Gram Parsons at Cap Rock

The rock formation ahead of you is called Cap Rock. It does not look like a shrine. There is no marker, no plaque, no official recognition of what happened here in September of nineteen seventy-three. What there usually is, if you look at the base of the rock, is a scattering of guitar picks, dried flowers, and sometimes a bottle of bourbon.

Country-rock singer Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose on September nineteenth, nineteen seventy-three. He was twenty-six years old. He died at the Joshua Tree Inn, a few miles from here, having spent considerable time in this desert and having told people, in the way that twenty-six-year-olds do, what he wanted done with his body if he died. He wanted to be cremated at Cap Rock. He wanted his ashes scattered in the high desert he loved.

His family arranged a conventional funeral in New Orleans. His road manager, Phil Kaufman, learned of this and made a different decision. Kaufman and a friend drove to Los Angeles International Airport, intercepted the coffin before it could be loaded onto the New Orleans flight, loaded it into a borrowed hearse, and drove to Cap Rock. They poured five gallons of gasoline into the coffin and set it on fire.

The improvised cremation was only partially successful. What remained was eventually returned to the family. Kaufman was arrested and charged. California had no law at the time against stealing a human body. The charge was theft of a coffin. Kaufman was fined seven hundred fifty dollars for stealing the coffin.

This is a factually established series of events, documented in contemporaneous accounts and court records. The part that resists documentation is the relationship between a musician and a landscape, and the specific conviction that the desert was the right place to return to. Parsons had recorded some of the most important country music of the nineteen-seventies, work that would influence performers for decades. He was twenty-six years old, and he was very clear about one thing.

The pilgrims still come to Cap Rock. They leave what they have.