PROLOGUE

“IS HE THE FAMOUS?”

THOUGH NEW ORLEANS IS RENOWNED FOR HAVING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL graveyards in America—urban death museums featuring bodies buried aboveground in ornate marble mausoleums—Gram Parsons lies far from the center of town and its elegant boneyards. His charred remains rest in a lush, green, and perfectly conventional cemetery a mile from the airport, twenty miles from the heart of the Crescent City.

Today the roadway to Gram’s graveyard remains grim as death, an industrial four-lane gauntlet of auto wreckers, towing yards, and cement plants. How isolated and remote the place must have been when Gram was buried in 1973, how un–New Orleans and lacking in glamour. But if the setting is drab, Gram Parsons’ grave itself was, until recently, unabashedly low-rent.

The grave marker is a six-inch-round stone disk with a connector-like snout protruding from the center. The engraved circular inscription is too small to read when standing. If you kneel and slowly rotate your head you can barely make out the tiny dirt-filled letters. Just behind the marker stands a small yellow plastic square mounted on rusty rebar—an aid to the death tourists who come ten to the day on weekends. A black plastic arrow glued to the yellow square points down. If you didn’t know it was a grave, you’d swear that black arrow marked a sprinkler hookup for the grounds crew. I certainly did.

New Orleans cabbies talk a lot—they like to connect. A cab ride of any length usually features some bizarre intimacy. As we roll out of town through a pounding March rain, my cabbie grills me on my mission. Five minutes outside the French Quarter, we stop in frozen traffic. At the intersection ahead, a hundred-odd dancers in feathered outfits leap and swirl, knotting up the streets and drawing the locals out of the two-story red projects that line the corner. It’s nowhere near Mardi Gras; this is a neighborhood impromptu. Traffic stretches behind us as three New Orleans cops lean on their cars and watch the scene. No one seems to mind the gridlock or the rain.

My cabbie wants to chat. He insists that he’s Moroccan; his unspoken concern is that I might take him for a light-skinned Louisiana black man. His French accent makes him sound like a mixed-race Louisianan—but he’s adamant that he’s not from anywhere around here. Bloodlines and gradations of whiteness apparently still matter in these parts, and he’s sensitive to misidentification. Pedigree, class, and family identity matter, too, and all exerted a strong force on Gram’s life. Given that his journey relentlessly produced its own inescapable metaphors, it’s no surprise that my cabbie grants me the necessary metaphorical context for a graveside visit.

Pedigree and gradations of whiteness used to matter to me, too. I was raised in a desolate hick town in north Georgia that was not much bigger than Gram’s hometown of Waycross, down in the southern, swampy part of the state. And from tenth grade on, when the music I listened to became my self-definition and moral compass, I pretty much tuned out white music. Especially country. Country music incarnated everything I loathed about my hometown, the South, and all they represented: violence, racism, small-mindedness, desperate conformism, knee-jerk patriotism, oppressive Christianity, and blind obedience. Not to mention high school football.

Rejecting all this music (and an entire race) was not as idiotic a position as it might sound, even for a tenth grader. During the day, my hometown radio played only the lamest and most commercial country. After midnight, otherworldly possibilities floated through the mountain air from the blessedly clear WLS-AM in Chicago. At the time, music was as segregated as my high school. You could get beat up over what you listened to, and in other parts of the state—like Atlanta, where actual hippies were reputed to exist—you could get murdered for having long hair.

All I knew of country music was the TV show Hee Haw and the twenty-times-a-day rotation of “Okie from Muskogee.” Buck Owens’ red, white, and blue guitar gave me the creeps, as I’m sure Buck intended it should. For me and many others (and a lot of them were country musicians), country incarnated the forces of reaction. It made a point of being pathologically anti-hippie, pro-Vietnam, pro-authority, pro-Jesus, and pro-Nixon. Music was a collection of willfully exclusionary fortresses, each policing its own vision of morality, making sure its message got out and ensuring that no infiltrators watered down its values. Country, psychedelic guitar rock, radio pop, soul…you picked your tribe and stuck with it. As for blues, old-time white rural string music, John Coltrane, or the Velvet Underground, I didn’t have a clue. How could I?

So I raised myself on soul music and was lucky to be in high school during the perfect era to do so. Otis Redding, James Brown, Stax-Volt, and Motown were my salvation. I grew up convinced there was no insight or worthy emotion to be heard from anybody white—except maybe Gregg Allman, who didn’t exactly sound black, but who clearly had soul.

Then one day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gram Parsons’ voice came floating out of a dorm window onto the quad where I was throwing a Frisbee with my long-haired Southern soul-obsessed friends. And that was it: As Martin Sheen says in Apocalypse Now about the voice of Colonel Kurtz, “It really put the hook in me.” Gram Parsons’ voice was then, and remains today, the most moving white voice I know. For me, for my soul, Gram Parsons’ voice lives with the voices of Robert Johnson, Patsy Cline, Furry Lewis, Lou Reed, Otis Redding, Joey Ramone, Charley Patton, Alex Chilton, Townes Van Zandt, Lowell George, George Jones, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Son House, Gregg Allman, James Booker, and Chet Baker…American voices that transcend any rational discussion and, really, anything rational at all.

