- fined youth culture from Woodstock to the Joshua Tree Inn. It is an American world, greedy, extreme and naive, and it killed Gram Parsons.
Kaufman says his failure to find "a big fan base", and the fact that his marriage was "going down the shitter", had a lot to do with his self-destructive drive. But I suspect it was also something to do with his desperate need to belong, even to such a riotous community as early-1970s rock'n'roll. He embraced that, as well as country music and a fantasy South, as imaginative homelands to replace the disastrous one into which he was born. In his art, the Hickory Wind was always calling him home and the Grievous Angel always yearned to return to Sweet Annie Rich.
Parsons embodied a tradition, that of country and western, that toe-tapping, heart-breaking music. He understood its tension between high morality and the low expediency of the road, and he added his own hallucinatory take on its dark, religious manner. Country music, at its best, says that life always gets you in the end. But, on the way down, what counts is to survive, to live well, to appreciate the passing scenery and to remember the characters -"The truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels" -that you met on the road.
Kaufman doused the body in petrol and the resulting flames lit up the desert for miles. All that was left was "brass and bones". These were taken by Bob Parsons to New Orleans, where they were interred in the Garden of Memories Cemetery. The inscription on his gravestone reads: "God's Own Singer." At the end of Gram Parsons's short life, somebody had finally got something right.
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Grand Theft Alan Parsons

Or even better, Gram Central Station Theft Parsons Project