Gram Parsons’ voice led me to the world of country, to the world of white rural American music, and thus, years later, into recognizing how few categories or separations or genus-naming make any sense at all when you listen, truly listen, to the music of America. Gram preached his idea of “Cosmic American Music,” a holy intersection of unpolished American expression: gospel, soul, folk, Appalachia, R&B, country, bluegrass, blues, rockabilly, and honky-tonk. That sound remains difficult to define but has become, in large part because of Gram Parsons, easy to recognize. Gram Parsons’ music convinced me that Cosmic American Music exists. His voice led me to the America where it does.

I tell my cabbie why I’m going out to such a godforsaken cemetery on such an awful morning. He says if I take no more than twenty minutes, he’ll hang out and help me search. He swears I’ll find no cabs in the middle of nowhere on a monsoon Sunday. I believe him. His curiosity does not surprise me. For one thing, it’s Southern, and for another, everyone drawn into Gram’s orbit ends up seduced.

Outside the gates the street looks like any other near any airport in America. Towers of crushed cars, massive, foreboding tow trucks, and the spires of a concrete plant frame a check-cashing store sealed off for Sunday behind iron grates. We swing through a gated concrete wall, and the cemetery reveals itself as a sprawling, pleasant place with overhanging trees, Spanish moss, and a stream meandering through endless headstones all lying flush with the ground. The office, a mock Swiss chalet, is locked up tight. I assumed there’d be some sort of guide to Gram’s grave—a map, a sign, a marker, something. There ain’t.

The warm soft rain falls in sheets. The cabbie and I walk over who knows how many dead, looking for a large marker near a tree. An earlier book on Gram’s life had planted a clear mental image of Gram lying in Byronic repose under quintessentially moss-hung, leafy branches. But there’s no sign of him near any of the oaks. We switch to checking out the larger monuments away from the trees; still no Gram.

It’s almost lunchtime, and several other couples stumble through the rain staring at the ground. I talk to one or two; they’re all looking for Gram and they haven’t a clue either. After twenty minutes we give up and roll out under the blue-black thickening clouds. My cabbie promises to be at my hotel door at ten the next morning.

Monday the rain thickens and the graveyard office is open. Running the place is a fiftyish woman who looks like the evil hotelier in a film noir. Her steely hair is piled up over her head in a roadhouse bouffant and sprayed solid. An unfiltered cigarette flexes in the side of her mouth as she speaks with clenched teeth and a hardscrabble accent; the front of her black dress, which fits her formerly va-va-voomish figure closely enough to sculpt her potbelly, is scattered with ashes. Even twenty-eight years dead, Gram remains surrounded by mythology and archetype.

GRAVEYARDS ELICIT SENTIMENTALITY and grand thoughts. I wish I were immune. In the company of so many corpses, Gram Parsons’ life might appear as a litany of archetypal reductions, so many easy solutions for someone wanting to sing his ballad: the Poor Little Rich Boy, the Child of Suicides, the Tortured Dionysian Genius, the Lost Prince Born in the Wrong Century, the Underappreciated Artist Who Suffered from Being Ahead of His Time, the Coolest Guy in the Room, the Singer-Songwriter Too Sensitive to Live in This World, the Guy Who Could Do More Drugs Than Anyone (except Keef ), the Man Who Refused to Get Out of His Own Way, and (as Neil Young epitaphed the self-murdered-by-overindulgence Danny Whitten) “He tried to do his best, but he could not.”

In Gram’s case, all the archetypes are true but none tell the truth. In tracing his story, I discovered that the man himself, as befits a walking catalog of archetypes, was an archetype magnet of the first degree. And so he posthumously remains.

The archetype in charge here is the Southern, pursed-mouth, nasty-redneck Dragon Lady. She rails at a cowering Bartleby-like employee, who scuttles away clutching his buttoned-up cardigan to his chest. When I take a graveyard map from a desktop stand, she snatches it from my hand and scribbles incomprehensible directions all over it. When I reach for another, she moves between me and the map rack. I ask her outright for a pristine copy to reproduce in this book, and she turns her back. She’s in the midst of monologing to herself about the inconvenience of Gram grave seekers when I head out the door.

Gram Parsons’ death and his subsequent slow-building legend have generated all sorts of classically American obsessions. On one hand there are, in the priceless phrase of novelist Dana Spiotta, the Bitter Lieutenants: those who played with Gram at one time or another and who may have surpassed him in money, fame, and achievement (or not) but who remain hard-hearted and unhappy about all the fuss attending him today. No matter how much they’ve been given or earned (or had taken away) in the rock/country/fame salt mines, only the most spiritually generous of his contemporaries can bear to give Gram Parsons his propers. The rest are sick of hearing about him and even more tired of talking.

The yin to the Bitter Lieutenants’ yang are the possessive necrophiliacs known as the Grampires: those who know they have the handle on Gram Parsons’ life and music and will brook no other viewpoint. The longer and more religiously they’ve pursued the Parsons mythology, the less likely they are to welcome anyone into the clubhouse. The graveyard proprietress represents all that collective resentment, all that conviction that anyone else who might appreciate Gram Parsons is an interloper and a fraud. Her illegible marks on the map represent everybody who wants to make sure it’s their incomprehensible directions that get followed, that it’s their version of Gram’s story that gets told.

The cabbie drives me to the necessary quadrant. I could swear I walked this ground yesterday, squishing ankle-deep in the rain-soaked lawn. We pace back and forth over the same ten rows of flat-laid headstones, peering straight down. I read some stones, scan others for a recognizable word. The smaller ones I skip. It seems impossible that Gram Parsons wouldn’t have a monumental monument. I turn from the map to the world it claims to show but see no correlation. I’m getting soaked. And frustrated: Shit-fire! I think. What if I’ve come all this way and can’t find his goddamn grave? It’s the biographer’s dilemma in a nutshell.

A big-ass John Deere tractor comes inching along the paved circular drive. Sitting on its fenders, blank-faced in the rain, are four African American men in piercingly yellow pants and hooded slickers: the grounds crew. I wave them down and ask for help. All four climb down and walk slowly, gravely, over. They appear to be between forty and sixty years old. Maybe they’re family: They have outsized heads with similarly pronounced, oversized features, and all four are dark, dark black—African tribal black with not a hint of American brown. Their darkness and solemnity makes the moment even more Southern gothic.

Their black skin stands out against the living green of the graveyard lawn and the flaming yellow of their head-to-toe rain suits. They enclose me in a tight circle. The cabbie shies away, pretending to examine more gravestones. I ask after the grave by name, number, and marker quadrant. The eldest, with an air of deep church authority, consults the plastic-covered pages of his own more detailed map book. Rain spatters off the diagrams and the backs of his enormous hands. As I did, he looks from the page to the world and back again. He asks me to repeat the name.

When I do, the youngest of the crew says, “Is he the famous?”

I nod. The crew boss takes one more look at his pages and raises his huge hand to the sky like Moses calling down Yahweh’s judgment. I thought he was going to deliver a benediction. Instead he lowers his hand slowly and his long, strong fingers arrange to point. The hand stops. His rock-solid finger aims at the tiny round stone beneath the black plastic arrow on the yellow plastic square. When he sees that I see it, he drops his hand and claps his book shut with a solemn air of Here Endeth the Lesson.

I thank him and turn away. The crew clambers back onto the tractor without a word. The cabbie leans under my small umbrella and there it is, six inches across, with Gram’s name engraved around the curving circular rim in microscopic letters. Below Gram’s name are words even more difficult to make out. I tiptoe a tiny arc around the tiny marker as it fills and overflows with rain, striving to make out the characters. GOD’S OWN SINGER, they read.

Myth and archetype define Gram Parsons, along with that most seductive of biographers’ prisms: tragic irony. But being on guard against the seduction of tragic irony doesn’t make the various tragedies surrounding Gram Parsons any less ironic. Or, if you prefer, doesn’t make the various ironies any less tragic.

The official version for years has held that Gram’s stepfather, Robert Parsons, chose the remote graveyard, the tiny marker, and the misplaced epitaph. He thought, the story goes, that he was choosing a quote from a song by Gram. But Gram Parsons never wrote that phrase. It was composed by Gram’s Flying Burrito Brothers bandmate, Bernie Leadon, a future member of the Eagles, the band that most blatantly co-opted Gram’s intentions and that Gram despised with a special loathing. More recent evidence suggests that someone other than Robert Parsons—a semisecret admirer, possibly a former lover—chose GOD’S OWN SINGER and did so with full knowledge of who wrote the song. So even the tragic ironies surrounding Gram exist in the smoke and mirrors of sorting myth from history, fact from truth.

I snap a couple photos of the absurdly small marker and shoot a few minutes of video. The isolated graveyard, the misinformed epitaph, and the confusion that accompanies trying to find this final resting place leave me unbearably sad. As in so many other instances, Gram Parsons deserved better. And if Gram Parsons was foremost in treating Gram Parsons worse than he deserved, that makes his grave no less heartbreaking.

Seeking to sort out and hold on to my feelings, I ask the cabbie to drive slowly around the cemetery on the way out. He tries, but steers us into construction, then into a dead end, and then has to drive in reverse a half mile to the cemetery gate.

It’s difficult to maintain a grieving sense of transcendent connection while weaving backward at forty miles an hour through a graveyard while a cabbie curses under his breath in (supposedly) Moroccan French with a Southern accent. Finally even he recognizes the lost spiritual momentum and is embarrassed into silence. We don’t say much during the forty thunderstorm minutes back to my hotel. He promises to pick me up the next morning in time for my plane, but when I hit the street at eight A.M., he’s nowhere in sight.

I’m on my own.

         

(A couple of years after my visit, an ornate bronze plaque featuring a bas-relief portrait of Gram with his guitar was laid on the grave site. On it, Gram’s birthday is listed as November 7. His birthday is, in fact, November 5.)